Things That Amuse Me

This December has been a little rough.  We have had a lot of fun things going on, but quite a few of those things are not kid-friendly.  Those that know me well know that asking people to watch my kids is a huge stress for me.  I HATE inconveniencing people, and I HATE needing things.  But sometimes it can't be helped.  We have had a lot of residency recruiting dinners and lunches that kids aren't invited to, a residency Christmas party that was a blast (but still no kids invited), and it seems like a million other things where I have to find a babysitter.  Our residency program really is kid friendly, and I totally understand it not being appropriate to have a million kids at dinner and lunch when you are trying to take time to answer applicants' questions (and there would be a million kids because there are 41 kids and counting in our residency), but it all just came at once and caused tremendous stress.  Add that to the fact that I don't know a ton of people in the ward because I am the Primary pianist, and I don't want to creep out the parents of the young women who have no clue who I am, and also that my husband is gone quite often, and it is bound to cause some stress.

So in light of all that, we have been trying to do things at home that include the kids.  Whether it is having dinner at the hospital with Daddy, doing gingerbread houses, finding that silly Elf on the Shelf (ours is named Josh...more on that later), having lots of movie nights, reading Christmas books, doing FHE by ourselves, playing princesses and robots, or going to the dang grocery store again, it has been fun.  My kids amuse me, and of course I think they are the greatest thing ever, most of the time.

I love when they wake up in the morning and greet each other very sweetly like they genuinely missed each other.
E: "Hi Sam! Did you have a goooood sleep?  Oh Mom, Sam's so cute!"  (While patting her back and giving her a hug)
S: "Yeah." (While rubbing her sleepy eyes and trying not to smile)

I like that Sammi calls her pigtails "piggybanks".

When she asks for a show, she calls it a "DV-DV"

Emerson made up his own goofy dance, which looks like goose-stepping, and he named it "The Up-Frog".  He does it whenever he is pleased with something while saying, "Do the Uuuuup-Frog".

Sammi's constant chatter makes me smile.  She talks an awful lot, and uses words like "aggravated".  Her favorite things right now is to come grab my hand and say, "I want a snack.  Will you open the pantry?"

The kids have figured out that if they move the kitchen chairs and bathroom stools (as in stepping stool) around, there is almost nothing they can't reach on the counters.  It does make me smile a little when I go upstairs for a second, and come back down to see a kitchen chair pushed up to the counter, and Sammi guiltily/happily eating a cookie on the floor.  Emerson is less penitent about his sneakiness, and usually proudly exclaims, "We are snitch-a-roos!"  I am a little sad that no treat is sacred anymore though.

The kids keep telling our elf that they are dying for a remote-control train and princess barbies.  I'll let you decipher which child wants which present.  I will have you know that I have mercilessly milked the whole you'd-better-behave-or-I-am-telling-the-elf-to-tell-Santa-he-doesn't-need-to-bring-you-presents thing.  When I was a kid, we would just hurl the word "SANTA!" at one another if someone wasn't sharing.  After Christmas, I may have to invent something else to instill fear in my children.  (Just kidding...but would Easter Bunny minions be so bad?)

December

 We haven't been up to much lately.  Just a lot of staying inside and trying not to go crazy.  We have been doing fun Christmasy things with the kids, but I neglected to take pictures of them all.  So...here we are decorating the tree (in our standard Sunday afternoon clothes).  Emerson always has to wear his undershirt "With NO shirt on top!" and his comfy pants, and Sammi wears her comfy pink pants as well.  Silly kids.

 This is one of the days the kids were dying to play outside before it snowed and got too cold.  It was still pretty dang cold, but bearable.  They were being buddies, so I thought it would be a good time to document that.  It's less fun to document when they are pinching each other and trying to send each other to time-out.

We are getting excited for Christmas in a week!

It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas

 After a fabulous Thanksgiving, at which my mom prepared a most perfect meal, we jumped right into the holiday spirit and took the kids to Temple Square and City Creek.  We rode Trax there, which gave Emerson the biggest, loudest thrill of his life.  And we were all glad to finally get there after he asked at each lurch of the train if this was our station.  "Nope!  Just 13 more stops, E!"  It was a pretty eventful ride, especially when the schizophrenic guy sat right behind Ben.

We were lucky enough to have Grandma and Grandpa J join us.  It was the perfect night to go because the weather wasn't so cold that the snot froze in our noses, like pretty much every other time I've been to Temple Square.  Temple Square is always sub-zero, and Hogle Zoo is always hotter than the Sahara.  Yay Utah weather!

Can I just say that I heart City Creek?  It was the first time I've been and it was a lot of fun.  Poor Gateway.  I feel a little bit bad for it now.  The Deseret Book flagship store was pretty cool with its train factory display.  Guess who we had to drag kicking and screaming away from that?

Then we finished off the night with dinner at Corner Bakery.  The perfect ending to a perfect night.

Grandpa and E looking at the ZCMI candy windows

Dad and the Gril with her wavy-hand disease

"Smile!  Come on, look at the camera and smile!  Be happy, dang it!" -Mom

Ah......fer cute

Admiring the train window

Sammi and E in front of "the castle where Mom and Dad got married" as Sammi likes to say

Fall

 We have a crazy amount of trees in our yard.  The kids had a blast jumping in them and spreading them back out on the grass while Ben tried to rake them up.

 There is a head attached to that helmet...

 Mid-jump! Yes!

 Why yes, we always make our kids wear helmets when they play in the leaves.

Sammi is such a copycat

Love these kids!

Love These Little Faces!

The Festivities

 For some reason every year, I forget what pumpkin carving entails.  I think it's going to be this wonderful, short-ish family activity where everyone has a great time and we end the night with a cute Halloween movie while eating roasted pumpkin seeds.

Not so.

The reality is, it dissolved into us pleading with our kids to just touch the pumpkin guts once, just once, and then we promised we'd hollow out the rest.  So this picture with the pumpkin guts scooper was fake.  Totally fake.  Emerson just likes running around with the tools, and that includes the little saws.  Don't worry though, we drew the line at the butcher knives we used to cut the zig-zag tops off the pumpkins.

"Don't make me touch the guts!"

 We finally got all four pumpkins hollowed out, and then we set about choosing designs.  Sammi wanted Ariel AND Tiana AND Cinderella on hers.  Mom isn't that patient, so I chose just plain Ariel for her.  And did she help me carve it?  No.  Emerson chose some vampire demon thing for his design.  Before he settled on that though, he also liked about 20 designs, so Daddy helped him choose.  He sincerely wanted to help Dad carve, and he helped a little, but then both kids ended up on couch while we kept hitting "play" on another Jake and the Neverland Pirates episode.  Meanwhile, I kept grumbling about how cheap they make the little pumpkin-carving saws and tools.  I swear they used to be better quality and didn't so easily bend in half.  (Did I mention the night deteriorated quickly?)

 About 7 hours later (ok, 2) we were finished with the kids' pumpkins.  And look! They are in their jammies!  Makes sense though since it seemed like it was about the middle of the night by this time.

Yay, Ariel!

Yay, Dracula demon thing!

So to finish out the night, we put the kids in bed and finished carving our own pumpkins.  And we did have roasted pumpkin seeds, but they weren't done roasting until midnight.  I'm serious.  It only takes like an hour to roast them, but we had so many that they wouldn't all fit in the oven at the same time.  (Now that I wrote that, it sounds like we had loose pumpkin seeds busting out the seams of our oven.)  We only have 2 racks in our miniature easy-bake-size oven, and those pans were filled to capacity.

To pass the time until the blasted seeds were roasted, we read Mockingjay together.  (I know, we are so behind to not have finished the series, but we are getting there!  Don't you dare spoil the ending.)  Then I pulled the dang seeds out and we collapsed into bed.  I think next year we might paint our pumpkins, or at least draw jack-o-lantern faces on with a Sharpie.

The Costumes

Our silly little Wall-E

Our gorgeous Ariel

Happy Halloween!

Disneyland 2012

 We surprised the kids with a trip to Disneyland this week.  The word to sum it up: MAGICAL.  I know that probably sounds cliche, but it truly was magical for us.

We were originally going to take a different trip with my family to San Diego, but there were some miscommunications between all of us, and we ended up having to change some plans around.  The good news was that my dad got to come with us, but the bad news was that my mom and Steph didn't get to come. :(  They get to go see Nat in Boston this week instead!

We drove and drove and drove to California, and got there just in time to enjoy the beach before picking my dad up from the airport.  It was my kids' first time, and they thought it was great.

So excited to finally use those beach toys on the beach!

Had a blast chasing the seagulls around

 Newport Beach brought back a lot of memories from about 10 years ago when I went with my best girlfriends in high school and we got pulled out to sea on our boogieboards by the rip current and the lifeguards had to rescue us.  So embarrassing.

We finally told our kids the morning that we were actually going to the park.  Up to that point, we just said we were going to stay at a hotel and that we had a surprise for them.  They were very excited, and it was nice that they didn't know about it before that so they weren't asking us every five minutes of the ten hour drive.  We spent the next 3 days playing hard in the park and sleeping like rocks at night.

We rode The Little Mermaid ride, and then we rode it about 8 more times while we were there.  Sammi adored it obviously, since Ariel is her favorite princess.  She got very nervous about Ursula, and would bury her head in your lap, peek once, then bury her head again.

Right after the Ariel ride.  Mind blown.

 On the ferris wheel

Emerson hating the characters. I don't blame him.  They make me nervous too sometimes.

Cars Land!

 Cars Land was way awesome, but way busy.  It was difficult to get on the racers since the wait was so long, but the other two were pretty easy and lots of fun.

She got so exhausted that she fell asleep in the middle of eating her snack.

Cheeser

Terrible picture of me.  But Mater was cool because he actually drove around.

Sammi was terrified of Lightning McQueen

Disneyland!

Buddies

The magical moment.

Belle

Ti-nana as Sammi calls her

Merida

Snow White

Cigewwy (Cinderella)

The kids laughed and laughed while they bounced with Tigger.  That's why E is blurry.

They LOVED Pooh Bear.  This is E's second time meeting his hero, but he doesn't remember the last time because he was only 18 months.  I will admit I got teary when my kids met their heroes.

Minnie

Mickey

We were so glad to have Grandpa J with us on the trip!  He enjoyed spoiling the children, and we enjoyed his company.  It worked really well to have 3 adults and 2 kids because we could trade off and use the Parent Swap passes so we all got to ride what we wanted.  Mostly we just enjoyed going with the kids though.  As I kept telling myself, "They have no expectations.  They have never been here before, and they will think anything is great."  

 I would say that the most magical moment of the whole trip was when we were watching the World of Color show and they projected Ariel on the wall of mist and played her song and Sammi belted out every word of the song while sitting on Ben's shoulders.  I cried.  I really did.  Then I cried again when they showed a picture of Wall-E and E got all excited since he pretends to be Wall-E half of the time.  

Our trip was just about the right length.  We were ready to go, but sad to leave at the same time.  I was not looking forward to the long drive home, and it ended up being really difficult with Sammi who turned out to have an ear infection, but we survived.  

Overall, definitely worth the money and time spent.

 On the drive home, we took a little detour to Richfield to visit Grandma Christensen.

They read stories

Had good naps

Really good naps

 And she took us to the Pumpkin Patch and out to dinner!

We love you Great Grandma Chris!