Nate Update

I try to get pictures of my babies every month for the first year. This is for two reasons, the first is because babies change so much during the first year and I am not so good at consistently taking snapshots of them, so I figure I will for sure get them if I do professional pictures. The second is because I was a middle child and when I look back at my baby pictures there are surprisingly few of them...especially since my mom was into photography at the time. I don't want my children to think there weren't enough pictures of them, so I err on the side of much too many. (My mom is making up for it by taking a lot of pictures of my kids, thanks mom). For Nate's 10 months he got to be involved in the disaster that was the kids group pictures that I posted about a couple of weeks ago. I didn't get to write about his development last month, so I thought I would do a quick post about that.
Nate has been very busy. He finally learned the regular way to crawl, no more army crawl and he is everywhere all at once. I have found him in the bathrooms playing in the toilets more than I want to admit to. (Yuck!) He has two kinds of crawling now..he crawls normal on soft carpet, and can get across the house pretty fast. He crawls like a stink bug on any surface that is less than soft, i.e. cement, tile, grass, church carpet.

He loves to be outside. It has been nice here so I have been able to leave the back door open and he will crawl outside and play out there for a while. He LOVES the sandbox out there. This has also created some problems as we got a rabbit a couple of weeks ago and I have found its droppings in his mouth (yuck, yuck, yuck!)

He is more cautious than our last one was...he is just now getting brave enough to crawl up the stairs (we finally got the gate up yesterday). He loves to pull up on whatever he can get to. He will pull up and then cruise along to get where he is going. I have a couple of times seen him let go, or get half way pulled up and then attempt to stand. It hasn't been completely successful yet, but its definitely in the works.

He is stilll quite social and will smile at anyone, and sometimes we can get him to wave too. He has such a radiant smile, it lights up my day. The other day Joe said that Nate said "hi Dada." I figured if he could say that then he could say "mama," so I tried working with him to say mama. When I said to say "mama" he didn't say anything, he just put his hand to his mouth and brought it out like he was blowing kisses. He also likes to clap. He loves patty-cake and will clap along if you sing it.

He also has the most beautiful blue eyes. They are darker than Michael's and a little bit turquoise. I hope he keeps them, because they are dreamy and I would love to have that color eyes!

His favorite funny noise is the clucking sound. He will mimic you if you make it. If you make kissing sounds at him, he mimics with a clucking sound. So cute.

And like any baby, we love them most when they are peacefully sleeping.

The Laundry Fairy

Does your house have a laundry fairy? Ours does. She comes sometime after Joe leaves for work on Monday morning and works all day and leaves sometime before bed on Monday. Usually she does between 4-6 large loads of laundry in the high capacity washer, folds, sorts and puts away all of the clothes. Its amazing how on Monday, all our clothes magically get clean and appear in our drawers right where they go. Every couple of weeks the laundry fairy has to do a couple of more loads in order to make sure all the non-iron shirts in the house are properly cared for and hung "just so."

Even though our laundry fairy works extra hard and does such an amazing job, sometimes she too gets criticized...."why is Michael's shirt in my drawer?" (because until 2 weeks ago it WAS your shirt) "oh wow, look, the laundry is getting really high, wow you need to do it," and "how did this shirt get hung this way?"

Oh well, I guess even fairies aren't perfect!

Why you should never pay money for pictures of 4 kids

I made the mistake of taking my kids to have professional (well at least as professional as JCPenney's gets) pictures last week. I had done it when Nate was 6 weeks and I had a couple of pictures that turned out perfect. Of course, my mom was there to help me. This time turned out to be a disaster. Either the older kids couldn't look right at the camera:
Or the photographer came up with horrid poses:

Or if the pose had potential, the kids didn't get it..think Sound of Music here:

Or Nate really wanted to check out the camera:

Or my kids forgot what a smile looks like:

Or if all these things were right, then the picture was still only so/so:

Oh well, so these aren't frameable, but we did capture what they looked like at this point in time...too bad I worried about matching and spent the time to get them there.

The picture that Joe took on Sunday on our front porch turned out way better than any of these. And he only spent 3 minutes getting it done!

Easter 2009

We had a very nice Easter! The kids went camping on Friday with Daddy and some friends. When they got home, they found there was a bunch of eggs hidden in the backyard! They enjoyed finding the eggs!

This weekend, Joe also got the kids (or really himself) a pet rabbit. It is a male California rabbit, which apparently is a good kind for keeping here. It is very pretty, and docile. Joe hass been talking about getting a rabbit for a long time, but he thought that we would try the hamster first. Since the hamster didn't work out, I think we should have tried the rabbit first. It is an outdoor rabbit, it will stay in a cage in the backyard. Eventually Joe wants to get a female and to breed them, but we're just trying one at a time for now. We're going to name him Whitey!

Nate was enamored with the rabbit!

The kids also got to dye eggs on Sunday! They thought that was pretty fun!

(On a side note, Ron....the hamster...died the other day. We had been going to give him away, so we moved him to the garage so he wouldn't stink our house up anymore. One day I looked and he wasn't moving. The kids still haven't noticed that he's dead).

Straight A Adam

Adam got straight A's again for the third quarter! We're so proud of him! Good Job Adam!

Nate's Favorite Toy

Nate has a new favorite toy. He likes to sit in this car and pretend to drive. It moves just like the cars on the Flinstones move...with foot power. Once in a while he will back up and his little body will end up falling down into the foot hole. He will sit there patiently, without crying, until Mommy comes and lifts him back up.
He loves to open and close this door. What a fun little boy!

Bees and Other thoughts on Preparedness

As most of you know, Joe has been very interested in preparing our family to subsist in case of some type of disaster or hard time. He has spent a lot of time researching what would be required if there were different types of natural (or unnatural) disasters, if he were to lose his job and be unable to find new work, if we needed to survive without being able to go to the store.

To this end, we have mostly compiled a years supply of food. If you look at what is needed for a years supply of food, however, you see that what is recommended is very basic and would make for a miserable year. He has tried to diversify this by doing many things that will continually help supply or family with food and necessities.

A little over a year ago, we bought some rural property that is on a lake about 30 miles from here. We bought it with the idea of using it for a place to get away from the city and relax. It also is a nice place to think of when we think about emergency preparedness. It is away from the city, so not as many people will be around to bother us. It has a natural body of water nearby that can provide water (with filtering) and fish. It is in a forest so there are many types of wildlife that we can eat (if absolutely necessary...otherwise, we will leave them alone). We have also been working on bettering the land for our use, and so we have planted some fruit trees there. That will provide fresh fruit to us. Last week, Joe got a beehive and put it up on the property next to the fruit trees.

Apparently, when Joe was growing up, his father had a beehive. Raising bees is quite a hobby as far as I can tell, but I think that having fresh honey will be a good thing for our family. (Plus it makes a great Christmas gift). We have also planted pecan trees at our house because that is another excellent source of protein for us. We plan to get a rabbit as a pet, but also with the idea that we can learn to breed them to provide a protein meal for our family. (My family raised rabbits when I was young, I am not a big fan, but as compared to one solid year of ground wheat, it might be okay).

Beyond this, Joe has also thought about what we would need to take with us if we have to leave our house. Instead of the basic 72 hour kits, Joe has created for our family "survival backpacks" that have supplies for us to survive on foot for an extended period of time. Everyone in the family has one, and together we have all the supplies for our family. (Nate doesn't have one yet, but Ellie does). He has really spent a lot of time thinking through this.

We are now working on creating a set of bins we could throw in the car that would give us some essentials if we had to take off by car for an extended period of time.

I'm glad that Joe has spearheaded this effort, because it is a lot of work, and there are a lot of variables to think about, but it is nice to have a plan in order.



This is Nate last weekend at our property. He likes to crawl on the ground and eat the dirt.

A cherry blossom on one of the trees:

Plum blossoms:

Pears growing:

The property we bought had 5 pear trees on it. Three are quite large and produce pears, but two are smaller and will need some care to start producing.

We are teaching the children to work by letting them do projects with us at the land. Here they are watering the trees:

If you want any of Joe's spreadsheets on survival, e-mail him and he would be happy to forward them to you.

Uno the Turtle

Uno is a Russian Tortoise. Santa brought him for Adam. Adam really, really, really wanted a turtle for Christmas and Santa thought a non-aquatic turtle (tortoise would be best). He's a great pet...40 year life span, non-smelly, takes up a minimal amount of space, and is very low maintenance. Yesterday we let him out in the back yard to cruise around for a few minutes.
This is Adam with his pet!

Short

So I decided to go for a change. I always go get my hair cut and try to do something different and come back with hair that is 3-4 inches shorter, but not short enough for anyone to notice that it is different. This time I thought I'd do quite a bit shorter to see what that would be like.

I went to Supercuts. I always do, every time I have gone to an expensive place to get it done I end up going to Supercuts to get it fixed. But don't get highlights there, I made that mistake once.

When I got home, Joe was having an elder's quorum meeting at my house so our friend Brian was over and he said "it looks like my daughter, Kaiya's hair." Kaiya got her hair cut on Saturday. Then when I went to get the kids up this morning the kids all looked at my hair and said "It looks like Kaiya's hair." So there you go, I look like a 5-year old.

Joe said....."wow...its short." Then a little later he said, "I was hoping you'd do something quite different and you did." Sounds to me like excellent avoidance strategies so he can comment but not say he doesn't like it. Oh well, I like it.