Worn Out and Ready to be Home!

We stopped at the KFC somewhere around Gallup, NM at the end of our first day of driving back to Ft. Worth. It's a bad sign when you still have another full day of driving and everyone is already this worn out and crabby!

Hadley and Oliver

Here's Hadley figuring out the puzzle. She actually loved to play with the blue chairs behind her more than almost anything at Gr. and Gr.'s.
Here's Grandma Oliver holding the baby cousins, Hadley and Oliver. They are both SO CUTE!

Jumping Jacks

Here we all are at Jumping Jacks. This was obviously mostly fun for the kids, but it did provide a cool, although extremely noisy, place for the adults to sit and chat.

St. George trip--Misc.

Grandpa Oliver and Hadley.
On Tuesday we went to visit my Uncle Rob and Aunt Rebecca. It's funny, my uncle is only three years (I guess almost four years) older than me. Scott and I have followed Rob and Rebecca about six months behind in everything. They got married in May, we got married in December. They had Jacob in July, we had Ryan in November. They had Aaron in April, we had Julia in June, etc. We actually bought our Salt Lake house from them. They moved down to St. George where Rob is now bishop of their ward. I couldn't imagine sacrament mtg. alone every week. You're my hero Rebecca!
Here we are at the St. George temple. The temple where Scott and I were married. We had planned on going to the temple one day; but sadly, it was closed for cleaning. We spent Wednesday with Grandpa and Grandma Matthews, and Brent, Natalie and Cousin Abbey. We went to the temple visitors center, Jumping Jacks, the new In N Out in St. George and then went to the movies to see Kung Fu Panda.
Uncle Brent, Aunt Natalie and Cousin Abbey drove up from Logandale, NV just to see us. They even put off moving to San Diego for law school just to see us. We're glad you did, we loved seeing you and we wish you the best of luck!

St. George trip--Water Works

The first full day we were in St. George we went with cousins, Gr. and Gr. and Aunts and Uncles to the new Water Works in St. George. They totally destructed the old library, and built a fun park where it stood. After about five minutes, Ryan--who obviously forgot the rule about no running--fell and slammed his head on the concrete. He was out for the count (that makes it sound like he passed out, he didn't, his head just really hurt!) for about twenty minutes. Which tells you exactly how hard he must have fallen.

Here's Ben, Julia, Cousin Drew and Emily playing in the water spurts.

Ben really loved when they came up as arches instead of spurts.

Here is grandpa and seven of his "grandbabies".

Privacy

I hope it will be a long time before I ever take a fence for granted again. Before we left on our trip for San Antonio, we had a huge severe thunderstorm which effectively broke five or six panels and the gate of our fence. It has been quite embarrassing and concerning to have our backyard exposed to the public at large. Thankfully, after many steps, we have a beautiful new fence! I'm sorry I don't have before pictures to share, it just didn't even occur to me until I was so excited about the new one!

Watching Star Wars

I went upstairs because I had heard Haddie fussing. I was going to get her out of her crib and beg one of the older kids to watch her so I could finish some cleaning. When I walked up the stairs, this is what I saw. Ryan had taken pity on Haddie and had taken her out of her crib. He was being such a sweet older brother! They were watching Star Wars together. Hadley even had the appropriate apparatus for such viewing. She was seeing if she could effectively shove an entire light saber into her mouth. Notice the choice of the blue light saber, we definitely stick with the good side of the force.

Picnic

Yesterday I had some errands to run around lunch time. I had tried to leave earlier, but Haddie needed her nap. So, even though I wanted to go, we let Haddie have her rest. A crabby baby is not a thing to be triffled with! Because it was so close to lunch, and because I am currently trying to lose some weight, I told each of the kids to pack a lunch. We combined pleasure and business, and it turned out to be quite a fun day!

My Mornings

Welcome to my mornings! Scott leaves most mornings at 5:45 to go running or lifting with his friend Ben. Around 7:00, sometimes earlier, much to my disappointment, I have visitors. They come one by one, or often in groups of twos. They weedle their way into my bed until, wham-o, there is no more room for me!

Haddie and Julie

This is Julia's new favorite thing to do with Haddie. Hadley likes it a lot, until Julie starts bouncing her faster and faster and crazier and crazier, and then she starts to cry.
What a sweetie pie!

Contest

Hey all, my friend's sisters entered a singing competition in which the winner will be the one whose you tube video is viewed the most. They did a fabulous job, it's absolutely beautiful. So, play it as much as you can stand and lets help them win!

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!