Monday

So today has been very crazy, only a Monday would be like this! I spent the whole day at Children's Hospital in Seattle going through all Daniel's pre-op appointments. I had all three kids with me, but the hospital staff seem to enjoy having the whole family involved, so they were really great. I felt like a lot of the appointments with the surgeons were a repeat of everything we did back in May, but it was nice to have it all laid out for me again. One of the surgeons even printed out the CT scan of his head for me to put in Daniel's baby book. I am sure he will love that when he is older! I don't know many kids that have pictures of their skulls in their baby books. They had to draw blood for the transfusion stuff, which Daniel didn't like very much, but he survived. The big day is Friday. I am trying really hard to not think about it to much. It is really scary, but I know it will all be okay and he will come through it just fine. He has a lot of people praying for him. The kids were excited about the whole thing because they knew Manna and Papa Ted were coming to spend time with us. My mom (Manna) called when I got home and told me Ted had a heart attack and passed away this afternoon. I wish I could be there for her right now, it is hard being so far away at times like this! Ted was a great person and so good to my mother! He will be missed so very much!! My brother and sister-in-law are driving up there to be with her so that is good. I know she has a lot of friends with her to help and support her. Well it is late and all the kids are asleep so I should be too! Till next time...

Homeschool

This week Noah started 1st grade. He has been so excited to start school and I have to admit I was a little excited too. He has given me no trouble at all about sitting down and doing the work. I love teaching kids at this age when they are so curious and soak everything up so fast! He loves history and math. He is reading so well. Most kids sleep with stuffed animals or a favorite blanket, but Noah sleeps with books, I go into wake him up in the morning and he has at least 10 books all over his bed. He loves to stay up as late as we will let him and read his books. I can't get to upset because I remember staying up all night reading when I was younger. A few moms from my ward at church have gotten together and we are starting a preschool for our 3 year olds. We just rotate who teaches every week. So Emma starts preschool on Tuesday. I think it will be really good for her. She is so shy and quiet around other kids. Well I wouldn't call it shy just quiet. I am really excited about it. I think it will be a lot of fun.

Daniel is 6 months old!

Daniel is now 6 months old! I can't believe it has been that long. Time is a strange thing... sometimes I feel like he has been here forever and then at the same time I feel like he just arrived. He is such a wonderful baby. He isn't crawling yet but that could be my fault. I don't give him enough "tummy" time on the floor. I have started giving him more time on the floor and he is moving around just not crawling, I think my brother would call it the army crawl! He is so happy and loves to play with Noah and Emma. He is such a joy in our lives.

Camping

Daniel playing in the tent.

Kendall and Noah messing around.

Noah took this picture. Pretty good except he cut Emma off.

Daniel loved the tent! This was his first camping trip and he did great and really loved being outside so much.

Daniel and friend Aby playing in the tent.

Emma collecting gravel.

Emma loved this little chair. She carried it around everywhere!

Emma discovered smores. Yummy!

Noah spent most of the time playing with the fire. He went through several sticks. He loved the smoke coming off the sticks.

All of us sitting around the camp fire in the morning.

Kendall and Daniel. Aren't they cute! Daniel is a morning person! He was so happy that morning.

This is Emma whining about being hungry and wanting breakfast. She refused to eat dinner the night before so she probably was pretty hungry.

This is Emma Saturday Morning. She was trying to let us all know that she is cold, or maybe she is to hot in front of the fire, she kept going back and forth for a while!

Saturday we went for a walk by the river and Noah had a great time throwing rocks into the river.

As you can see we had a great time camping. We all came home tired and dirty. The rain held off till just after we finished cooking our dinner. I was a little worried about our new, very large, tent. We read some reviews about this tent and they all said that is took a while to set up and it was a little tricky. Well Kendall forgot the directions. But then again, he is an engineer and we got it up in less then 30 minutes. It really wasn't very difficult at all.

Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails

Meet Hyper Jumper. He is Noah's pet for the day. Noah was very sad to let him go! But they had a great day playing together!

Noah's catch from our back patio! He went on to find tons more and had the can filled about 2 or 3 inches deep with these slugs! Yuck!

We have a bit of a slug problem here in our area. It had rained all night and Noah decided to go out in the back yard. He soon found lots of slugs and decided to try to catch them. He found tons of them much to his delight! I didn't have a big problem with this until he took them out into the front and left them on the front walk. After about an hour I went out front and found snails trying to escape the can and all over my sidewalk! YUCK!! He very happily cleaned them all up. Well a little later he comes home the a new pet. This was a little green frog he named Hyper Jumper. He had that frog all day and introduced him to Daddy when he got home.

Random Thoughts

It is only 7am and I feel surprisingly rested. It could be due to the fact that I am getting 8 hours of sleep almost every night now. It is so wonderful to be able to sleep! Yesterday I took Emma in for a hearing test and they found nothing wrong with her hearing, it's perfect! If you are wondering why I got her hearing tested it is because she seems to have extra sensitive hearing. She will scream out in terror when she hears different sounds (like say a heart beat). Her most common question besides "Why?" is "What's that sound?" So she's a little odd, we'll still keep her around! It is really quite fun sometimes, Noah loves to play the lullaby CD just to make Emma run from the room screaming when the heart beat sound comes on. Poor girl will never be able to be a doctor or nurse when she grows up!
After the hearing test we went to a friends house to let the kids play. It was one of my friends birthdays so we went out to lunch. The waitress kind of looked at us funny when the three of us walked in with our 6 kids. She stuck us in some corner in the back with all the other families with kids. I am happy to say it was a good lunch and our children were all very well behaved, I think we were one of the quietest tables in that "kids corner". It was nice to get out and let the kids play. We don't eat out very often so it was a really treat for the kids.
This weekend is our stake camp out for our church. We are going up a day early as we did last year. Noah is soooo excited and can't seem to talk about anything else! I am excited because we are getting a new bigger tent. We are kind of out growing our little 5 man tent. It is kind of crazy that it would be no problem putting 5 grown people in our tent but try fitting 2 kids, 2 adults and a baby in it and there is no way it is going to work! Kind of like putting 3 full grown adults in the back of our car is no problem, but three small children is next to impossible to fit.
School starts next week. I just got my history curriculum in the mail this week. Noah was soo excited when I opened the box and he saw all those books! He wanted to read them all that night. When I woke up in the morning I saw that he had tried, all 18 books were all over his bed! I am glad he is so excited about school. I am too! I think I know how I am going to teach all his subjects. I am really excited about his history, I love teaching with living books and not the normal boring text books. It should be a fun year! Emma is excited about starting pre-school. There are 5 of us moms in my ward with 3 year olds and we are starting a pre-school. I think it will be a really good thing for her. She is so shy, but I think this will help her overcome that a little.
Well that is all I have time for right now. Gotta go get the day started with the kids.

Motherhood

Well it's been almost a week since I last posted. Not much going on. Today is going okay. I woke up to Emma and Noah whinning that they were starrrrrrrving and needed breakfast. And Daniel had leaked thru his diaper all over his sheets. So I got the kids breakfast and changed the sheets. I will have to wait to wash them til later as I have a pile of diapers to wash. I was feeding Daniel in my room and Noah and Emma went outside to play, time to relax and read a little. A while later Emma comes walking in wearing sandles and a t-shirt, no pants on, no underware on. I asked her where her pants were and she said they were in her room. They weren't dirty or wet, she just decided she didn't want to wear pants. She told me "My Bottum was to hot". She had been out side playing with out pants on! She had pants on when I went into feed Daniel. I sure hope the neighbors didn't see her! I don't know what is up with my kids! Both Noah and Emma see nothing wrong with going outside without pants! Daniel has pooped on me twice and puked on me I don't know how many times. I am going though clothes like crazy today. It's only 1 oclock. I sure hope the rest of the day goes better! I have to go down to Everett today in about an hour, I hope traffic coming home is not to bad! Being a mom is so much fun! Well Daniel is fussing and Emma is trying to sit on him so I should go rescue him.