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.

10 years later I got a 2 year degree!

A little history lesson for you: I met Allan after being in college for one year. We got engaged during the first semester of my second year. I tried to transfer to BYU where Allan was attending school, but my GPA was an awesome hundredth of a point below their transfer acceptance at the time. So instead of being able to keep going to school, I got a job and we got married and started our family. I have no regrets about this decision and feel it was the right thing for us. I am also grateful because before I had kids I wanted to be an Elementary Teacher, and since then have decided that is not the way I want to go. Anyway, Allan finished his degree and went on to dental school and I put my focus on having and taking care of our family. When he graduated and we moved back to Idaho Falls, I was close enough to head back to good ol' Ricks/BYU-I. At this time I was pregnant with our fourth child and could only handle one class at a time. So after another year and a half of plucking away at courses and now being pregnant with my fifth child, I finally got an Associates of Science in General Studdies.

So just a side note, the day I graduated Allan had a cancer spot removed from his nose. It was a basal cell carcenoma and basically about as harmless as we could have hoped for. His poor face got a lot worse looking before it got better, when his doctor found out I was graduating that night he told us the surgery could have waited, but it worked out well for Allan because he got to take a couple of days off work as sick leave that he was planning on taking anyway.My parents came up for the evening. Really it was all much more emotional than I had imagined and I was excited that my kids got to be there to watch. I also do plan to someday go back to school and get a bachelors degree, probably after all of my kids are in school. This time around the plan is Home Family and Consumer Science, or basically home ec.

Summer Fun and the Livin's Easy

July was a great month this summer. We really got into a great routine with all of the kids home! I made chore charts for the girls with one chore for each year old they are and they were so great at helping out! Now that they are back in school I sure miss this because they just don't have the time.
We had lots of time to play outside. This is Lilly and Natalie playing in the little car we have. Lilly just loves being pushed around the driveway and Natalie had a great time doing the pushing. They were very cute!
I don't really have a picture about this but I know I have mentioned how great our neighborhood is and how many great families we have around to play with! It is awesome being able to send the kids out to our back yard and have tons of friends to play with right there!
June also brought our first bout of swim lessons. The girls had so much fun. We signed up with our friends the Pettingills and each one had a friend in their class.
Here is Natalie in her class practicing her kicks and her friend Spencer is actually doing it too! He is a bit crazy and liked to give the teachers a challenge. Natalie was and still is a bit of a chicken, but by the time we had our family reunion in August she was at least brave enough to put her head under water.
Here is Ally practicing a back float. I fibbed a little and put her into a 6 year old class so she could be with her friend Sydney, and she was actually the only one of my kids who passed their class up to the next level. She did really great!
Here is Hailey swimming. She struggled because she was in a pretty high class, but she really tried hard and got a lot better in the 2 weeks. Hailey was in a class with her friend Maddie.
Another thing that Summer brought was park day. Every Tuesday we went to a different park with the girls from our ward. It was a lot of fun. These pictures are from the day we went up to the Rexburg Splash Park.
There is a Carousel and the girls always love to ride on it at the end of the day.

Writing about this makes me miss those care free days, although at the time I know I wasn't feeling so care-free as it was my first trimester and I was not feeling great. I am just grateful now that it was during the summer I wasn't feeling good because I am so busy now if I didn't feel good I don't know what I would do!
Well, mission accomplished, I am blogging and catching up. Next you all get to hear about my graduation so stay tuned!