Tired boy, tired baby, tired mommy

This week on Sunday I woke up feeling a bit croaky. Of course I was singing in church that afternoon! Luckily my throat got feeling a bit better, and I think the song turned out pretty well.

Since then Amelia and I have been feeling a bit under the weather. My head is all congested and my voice sounds funny. Poor Amelia ended up with a runny nose and a cough. Add teething to that, and we have one miserable little girl! Poor thing.

She has not been sleeping or napping well, so yesterday after story time at the library when Karyn and I traded kids, I decided to go pick up Ephraim and drop off Micah. That way maybe Amelia would fall asleep in the van.

Well, it turns out that one of my kids did fall asleep... just not Amelia.

Ephraim was passed out cold when we got home. I carried him inside and set him on the couch. When I came back this is how I found him. Silly boy! Man, was it hard to wake him up.

I never did get Amelia to take a nap. She had a hard time getting to sleep last night too. It didn't matter whether I held her or put her in her bed, either way she was miserable. I think the congestion in her head was making her uncomfortable. Finally I ended up putting her in her carseat, and she settled down and fell asleep sometime around 1 a.m.

Hopefully we can both get feeling better soon and get more sleep!

Trim the Tree

For family night yesterday, we finally put ornaments on the tree! The boys were SO excited, especially after I made them wait four whole days. Oh the cruelty!

I am actually impressed that I have my Christmas tree up and decorated before December! Go Mommy. The boys were so excited that they carried up nearly all the ornament boxes for me. Hooray!

The boys loved decorating the tree. I just kept handing them ornaments and letting them put them wherever they wanted.

Of course the boys can't reach too high, but they used all their resources (and the couch) to get the ornaments up as high as they could.

It was so fun to watch my big boys decorating the tree...

Even if their ornament placement was a little bit off.

Yep! There are 7 ornaments in this picture!

Ephraim was excited that it was his turn to put the star on the tree. Daddy lifted him up, and he got it up there.






Of course Amelia was very interested in what we were up to and watched us decorate the tree. She even retrieved an ornament or two... good thing all the ball ornaments on my tree are plastic!

After the kids went to bed, I moved the ornaments around a bit and I have a few more to put on, but I think the tree is going to be beautiful!

Thanksgiving Day

This year we had a nice, quiet Thanksgiving at home. While dinner was cooking, the boys kept themselves busy. Joe always has tons to do around the house, and I was happy to find that he and Jacob gave my van a good cleaning.

For Thanksgiving dinner I cooked a turkey in the crockpot and we had the yummiest sweet potato souffle, crescent rolls, mashed potatoes, and green beans. Of course we also topped it off with pie! We had pumpkin and razzleberry pies- yum!

We had a great holiday just hanging out with our little family. I finished Amelia's applique turkey shirt just in time for her to wear it. Isn't she the cutest thing?

She was having a great time watching her brothers run around the house.

She is working on another tooth, so of course she chews on everything!

I finally got a decent picture of Amelia on her hands and knees. She is so determined, but just hasn't quite worked out the mechanics yet.

I am sure she will be crawling around before Christmas!

Amelia at 8 months

I finally got around to taking Amelia's 8 month pictures. I guess I am not doing too bad considering I was only a week late!

I can't believe my girl is 8 months old! She is absolutely the cutest baby girl ever. First I took a picture of her without any hair pretties so you can see how much hair she is growing!

What a little sweetheart!

Then I put a cute flower in her hair (thanks Karyn!) and got the cutest shots ever! She is such a happy, smiley girl! I just got a whole bunch of photos printed, and this next one is the one that I got done for anyone who wants one:

What a great picture! Can you believe I took it myself? Go me!
Here are some other pretty nice ones...

I just love her light brown hair and pretty blue eyes. We are going to have our work cut out for us when she is a teenager!

And of course I took pictures of her with her 8 months old sign. By this point she was getting tired of doing the picture thing, so she wasn't so smiley. But I still think they turned out great.

We love our Amelia. She is such a sweet girl. I love how happy she gets whenever she sees me. She kicks her legs when she gets excited, and she will already bob up and down to music, which is so cute. Right now the only thing she really says is "mamamama", and that is OK with me!

Right now Amelia rolls all over the place and is trying really hard to crawl. She can get up on her hands and knees and rock back and forth, but she hasn't figured out how to get herself going forward. She should figure it out pretty soon! She loves to sit up and play with toys and watch her brothers run around. I guess it won't be long and she will be crawling after them!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from my One Little, Two Little, Three Little Indians!

 

 I have so much to be Thankful for this year. First and foremost, my three beautiful children who bring so much joy into my life.

Today our local library storytime, we read fun Thanksgiving books and got to make these cute headbands for the craft. The library ladies were kind enough to let me make one for Miss Amelia too so I could have three little Indians! I am thankful that our library offers free programs that are so fun for my kids.

I am also so grateful this year for kind and generous friends and great family. Especially my wonderful husband who is there for me through the good times and the bad.  I don't know what I would do without all of your love and support.

We will be spending a quiet Thanksgiving weekend with our sweet little family. It will be nice to have everyone home for the long weekend. I am so thankful for my husband and my sweet kids... even if sometimes they are little turkeys!

Our Home Improvement Holidays

Our furnace started making interesting noises, and Joe did not feel good about letting it go any longer. So on Monday the heating and air conditioning guys came to our house, and we got a brand new furnace! Of course Ephraim and Jacob were SO excited to watch what was going on. I did not have to entertain them most of the day. Ephraim was talkative and asked a lot of questions, but the furnace guys were pretty good about it.

Can you believe that our old furnace was built in 1976? Holy Cow! That means it was 35 years old! No wonder it started making funny noises, etc.

We have known that this day was coming, so it was not a big surprise that we needed to get a new furnace. It does kind of stink to have to get a new furnace right before Christmas, but the good news is that I get an air conditioner too!

Yep. For the past 6 years that we have lived in our house we have had an ancient furnace and no air conditioning. We just had an evaporative cooler (aka swamp cooler). Won't it be so nice this summer to be able to turn on the air conditioner and have the cool air blow out all the vents in the house? Heaven!

It was funny because when I mentioned to Joe that the boys were fascinated by the work being done, he told me that HE was fascinated too. Must be a guy thing.

We got a pretty good deal on our furnace and a free upgrade on our AC unit, which made us happy. The installers were at our house for about 12 hours, but they got the job done!

I am thankful that our old furnace lasted so long and that we have the means to buy a new one. Plus, isn't my new furnace beautiful and shiny?

They had to make the hole in our bathroom wall bigger, so now Joe gets to figure out what kind of doors to put in and all that fun stuff. But the furnace seems to work great.

That's not the only shiny thing in our house either! A few weeks ago our dishwasher gave up the ghost (just before Halloween, coincidentally). It just would not drain and the motor died. So I got a beautiful new dishwasher.

So what do you think of the dishwasher, Amelia?

Oooh! Aaahhh! Pretty! Now my dishes actually get clean! Plus I don't have to wonder if I killed all the mold and junk that was growing in our old dishwasher.

So I guess you could say we are having a home improvement Christmas. Joe and I are getting each other a new furnace, air conditioner, and dishwasher. They may not be fun gifts, but we will definitely enjoy them! I am just thankful that we will have a warm house in the winter, a cool house in the summer, and nice, clean dishes!

Amelia's Tooth!

This weekend we had a good time at home, getting stuff done. Daddy was home, so I was finally able to get a picture of the new tooth that Amelia has grown. Check it out!

I know the picture is upside down, but that is how I took it! You can't really tell from this picture, but her other bottom tooth is working on coming in. Soon she will have two little teeth.

Despite growing teeth, she is still mostly a happy little human. She is such a cutie pie!

I could just eat her up, couldn't you?

Amelia is turning into a bit of a mommy's girl. She loves Daddy and has tons of fun with him...

but when she is tired, hungry, or upset, I am the one she wants. I guess that is not so bad for Daddy, is it?

It has gotten a bit colder lately, and we have had some rain that has turned into snow on Mount Timp. We had a light frosting of snow on the ground, but nothing that lasted very long. I wish I had gotten a picture of the boys on Saturday morning. They wanted to go outside and play in the snow. It cracked me up because we only had a light dusting. But they went out anyway and proceeded to gather up as much snow as they could in their big green dump truck using their toy shovels. It was pretty funny!

Un*be*leaf *ble

Most of our trees have lost their leaves by now. Here is the tree that we take a picture of on our way home from Kindergarten. I have stopped taking a picture of it every day because now it pretty much looks the same... no leaves! But you can see in the background that Mount Timpanogos has snow on it!

Our yard is usually bare of leaves because Joe is really good about keeping up with yard work. However our neighbor has been a bit under the weather, so we decided to help her out and rake up her leaves. Of course the boys were all too happy to help, as long as they got to play in the leaves afterwards!

Jacob and Ephraim helped me rake up any remaining leaves in to the pile. Then they took turns running and jumping into the pile.

They always have so much energy that I did not mind raking up the pile of leaves over and over so they could keep running and jumping and hopefully burn off some of excess energy. Plus it was fun to watch them going at it.

I got some pretty good practice with my action photography as well. Here are a few of my favorites:

Look at how much air Jacob got on his leap! Wow! Then I told Ephraim to flop into the leaves face-first and he was more than happy to oblige.

Splat! Just look at the leaves go flying!

Jumping in the leaves is so much fun! My boys kept at it for at least an hour this afternoon, and that doesn't include the time they spent jumping last night. Jonah actually cried when he saw the leaves being put into the garbage can.

Silly boy!