Westley is such a creative child; he is always coming up with new ways to play. Caleb actually does too, but Westley usually takes the lead when they are all together. I'm not sure who came up with this game, they actually started playing it in Mesa when Adam and Eve were down for Thanksgiving.
Caleb has this big foamy book that has letters that pop out. Under each letter is a picture of what the letters spell. So the boys turn the letters over in the whole book and then they take turns picking one letter. When they choose the letter, they have to "act out" whatever that letter represents. If it is a W, and the picture is of "walk", they will all walk around the room. They love this game and have spent a good amount of time engrossed in it. It's also a fairly quiet game, they don't usually get too loud with it, which is amazing, since they're acting it out.
These are just some fun pictures of daily life around here.
Eliza is just chilling on the living room floor. She looked so content, relaxed and just cool that I had to get a picture.
On Valentine's Day, Westley wanted to bake a spider web cake, so this is the cake we made.
This is Eliza taking down Travis. Girls who grow up with lots of big brothers often have no choice but to be tough as nails.
This is Eliza copying Caleb, who is leading the music for FHE.
One Sunday night when Corey was at work, after getting the kids all ready for bed, they decided to make some music, and they were all getting along and having a ball playing on the piano, in their matching p.j.'s, I might add.
This is our dog Snoopy. We got him in May 2002, when he was only 6 weeks old. We don't have very many pictures of him since we started having kids, so I thought I'd include him. He's a pretty good dog. He's getting fat, though, so we need to take him for walks. We used to when we lived in apartments because he didn't have a yard to go in, so we'd have to walk him, but since we moved into a house, he has really put on weight. It's hard for me to walk him, with 4 kids in tow, so unless Corey is home and one of us takes him out, we rarely go. I walked him tonight though, since Corey is gone with the kids.
I've been waiting for Corey to upload the pictures for the last couple weeks so I could write about Valentine's Day. For Valentine's Day, we had a special breakfast of heart-shaped pancakes, bacon, eggs, and strawberry milk. The kids loved it, and they thought that having heart-shaped pancakes was really cool. I tried to make them heart-shaped as I cooked them, but after the first batch flopped, I cheated and cut them out with some heart cookie cutters after they were cooked.
We spent the rest of the morning running errands. The original plan was for Corey and I to go to the temple. We had even hired a baby-sitter and confirmed with her just the night before to make sure she was still set to come, and then I had to call and cancel during the day on Saturday because Travis and Eliza were both coughing up a storm and Corey came down pretty sick, probably with the nasty flu bug I had. So we stayed home.
Corey made me a nice dinner of steak, steamed veggies, fruit, and strawberry cheesecake for dessert. We had both forgotten about getting some Martinelli's sparkling cider, so we improvised with gingerale. We had a nice, quiet dinner and then we watched the movie "Fireproof," which is a great movie about making your marriage work that I highly recommend to anyone.
Seems like all we've had for the last 4 weeks is one bug after another! All of the kids have been coughing since mid-January, and Corey and I are finally getting over our nasty bugs, but that cough just keeps hanging on. At least the pinkeye is gone, but the hives keep coming back. It's been pretty stressful dealing with all the sick kids. And Westley, the one in school who is actually exposed to germs, has been the healthiest of us all!
Corey is in CA right now for an In-N-Out dinner, and he forgot to upload the pictures from the camera before he left, so I'll have to post about Valentine's Day another time. But we were all sick that day, so Corey and I didn't go out, as planned. We even had a baby-sitter lined up (and confirmed in person with her on Friday night with her mom there), but we had to cancel because Corey could hardly talk and every breath he took led to coughing fits, plus Eliza was pretty sick herself.
I am eagerly awaiting healthier days. I haven't been to the YMCA since the 2nd to last week of January because that's when we all started getting sick. I was just starting to feel like I was in the fit mode again, too; now it will be back to square one with the workouts. Oh well. But I have to be able to move about and exercise without going into a coughing fit myself before I want to head back over there. So for now, it's Pilates at home and playing with the kids. We did go for a nice bike ride around the neighborhood last weekend (me and the kids).
The weekend actually started off nice. Corey was off on Friday all day, so we got up in the morning and got Westley off to school. Then he went outside and trimmed the big bush in front of the office window and put down some weedkiller. While he was doing that, I was inside cleaning the house--the bathrooms, vacuuming, dusting, etc. Then Corey washed both of our cars--inside and outside.
Thursday night I actually started feeling a little yucky, with a deep cough. It kept me up most of the night. I took a nap on Friday afternoon, before going to get Westley from school. After the nap, and after the kids got up, I took them with me to the park until it was time to get Westley from school. I was feeling fine then. When I got back from that, Corey and I both started to get ready for that night.
My parents had given us tickets to see "The Lion King" at ASU Gammage Theater, so we had called a baby-sitter and were going to get some dinner before going to the performance at 7:30. The thing is, living out here in Queen Creek, it's almost an hour just to get to Tempe. So we wanted to leave no LATER than 5 pm in order to get there between 5:45 and 6:00 to have dinner and then go to the show. We were meeting a couple for dinner--Corey knew the guy from work. So we scramble to get everything in order at the house, including the information for the baby-sitter, and then I go to pick her up. I had asked her to baby-sit almost two weeks prior and called earlier in the week (Tuesday night) to confirm and set the time.
Well, when I arrived, she was not there. Someone at her house (a sister, a friend, a cousin) got her on the cell phone and found out that she was about 25 mintues away from home. It was already 4:45, and we needed to get going. So I called my mom and asked if we could drop the kids off there for the evening. Then I called Corey on my way back from the sitter's house to get the kids' stuff for the night packed up in a bag. Anyway, we got off, dropped the kids off and headed into Tempe.
By this time, I was feeling REALLY lousy. My body ached, my throat hurt, I was hungry (having not eaten since lunch) but with a touch of queasiness, and that cough just wouldn't stop! We got Corey's friends on the phone, found out they were waiting at a Mexican restaurant, and Corey said, "Mexican sounds really good!" and I thought "ugh!". But I couldn't say anything, it was already 6 pm and they were already waiting for us at the restaurant. I ordered the chicken flautas thinking they might be kind of mild, and they would have been except for the sauce they poured over them that was hotter than hot (and not mentioned in the menu at all)! Needless to say, I only managed about 5 bites before my stomach refused to allow any more food down. Well, we booked out of there at about 7:05, headed over to ASU, found a parking spot, and ran to the theater, making it to our seats about 2 minutes before the performance began!
The show was spectacular. Just amazing. Wish I'd been feeling better to truly have enjoyed it more, but I did enjoy it. I enjoyed discussing thoughts and opinions of it with Corey on the way home that night too, despite feeling so lousy.
Corey was a gem on Saturday. He got up with the kids at 6 am (even though he went to bed after midnight), made them breakfast, got them dressed. Then I came out around 8, ate some breakfast, stayed out there with them for a bit, then I went back to bed, and later he took ALL of them grocery shopping, having made the list and everything (including the meal list for this week's meals!). He was back within an hour, with lunch and flowers for me. Then he put the kids down for naps, put a movie on for himself and the older kids, and I went back to bed and slept the rest of the day, until dinner, when we noticed that Caleb had a horrible rash, so he took Caleb to Urgent Care and I stayed home, feeling much better after sleeping most of the day, and fed the other kids dinner. Oh yeah, he also called in sick to work and arranged for a substitute for that as well.
Did I mention the pink eye that everyone has had this week as well?
So that has been our weekend. We all stayed home from church today, just to recuperate. Hopefully this week we will all be well and Corey will not get any of the illnesses (his reward for being so wonderful!--cross your fingers).
I was watching Eliza the other day playing by herself, and I could just see the joy radiating from her. She would run around and around the kitchen table, and then she would sit on one of the ends of the table legs, which is just the right height for her to sit on without having to take her feet off the ground, jump up, and run again. She was laughing to herself the whole time, thinking she was so clever, and the look on her face was one of pure delight. And the thought came to me that small children truly feel pure joy, and it's not forced at all. They delight in such small things. Last night, just before dinner, Eliza was screaming because she wanted to eat, but it wasn't quite ready and I didn't have anything for her to munch on beforehand. All I did was put my finger over my lips, make a noise, and run my finger up and down, and she thought the noise I was making was so silly that she started laughing and just couldn't stop. The smallest things amuse them, and they take such joy in everything about life around them. It's amazing.
