Poor Daniel!

My poor husband!  Why you might ask?  Because he is married to me and we just had a shindig!  We just blessed Isabella last Sunday which of course means that I (like my mother before me) had to make changes to our house.  Fortunately, I did not go as in depth as we often did as children.  There was no knocking down of walls, wallpapering, or painting to be done.  I did however decide to finally finish up some decorating.  This meant that the whole week before the blessing I was working on getting pictures arranged, printed and hung.  Here is what I did:

I took these pictures of my kids and then arranged them in photoshop.

Then I had Daniel make them into canvases to hang on the wall.

Then we tossed around some Ideas of what to do with the wall in our hallway and ended up with this.

Finally he helped me update the pictures over our stairs.

Besides all of that, Daniel cleaned the entire house, (I am talking, bathrooms, mopping floors, vacuuming, kitchen, the whole shebang!) and watched the kids for much of the day on Saturday while I taught a Zumba class and tried to figure out how to cut the vinyl for the walls in the pictures above.

Yes, poor Daniel.  He was fabulous though.  I am so blessed that he is so supportive of my often annoying habits.  He wasn't bugged at me even once the whole weekend and there were plenty of opportunities for him to have been so.  I AM BLESSED!

Black-eyed pea!

I forgot to post this back when it happened, so here it is a little late.  

Bugsy is our crazy little guy!  He likes to run back and forth in the kitchen/living room area.  He was doing this one night as usual when he slipped and hit his cheek on the bottom part of the couch where it is hard.  Here's what happened:

This was actually after about a week.   It got a lot worse the first few days and then slowly started to get better.  It looked much worse than this when we went to church the next day!  We got some teasing about that.  I called him my little black-eyed pea for several days.  I felt so bad every time I looked at it because it just looked like it hurt.  It didn't seem to bother him though.  It has all cleared up now, but I imagine this is just the first of many to come with this little guy.  

As a side note, he did something the other day that we were praising him for.  I don't even remember what it was now, but when I asked him how he did it he said, "I'm just a cool guy."  It was so cute!  We love our "cool guy!"

What we've been up to!

Here is a little of what we've been up to lately.

February 25th was the last really good snowfall as I recall.  Daniel had a little time off that day and took the kids out to build a snow fort.  Bugsy got cold and bored and came inside before I got around to taking pictures, but here are some pics of Emma and Daniel.  Thy are not the best because I took them through the window, but they are fun.

For St. Patrick's Day, we had a play date for Emma and Matthew and did a "Leprechaun Lunch."  It was not a huge success.  I made green rolls that Emma really liked, but she was the only one.  I also made green pudding that nobody liked.  However, after lunch we made homemade oreos with green frosting that they liked.  Also, Mieka brought Matthew a cupcake with green frosting which he loved.  We had a fun time despite the fact that the lunch was a flop!  :)

We have had a couple of semi nice days this past month and have decided to take advantage of them.  Daniel stacked up some bricks in a circle to create a fire pit on part of our dirt.  We have used it a couple of times to roast marshmallows and make s'mores.  This was the last time we did it.  We had made them before and Emma couldn't exactly remember what they were called, so between her and Matthew they were called snorklers, snorkels, smorklers and finally s'mores.  They didn't really seem to care what the s'mores were called, they were just interested in eating them!

Dropped What?

We recently told Emma that mice carry disease and so we don't want them in our house.  The next day I was doing her hair for school and she saw a spot on my oh so clean mirror.  The following conversation took place:


Emma (pointing to the spot on the mirror):  "Mom what's that?"
Me: "Just a spot on the mirror that needs to be cleaned off."
Emma (after thinking for a moment): "I think it was a mouse that walked across the mirror and dropped some disease on it."


Watch out for those gravity defying, disease dropping mice, apparently they are everywhere!  You never know when one might strike a mirror near you.  I have since cleaned my mirror!  :)


Note to me:  explain that the word "carry" does not always mean holding something in one's hands.  

About A Month Ago...

We celebrated Bugsy's birthday.  My little boy turned 3.  He's getting so big!

Bugsy wanted a tractor party.  There wasn't much in the way of tractors, so we went with a construction theme.  Here are some pics:

This was the invitation that I ended up emailing because I got around to it too late, as per usual!  :)

We decorated with a bunch of "construction signs" that I made.

We decorated hard hats instead of party hats.  Everyone had a name tag to wear and one to put on their hat.  They each had their name and then a construction tool that started with that letter.  For example Bugsy Bulldozer, Emma Excavator, etc.  We also did a tractor pinata, pin the bucket on the tractor and scoop the rocks (balloons) with your tractor bucket (cake pans.)

Bugsy wanted a tractor cake, obviously.  I finished it around 3:00 in the morning, as usual.  Bugsy loved it and it was well worth the time and effort.  He was so excited about it!

 We did invited all cousins this year.  There aren't that many kids Matthew's age, so the age ranges goes pretty high.

Everyone seemed to have a pretty good time.  Thanks to everyone who came!

Christmas!

Yes, Christmas was a few weeks ago and at last I am posting about it.  :)

For Christmas Eve we went to Steve and Jane's house.  It was a full house with Daniel's whole family there along with Grandma and Grandpa Sperry and Chris' fiance Lisandra and her family.  With everyone, I believe the total was 26 but I am not sure.  There were definitely a lot of people, but it was fun.  We got to meet Lisandra's family and they were all really nice.  Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures that night.

Christmas morning was fun.  Tamara, Chris and Lisandra along with several of Lisandra's family came that morning.  I didn't know they were coming and so didn't have any little gifts for her family and I felt a little bad about that, especially because her mother gave us a bunch of yummy treats from Brazil.  Wish I had thought of doing something like that for them!  Alas I didn't, maybe some day I will be more thoughtful.

The kids had fun opening presents.  Matthew was so excited for me to open the present he got for me.  Although I already knew what it was because he had told me about 30 times the day before that it was HIS garbage truck.  I opened the garbage truck second after the Zhu Zhu pet castle that Emma got for me.  Matthew hardly wanted to open any presents after the Garbage truck was opened, he was so excited about it.  Emma was excited, but a little more quiet this year.  She was excited to get her Zhu Zhu pet stroller though.  Bella was a little zoned the whole time and didn't really know what was going on, but we all had a good time.

After we opened presents, Daniel showed Lisandra's family our pride and joy, the skateboard ramp of course!  :)  Then we went out to my parents house.  We had our traditional Christmas breakfast which is much better now that we have the food warmers from the rental center so everyone can eat at the same time instead of in shifts.  At least the rental center is good for something.  :)  Then  the kids opened presents from grandma and grandpa and from each other.  Then we did our adult gift exchange.  It was a pretty standard day, kids running around screaming happily and the adults lounging on the couches visiting. 

Later that afternoon we watched my present from Daniel.  If you looked at the last post, it as my 12th day of Christmas from my true love, "Twelve Months of Bliss."  It was a picture video of this last year.  It was fun to see all of the different pictures and somehow things like that always make me slightly melancholy.  I think it is because I realize that the kids are growing up and will not be my babies forever.   There is always a sweetness about it too though, to see the fun times we have and the precious little spirits we are blessed with.  I really liked the video.

All in all it was great!

The Twelfth Day of Christmas

And finally, the conclusion that you have all been waiting for...

The 12th Day of Christmas!

(Yes, it is in fact January now and I am just getting around to posting this  :)

The tag said:

"On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, Santa gave to me:  Twelve Growing Animals

Merry Christmas"

They are these little capsules you put in water and when the water dissolves the outside, a little sponge animal pops out.  There was also a $25 gift car to McDonalds.  Mmmmm!

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:  12 months of bliss!

Daniel made a picture video of our family in 2010.  We watched it Christmas afternoon.  It was wonderful and so fun to see all we did in 2010.  What a fabulous husband!

It was so fun to get the 12 days of Christmas this year!  I am still curious who our Secret Santa was, but whoever it was, we sure are grateful for their kindness!