baby preparations

 We have been having so much fun creating a baby room for our little boy:

Kami sketched a tree on the wall and then all of us girls painted in-between her lines:

The finished product, minus the laminated patterned-paper birds we added later:

The little boys  were hopeful painters- but probably not quite capable- so I set them to work on the important task of painting some pictures to hang on the baby's wall for him to look at:

Their finished product - they also painted the picture frames:

Abram  was finished after he painted that big brown bear in the upper right hand corner:) There is also a bear cub in the lower right of that same picture and a small coyote in the lower left!;)  Nolan painted the other three: a blue bear, a moose and a great horned owl.  They know their baby brother is going to love these!!

Meanwhile, Caden was busy assembling a baby crib.  Yes, it may seem a bit late in the game to purchase a baby crib, but ours was thrashed.  In many ways, this baby is like starting all over again.  We have also been buying baby supplies that didn't make it further than the three other boys:)

While the boys were all gone at father-sons outing, part of the girls party was that the girls sewed some stuffed owls for some baby room decoration:

l-r: Maddie's, Kami's, Isabelle's

I sewed a bumper pad, crib skirt and diaper stacker out of these fabrics:

and crocheted a baby blanket - draped across the end of the bed:

We're all pretty pleased with our group effort. Abram's show-and-tell when people come over is to reach into the diaper stacker and pull out one of the tiny little diapers.  After people notice, for him, how small it is, he says, "Smell it!  It smells just like a baby!!"...he actually means the baby powder smell that is still in them...

Anyways, nine more weeks to go...

Sunday afternoon visits

Every Sunday afternoon when Shawn gets home from meetings and we've finished our dinner, we leave to go "visiting".  Usually to my in-laws house.  Sometimes to Kristi's.  This week Jim and Marilyn were working at the temple visitor's center, and after a church-wide meeting, we all met over at our house.  It was particularly fun to have Dave and Kelley here with their kids (they moved to Utah about a year ago).

left to right: Dave, Kristi, Shawn, Suzette, Kami, Kelley, Terry

 We sat out on the front porch to keep an eye on all the little kids- and boy was the place crawling with them! Too bad my camera makes everything blurry when I try to zoom in on things:(  After we visit for awhile, we all go inside and eat treats.  I'm glad that we have a lot of family to enjoy around here!

David, Kristi,  Shawn

Suzette, Kami,Kelley

drum roll please...

My parents opened up their mission call on Saturday.  They will be leaving for a mission to Vanuatu, Port Vila on the 30th of September.  Where is Vanuatu, you may ask?  None of us had ever heard of it.  It is a group of islands around the northeast of Australia (around Fiji) and pictures of it look like a tropical paradise! My parents are going to be great!!

passing the summer

Well both of our computers simultaneously stopped working after my last blog, but I think Caden may have this one up and going enough for me to do something on it!  I'm excited to catch up on everyone's blogs! A couple of days after school let out, Nolan turned six!  He got a bigger bicycle for his birthday and very soon after words looked like this:

He decided to try riding with one hand while pedaling at top speed - it was quite the crash that I watched from the kitchen window, and he had road rash down his torso as well.

Caden started his job working for his great-uncle Kerry, changing pipe and fixing fence up in Driggs, Idaho.  He is working with three other cousins his age and is LOVING it! Kami is working for Suzette doing her yard work and anything else she wants done, and also is doing yard work for the Evans in our ward.  She would like some more to do - but we're glad that she has something. Recently she started running to begin getting back into shape.  Last Saturday Maddie and Caden rode along beside her on bicycles (blurry picture of them when they returned):

Then they jumped into the pond for a refreshing swim: The younger kids are always begging Shwn to take them on a canoe rode:

These two girls (Madeline and Isabelle) have begun canoeing every chance they get and catching turtles:

A picture of Shawn and the kids after they went swimming today:

Hiking R mountain on Nolan's birthday:

The Anderson cousins came over for a sleepover, and they all slept outside in the tent (except for Isabelle and Ainsley):

Abram, Isaac, Nolan and Sam:

Maddie, Abby, Sam, Abram and Isaac:

The girls have been learning some new skills; below is Isabelle sewing an owl for the baby room (more on that later):

Maddie baking bread - this has to be done every other day in the summer, so I have been training Maddie and Isabelle who think it is incredibly fun:

I should have placed these next two pictures first because every day we have the kids work until 11 or 12 before they play.  They have house chores and then they have to go weed a sizable section of the yard. I thought it was pretty cute to look out at these cute little workers the other morning:

Things are almost completely weed-free with all of the kids helping - i need to get a better picture of it one of these days!

The boys went on their Father and Sons outing and had a great time...well except they DID have to endure the adventure of Abram getting carsick and throwing up on the way there.  He had to wear his pajamas the rest of the time and Shawn had to go get his car shampooed to get rid of the smell.  But they found a great campsite and enjoyed their time together! As you can see, Caden was the photographer and therefore in none of the pictures:

The little boys picked me some lovely flowers that grew around where they camped.  When I opened the door to Abram the next morning he enthusiastically presented me with his. After I raved about them he confided that he had actually picked them for Maddie, but he would let me have them:) I think I have received six floral bouquets so far this year - the bouquet in the middle below is of white top and some of my bleeding hearts from the yard.  I have also had wildflowers the girls have found on hikes and clover bouquets that the boys have found in the yard:)

We just had a visit from Matt and Kelly and their boys, David and Jonathan.  They didn't get to stay long, but the boys sure enjoyed each other and we, of course, enjoyed Matt and Kelly.  I wish they could have stayed longer!! Below: David, Nolan, Abram and Jonathan (love the faces)

And lastly I need to include that on one of our summer trips to the library, Nolan decided that he wanted to check out a Rangers Apprentice book.  (He has seen some of the older kids reading them.) I told him I didn't think he was quite ready for that level, but to prove to me that he was, he sat down and started reading it.  He said, "I totally understand it mom!....EW!!!! leg ends?  That is disgusting!!! It says things about leg ends in this book!!" I had to inform him that the word was legends. He thought gory sounded better I think. I let him check it out because what can it hurt anyway?  He was done reading it after a couple of pages:)

One-on-one time and technology is great when it works!!

The last couple of weeks have been jam-packed with last days of school stuffs: projects galore that have kept the kids up late into the evenings, and that have kept us attending parent-invited events during the day and at night!  It's been crazy but fun, and the best part has been that Shawn stayed home this week because there was just too much he would have missed out on family-wise.  We have attended a gymnastics recital (Maddie), a choir concert (Maddie), two orchestra concerts (Kami), a band concert (Caden), gotten kids off on at least five field trips, and attended some during-school functions - reports, etc.to name the big things...an there's more to come!  Summer vacation is going to feel so relaxing.

Shawn and I were out until 10:30 on Thursday evening at a ward temple night, and the older kids had put the younger ones to bed.  Friday morning, Nolan bounced into the room for scriptures at 6:00 already all showered and ready to go for the day.  He was glowing with excitement and reminded his dad that THIS was the big day to ride bikes to school!! Shawn hadn't even mentioned it to him for days, but Nolan had been counting down the moments:) They got a bit of a late start, and it took about half an hour to make the three mile ride to school on those tiny bicycle tires - It was pretty cute to watch them taking off with Nolan pedaling as fast as he could go and Shawn trying not to pedal at all so that they could stay together.

Shawn said that when they arrived, the class was all ready to leave on a field trip to Bear World, which is a pretty neat place for little kids to visit, but which Nolan hadn't even been mentioning because he was so much more excited to go with his dad.

I think that Shawn had so much fun that he decided to devote as much of his day as possible to having as many one-on-one moments with each of his kids as possible, because at noon, Shawn took Isabelle on a date to lunch. They had a great time.

Right after school I had to take Kami to an orchestra recital after school.  Caden had a scout camp-out that Shawn felt like he needed to go to, so he and Caden were hurrying around getting ready for that. It was time to take Kami, but I was getting worried because Maddie's bus still hadn't dropped her off. The older kids told me that they thought that her bus driver had switched up the route and she ought to be home soon. Finally I had to leave, but started calling the school on my way.  No one answered.  I tried finding a number for the bus department, and couldn't find one, so I called a neighbor whose kids ride the same bus.  She asked her daughter if Maddie had been on the bus and she said, "Yes, but the bus driver missed Maddie's stop so she just dropped her off at the side of the road (on the highway) and asked her if it would be OK if she walked home." WHAT?!?!  I started to really freak out because it had now been 20 minutes past the time that she was supposed to get home! The recent kidnappings of those three girls on the news was fresh in my mind!!  Anyways, the mother I had called and I started looking all over for Maddie.  Caden was also out on the road trying to find her.  Finally, I called Shawn who had run to the store and told him to hurry home and told him I couldn't find Maddie ANYWHERE!!  I was ready to call the police and get help finding our girl! He calmly replied, "check your texts".

Then I remembered a text coming in at about the time that Maddie should have arrived home, that was from Shawn, that said, "I have Maddie."  Normally that would have been just dandy, but all week my phone has been acting funny and that very day I had received a bunch of texts that people had sent me days ago.  In fact, Shawn had picked Kami up from a lesson on Monday, then on Thursday he offered to pick Maddie up from gymnastics.  1/2 hour after he was supposed to have picked her up, I received a text from him that said, "I'm at the Jr. high.  Where's Kami?"  Apparently he had sent that on Monday, but when he didn't answer a text I sent right back, I called because I thought, "Oh no! he went after the wrong kid!!" So my phone had been going crazy, and I thought that this text about Maddie was from the other day when  I thought he'd picked up the wrong child.  So I was beyond worried and I was still very up-tight and I let him know that he knew my phone had been having texting issues and he should have CALLED!! He felt pretty bad - the poor guy was just trying to spend time with his daughter...

weekend excitement

What an exciting weekend!! Doesn't this look exciting?

Shawn and Caden washing windows

A little too much excitement for me, which is why my five back and side second story windows on my house have not been washed since right after we moved in!

More exciting than that *but in a different more important sort-of a way* is that my brother Eli got his mission call to Santiago, Chile! He will be leaving straight for the MTC that is in Chile, on September 11th. Now that my parents know when he will be leaving, they will turn in their mission papers with Sept. 11 as their availability date.  Lots of mission stuff going on lately in our family - we are expecting to hear any day when and where my niece, Abby will be going.  (I will add that later if she finds out in the next couple of days, because it was supposedly in the mail on Sunday) Also, on Sunday, Shawn's parents left for the MTC.  They will be serving at the Idaho Falls temple visitor's center for the next year and a half.  We are so excited that they will still be living at home and close to us!

This Nolan boy suddenly jumped on his bike on Friday afternoon and took off! Last year he wouldn't even try it without training wheels.  He has been riding his bike every spare moment, squeezing in the five minutes before the bus arrives in the morning and for hours after school.  He has been enjoying the spring-time thunder storms that we have had in the afternoons twice this week, because then he also has puddles to ride through!!  This morning, at Nolan's request, he and Shawn made plans to ride bikes to school one of these mornings before school lets out for the summer.