Nathan's Third Birthday

May 2008 - The week of Nathan's third birthday was a complete whirlwind. We had my mom's birthday, his birthday, Lexy's ballet recital, and a Father and Son Camp Out. With everything else going on we decided to have a small party with two of Nathan's best buds - Jeremy and Cody. We went to Pump-It-Up and played for an hour or so. Nathan had helped me make some cupcakes so we took those to share. The boys all had a blast!

Jeremey took a little while to get comfortable going through the obstacle courses by himself,
but once he decided he liked it, there was no stopping him.


Cody coming out of the obstacle course.









Nathan about to go down a slide.

My life is "mostly" back to normal

I know that I disappeared again from the "World of Blogs" but this time it was due to a true lack of time and severe stress. :0) I know that all you "supermom's" who keep up with your blogs on a regular basis wonder what could possibly have kept me from blogging? It was a surprise 60th birthday party for my mom. I started planning it a week or two after my last post and the actual party was not until May 31st. I know that it sounds like I had plenty of time for some extra curricular activities (like blogging) but since I am a perfectionist and wanted to make this extra special I took on a few extra projects.


First, I hand-made all of the invitations with a picture of my mom in her 20's. Let me clarify that....Jonathan (my brother) created the invitations on the computer, then I printed them out and cut them and backed them with paper. Next I had wanted to get video of friends telling mom what they loved about her. I was really stressed about how I was going to get all the videos in time to put something together. I am not a video person like the Curry's or the Watkin's and the whole idea of the video made my heart beat faster. So a kind friend suggested that I do something more on my level like scrapbooking..... I took her advice and then requested letters from every friend that I knew my mom has ever had. I picked out a scrapbook and a color scheme and started making scrapbook pages. I think that I ended up with about 25 letters. This is what ate almost every waking minute of my life through the entire month of May. I worked on it during nap time's and every night until at least 11:00. (It was all worth it, mom!)


Jonathan and I also wanted to use pictures from throughout my mom's lifetime to make a picture video. He wanted to work on that, but since he is in North Carolina that meant that I had to collect all the pictures. That in itself was a huge project. Any time that we went down to my mom's for Sunday dinner I would try to get her to take a walk with the kids and the dog by herself, stick Aaron on "window watch" and I would run back to search through the pictures and "steal" as many of them as I could. Usually the walks would last all of about 10 minutes. Needless to say, I think that it took me 3-4 trips to actually confiscate all of the pictures that I wanted. By the time I actually got them all it was too late to send them to Jonathan. He and Val were coming at the end of May so they created the video after they got here.


In the middle of all this was my mom's actual birthday, Nathan's birthday, Lexy's ballet recital and many rehearsals, Jonathan and Val arrived, Julia came home from her mission and we had friends come into town. Oh yeah......and to top it all off I was called as the new Relief Society president. I still have to chuckle at that one and think half to myself and half to heaven "are you serious?" - seeing as how I have spent the last 15 years in Primary with about 4 months as a teacher in R.S., and a couple more as the enrichment leader (while teaching primary).


Anyway, these are all of my excuses for not blogging since the beginning of April. I hope that I can get back to blogging on a more regular basis now. Thanks for all of your understanding. :0)

P.S. I will post pictures of the party - which was a huge success, by the way - after I get all of the other posts done that need to come first.

Girl's Night Out

May 16th - Tonight was the Father and Son Camp out. Aaron and Nathan went for the firs time together. We decided that we should take full advantage of this opportunity and have a "girl's night". So Lexy and I spent the evening with my good friend Kristen and her daughter Bryn (and baby Abby). First we went out to eat at California Pizza Kitchen, then we took the girls to a Spa around the corner and they had pedicures. After that we went back to our house where the girls made picture frames to put their pictures in and we made s'mores. It was a great night. We had so much fun.

Learning to let loose...

Here's the deal....I am an uptight mom who is an organizational, neat freak. I need a clean house and I don't feel like I function very well without one. So what is the problem with that, you ask? I have a really hard time taking the time to play with my kids when the house is a mess because I feel like I have so little time and that I need to use the time that I have to get something done like the dishes, or the laundry, or filing the mound of papers on the kitchen counter. I have known that this is a problem for a long time, and I will say that recently I have gotten better about playing with the kids even if it's for 30 minutes before bed - so I have been working on it.

Listening to General Conference on Sunday was great for me. I loved all of the talks, but there was one sentence in one of the talks (I don't even know who said it) that hit me the hardest. It was the comment that if our children live in our homes until they are 18, they are only with us for 1/4 of our entire lives. That hit me like a ton of bricks. I know that everyone says that time goes by so fast and enjoy the kids while you can, but this sentence made me feel really selfish. It made me realize that I will have at least half of my life without them (whether I like it or not) and that I can worry about all the silly things I worry about now when I have nothing as important as my children to worry about .
So today I decided that Nathan and I would have an uneventful day together. I ignored the fact that we have no groceries in the house and I ignored the suitcase that has not been unloaded since our trip this past weekend and I also ignored the piles of junk around the house. At one point Nathan and I were in the office together and he spotted the large trash bag full of shredded papers that was sitting by the desk. I had not tied the bag very well and he discovered that he could open the bag and get to the shredded paper. At which point he pulled out a handful and threw it on the floor with a big grin. My first reaction was "oh no you don't"....but then the talk from Sunday popped into my head and I stopped and thought, "how can we have fun with this?" So, I got the big yard gate and set up a barrier in the kitchen, stuck Nathan in there with some toys and the bag of shredded paper and told him to have at it. He played in there for 1 and 1/2 hours. I joined him for some of it and also let him play some by himself for a while. Then we worked together and cleaned it up when we were done. It felt really good to give him something new and fun to do and it even felt good to let him make a huge mess. (Although there are still little papers that made it to other parts of the house, but I am trying really hard to ignore them) :)

Fun in Orlando

We went to Orlando this weekend and went to Sea World with Daylynne, Ernesto and Elijah. We had a great time. Unfortunately I left my camera in the car, so Daylynne is going to share the pictures that she took at Sea World with me and those will have to go on another post. These pictures we took the next day in Kissimmee at a little fair. The kids had a blast going on the rides.

Losing the training wheels!

Step #1 - Remove training wheels and put on safety geer.
Step #2 -Remove bike petals and practice pushing and balancing.
Step #3 - Put the petals back on and learn to ride within 48 hours.

We have to thank the Watkins (and the Browne's) for the ease at which Lexy learned how to ride her bike without training wheels. We had taken the training wheels off and I had held onto the back of the bike, balancing Lexy while she rode around for at least 20 minutes. All that got me was an extremely sore back and a child who still couldn't balance on her own and got very upset if I tried to let go of the bike. Luckily we have the Browne's in our ward who have owned a bike shop for years and shared the secret with the Watkins when they came down and rented some bikes for Chase and Phoebe to learn how to ride. Once we took the petals off, Lexy picked up on the balancing thing almost over night and within 2 days we had the petals back on and she was riding all by herself. I (and my back) are so very grateful for this amazing technique. Thanks guys!

Nature at it's best!

February 2008 - Aaron's parents came down for a visit this month and for the first time since we have owned the boat we went out on it to watch the sunset. Of course it was beautiful! Being outside in nature is one of my favorite places to be. I am so grateful that we live in such a beautiful and free country where we can enjoy all of Heavenly Father's creations. We are so lucky that we don't have all of the worries that people in other parts of the world have. Watching the news on any given day constantly reminds me of how very blessed we are.