""Decades day" for Jr. High, "dork" day for Middle school

going as a hippy

dressing like one of our dads:)

The best part of the morning:

Maddie was thrilled that to dress like a "dork" all she had to do was comb through her naturally curly hair.  You've got to admit, the girl's got hair!! She may get more attention about it than she bargained for at school today...

Abe's progress

I know that I have loved ones out there that find themselves, almost without being able to help it, thinking about Abram and his potty training progress during their fleeting moments of repose throughout the day. And so I ought to share with you how it is going......or not going as the case happens to be.

My mom asked me how it was going one day and she started laughing when I told her that we had attempted it for one WHOLE morning.  "Oh... I SEE!!", she said. I'd gone through six pairs of wet underwear, with Abram never getting any idea to even attempt making it to the toilet so I threw in the towel (so to speak- a very wet one) when one of my friends called and invited me to lunch.

Maybe he's not ready yet- or maybe it's just that things in our family have evolved so much since those first kids were potty trained! Gone are the days where I could stay home all day long working on this project until it was completed. There is no urgency to complete the project because of an up-coming new baby on the way. And, I admit with some element of shame, gone are the days where he can have accidents in an apartment that I won't live in forever!!  I told Shawn that  I wasn't very excited to break our house in this way....Perhaps  I will summon up some more gumption when the kids are all home for spud harvest vacation and  I don't have to drop everything to run them all over creation:)

Progress in other areas is coming right along - one reason being that Maddie chose to use Abram as an experiment for her science class on how quickly a two -year old can catch on to letters and letter sounds.  With both of us working on it whenever we think of it, he is making some very great progress there!!

I walked into what we term our "scripture room" the other day and there was Abe, pretending away, with one of the girls headbands around his forehead.  "I'm Nephi!!", he said.

I had this inspiration last year to put up a white board with the scriptures that we are memorizing on it, and then I put frames all around it that I put pictures from the gospel art kit into.  As we read through different sections of the scriptures I change out the pictures so that there are always pictures in them about what we're currently reading.  This has been so great for the little boys, because we stop our reading periodically, point to the picture, and tell them the story.  They catch on to the stories so much faster this way - and I think especially since the pictures are always in front of them, as opposed to a book. From time to time they ask questions as I catch them looking at them during the day.

This summer, while we were visiting my family, and not too long after reading the book of Mosiah, in the Book of Mormon, Abram met his cousin Benjamin.  He called him "King Benjamin" the whole visit - it was pretty cute. I am excited that these things are beginning to stick in his head:)

Abby and her roommates

My niece, Abby,  is up here for college - it's so fun to have some more family here!  She comes for Sunday dinners, and Wednesday she turned 19 so we had a birthday party for her here at our house.  She has fun roommates and is going to have a great year!

Anyways, mom and Katie - I thought you'd enjoy seeing her and her roommates:) The gal she shares a room with is in the BYU-I t-shirt.