February

Heath loves mazes.  He had this grand plan in his mind for a long time. One day while Hannah was sleeping we finally did it.  He had so much fun! After completing it several times, he put items in different corners then found how many different paths would lead to that spot. 

 Houston must be going through a growth spurt. He goes to sleep at 7pm and usually wakes up about 7:15am.  Lately he has been falling asleep in the afternoons as well for about an hour.  He has been pretty grouchy all day. Hopefully he will grow out of this funk soon.

 The boys have been saying a new remark when they are surprised by something. They say,

"Oh my HUMAN!?!?"

We've tried to figure out where this came from.... I think they're just weirdos.  : )

 Houston has such a great imagination. This is him as a chef. Wearing his chef hat.  You may not be able to see it but to his left is a great big pie that he baked himself.  His plate is in his lap and he has a knife and fork in his hands.  He loves to pretend he is baking and cooking.  He will work so hard to make something, then pass a piece out to everyone in the room.  He often saves a piece for our neighbors Kaitlin and Parker.

 Almost every day has been my Birthday. He'll just come up to me and say, "Happy Birthday Mom! I'm going to go make your cake now.  It's a surprise!" Every day it's a different kind of cake.  After it's baked and iced he brings it to me and sings me Happy Birthday, I blow out the fire and he cuts it up and passes pieces out to everyone.  Then he usually makes me presents too. I have to open them and act super excited. If I ask him what it is he gets offended and says "You know!" 

 I am no longer watching the little girls.  Their Mom decided she wants to stay home from work with them now, and I don't blame her one bit. We had them over to play one day and Hannah was SO happy to see her long lost friend.  They were always so cute together. : )



I have started watching a little 5 week old boy about once a week or so. He is so cute. I think he looks like a little Eskimo baby.  He has 4 older sibblings, 2 sets of twins! His Mommy stays home with her kids, but has me watch him when she has errands or something else to do.

Although we miss the girls, it has been good to only have 2 babies at the most and only about 1 day a week.  I felt like when we had 3 babies I was always saying to the boys, "SHhhhh! You're going to wake up the baby. Shhhh."

 The weather has turned cold. It had snowed a few days. Hannah especially loves to watch the snow falling through our window.

Every Valentines day that we've lived here it has snowed, and this year was no different.




Houston is our Movie boy.  He LOVES movies! He remembers so many lines too.
He asked me the other day,
"Mom. Can I just watch a movie forever?"
He was totally serious. 

 Hannah is getting quite the little personality.  She is SO cute!   She is now 11 months old.  Its crazy to think that she is almost a whole year old.   She is getting really good at saying Mama and Dada. Sometimes I think she says Heath. (it sounds like Eat) She is great at waving goodbye.  She loves to sing (yell "ahhhh" and wave her hand around like she's conducting music) and follow the boys around.  She almost never sits.  When she plays she carries her toy around while she walks circles playing. She loves to hold babies and rock them. She also loves to carry around bags or containers with things in them.   

 One day Houston and I had this conversation.

"Houston, did you toot?"
"no"
"Are you sure, because if you didn't, that means Hannah pooped, and I don't want to change her stinky diaper again."
"Mom I'm an hundred pus-sent sure. It is Hannah."
"What does one hundred percent mean?"
"Mmoooomm.... It means I didn't do it."

 Heath is getting really good at building things with his Zoobs.  This is a little top he created.

 We have a new dance in our house. It goes like this.  When you're really mad, you make fists and pound your thighs with them, then you make a good "MMMH" sound and stomp your feet as hard as you can.   Houston is really good at it.


He has also started to remark,
"What the MAMMAL?!"
It makes me laugh every time. 

 Hannah LOVES bathtime!  If the water is running she comes a runnin.

 These two! They are becoming really great friends.  So cute!

So often when we are out and about people say that Hannah looks just like me.  I haven't seen it very much.  I think she looks a lot more like Matt than the boys did.

but I guess in the bath tub, we do look pretty similar.  This is me in Grandma Verna's kitchen sink I believe at about 9 months old.

Hannah definitely has Matt's ears (which all our kids do) but the eyes and nose look a lot like mine.  

 Houston loves to pretend he is anything, but lately he has been pretending to be Ammon a missionary a lot.  He carries around scriptures, practices bearing his testimony and slings rocks at the bad guys trying to get the king's sheep.   Last weekend Matt let Houston wear his missionary name tag.  Houston sure thought it was cool! 

 Much like her brothers Hannah LOVES books.  She will sit and read them for a good 10+ minutes.  It really is one of the only times she sits on her own.

 The boys love the song,  Row Row Row your Boat right now.


Houston has changed it up a bit  and sings it,

"Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a Butt!"

Then he and Heath laugh hysterically.

 One morning after helping Heath into the shower I came into the kitchen and found this.  Houston said, Mom I'm making breakfast for you! : )

He didn't have the heat on, (thankfully, I don't think he knows how to do that yet.) but got the pan and tortillas out all on his own and was flipping the tortilla around and around. Such a cute little chef.

 The boys have been emptying the dishwasher every day and also usually clear off their dishes after dinner.

The other day I found all of our dirty silverware from dinner back in the clean silverware drawer.  I guess someone got things a bit mixed up.




The kids love to make forts in the living room.  Hannah has been renamed Princess Pillowa when they play this game.

We did some painting the other day, and Houston painted all of his nails.  I won't let him do it with real nail polish, so I guess he took things in to his own hands. He was pretty sad when it washed off in the sink. 

"I'm a banana. This is my banana peel."


He has done this all day for about 5 days this month.  He even sleeps in it.

Hannah loves shoes and socks. If she can find one she has it in her hands/mouth.

 

This sweet girl got some more shots.  This time the nurse gave them in her arms.  I loved that so much better than the legs. I didn't have to be nearly as careful when holding, snuggling, feeding, or changing her.   She really seemed to be slowed down by them this time.  She seriously laid around like this ALL day if she wasn't sleeping.  So unlike herself.  The next morning she was as busy as ever though.  Just her normal Hannah Jane self.



She sure loves that little ducky!

This month when I taught preschool we learned about the letter K.  We had a Kite day, then a Kingdom &Knights day.  Heath wasSO excited about it! The girls dressed as princesses in the Kingdom, and Heath and Houston dressed as knights.

We played a game where we catapulted (the lesson said to tell the kids this was a K word, and that in pre-k it's just fine to mix up K & C words as long as they're learning the sounds. I'm not a trained educator, but I totally didn't agree with this. I'm sure Heath would remember. He remembers everything. Especially when it's a mistake. So instead we talked about how K & C make the same sound, but you just have to memorize which words begin with which letter) anyways, we made our own Kingdoms, then catapulted all of the K words we could think of at the Kingdom of Evil King Egbert (who hated the letter K)  It was so much fun.  I love these kids.

Houston didn't want to be part of the good Kingdoms.  He wanted to be in the Kingdom of Evil King Egbert.  (Really I think he just liked everyone shooting paper at him. )

Then we talked about what it took to be a Knight (helper of the weak, obedient, honest etc) and after they acted out scenarios of doing those things, they promised to live by them and we had a dubbing ceremony.  The girls went along with it, and may have thought it was fun, but to Heath and Houston... it was like MAGIC!

The next week Emily taught about the letter D and guess what they did, Dragons and Damsels. Heath got to wear his Knight costume again to fight the dreaded dragon! 

This little girl is so good at saying "HI"


Whenever you walk in the room she will quietly say, "HI"

It still catches me off guard sometimes.

  I have been taking pictures for friends lately and saved up the money to buy a new lens for my camera. I am SO excited about it and so happy with the outcome.  It is a fixed 55mm lens, the aperture goes down to 1.8 so I can take pictures in low light without sacrificing shutter speed. (blurry pictures)  It's pretty awesome!  my photo blog cegophoto.blogspot.com has some of the pictures I've taken for friends with it (and some of the pics in this post were taken with my new lens, I think you can tell which pictures were shot with our point and shoot.) I'm still learning, but I LOVE IT!

I just love this picture. I came in to check on the kids, and the boys had dressed Hannah up.  They are always dressing up themselves, but this was the first time they got her in on it too.

We went to the Nature Center one day to get out.  It's been so cold...

Hannah LOVED the fish tank! She could have watched those big fish all day I think.

At one point Houston got a bit ahead of us.  We found him in the lookout window like this.   He said, "I just got too tired and need to sleep. You can leave me here."

This year for Valentines we actually got a sitter! We usually just have a family day, but this year Matt was in charge of planning the Stake Valentines Dance at Church so we just had to go. It was fun to get dolled up and have fun together with some of the great couples we've met here in St Louie.  While we were there we realized we hadn't danced together in public since we've been married. (When Matt brought it up I though, no surely we danced at so and so's wedding reception... nope. what about.... nope. ) We have done some swing in our living room with our awesome dance instruction DVD, but not out in front of people. We broke the chain though.  Hopefully it won't be another 8 years until the next time. 

We were in charge of the Ice Cream Machine! Yep. It was delicious! Since that night we have been dreaming about owning one of our own someday.  : )

Matt has been studying like crazy for his board test coming up March 17&18th.

He goes to school or clinic first thing in the morning, comes home and says a quick hello, then studies until dinner, eats, studies until scripture time, reads with us, then studies until about 10-11 when he goes to bed.

Every now and then he can't take it anymore and comes out for a good wrestle!  It is a fun time for all! 

This little girl just Loves her Daddy!

Sometimes Daddy suffers a few battle wounds.

The boys love to play "The Animal Game"  It's pretty much charades, but you only act out animals.

Some of their favorite animals to be lately are:

A Basilisk Lizard (can run on water. Houston runs around the couch as fast as he possibly can) (He is this like 9times out of 10)
A Cheetah (they run as fast as they possibly can across the living room)    A moose, A shark, An alligator

We were playing for our Family Home Evening game one night and could not figure out what Houston was acting as for the life of us.  He had been crawling around on all 4's, kicking up dirt, and eating grass.  After about 5 minutes we all gave up and he said, "Ok guys! I'll tell you what I am.  Why didn't you know? I'm a Unicorn Bull!"

Why couldn't we get it? 

I love everything about this picture.  : )

Yesterday Houston was helping me make dinner.  He asked,

"Mom, when will you be the little girl and I be the Dad?"

Houston had a hair tie. I asked him if I could have it to put my hair in a ponytail.

"I'll give you this bracelet when you get married."
"But I'm already married"
"No, you're not."
"Yeah, I married Daddy. See in this picture." [gesture to wedding photo on the wall]
"But you don't have a dress on. You're not married."
oops.

We had a good snow a few days ago. The boys and I went out while Hannah slept and Daddy studied. We walked up the trail to a big hill then slid down a few times. It was so bitter cold we only lasted about 15 minutes. The boys wanted Hannah to see snow so badly so I brought in a bowl full.  She sure had fun eating that cold wet stuff.  The boys had a blast laughing at her facial expressions.

 Matt introduced the boys to "Grunt Piggy Grunt" [or loving renamed Grunt Grunt Piddy by Houston] for our FHE game this week.  The game goes like this.  The farmer is blindfolded and waves around a roll of news paper until he taps someone. Then he says, "grunt piggy grunt" and the piggy grunts.  He then has to guess who it is by the sound of their grunt 

They LOVED it! They have been begging to play every day, and I think we have played every day since.  

The boys were so funny to watch. They'd run up and pinch the farmer's bum, or squeak past as closely as they could without getting hit.  Then they'd run and cower behind the couch laughing hysterically.  Houston always had sound effects for his ninja movements to get away from the farmer.  They were both laughing so hard it was pretty hard to not guess correctly.