Weekend Getaway!

We took our very good friends The Layton's up to the Parker Family Cabin a couple of weekends after school started. We had such a great time. We went up Friday night and got settled in pretty late and chatted even later.On Saturday we went to Cliff Lake, this awesome lake totally hidden away in this beautiful little mountain valley. We took up some canoes and lunch and spent the day wading in the like and canoeing about. There is also a fun rope swing that Allan went on lots of times, Ally braved once, and even Arin and I had a go at it. Allan unfortunately on his last swing of the day was pretty tired and kind of fell weird and broke his middle finger on his right hand. (Not great when you are right handed and a dentist.) We went back to the cabin and roasted up some hot dogs and s'mores, gave the kids baths, and played games. Unfortunately these pictures of Lilly and Natalie sleeping are all I have to show for the day. I am hoping maybe Arin will share the pictures she took as well!On Sunday morning we had breakfast and cleaned up the cabin and headed home. We stopped at Big Springs, this natural spring that is protected and has huge fish that we go and feed. We decided to walk over to the cabin and take a look around, but were stopped by two moose! It was a cow and her calf coming down to the spring to have a drink. To tell you the truth, I am pretty sure they were cooler than anything we were going to see in that cabin on the other side of the spring!
**Just a side note, Allan headed off with his dad and nephew to go hunting this weekend (not for these moose) so I have had a bit of extra time and posted several blogs so keep on reading!
***Just another side note, I really love getting comments, so feel free to comment away!

Funny Story

So this is Dawson and Ally. Dawson lives next door to us and he is such a fun little boy. Ally loves Dawson, and Dawson loves Ally. They have been saying for about a year now that they are going to get married when they grow up. I have heard reports of kissing, and I know they hold hands while they run around the back yard and now school.

A few weeks ago, when they were getting off the kindergarten bus the bus driver was talking to Dawson's mom, and then called me over. Evidently, she does not let boys and girls sit next to each other on the bus and so Ally and Dawson had the idea to sit across from each other and hold hands across the aisle. The bus driver told them they couldn't because it was safety hazard, and had to ask them to stop several times and so she was asking us to please talk to them.

I talked to her, BUT I think this is hilarious! Ally and Dawson are both affectionate and loving kids by nature and they weren't trying to be disobedient. And really if kids holding hands on the bus are the biggest problem I think we are doing okay!

I won an award!

I won an award!! It's from Michele, a girl that I was good friends with in high school. Thank you Michele! Michele just recently married her best friend and is expecting her first baby!

Here are the rules for the award:

1)You must thank the person who gave the award and list their blog and link it.
2) You must share "10 Honest Things" about yourself.
3) You have to present this award to 7 others whose blogs you find brilliant in content and/or design, or those who have encouraged you.
4) Last, you must tell those 7 people they've been awarded HONEST SCRAP and inform them of these guidelines in receiving the award.

10 Honest Things About Me
1) I am OCD about certain things, unfortunately my house being clean is not one of them!
2) I glean hobbies and interests off of people I know. I think the things I learn make me a better person.
3) I would love to be super organized because of my OCD, but most of the time I fail to do so.
4) I am expecting our first boy and I don't really know what I think about it, I have decided that I am excited not to do another girl's hair and that maybe a boy will be less emotional.

5) I love being a stay-at-home-mom. It's all I ever want to do, even when my kids are all in school and probably even when I am a grandma!
6) I procrastinate the things I don't like doing and spend too much time doing the things I do like doing.
7) I don't listen when told "no." My husband tells me that he has said no to me twice and I didn't listen either time.

8) If I wasn't too vain, I would never wear make-up or curl my hair. Sometimes I don't, but a lot of the time I am too worried about what people will think.

9) I really like to plan things out and make lists. In January when we went to Disney World, I had an agenda for every day planned months in advance all the way down to the order we would go on rides and which ones we would get fast passes for and where we would eat. I had to let it go some of the time because we were on a family vacation with Allan's whole family and I couldn't make other people do things "the right way" all the time. This was hard for me because of my OCD.
10) I am super competative. I like to win and be the best. I like my kids to be the best and I probably push them too hard sometimes.

I mentioned that I love to glean so I decided to nominate some of the people who have inspired me all of these girls are fabulous friends and have tons of great qualities that pretty much overlap, I am just choosing one thing to list here:

1. Sarah- Wonderful Homemaker

2. Emily- Awesome Mom
3. Amber- Beautiful Singer
4. Shaunna- Brilliant and Healthy
5. Robin- Physical Fittness Genius
6. Zoe- Creative Crafter (check out her link to her craft blog)
7. Arin- Super Hospitable

There are also many more of you who inspire me but I had to choose 7!

First Days of School

Well, still no family reunion, on Sunday I got the CD's of pictures from the Staker's house together, and then left them by the door. So, as not to get too much further behind, we are moving on to School Days.


This is Hailey and Ally (and Natalie jumped in there) ready for their first day of school this year.


The weather cooperated nicely and was a little cooler for their first day back so they wore some of their new school clothes and I didn't have to feel like I was over-dressing them.


Hailey is going into second grade this year. She is getting so big. She really enjoys reading chapter books, especially the Junie B. series. She is also great at math and pretty much every subject there is!
Here she is heading off for the school bus. The kindergartners don't ride the bus for the first three days so it was just her from our family.
Ally is starting kindergarten! She is already reading very well and is excited to learn more. There are going to be a lot more pictures of Ally than the rest because after all kindergarten is a big deal!
In this picture Ally is waiting with some of the other kindergartners on our street to go into their classroom. (You read right, all of these kids live on our street(about 14 houses total). There is also one other kindergartner on our street but he goes to a different school, and there is another kindergartner who lives in the house almost behind ours, and I have been told there is one other kindergartner but I don't know him if this is true.)
Ally sat between our neighbor Dawson and our neighbor Brylee. Across from her were Tyler, Mitchell, and Gabe (not in this picture). In total there are at least 7 kids from our ward in her class and a few in the other classes! Have I mentioned lately how much I love our neighborhood!


Natalie is doing 2 preschools. The first is a neighborhood one that the mom's rotate teaching. She was not too keen on picture taking that first morning!


This is all of the kids waiting to be picked up after school.

Natalie's other preschool is a district run program at an elementary school a few minutes from our house. (not the one the big girls go to) She was a little more cooperative with the camera that day!

I thought maybe things would slow down a little bit now that the girls are back in school, but boy was I wrong! Between school, homework, piano practicing and lessons, soccer, ballet, church, BYU games, exercising, doctor appointments, canning, crafting, and everything else, we have been busier than ever. I am hoping now that soccer season is finished, canning is almost done (I need to make some spaghetti sauce with the tomatoes that are ripining in my garage and then I will be finished) and there are only two more football games we will have a little more time, but with the holidays coming that is probably wishful thinking!

Breaking News

Okay, it's not really anything that important, or really interesting, I haven't caught up with my summer and I wanted to post about something current, so I am. I should warn you this is going to be long, but I wanted to document it, and this isn't something I would write about in a month when I am finally getting around to catching up to now, so continue reading or don't.

As everyone knows right now we are in the middle of the swine flu epidemic. Our house has not been spared. About a month ago we all went through a 24 hour stomach bug. Now, 24 hour bugs are the kind I like (if you have to get sick) because they are quick and you are done. ONLY we have a family of 6 so our 24 hour bug lasted a week or so. So a nice long week of tons of blechy laundry and cleaning bathrooms round the clock. I also got sick and luckily had some great friends and visiting teachers who brought dinner and went to the store for me that day.

Then a few nice weeks of nothing (oh I miss those days) Then 3 Saturdays ago, Allan had a fever and wasn't feeling too well. There was a football game and it wasn't enough to keep him home, but he had me drive most of the way to Utah which never happens. (It was only most of the way because Allan can't be a passenger, he closes his eyes to rest and every small movement he thinks we are going off of the road.) He also felt good enough to go swimming and play "pickle-ball" with his brother and neice and nephews. I always say when Allan is sick he is very selective about the things he can and can't do!

So then later that week Natalie woke up in the middle of the night with a high fever. We gave her medicine and she seemed better during the day but sure enough the next night, high fever. So this trend continued and she never really had any other symptoms so I admittedly ignored it, partly because her cousin Matt had had the same thing and gone in and had a negative flu test.

So then on Friday Ally stayed home from school because she said her head hurt and pretty soon she had a fever. She rested most of the day, but I made her go to her piano lesson because her teacher was having surgery and wouldn't be doing lessons for a couple of weeks. Hailey came home from school and had gone on a field trip that day and was complaining that her legs hurt and I thought it was just from walking so much and she also went to her piano lesson. By five o'clock, they were both running fevers above 104 degrees, so I called the doctor. They didn't have any appointments that night, so they scheduled me for Saturday morning.

They both tested positive for flu and the doctor prescribed Tami-flu. They assume that this was the swine flu because something like 90% of all flu cases that were being tested were H1N1 and the test is expensive and takes a long time so they stopped doing it. I assume Natalie also was sick with the flu, but it had been several days so too late for Tami-flu so I never took her in. This was also their cousin's baptism day so much to their sadness, I ended up going to the baptism alone while Allan stayed home with sick kiddos.

Then on Tuesday night, as Hailey and Ally and Natalie were all starting to feel better, Lilly started with the fever and I called and got an appointment for her for Wednesday morning. The doctor assumed she had the flu because of her symptoms and the girls at home with the flu and put her on Tami-flu.

Just a side note here, I got several calls about people worried about me getting the flu because of all of the complications of being pregnant, I haven't been sick at all which is fabulous because I am the only one who can keep our house running somewhat smoothly.

So Thursday night Hailey wakes up in the middle of the night complaining about her ear. In the morning it was still bothering her, but I looked at it and didn't see much wrong so I asked her if she wanted to go to school and she did. Well, by 9:30 I got a call from the school from her saying her ear hurt and that she wanted to come home. So I called the doctor, and back we went for the third time in a week. He confirmed her ear infection, gave her some medicine, and said as long as she was up fo it she could go back to school because it wasn't contagious. Well, by the time we were done at the doctor and getting medicine and eating lunch it was after 1 and I figured it was pointless to send her back either way. This weekend when asked she would tell me her ear still hurt but I just kept on giving her the medicine and hoping it would get better.

So last night she was complaining about it a bit after school, she had the lesson for FHE and I was helping her get it together and she seemed okay. By the time we finished dinner and it was time for her lesson she was in too much pain to give it, so she sat by me while I did it. After FHE we sent her off to bed. By 9:30 she was crying in her bed, "Owie, owie, owie, owie, owie." I asked Allan if she was crying and he said he had heard her once before but she was saying, "Mommy" so he was waiting for me to go. She was saying, "owie" not "mommy" for the record, but I went in to check on her. This continued ALL night long. She would sleep for a short while maybe 20 minutes or so and then the crying would start again.

A little after midnight, she went to the bathroom and then came into our room and I told her Daddy had to rest for work tomorrow, but if she could be quiet she could come in and lay down with us. By about 1:30 she was crying again and we told her she had to be quiet or go out to the couch or back to her bed. She continued to cry louder and I tried to move her out of our bed but of course she fought me, then Allan got upset and carried her out of the bedroom and they had a little power struggle for a minute and she ended up locked outside our bedroom door screaming, so I told her I would go and lay down with her in her bed.

She slept off and on the rest of the night waking up very regularly crying about the pain. During the night (about 2:30) I heard Natalie up and discovered she had had an accident, so I changed her bedding and her pajamas and tried going back to my bedroom and Natalie followed within 5 minutes, and about 15 minutes later Hailey was crying again so I went back up to her bed leaving Natalie in mine. A few minutes later Natalie wandered back in and wanted to sleep with me, so all three of us were in a twin size top bunk of the bed. The crying continued, "owie, owie, owie, owie, owie." The rest of the night and into the morning.

In the morning I called the doctor again and left a message with the nurse to call me. After I called the nurse, Hailey had some discharge from her ear, I figured her ear drum had finally ruptured, the doctor had said on Friday it was close and would probably do that. The nurse called and made her an appointment at noon. All morning, "owie, owie, owie, owie, owie." We took her to the doctor, got her new medicine and new ear drops. All afternoon, "owie, owie, owie, owie, owie," okay it's only 3:00 but it hasn't stopped yet.

I am working on very little sleep and am really getting tired and impatient. Everytime she cries, starting last night, it starts out pretty quiet and gets louder until she either gets a response from me or she comes to me and tells me her ear hurts. I have tried to explain that I have done EVERYTHING I can possibly do for her, she has been on Tylenol and Motrin basically non-stop since Friday morning, and what she really needs to do is try to rest. I really hope she gets better soon and that this is the end of the sickness at our house because I don't know how much more I can take. Really my one saving grace is that I haven't gotten sick, and well, also that I have had some crafts to do, that I bought on that trip to Utah when Allan started all of this, to keep me busy. Wish me luck and pray that it all ends soon!

Reed's Dairy Days

I am going to temporarily skip over the next event of the summer, our Parker family reunion, because I need to get some pictures from my Mother-in-law. So here we go to Reeds Dairy Days!
For those of you that don't know, we have our milk delivered to our house by a local dairy. They have a customer appreciation event in the summer. Above is everyone getting ready for a wagon ride/tour of the dairy.
They sent us coupons for $0.25 ice cream cones for everyone. Here are the kids enjoying theirs!
They had a petting zoo that Hailey and Ally went in while Allan took Natalie to do something else because she wasn't real excited about the animals.
They also had a clown, pony rides and a dairy-man obstical course but we got there pretty late and didn't have enough time to do everything, there's always next year. Overall the kids had a great time.