Goldfish Challenge!

What to do when you see Goldfish crackers on sale for 99 cents?

Thomas says, 'Buy all 21 kinds of them!!'.

So actually we had to scour 3 stores to find 21 varieties.  Missing 2 or 3, but we decided we would survive.  Poor Thomas and Catherine could hardly standing seeing them all lined up on the fridge, waiting for family home evening to come...

I have never seen my kids so focused... Harder than you might think to differentiate 21 flavors.

THE WINNER: PAPA- with 15 correct.
2nd PLACE: MAMA- with 11.5 (1/2 pts given for a few close flavors like chedder/xtreme chedder)

Parents rock ;)

Not to ruin your weekend drag racing plans...

After years of constant frustration with flat wheelbarrow tires, I say to Sean, "Sean.  Here is a million dollar idea for you.  Solid foam tires for wheelbarrows so they don't go flat!  Why don't they make that!"

(well, it turns out that they do...)

I want to know what idiot tried using a wheelbarrow wheel on the highway and then sued the tire making company when it blew out at 55 mph, bringing about the necessity for this warning.  Really?  I had to laugh

Birthday 3

So this is actually part two of my birthday.  Time kind of got away from me... 

Brandon's daily surprises leading up to birthday were, as always, awesome.

Birthday itself was also. awesome. 

Woke up to a lovely cake decorated by my girls with loads of fresh flowers.  Ahhh. After some perfect present opening, we headed over to a trail that Brandon had found near to red rocks.  Although the hike was only 2-3 hours long, we did manage to trudge through some snow, climb to a great overlook to view downtown Denver, get lost (harder to see the trail when there is snow!) and circle the same 80 ft stretch a few times till we found our way, and find the ruins of a castle.  Good times!  Can't remember the name of the family that built this 'castle', but if memory serves, it was built near the turn of the 20th century by a (of course) very wealthy man,  He planned to make his property a place that US Presidents could vacation when they were out west.  With in a year of it's completion, however, his wife died and then (I think) about 7 years after that it was struck by lightning and burnt to the ground.  I guess he took that as a bad omen as after the fire he decided to leave town. 

I loved being out with the fam, though, and was pleased the sun decided to come as well. ;)

The castle.  The kids were actually all collapsed, exhausted, on a bench right before this, but were sweethearts to show some energy for the camera.

One of my sweet coworkers made me a personalized nursing card for my birthday, as well as some fajitas for lunch.  Mmm!
I'm enjoying my CNA class but do miss the company of Sandy, JoNell, and Brisa.

Birthdays 2

THOMAS

What an awesome kid.  I look forward every night to tucking this kid in.  After the scriptures, prayer, song routine, I can just lay by him and chat.  He's not generally a talker, but at night he has all sorts of things to say: thoughts, questions, musings, curiosities.  All good stuff.

My baby is 9!!

After morning presents and skylander cake, we had a hangout 'yes' day (that's from Alyssa's family ;). Played games, random treats and such.  Then as soon as Brandon got home from work we picked up Thomas' friend Charlie and headed over to the 'Family Fun Center'.  You always worry when they have to put 'Fun' in the title, right?  But we actually had a really good time.  One more friend joined us over there.  3 rounds of Laser Tag (which I pretty much stink at...but still enjoyed) and then many MORE rounds of bumper cars, and then obstacle course racing (and no, I never beat the 9-10 yr olds, but I totally rocked it against Brandon!).  I was tired.  And feeling more than my young 39 years.  A couple head first leaping dives over inflatable mountains takes it out of you.  Once I got the tuck and roll down, though, it went much better.  Then came rock climbing.  I 'let' all of the kids go first.  Really just needed to catch my breath.  I saw Catherine make it all the way to the *very high* top and knew I had to do it.  Two moves off of the ground and my hands were sweating like a pig and I knew I was in trouble.  Stay calm and don't look down. Stay calm and really don't look down.  Proud to say that I made it!  Woo-hoo!  So pleased with myself.  Got down and am like, 'Brandon! Let me see the picture of me at the top!' And he's like, 'oops'.  Sooo. No proof, but I never lie ;)

Nana gifted some magnifying glasses.  Forget looking at small things when fires can be made!

 

Fire!  Now we need something to burn.... Mama had a whole bag of past tax documents to part with.  Ahhhh.  Kept us nice and toasty.

(we did move to the fire pit for this one)

birthday- post 1

I love birthday week!

So far cheez-its and a family card game on my pillow and date night was to see Shen Yun, a classical Chinese Dance company.  Which was fabulous.  A little hokey, like old martial arts movies, but really impressive and fun at the same time.  And beautiful dancing.

and did I mention Cheez-its?

My little ponies..

Conversation on the way home from the orthodontist yesterday:

Milla- 'I can't WAIT for the next MY LITTLE PONY episode! It's going to be AWESOME!!!'

Mama- 'Oh yeah?  How so?'

Milla- 'It's about BETRAYAL and the IPAD of EQUALITY and...COM-MU-NISM!'

Mama- (Waahhh?) 'This is not the My Little Ponies of the '80's......'


So you think I ought to actually sit down and watch a few episodes?

(Oh- and *spoiler alert*- Milla's braces are coming off April 1st! She's so excited)

February

I think I might as well just label all of my posts by month as I don't seem to get around to writing any more often than that.  Might even be time to switch to 'season'.  But I'm going to stick to 'month' right now, showing my unending optimism.  

So in January, we decided to begin our 'Christmas 2015' season with getting a snowbuddy: a program with Volunteers of America where you are paired with someone nearby that is in need of snow shoveling assistance.  It took a couple of weeks to get the background checks done, forms filled out, etc, but we were finally paired with Ms. Barone.  Since then we have been consistently enjoying 50-70 degree weather.  But the skies did open up on February 1st and gave us a good 6-8 inches so with our 1 snow shovel, 1 large broom and 1 flat bottomed regular diggin' shovel we had Ms. Barone's driveway and front walk cleared in no time.  The sun came out and shown 60 degrees the next day and melted off all that we may have missed.  Consistent with my aforementioned optimistic spirit, we purchased a second snow shovel the next week so that more of the family could participate next time.

For February, as well as continuing with our snowbuddy, we decided to focus on Family History and have a goal of 24-48 hours of indexing by March 15 (we are about a half month off).  Milla has been enjoying the challenge of learning to read cursive (you all know that cursive is kind of a thing of the past?  My kids have still been introduced to it in school, but Milla has said that her teachers usually ask that they just print -- or type ofcourse--as appropriate).  

As this is my 'February' post we mustn't leave out Valentine's Day!  We've made it more of a family affair as Brandon and I will have Anniversary fun on Monday.  Following a relaxing morning of taking it easy, we headed out to our nearby Cherry Creek Reservoir and spent an hour walking and exploring with Henry and the family.  They have a great off-leash area that is HUGE and, along with the meandering paths, is lined on one side with a river/stream.  It's nicely edged with rocks and sand (so you don't get muddy!).  A lot of dogs were jumping in.  We were a *little* concerned that Henry might follow suit and we'd have to go in after him, but luckily at almost 7 years old, he has wised up to the fact that a gimpy 1+ foot tall basset hound would probably drown in 18 inches of water.  Nice to be out on a gorgeous day.  Afterwards we stopped by the grocery store to pick up a couple of missing items from the 'heart' menu the kids had planned out and then went home to make dinner! 

Seans strawberry lemonade

 Catherine's fruit pizza (okay-you know Rin better than that, right? She did the sugar cookies with me, but everyone decorated their own 'pizza's' and hers was, true to form, covered in chocolate and marshmallows)

Sean and Catherines hearts shaped cantaloupe

and

Milla/Papa/Mama's spinach cheese and sausage basil raviolis

We watched one of our favorites, 'Return to Me', while eating dinner and then finished with evening off with an emotional round of HERO QUEST.  (thanks again, Lys!)

I suppose just as March's post will contain the last part of February, it is okay to include some of January here.  The next two pics are the only time I remembered to take out my camera in January.  It was quilt washing day and I had my white bed quilt soaking in my tub when Thomas came in and said, 'You know that big thing in your bathtub?  I really want to jump on it!'.  I thought, 'why not?  needs some agitation after all'.  So in he and Catherine went.  And out came the water.  We had about 5 towels out soaking up water by the end

they were getting pretty creative with ways to coordinate their movements so that geysers of water would shoot up into the air

by the end of quilt 2, Catherine was a little worn out and was showing me here how she could trap air in the quilt and make a little pillow for herself.