New House!!!

There comes a time in a woman's life when she needs a yard to kick her kids into. That time came to me about 6 months ago when the full realization of the capacity of two very energetic boys came to it's climax and then went higher! Ayden is now 3 and Ethan is close to 18 months. They have more energy than I thought possible for a child! I knew I was busy as a kid, but it just seemed natural to do as much as I did when I was younger.

When it comes down to it, the getting under my feet so I trip over them, the crying because I closed the door to the laundry room, the nonstop questions until I answer them, and the screaming over who gets to hold the American flag was really starting to wear on my already thin Mommy patience. As a result, McKay and I began the hunt for a new place to live. This endeavor became a lot for complicated and stressful by our own 'livable' criteria. We had to have a dishwasher, we had to have a w/d hook-up, we needed a private backyard, and we wanted as much space as we could possibly afford. And so, the hunt began. And we saw crappy house after crappy house with terrible yards.... UNTIL, we found the place for us!

BEAUTIFUL YARD!! We have the front yard of the house, the backyard, another portion behind where I'm standing in this photo and then A GARDEN!! I'm absolutely thrilled!

If you can find the pots in each photo you should be able to somewhat follow the line the yard takes. On the other side of those two cars in this photo is the garden and more yard!!

(Other yard/garden in the back)

And the garden!! It had 3 large boxes that we will definitely need to weed first, but by this weekend we hope to have some already grown plants in our garden!

The only sacrifices we made were we do not have our own washer and dryer, but our downstairs tenant has one and if we schmooze her up enough, hopefully she'll share with us. And we also sacrificed the amount of space. BUT the inside of the house is nice. We have a loft, which is kind of fun and I'm a sucker for a sweet kitchen and as far as renting goes, this kitchen is sweet!! More pictures to come once we actually move in and take photos. I'm excited about this place. It has so many possibilities outside.

Clothes line, private yard, garden, patio, hammock, grill, patio chairs and table, garage, storage shed, private driveway for possible basketball hoops set up. All in all, it will help our family get away from electronics and enjoy the outdoors... and spare me my sanity while my kids get to release their energy outside instead of on me... and perhaps vice versa in some cases. :)

This is what summers are for

Intense loving up of cherry red homemade Popsicles.

Intense mess with cherry red homemade Popsicles!

Big smiles on little boys!

And all in all... a great time spent outside for 1/2 an hour with no purpose or desire to move.

Venice

Not the real Venice. I wish! M's birthday is on the 4th of July and I wanted to have a weekend get-a-away with him, so we went to Salt Lake City 'Venice'. There's a place called Anniversary Inn and it has themed rooms. Kinda fun. There's a Romeo & Juliet room, a Phantom of the Opera room, Old West rooms, etc. Some of the rooms are pretty funky looking and some of them are really cool! We chose Venice mostly because it was a reasonable price for us and it looked cool.

So this is our bed/gondola. We got to enjoy some movies, candy, complimentary cheesecake and sparkling cider. . . oh. . . and the best part! NO KIDS!! I always have to qualify this, but we love our children, but it is always a treat to get away from them now and then. I believe A and E were appreciating our absence as well, as they were chilling at  Great Aunt K's house!

  Posing here on our bed!

So this was our bath. Its HUGE! And water fell from our ceiling. That was pretty cool, I have to admit. There's the sparkling cider I was talking about before. We were pretty excited about that to be honest!

M and I started our weekend on Friday, went shopping and I tried to force M to buy his present. But since he did not, I will still have to be getting him something later. :) The mall had the Tucanos restaurant that M loves, so we stopped in there and enjoyed a great meal! Both of us were starving and stuffed our faces with mashed potatoes before we had the meat. But instead of being done eating; we ate meat until our stomach's hurt. It was worth it. After the restaurant, we went to the store and bought some snacks and rented some movies to watch. We chose Wolverine and Alice in Wonderland both were good. Alice in Wonderland was pretty weird. I'm not sure I would let my kids watch that show if they were older. The eyeball thing with the mouse was funky and the mote Alice jumped through was pretty disturbing too... 

After our weekend away we headed home and stopped by Ikea. Leaving there with 12 cups... and that was essentially the only thing new we came home with instead of a birthday present for M. 

Celebration!

This coming Thursday is my oldest son's birthday. He will be 3! I cannot believe it! I'll probably say that every time for his birthday. "I cannot believe he's 4...16...40!" In order to celebrate my 13 hours of labor and ultimately A's BIRTH of course, we had a party on the 19th. A good friend of ours has his birthday on the 20th so we decided to celebrate his day as well. We had our friends and family there. So hopefully each person felt like we were celebrating their day! Daddy M and I set this up about 2-3 weeks before the date. We bought all the yummy food and told people to come play with us and enjoy a nice day! I am glad we had enough food for everyone. There were little cousins there for A and E to play with as well as plenty of adults to keep track of all the kids.

Daddy M was stud. He lived about 70% of the time at the BBQ.

No smiling at the meat station. Its too manLy of a station for smiles. :) However as I was photographing M, I did catch a friend of ours in the background.

 Love it!

A and E took full advantage of the busy parents situation and dominated the food. You'll see a few pictures of fun cousin that came to play with us. We're so glad they got to be there.

 

I feel that A and E's shirts are fitting for their food massacre. We have the little A's shark and the little E's bull. :)

A party of course is nothing without a party cake! A loves Blue's Clue's so we made our cake blue. I'm not ingenious enough to order an actual cake that looks like Blue. Plus, we didn't want to spend the extra money on that. I think A was perfectly satisfied.

And so were his party observers/helpers. Next time we'll have to make a bigger cake to accommodate everyone's sugar tooth!

Check out the kid in the bottom right of the last picture. I don't even know WHO that is or why his eyes are buggin out of his head like that. haha. Although I do know E on the other side- chowing down on still more watermelon! And then cake once someone handed him a piece. Mmm MMM

 

The party was wonderful. We had some squirt guns that the kids and adults played with. :) I say that was worth the $6 we spent on them all. Our friend and the other birthday "boy" Chi... was massacred at least once in honor of being one year older. I guess getting sprayed down is better than getting spanked. Depending on who is doing the spanking that is. :P 

Toward the end of the party I noticed that I was not in any of the photos. So as proof that I WAS actually there. A and I took a picture together. It took us about three tries to get it right.... and even then, the right smiles are not lined up in the photos. So I guess that means we never got it right. But we still had fun taking the pictures!

So close A. We were so close.

Ode to Ethan

This is Ethan.

He is 18 months old.

He hurts himself all the time. *Note the bruise on his forehead. That was achieved by falling face first off a chair I don't even know how that's possible!*

He likes to play and play and play! ALL the time!

Sometimes his play results in pink stains down his belly. Pink shirts,pink shorts and pink diapers. All that are NOT supposed to be pink.

Ethan loves his Flowers. Gloves. His hat. and his Mommy.

Ethan is also a tease.

He will sit and wait at the top the stairs so he can scare people. He's not very good at it. It's hard to be scary when you're so cute!

Ethan also loves his towels. He loves being naked. And he loves being wrapped up like a hot dog.

This is Ethan. My lively 18 month old!

Catching Up

I think this could potentially be the longest I have gone without posting something on here! In some sense this is a good thing because that means things are quite mellow around here, at least as far as my children go. However, this also means that I am too busy to write much. It is finals week and I've been swamped with a 10 page paper on the violence in media and the effect it has on children. A topic that I have always been passionate about and now that I have my own two boys, my passion has only grown. My next semester of classes will being on the 21st of this month. This is crazy to me! Where's the break? I would like at least a little breather between semesters! Am I wrong to desire this?? Because I don't think so. It would be wrong to go without saying that I am SO excited for this semester to be over. NOT because I am sick of it, quite the contrary. Who on earth doesn't like to learn about Christ's life and about the English language?? Anyone? There's probably actually a lot that would not care for the English part, but in my case. I love it! So far I have As in both my classes. I praaay that my grades stay that way after both my finals! In order to get into the Nursing program, you basically have to be an epically smart person. I am determined to be epic. Even if I'm not entirely so. Next semester I have Chemistry. I hope hope hope that my brain has matured enough to better understand Chemistry! In high school I think I had a high B in that class. I don't entirely remember though.

On another note, the boys are doing great. I took E to Nursery class today (a church class from the 18mo.-3yr olds) at the end of class the teacher asked me when his birthday was and then reminded me that he's not old enough to be in nursery yet. He'll be 18 months old in July. I could have sworn he was old enough now. Oops! My bad for not even knowing the age of my child. I guess he gets to sit with me for another month in my classes.... ohhhhh joy.

A is still being the same old A. He thinks he's the Mom. I'm fairly certain that he believes I don't do my job right half the time. I often hear him telling E. "Don't do that" (smack) "Bruder det down!" (donk) "or Eees... you tan't have dat!" (smack, donk, shove). A is often reminded through timeouts and flicked ears that he is not the boss and I have it under control. SINCE he is still receiving timeouts and the occasional flicks, it is clear he still thinks I am not cutting it as a discipliner in our home. My mother must be sitting at home somewhere inwardly grinning because she knows I DESERVE THIS. I can even remember times when I acted like the boss. I felt that if Mom wasn't there, someone had to deliver the punishment for the awful deed committed, little did I know that SHE was the only that was allowed to issue a timeout to anyone. Or discipline us for whatever ornery thing we were doing. A one day will get his come-up-ance. I'll hold onto that thought for as long as I have to. :)

Traveling little men!

My kids these days seem to be more popular than I am! They have had a lot of fun this last week going to Thanksgiving Point and swimming with Daddy M's Kunz side of the family. I'm kind of jealous that I have big adult things to do and they get to play!

 We will definitely be going here again! With Mommy hopefully, because it looks like they had soo much fun! I am so glad they got to do and play.

This is where they belong about half the day. They are naughty little stinkers sometimes. But we love them!

hehe

Thanks Great Aunt K, "Cousin" Ja... and GG for taking us to play!!

The first time A rode the donkeys here, he was terrified. As you can tell he's absolutely transformed.

Sorry Officer. . .

I haven't done a lot of crazy things in my life. I'm a pretty mellow person. The idea of getting pulled over makes my heart race. I do not put myself in situations where I would potentially get in trouble. I might be a big talker, but that's about as far as I get. My bark is much more than my bite. Tonight, Daddy M put me in a situation that I would not have put myself in... EVER!

Aunt M, Aunt Cor..., Daddy M and I were up tonight playing Rock Band 2. Innocent enough right??? Yeah. That's what I thought. M and I were playing one of the songs and there's a part where apparently M felt the lyrics shouldn't be sung, but screamed. So there I am, focusing on my part on the guitar, feeling pretty good about myself because I was on a hot streak and all of the sudden I hear this screaming from behind me:

"SHUT UP WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOUUUUUUU!!! SHUT UP WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOUUUU!!!"

If I had had to pee, our couch would have been destroyed! He didn't just stop at saying it twice. He kept screaming it over and over, EVEN though I was yelling at him to stop because our children were upstairs sleeping. 

So we've got M screaming: SHUT UP WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOU!!! Me yelling: Be quiet, you're going to wake the kids up!! SERIOUSLY be quiet!! I'm not joking!!" And then Aunt M and Aunt Cor... just laughing. 

It's no wonder someone called the cops. It certainly didn't help that our front living room window was wide open. I would have called the cops too if I'd heard someone screaming that at midnight.

Lucky for M our kids still slept through the noise and lucky for us the officer was very nice and pretty too actually. I can't imagine they would send her any place scary; no one would take her seriously, she was too pretty. Although I would not want to test her and see if she really could compete with the guys because I'm sure she could. They don't just let anyone be a police officer. And they especially wouldn't let any officer just patrol our neighborhood, there's at least 14 sex offenders within a 3-5 block radius of our house. 

I still can't believe someone called the cops on us. M will never live this one down!!!!

The hunter

Has it been forever since I've posted on here? I think it has. I just haven't had much to say. I've been crazy busy with school. My lovely sister moved in with us until she finds a place to live here in Utah. We went to Boise for Memorial Day. I didn't take any pictures!!! What was I thinking?!?! We had a lot of fun though. We ate, we drank....water, we slept, and played! My cousin Jon had his farewell talk that Sunday. He is going to serve a mission in Guatemala. The poor kid is going to get roasted! He's a red-head. There is no hope for his fair skin! Speaking of skin roasting. I can finally feel the effects of summer. Its actually warm outside and I'm pretty sure its not going to SNOW again, like it did the end of May.

Ree-donk-ulous.

McKay and I are so excited for this warm weather. We have camping trips we want to go on. There are swimming pools we haven't defiled yet with our children. There are walks in the canyon that need to be taken! It's going to be so much fun! And having Melissa and Corinne here to enjoy some of these activities with us will make it all the more exciting!

Random note, I haven't seen Ethan in about 5 days and you wouldn't believe how much can change in just 5 days. He's saying my name clearer, he can sign, 'more' and understands what it means. AND he has a new love for yogurt. Or better yet an old love reignited and magnified. Today after Melissa and I went on a beautiful walk to the BYU campus we decided we were starving and opened the fridge. Ethan was also starving. As soon as he heard the fridge door make its blessed welcome sound of opening, he ran his little bum over; squeezed between Melissa and the door and stood himself right in front of the display of food. He quickly grabbed a yogurt and said 'day-dooo' (thank you), thought for a second and grabbed another one. Satisfied he evily laughed and ran off with his prey. There was no stopping him. Those yogurts never had a chance. They were doomed from the moment I bought them.