November...

Was,  BEAUTIFUL!! 

 A couple of my favorite colors from around here. There were SO many colors and SO many leaves :)

This is from the park across the street. All those leaves fell and the wind blew them all into our yard! The kids loved it and I can't be frustrated about it because they had so much fun.

 November was Freezing!

 But we still tried to get out and play at the park, 

 Swinging in the cold didn't sound so fun to me but they still enjoyed it.

The silliness continued as always-

 Cole wanted to make a scary face

 Lucy's scary face

Sadie gets food everywhere when she Eats...literally.

Cole loves to read his scriptures. He looks so big in this picture, my little man. I love him. In fact he reads them so much Sadie has started flipping through them too, because she thinks it is the 'big-kid' thing to do. 

Sadie discovered she can get to the snacks on the shelf. Ever since then she has been bringing us the containers...or just going for it herself.

We needed something new to play in on those REALLY cold days, so we pulled out some old oats and had some fun :)

I can't remember what Lucy was upset about, but she put on the cowboy hat and turned away from me. She can be pretty cute when she pouts :)

We have a couple of rotary phones in our home (it was built in the 50's). Sadie had just discovered the cords and was having a blast.

Our favorite place in the house is by the 'fire'. We hang out here in the morning when we wake up and any other time of day the heater turns on. Sadie will sit here until her skin is burning hot. 

Even when it was cold all little man wanted to do was play with his sticks in the leaves. I was grateful for the push to get out but Lucy wasn't always so happy about it :)

So good story that I have to record. The kids were all drawing on our white board, Lucy wrote her name (unprompted) all by herself! She called me over to show me her name (below), I was pretty excited about it and then Cole wanted me to look at his picture. 

Cole: "Mamma yoot! A bum"

Me: "A bird?"

Cole: "No, a bum! Like this is a bum and points to Sadie's bum"

All I could do was Laugh :) So I went to get a picture before he spoiled it...

Isn't her name great!! I was so proud of her, she did it all by herself!!

Lucy: quotes and conversations

Sometime in late July early august:  you Went potty all by yourself. We were in a public bathroom and you said "I can do it" while pushing me out of the stall. 

August: You and Cole love to share, and love to be Simba and Nala, I think that is when you play together the best. 

"That's not being helpful or kind, that's kind if being a punk. "

       Lucy to Devin after he dumped water on their mud puddle

"I run like a Carnator mom"

"Mom, can we have a bigger animal? Not a hamster. I want a big animal I can play with...." That was early October. Since then you have learned how to play with snowball and I think for now you are content.

Oct 17

Lucy kicked Cole while walking by today. So I sent her in time out. While on time out she starts singing:

"Why did mom send me to timeout?? Because i kicked Cole." 

"MOMMY!?!" (This part she yelled randomly in the middle of the song)

"I'm in time out for kicking, Cole got hurt..."

"MOMMY?!?"

:)

About the leaves falling: "Did you know what? in summer after winter, the leaves blow back up into the trees!"

"No, munchkin, I had no idea that is how it worked"

"Mom, I wanna move back to Provo. 

Why?

Because that's where all the people are, and my friends. "

This about broke my heart...

... ... Poor thing, I'm sorry we don't have more friends....

"Uh oh it's rambasees" --Ramses :) from The Prince of Egypt.

Gwate right shark"

"Her hair is funny, it has zigzags."-- talking about Miriam, Moses' sister. 

Cole notes from October

Coles is protective of his sisters, a little boy was playing by Sadie and Cole went after him and put himself between Sadie and the boy. Then the boy almost pushed Lucy and cole ran over and told him to leave his Lucy alone.

Oct 2

Cole asked me"it's okay if Sadie has a raisin?"  ...five mins later Sadie comes over and spits out about a handful if craisins into my hand... :)

Oct 9

Almost al the way asleep and still gave me a kiss on the cheek :)

Oct 10

Can children survive in Goldfish?? I guess you will let me know :)

Oct 17. 

Daddy, you hulk! 

Devin throws a pillow at Cole...Cole turns around and says

"Stop, don't move." Gestures to behind himself," lamanites get him!!"

Then Cole says "wait, stay there," he runs to the doorway and starts fighting the lamanites so they won't get the hulk :) 

Oct 20

"Mom, what's on yo ice?" 

"That's make up bud." :) 

..guess I should wear that stuff a little more often..

Lucy's talk

Primary talk on 12.15.13

This talk was mostly your words. You walked around and told daddy what you knew about Jesus and him coming again. There were prompting questions but the answers were all your own...

"Jesus came to earth a long time ago:

A big star in the sky that shined brighter than the rest told the wiseman that Jesus was born.

Samuel the lamanite said Jesus was born in Bethlehem and te nephites would know because it would be light at night. 

Jesus died on the cross and then he was risen and everyone was surprised and happy. One of his apostles didn't see him and didn't believe he was risen. Jesus came and showed him his hands and feet. 

Jesus came to the wicked nephites. After the earthquake he came came in the sky. And then he helped the righteous and the people that we're tired. 

Jesus will come again and I will be happy and smile. "

Potty Training

Cole has been potty training for the last few weeks. I wasn't going to start yet because I hated the way I pushed Lucy to be potty trained and I've heard boys are usually ready later, but one day he told me he wanted to go on the potty and he went. He went several times that day so we decided he was ready! It had been pretty good. Here is the log I've kept on my phone:

September 26th you started potty training. "Mommy! I go human potty!" 

We decided to start him standing to pee, seemed easier and we have a seat is hard to get over without hurting himself. That first day he was peeing he said, "Yook, I'm popping bubbles!" :) Yes, yes you are.

10.1.13 -- Dry all day today! We went out THREE times and you had no accidents. Trying underwear tonight! [he has been wearing underwear every night since, only peed once...sadly last night]

10.4.13  Two accidents today but its because I'm not prompting you to go I wanted to see if you would run to the bathroom yourself. You peed on the way to the potty but made it in time to poop! You peed and didnt' say anything once, the next time you ran as fast as you could but couldn't hold it long enough :)

10.7.13     I was putting Sadie to sleep while i heard the following take place:

Running feet

potty slams

stool scooted into place

Lucy, "oh, do you need to dough potty?"

Cole, "Ya."

Lucy, "I'll help you!!" (very enthusiastically)

Hear peeing sound....

Lucy, "Dood Jab, buddy!" (good job)

"a little more..."

Cole, "All done" 

Lucy, "otay do you need a wipe? Let me help you, otay? Otay. There ya go bud!"

"Ahright, pull up your pants and panties"

LOL. I just sat in the room and listened. And tried not too laugh too hard. Still working on telling Lucy that Cole wears underwear not panties.

This week we've hit it hard. You had a few days last week where you just peed. And stopped saying anything. It was really weird. So this week we printed off a sticker chart and told you that if you stayed dry for a week we'd get you Spider-man underware. Well you did it and got you big boy underware!! In the end you picked Pixar but still loved them.

Lots of training and goofiness

 I felt like we had just recovered from being sick and lo-and-behold the kids all got sick again! It wasn't that bad, thankfully, just some stuffiness and a little bit of a cough. They are recovering, and hopefully we can go more than two-weeks without being ill :)

Apparently when you move things they become a LOT more exciting! In lou of winter approaching we decided to clean our slide and bring it in.  The kids have been having a blast with it being downstairs.

Sadie can climb up the ladder half way and then tries to get back down....and climbs in through the holes in the bottom without using the door.

Potty training and Sleep training

The kids spent a week sleeping in the living room while we worked on teaching Sadie to sleep at night :) That was a lot of fun. She cries louder than any baby I have ever had. The first night was rough, the second was slightly  better, she had a couple of good ones. I wish I could say she sleeps through the night. She doesn't. She has once in the last two weeks which I'll take. For the most part she wakes up once or twice. I can usually get her back to sleep without feeding her one time. The second time she has to eat or she screams forever. So that's where we are at. Much better than waking up every hour to and hour and a half like she was for a while there. 

Here are the pads in our futon cushion being used as slides... because Cole has been potty training and had an accident. I had to clean the cover...

Praying these things make it through the training and the slides :)

Chores

We decided it was time for the kids to start doing the dishes. 

No worries not all the dishes, just their breakfast dishes. We're trying to teach them some responsibility..its going well and they actually like doing most of the chores. Thankfully.

Probably because they play for a good portion of the time. But that is okay too. They get them cleaned.

Making Faces

Sadie makes the best faces. Someday I will figure out how to get a good pic of her making the scrunch face...

I'm horrible for taking pictures of her crying, but she really makes the cutest crying faces.

Goofy Lucy

Cole-meister was sticking out his tongue, so Devin helped him make a more appropriate face.

 I swear these kids grow up over night! 

October Videos

Doing Puzzles...Cole loves his puzzles. He always has. This time he is doing his favorite dinosaur puzzle upside down :) I love that he says, "oh Sorry!" every time he doesn't know where one goes...

After playing in the leaves they decided it was time to move the pile!

At Boggio's Lucy has a conversation with the goats. Before this video she kept saying, "woah, don't crowd us!" "woah goats, too many, too many. Back away I need to feed the baby." 

Snowball and Lucy

The other morning Lucy told me, "mom when we get another animal, can we get a bigger animal that I can play with? Because I can't play with snowball."

What an insightful comment. That girl.

And our crazy hamster tries to escape-- ALWAYS!!

He would have a pretty cool cage if he hadn't figured out how to get out of every hole in that thing!

did you see the duct tape on top of that lid? Yeah, he figured out how to open even that top door. 

C.R.A.Z.Y.

Never again with the hamster. Never.

October so far

Because the photos loaded backwards and I'm too lazy to go switch them around I'll just go backwards :)

Adventures in Canning

We have a wonderful ward. Actually I have been blown away with the kindness of the people here in Illinois. A guy from Devin's work has been brining us all sorts of stuff from their garden! It has been fun trying some new recipes that they have suggested. Then a woman in our ward gave me a jar processor and some canning supplies. And another woman gave me a TON of tomatoes. And a guy down the street has an apple tree that he doesn't care for or use so we've been given the okay to use his apples!

So with all of that this last week I got to make 13 quarts of salsa. It may seem like a lot but with Devins love of salsa that will not last us THAT long :). I also got to try my hand at homemade Spaghetti Sauce, which is delectable!  And I got to make applesauce for the first time, but might need to tweak what I did a little bit..we'll see. Canning was fun, a little overwhelming, time-consuming, but INCREDIBLY rewarding, I enjoyed it.

 Getting our ScArY on

 What?!?? That cake doesn't look scary to you? 

We've been slowly decorating for Halloween and getting into the non-scary side of Halloween. It has been fun. I tried to get the kids to do a halloween cake but since the favorite color of this household is BLUE we had to settle for half-n-half. 

Can you see our puppets??

One of the kids most favorite things of late is playing with flashlights. We hid in the dark and 'search' for whatever they decide we're looking for. 

They keep them in their bed and after Sadie is asleep they are allowed to play with their flashlights until they fall asleep. 

They love it and I think it is so cute....I don't know why but I do.

BOGGIO'S (a.k.a. the pumpkin patch)

We went with a family from our ward we do preschool with. This was a fun place, there were a few animals, some fun activities, and INCREDIBLE amount of pumpkins, pony-rides (thankfully only on the weekends) and some really good doughnuts :)

 Ever seen a goose with hair?? Haha, I hadn't either. They were not nice geese ( I don't think I ever have met a nice goose). 

 There was a big hay pile with tunnels running under it and a tree house next to it with underground tunnels. Kind of cool! 

 There was a corn silo, just a small silo filled with corn! They played in it like you would sand, really fun. Little Sadie kept eating the corn. I thought I stopped any from going down but, alas, I found one in her diaper the next day...TMI? Sorry :)

 Check out these pumpkins!!! They were VERY large.

Fall is here!

I have been loving the fact that this year Lucy understands the seasons and the changing weather. Well, not necessarily UNDERSTANDS them, but notices and asks about it, etc. The leaves have started changing and falling just in the last week and a half. 

Burying each other in the leaves.

He LOVES the pile of leaves! I don't think he has liked something so much since we started swimming in the summer.

Tromping through the leaves...

Now Cole is burying Lucy.

Sadie didn't like the leaves at all. Not sure why, but she is not a fan and really doesn't like to sit down next to them.

 After playing in the pile it was time for dinner. We kept calling Cole in but he kept running through the pile and raking it back together. He didn't want to eat, just to play. Love this kid.

 Thumbsuckers
Yup. Plural. There are now two thumbsuckers in this family.

 Sadie decided it was time to find her comforter. Too bad she doesn't find it at night! I really wish she would. 


She just uses it during the day and sometimes during naps with some convincing from me :) :) :)

 And just because he is the champion of it...here is Cole-meister.

Sinker-face
Sadie is a stinker. Literally and figuratively. A week after Cole recovered from being sick Sadie got the nasty flu. She had fevers for 3 days...of 103...yeah, it was bad. She got stuffy and congested, earaches. The whole nine yards. And diarrhea so bad her bum was sore for over a week! I had never seen diaper rash so bad. After a visit to the doctor and a miracle cream suggested she is now recovered with a perfectly pink cute baby bum :)

 Thankfully, thankfully after the earache settled down she was a happy baby once again. Happy enough to give us some stink :)  This was the face she made when Devin caught her ripping up some tissues or wipes. 
 Her nine month update: 
   She thinks she is HILARIOUS, she'll do something and just laugh at herself.
   She LOVES her siblings and thinks they are even funnier than herself.
   She loves to eat, but she needs to feed herself or she'll just take out whatever you put in her mouth look at it and put it back in. 
   She can walk across a room but because she wants to run she falls within a few feet :)
    She can say 'mama' 
    She 'calls' for Lucy and Cole.
    Loves to play peek-a-boo and hide and seek.
    Gets UBER excited whenever we go outside....we should probably go outside more.....
    because this post is already incredibly long I'll end there.

 Parking it up

We still love going to the parks around here. 

 Kids found a lady bug

 This is one of the coolest things at the park. They climb to the top, 

 or climb upside down.

 Cole is finally going down slides!!! He went down by himself for a few months, but it seems like FOREVER since he would go down by himself. He still wants me to go down some of them with him but he is getting so much better.

I don't know what these are called but Lucy LOVES them. Now that we wear long sleeves more often she is constantly asking to go to the park so that she can go down this.

That is our October in a not-so-small nutshell :)

Utah Visit (photo dump)

Devin's younger brother was getting married so we made the trek out to Utah for a week! It was a blast! We LOVED seeing everyone.

Since I was told my children were AMAZING on flights moving out here, I wasn't worried one bit about flight to Utah with the kids again...

HAHA! Yeah right.

 I was slightly nervous. Because Sadie is older and getting her to sleep without some screaming is difficult to achieve.

But I have to say I will never worry about it again. My kids were TROOPERS! They all did amazing on the flights, with very little whining, crying, and screaming. 

We planned out flight so that we could be on the same plane (from Denver to SLC) as Whitney and her kids. As we were boarding the stewardess let the kids into the cabin and the Captian's showed them all the buttons and how it works. 

 I had no idea that was even allowed, but the kids thought it was pretty cool! 

We got in incredibly late that night, i don't think the kids were in bed until around 1:30. Sadie baby was up bright and early the next morning. I can always count on her to rise before the sun :)

 Sadie and Celecta Rose getting reaquainted. Celecta Rose is still significantly bigger than Sadie baby...and stronger :). Despite their differences they got along so well! It was so fun to see them interact in their own little baby way.

The next day we just played around and had fun. The big kids loved playing on the jungle gym. They could clear that slide pretty well! Lucy tried it at home and it didn't work so well. I think the angle of this one is just perfect.

I think there was some confusion about which way they were supposed to go :)

 It took a while for Leigh and Cole to play together, but they got a long pretty well, when they did.

Devin and Patrick got in Thursday night about same time we had the night before. 

(whoever planned those arrival times is fired...And a BIG thank you to OPA! He stayed up so late to get all of us!)

Friday morning we headed up to 

 Uncle Ryan joined the party Friday, and was the life of the show. These kids just adore him. Anytime I went downstairs one of the kids would tell me to go back upstairs. I think they didn't want me to tell them they needed to be done.

Friday night there was a get together up the canyon with Brandi's family. It was fun, but Cold. I always forget that it gets Cold at night in September :p

Saturday was the big day!

In the morning all the guys went golfing. They had fun, and got to have some bonding time so that was good. While they were out Devin found a bunch of these things.

They are the fuzziest caterpillars I have ever seen.

Here is Alden holding his. I don't know what caterpillars eat but there were only two survivors by the time we flew home. :(

 Headed to the Temple

 Poor Leigh. I had to take a picture of her being sad, because she had such a hard time on the trip. Poor thing, she wasn't feeling very well and was attached to Whitney for most of the trip.

 Waiting for  enough babysitters to arrive. Daddy's and their baby girls :)

Our babysitters...Thank you again everyone!! I'm so grateful we were able to go in!

 Lovin' on Celecta Rose

 They said she only cried for a minute or two and then did just fine. What a BLESSING! That baby didn't let anyone hold her (besides myself) unless it was Devin. The ENTIRE trip. 

 Balancing...waiting for the Bride and Groom to come out. Look at that studd! Love my little man.

 Pretty proud of my sewing skills! She looked so cute in the dress, and she liked it--which is what matters most!!

My man :) 

Haha, Auntie Megan helping him get his tie all straight.

After pictures we headed home for some naps and rest before the reception. 

 The reception was really fun. I think the highlight was decorating the car. We filled it with balloons among other things, but the kids got to help throw the balloons in the car. I know its a horribly blurry but they had so much fun that I had to include the picture.

Sunday Devin and Patrick headed home. We went to an hour of church because of sick and tired children. Then all headed to visit our other families :)

The girls played their Ukulele's for us and sang songs. These kids are so talented! It's incredible.

 Everyone LOVES the puzzles at Oma and Opa's house. Cole had these things down pat before we moved to Illinois. It took some time to figure them out again. I think here on the floor is where Cole spent the majority of our visit :)

 Baby Caelyn! The tubbiest, rolliest, CUTEST baby I have seen. And I can't forget smiley. She smiled at EVERYONE. SO sweet. 

Celecta Rose sucking on the germ transmitter. Pretty sure this syrup bottle went in every child's mouth throughout the duration of the week.

 A trip back wouldn't be complete without a visit to the BYU Duck Pond!! The ducks were crazy, I don't know why, but they were getting too close for all the kids.

 On our last day there we decided to head to the Farm for some animal lovin'. One of the farm lady's was holding a 'mini lop' bunny and all the kids got to pet it. I guess mini lops are really the BIG ones. That thing was not mini in any way.

 Celecta Rose even got to pet a horse!

 Of course my children named the horses Scarlet and Aztec :) It was a super fun visit to the farm. The only thing missing were our friends Gina and Aiden. But she had just had a baby and some of our kids were sick so I didn't want to give it to her little guy. 

 The three babies giving us some 'cheese'

Flying home was bitter-sweet. We had so much fun visiting family, The night before we flew out Cole spiked a fever. While we were checking into the airport he had the chills and looked really bad. Poor kid cried about his legs hurting, and all he did was sit the WHOLE day. 

Hanging out at the Denver airport waiting for our flights. 

Excited for our Christmas adventure in a couple of months!!!