How scary are you?

I stole thus from my friend Suzanne's blog. It's too funny!

You Are 40% Scary

You scare men off ocassionaly, but only very weak men. You're a normal woman. You're not perfect, but you're pretty darn close.

http://www.blogthings.com/doyouscareoffmenquiz/">Do You Scare Off Men?

Catching Up!

I just realized that I haven't posted for over a week, and I don't have any pictures to post, sorry! We've just been kicking along through the summer. Our days go much better when we stick to our schedule. Scripture Study, Breakfast, Chores, School work, Free Time, Lunch, Quiet Time, Piano, Swimming, Dinner, Baths, Reading and Bed. If we don't do that, the kids spend their day beating each other, arguing and messing up the house.
Scott and I did get a weekend away, which was SO LOVELY! We left the kids with our AWESOME friends from church Jamie and Robby for three days and we drove down to San Antonio. We stopped at the new San Antonio temple, which is beautiful and peaceful. I think it's my favoritist temple so far. Scott said it best, they are just SO excited to have a temple that it stays perfectly busy, but the sessions are friendly and laid back. I'm ready to move to San Antonio just for the temple! But Scott says the P1 Ameriprise office down there just closed because it was failing :( Drat!
We went downtown and stayed in a nice hotel right on the Riverwalk! The Riverwalk is also one of my new favoritist places. It's SO peaceful (only before about two pm). It's beautiful. It's actually underneath street level and a nice breeze blows through even on the hottest days. It's jammed with quaint resturants. We ran together on the Riverwalk Saturday morning, went back to the hotel and had breakfast. Got back out to go and see the Alamo, which is MUCH smaller than I expected! And I think most of the reason why I didn't take any pictures. My first attempt to snap a photo on our getaway was inside the Alamo. A nice officer came up to me and very kindly informed me that picture taking was not allowed inside the Alamo because it's basically a shrine to the fallen heros of Texas. He simply asked me to delete the photo I had taken, and I did, but I was SO embarrassed. I still haven't taken a picture since then!
The kids loved hanging with Robby and Jamie. The worst thing that happened was I swear every towel in our house was dirty when I got back. But if that is the worst thing that happened, that is AMAZING! I know Jamie feels bad, but that's just life with tons of small kids.
We also had a severe Thunderstorm Wednesday night with winds exceeding 50 mph. Subsequently, we woke up Thursday morning to find several panels of our fence blown off! We are currently in the process of collecting bids to have the whole east side of our fence replaced. Such is the life of Home Owners ;( That's my left eye twitching!
Hopefully next post will have some pictures. We love you all!

Tagged

Haddie was tagged by her friend Sabrina Collins. So here are:
8 Things about Hadley

1) Hadley is the easiest baby to take care of. She hardly ever cries, she slept through the night at 3 wks. She seems to know when I need her to wake up and when I need her to go to sleep.

2) Hadley LOVES her big brother Ryan. He can make her laugh faster than anyone.

3) Hadley has a new favorite hide-out, she loves to roll under the couches in the music room and play with the straps on the under side.

4) Hadley has her daddy wrapped around her little finger. He is enamored with her. Every time he comes home from work he's so excited to see her.

5) Hadley, although she loves solid food, is the hardest baby to feed. She thinks she can feed herself. Her favorite thing to do is slap the spoon (fully loaded with food of course) on to her high chair tray so food goes flying everywhere.

6) Hadley most often has a very serious look on her face. I can already tell that she is going to have a very dry sense of humor. Can you imagine her cracking a joke with her deadly serious face on? Hilarious!

7) Hadley has already, in her short life, had two spinal taps, and three trips to the Emergency Room. She has also already had four ear infections. What are we going to do with her? She's not necessarily sickly, but it doesn't take much to unbalance her system and it usually results in an infection of some kind.

8) Hadley loves kisses! She loves to give the full on, mouth open, try and eat your face off kisses. She loves kisses and hugs. She by far has been my most affectionate baby.

Thinking back to when she was born and my doctor showed me her umbilical cord and showed us several spots where the cord had started to thin dangerously, the kind of thing that leads to a 38 wk. gestation baby dying in-utero, we are just extremely grateful that she is a part of our family and that she decided to come when she did!

Hadley tags: Hannah Ebbert, Ella Schipper, Tessa Brannock, Minnie Smith, Oliver Bowles, Peyton Hawke and Annette White

Swimming? Birthday Bash

The swimming part of our birthday bash was rudely cancelled by the torrential rain to which we awoke this morning! Too bad, it certainly would have made for an easy and entertaining party. Oh, well, such is life, ehh?
This is the glorious end result of my struggle to create the Tropical Pool Cake from Woman's Day magazine that Julia has wanted for two years. I finally took a stab and it was fairly easy. Except, they make it sound like you just pour the jell-o into the hole in the cake to make the water and everything just works out fine. I poured the jell-o in and the cake sucked it all up! I kept pouring thinking, maybe eventually some will stay where it's supposed to. NOT! I eventually just put the cut-out piece of cake back in and made the pool with blue frosting. I had to glue the soggy, jell-o laden cake back together with frosting, let it sit in the refrigerator to solidify and then just make it look the best I could. At least I thought the end result was passable.
Happy Birthday to Julia!

Happy 31st Birthday to my Scottie!

Little Scottie at a year old. Someone told me yesterday that they thought Haddie looked a lot like Scott. I didn't really agree, now I do. I love the picture of cub scout scottie in the winter hat in the summer in sunny L.A. Too funny! Next comes Scott, Bishop Stanton (who was then the Young Men's President and a major positive influence in Scott's life), and Scott's just younger brother Todd at a Scout camping trip. At that same camping trip Scott was mountain biking, trying to keep up with his friend who was at the time a professional mountain biker. Needless to say, he crashed and gashed himself up pretty good! He still gets mad to this day when he talks about it! I feel SO lucky to have him in my life. I love you my snicker-doodle muffin love, schawheatie-pie dumplin'!

Happy Birthday Sweet Julie!

I was late posting this because we're having Julia's birthday party tomorrow. It feels like that's her birthday even though it was officially on Monday. We are SO glad to have you in our family. In honor of her 7 years, I will type seven things I appreciate about Julia.
1)You have such and energy and enthusiasm for life
2)You are a positive role model for your friends
3)You are a strong leader
4)You want with all your heart to do what is right
5)You love beauty and strive to find it wherever you are
6)You teach mommy about making looking nice a priority
7)Your sunshine and light, always singing, smiling and dancing around
Okay. . .I have to add just this one more. One to grow on I guess.
8)You are my best helper
We love you SO much, and despite what you sometimes think, we are glad to have you in our family!

Baby Cousins

I watched cousins for a couple of days last week. Hadley and Ally played SO cute together. It had never occurred to me until then how much they look alike. Of course, Ryan takes the opportunity to give the little girls bunny ears. What an 8 year old boy!

7 months

It's hard to believe that Haddie is 7 months old today. She is sitting SO well by herself, and she is getting SO close to crawling. She wants SO badly to be one of the big kids. Right now she especially loves her brother Ryan!

Ben and Emmy

This is what Ben and Emmy were doing during the sprinkler battle!

The "How Long Can You Sit on the Sprinkler" Stand-off

Ryan and Julia and one of their friends decided to have a contest. As you may have already guessed, there was no clear winner. This was a sad day. We invited them over to go swimming at our pool, we got all ready and walked all the way down there only to find that the pool was LOCKED. Crazily enough, I found out later that the only reason it was locked was that the person who was supposed to open it that day had gone out of town!

Family Photos--last one, I promise! (for today anyway)

Here's Scott and I. I love the picture of the three oldest kids that comes next. The third photo was my favorite of the five kids together. And I loved the last one of my three beautiful girls!

Family Photos--Close ups

I love these close-up pictures she took, they turned out SUPER cute. We couldn't convince Ben to let us take one. He got a cranky bug about half-way through. He just really wanted to go and play on the toys at the park!

Family Photos Session #2

This first photo is my favorite of us sitting by the tree, the others are each cute or funny in their own way. I loved how Scott was tenderly looking at tired/crabby Ben in the second picture. Ben maimed Scott in the third picture and Kristi caught it--too funny! I love the fourth photo, and it probably would have been a favorite, but Emma is smashing her face!

Family Photos Session 1

I love my friend Kristi, she is the greatest! She took time out of her busy schedule today, and used her own camera to shoot some family pictures for us. Here are my two favorite family pictures by the bridge. I thought the one of the boys walking was priceless and then it's all the girls.

Swimming

Here's our first of many swimming trips this summer. Haddie kept trying to eat her floatie. I went and bought Ben one of those floating swimming suits so I wasn's so afraid he would drown. Then there's Emma floating in her duckie!