Bicycle Built for Two

Joe recently got a new bike and wanted Nate to go along with him, so he found this contraption.  Nate LOVES riding along behind him.

Michael is Eight!

Last week, Michael had his birthday, and he turned 8!  Wow, time flies!  We got up early to open all of his presents.  He got lots of fun stuff.  In fact, someone asked him the day after his birthday what they could get him for his birthday and he couldn't think of anything. 

 For his birthday, instead of a cake, which none of us like, we made blueberry cobbler for Michael.  We tried putting the candles in the cobbler, but they just melted down to a little puddle, so we put them into the ice cream container and he blew them out from there.

 One of his favorite gifts was a kit to make a solar powered dog.  He enjoyed putting it together with his dad.

A few days after his birthday, he and Ellie had a birthday party.  This was the first year we let them do it somewhere, and they picked Incredible Pizza.  They were each allowed to pick 5 friends to invite.  Even with just 5 friends each, it still was a big party.

Michael is such a great part of our family.  He is the easiest child by far.  He is obedient and fairly self sufficient.  His favorite thing in the world is to play anything Pokemon on his Nintendo DS.  If I would let him, he would play that all day and all night.  He also likes to play the computer.  This year at school he is learning all sorts of things on the computer, including making a website.  It is fun to see him get excited about doing so many things.  He gets computers and electronics well, and sometimes he will have friends call and ask him how to do something with their game or setting up their game. (Yes, we really do have a computer nerd on our hands). He really enjoys reading, and has recently gotten into the Harry Potter series.  He has caught up to Adam, much to Adam's chagrin, and so he now has to wait after every book he reads for Adam to finish reading it so that he can read the next one.  He recently has gone to writing his name on his paper as Mike.  I asked him if he wants to be called that, and he seemed like he wouldn't mind it, but I can never remember to call him that.  He loves to do handstands and walk on his hands.  When he is in the middle of getting ready to go somewhere I have to "remind" him many times to stop doing handstands and get his shoes on, or get his backpack or whatever we need to do.  He can even do pushups while he is doing a handstand, its pretty amazing.  He has just started cub scouts and is very excited about it. 

We really are happy that we have our Michael as part of our family.

Ellie turned 6

Our sweet Ellie turned 6 recently.  We all got up early so she could open presents.

 Then later that night she had cookies and ice cream to celebrate her birthday. It also happened to be one of the days we carved pumpkins so you can see that mess in the background. 

 A week later, we had a combined party with Ellie and Michael.  Since it can easily get out of hand, we had them each invite 5 friends.  Every time that Ellie named her friends at least one of them would change.  We finally decided on 5 that she could invite.

Ellie has grown up so much this last year.  She is doing great in kindergarten- she has a fantastic teacher that is not afraid to make up challenges for her.  She reads really well- and loves to read, she is even starting to read chapter books.  She recently asked her teacher to start calling her Elisabeth and she writes it on most of her papers.  She won't let us call her that though.  I am hoping it is just a phase.  She loves to color and draw, and we are finding she has a talent in drawing.  She still loves to do gymnastics, in fact, if anyone is in the living room she will persist in doing cartwheel after cartwheel after cartwheel.  She does them quite well, but the constant motion is a little crazy.  She just moved up classes in gymnastics so now in addition to learning basic techniques, she is also doing conditioning and strength training.  In addition to gymnastics, she also does dance.  When it is time to get dressed for dance, she isn't so sure she likes it, but when we get there, she runs right in, and I find her doing little dance moves all around the house.  I really love her dance, I feel like she is learning so much this year.  She and Nate get along pretty well, and if Adam isn't around, she and Michael play really well together too.  She rarely plays with Adam.  She still likes to be in the middle of most fights, but even that is better than it was a few months ago.  She also has perfected the fake cry...if we ask her to do something she doesn't like it comes out and we all just roll our eyes and try to ignore it.  She still loves her dolls the best, and likes to play mommy, sometimes I will see her rocking her babies and walking around with a purse filled with important mommy things.

We are continually grateful that we were blessed with this one special girl to be part of our family.

Michael's Baptism

Michael just turned 8, so he was old enough to be baptized.  He has been excited about being baptized for a while, he has two good friends who are not members of our church, but who are really religious and they often talk about church topics. 

 He was baptized and confirmed by his dad.  I got to give a talk on baptism.

After the baptism, while we were waiting for the boys to change their clothes, we had a short video with pictures of Michael and Ben (the other boy getting baptized at the same time as Michael).  I put just Michael's part of the video on you tube- here is a link to it. http://youtu.be/ziHh0nChJ0Q  The music is not clipped exactly right since I cut half the pictures out, but the important things, the pictures are in there.

Michael, we are so proud of you.

Halloween and Halloween and more Halloween and a few other activities

We had a whole week of events around Halloween this year.  It seemed like there were days and days of dress up BEFORE Halloween.  First, Ellie got to wear her costume to her dance class.  Then, Nate got to wear his costume to school.  I didn't get pictures of either of these.  On Friday, the kids had a storybook parade.  They got to dress up like their favorite storybook character.  There are two ways to do this: either wear the costume you have picked out for Halloween and find a book that goes with it, or make a costume up that goes with your favorite book. 

Adam put together a costume that went with his current favorite books: Harry Potter.  He is on number 6. Doesn't he look a lot like Daniel Radcliffe...I mean Harry Potter?

 Michael did the other- his Halloween costume was a skeleton, so he found a book with a skeleton in it.

Ellie was all set to be Snow White for the storybook parade.  When she woke up that morning, however, she refused to put on her costume.  She said she would go to school without a costume.  I finally figured out that she didn't want to wear her princess costume to school because the kids would make fun of her for wearing a princess costume.  We quickly put together this costume to be pinkalicious, I think it turned out cute.

 This is the costume Nate wore to school.  The day before, his cousin William was over and they had fun playing in their costumes. 

 Friday night was trunk-or-treat.  Here are all the kids in our ward that went to trunk-or-treat.  We definitely have a large primary.

 This was our trunk.  My parents helped pass out candy.  Somehow we won one of three prizes for decoration, the spookiest, but I think it had something to do with Adam's pumpkin on the left.

Ellie with Sydney and Ashlyn.

Yes, I was a bunny rabbit.  I needed to make good use of the pjs Joe gave me last year for Christmas.

 The next night, Joe and I went to an adult costume party.  He was darth and I was a vampire.

 That dress I am wearing is one I wore to girls reverse in high school.  I was impressed I could still wear it, but by the end of the night I had ripped up the slit in the back.  My mom is currently refashioning it into doll clothes.

 For an appetizer I made these yummy worms.

 Here are the kids pumpkins they made for Halloween.  Since we had to carve 4, we did it over the course of several days.  They go in order of kids from left to right.

 Halloween night we got to go trick or treating around the neighborhood.  Nate was Thomas again.  We did buy him a costume this year, but he never wore it, instead he wanted to be Thomas just like last year.

As if that wasn't enough, the day after Halloween, the kindergarten had a 50th day of school celebration.  The kids got to dress up in 50's attire.  Luckily, Koni had a really cute outfit we could borrow for Ellie. They had root beer and a sock hop at school.  By the time I got to the school, the scarf, belt and sweater were all off, but what can you expect?

We also had two birthdays this last week and a baptism coming up on Saturday.  Wow, I'm exhausted.