CARSON'S 4TH BIRTHDAY!!

When Carson came upstairs yesterday morning he was so excited and he said, "I love birthdays, they're just the best! I love cake!"

Here he is with his new car transporter....he's been really into playing with his cars lately.

One thing he kept asking for was a robe and some slippers, so Grandma and Bumpa got that for him and he was SO happy. This morning I went down to get Livi so she wouldn't wake Carson up by calling out for me, but when I got down there, Carson's light was on and he was in Livi's room laying on the floor with his robe and slippers on, it was so cute.

I love the look in Carson's eye here, he's stoked about having some cake.

Here's everyone gathering their loot from the pinata that took forever to break.

We had a fun birthday party with Carson's friends on a super cold evening...but it didn't rain! Yay! Thanks everybody for making it such a special day for him....he's so happy to be 4 now.

Jason's 30th Birthday

Jason turned 30 on September 30th!
It ended up that our friends Amy and Derek, who moved to SoCal last winter, were in town for the weekend, and we really wanted to see them, so we had a little get-together at the park across from us with some other friends as well. It was a great time to see them and to celebrate Jason's birthday, too!

Gilroy Gardens

Livi at the Wheel

The boys on the carousel...Jason's horse looks mad!

Brother and Sister

Livi

I just love the way this one ends!!

Bathtime

The picture says it all. :-)

Children's Books

I've been interested in seeing if any of you fellow blog friends have any good children's book suggestions. Whenever we go to the library, there are so many choices and there are so many weird books out there (as well as really good ones, I'm sure, but I always love a recommendation). So I was wondering if you have a moment to comment on this post as to what your or your children's favorite books are, then maybe we could all benefit from a few new titles to add to our reading times. :-)

Some of our favorite and most often repeatedly read are:
Walter the Baker, by Eric Carle
Pancakes, Pancakes!, by Eric Carle
Watch out for the Chicken Feet in Your Soup, by Tomie de Paola
Any of the Curious George books or other books written by H.A. Rey or his wife, Margaret (Katy N0 Pocket is cute)
The Tomten & The Tomten and the Fox (can't remember the author's name, something Scandinavian)
Minnie and Moo go to the Moon
The Bear Snores On

Something to Ponder...

This quote was on my friend Byranie's blog, and I've been thinking about it so much. Lord, I need some more Charity!...

"We have not got far enough if we play a game of cards with the children "merely" to amuse them or to show that they are forgiven. If this is the best we can do, we are right to do it. But it would be better if a deeper, less conscious, Charity threw us into a frame of mind in which a little fun with the children was the thing we should at that moment like best."

C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves

There are so many things I've been thinking about during the last few weeks that I always think would be fun to put down in the blog, but by night time, I've been so tired I haven't been up for recalling the funny things Carson's said or the silly things Livi's done, or they ways in which they completely humble me (like this week when I got really frustrated at Carson and pulled him out of the car to make him go back inside to go potty before we left cuz we were in a hurry, and I sat outside the bathroom waiting for him so I could quickly direct him back to the car, when I hear him saying thru this teeth, "I hate it when my mom does that...I hate it when she talks to me like that..." I was all choked up hearing him talk to himself like that about me, and the bad way I treated him. So when he came out, I wrapped him up in my arms and told him 1. I'm sorry, 2. I shouldn't have spoken so harshly and pulled you out of the car so hard, & 3. will you please forgive me? He graciously forgave me and we went along our way, we weren't even late...to Bible study!!!) I hate it when the nasty side of me comes out at my kids. No wonder Carson talks to me the way he does sometimes, they are little mirrors. God's working on ripening that fruit of self control in my life.

Here's a video from a few weeks ago, as you can see, it's a wonderful world for a boy at the beach!

Livi's 2!

Last Tuesday we celebrated our little girl's second birthday!!! Wow...I can't believe our baby is 2 now. I just love our little Livi, sometimes I just want to eat her up, she's so darn cute! We had a little birthday celebration in Colorado and then on her birthday morning we made blueberry muffins and she opened a few presents. We went to the beach for a few hours and then out for ice cream after dinner. It was a fun day. Then a couple days later we had a little playgroup party at the park with a few friends, so she really got an extended b-day celebration this year. We are so thankful God's given us this little girl to bring up, she's a treasure.

hard days

The age of 3 has been really hard for us. 2 was tough in that he often didn't have the verbal skills to get across what he needed to, but then 3's been hard cuz he has great verbal skills, but along with it a nasty attitude flares up, the last couple days especially! It truly wears me down and out. I feel like almost every response is an argument or disagreement or a whine or complaint or gripe. I have a great book on my nightstand called ......"Say Goodbye to Whining, Complaining and Bad Attitudes...in You and Your Kids".....I started it a while ago and then got preoccupied with other books (and blogging!)....but I think I might need to pick it up again. I also like Love and Logic's philosophy, so I think I need to get a refresher thru some books or tapes or something...I just need some tangible tools to combat the negativity. And I need to remember to rely on the Holy Spirit to help me respond the right way.

We started a sticker chart this morning to help reward him for things (like how today he made his bed before he even came upstairs!) or helping out around the house or whatever, and also that if he has a bad attitude we'll have to take the stickers off the chart. So he started off great with a couple stickers, but shortly afterwards we had to take them down and throw them in the trash because he had a 30 minute tantrum because I wouldn't carry him up the stairs. I know it sounds dumb, but it was one of those silly battles that I just couldn't give in to. Poor guy, I know it wears him out, too, and he's just trying to learn how to behave the right way. I've always heard that 4 is such a sweet and precious age, maybe things will get better soon. :-)

Our trip to Colorado

We had a great visit to Colorado recently and we have so many fun pictures, but I'll just post a few of the highlights. It's so fun visiting CO, but it's also hard because there are always so many friends that I want to see that I don't get a chance to. So for all my friends that I didn't get to hang out with and those babies I didn't get to meet...hopefully next time. Don't forget there is always an open invitation to come out here to visit!

We went swimming with my mom in their neighborhood one day, they had a great water slide that Carson could go down. He's getting to be a good swimmer, so it's fun to play with him in the water.


We got to have lunch with my friends Gary and John who I used to work with at First Presbyterian Church in Boulder and that was fun, I always enjoy their company.

We went down to Boulder Creek and took a walk on the trail with my friend Kathleen who I hadn't seen in many, many years and who now has an adorable baby boy, Charlie, so it was fun to meet him and catch up with her. We spent a lot of time playing in the water, both kids were loving climbing on the rocks and wading in the water. We went and got delicious bread from the Great Harvest Bread Co....yum...warm bread with butter, so good.

Saturday we went down to the Farmer's Market in Boulder and got some corn and peaches for dinner. While my mom and brother and Livi and I did that, my dad took Carson fishing. It was Carson's first time fishing, and I guess they caught 1 small trout and a bunch of crawdads! He had fun with those. :-)

We went into Louisville to the street fair to see the Subdudes play, they have great music that always reminds me of summer, and I love going to things like that. And....I finally got one of those little tattoos (kind of like Henna in that it is temporary, but it was spray on). I've always wanted to try that out, I got a little flower on my ankle. It lasted just shy of a week, but it was fun to have for a bit!

We went to the Denver zoo, and the kids loved that. It's changed a little bit since I was last there, years and years ago, it's really nice.

Jason and I got away for a night while my parents watched the kids, and we had so much fun together!

I got to hang out with my friend, Angie, which is always great. Our trips (her out of town, me in town) overlapped by a day, so we got to spend a few precious hours together and the kids had a blast on their humongous blow-up waterslide. We were so busy chatting we only got 1 picture of Carson and Emma as we were leaving.

We also went to the County Fair and saw the animals and Carson rode on a few rides. Livi was terrified in the petting zoo.

We spent the rest of our time in Breckenridge with Jason's family. It's super pretty up there in the summertime, they do an amazing job with the flowers all around town, it's just wonderful. We had a good time reconnecting with everyone and the kids loved playing with their cousins. Anyone looking for a new fun dice game, Pocket Farkel's where it's at!

The beach

We've been having a lot of fun at the beach this summer. It's such a great place for the kids to play. Carson loves the water and all the sand to play with and push around with his digger and shovels. Livi mainly loves to relax on the blanket, but she does also enjoy putting her feet in the water.

Long Time Comin'

I haven't blogged in quite a while now. We've been busy I guess. :-) My brother came to visit us for a week while my parents went on vacation to Mexico. We had a great week with Matt and the kids just loved having him around to play with. We had great intentions of doing all kinds of fun things, but we only managed to get to the aquarium, which he had never been to before, so that was a lot of fun. Otherwise we just went shopping and went to the beach and out to eat a couple times. There's only so much you can do in one week with little ones in tow. :-) It was a fun visit with Uncle Matt.

Carson's holding a snake that he bought at the aquarium gift shop and Livi's holding a "Nemo" fish.

Laundry

Here's the post I promised I'd write a couple months ago. Laundry. I was wondering how much laundry I actually do each week, sometimes it feels like mountains worth. So I decided to chart it. For 8 weeks I put a tally mark each time I did a load. In 8 weeks, I did 51 loads. The highest was 10 loads in 1 week, the lowest was 4. So it came to an average of 6ish loads a week. That's about what I had figured before I started tracking it. And I tell you, it was pretty satisfying putting a mark down each time a load went in...I like seeing on paper what I'm actually accomplishing, more than just a full drawer of clean clothes. :-)

I might just win!

You know that game where you have someone come up with things that you have to find in your purse and you race to see who can find it (if they have it!) in their purse first? I think I have a pretty good shot at winning! (if anyone wants to play) :-) I went out with my brother last night (who's visiting from Colorado) and as we were walking thru the mall, the weight on my shoulder was feeling heavier than normal, so I decided to see if there were a couple things I could take out and leave in the car before we went anywhere else....here's what I found (keep in mind, my purse is not very big):

2 chapsticks
lipgloss
4 pens
sunscreen stick
a chip clip
a hot wheels truck
a pocket knife
Livi's hair clip
used kleenex
1 sock
loose receipts
a pacifier (neither of my kids use them, so I'm not sure about this one!)
a gum wrapper
half a bag of almonds
my small Bible
2 rocks, not small ones, pretty good sized ones that the kids like to collect from church
some loose change
my wallet

So...I cleaned out my purse today and it's so much better, especially with the weight of those rocks out of there!

I've been tagged

A couple of times I've been "tagged" for a "meme" (can anyone tell me what a "meme" is....what does it mean?! Is it cuz it's all about me, me?). So this one is just a list of several things about me that you may not have known....some are weird or surprising, I know. :-) And it's definitely not a complete list. Feel free to do it on your blog, too, I love learning those quirky or fun or new little facts about my friends!

I love the smell of fresh play dough (the store-bought play-doh brand)

I was the drum major (field conductor) of our high school marching band.

I always take my eggs out of the carton in some sort of symmetrical way.

I'd love to go to a U2 concert some day.

I like to jump rope.

I'm always playing some sort of tune on my fingers...sort of like constantly playing piano.

It feels really weird to put my left leg in my pants first or my left sock on first, etc.

I REALLY like the Gilmore Girls and wish sometimes I could be in their world. :-)






Bet you never knew I could make that face!

Or wear my hear so fashionably!

Carson's Amazing Adventure

Hey guys! Carson went on this amazing adventure where he got to try all kinds of cool things, check out some of our footage.

This is a fun time waster I found when I was wasting some time. :-) It's kind of addictive!

My favorite summer drink is definitely lemonade, but even better is lemonade with tea. Trader Joe's makes a really delicious tea and lemonade combo, I love it! Anyways, Carson decided he'd like to try to make some fresh-squeezed lemonade, so we got a bag of lemons and pulled down the old juicer my grandpa gave us, and squeezed away! It was fun and it turned out quite yummy...but boy it sure does take a lot of lemons to make very much lemonade!

A couple months ago, we ate an apple for a snack and then planted the seeds straight into some dirt and gave it some water...a week later it had sprouted and now look! It's really growing into quite a nice little plant! It's been so fun to watch it grow! Carson's very proud of it. So after we made our lemonade we decided to plant the seeds from the lemons we used. We'll see what happens with that one! I'd love to have a lemon tree of our own.

This is what can happen when cooking with youngn's! Especially 2 youngn's. It's so much harder to cook with 2 kids, I feel so much more scattered and distracted. But for some reason this didn't make me too flustered or mad or impatient! I think that I have blogging in the back of my mind a lot now, and so my first thought was aaahhhhhhrrrr, and then my second thought after that was, "Carson, quick, go get the camera, so we can show everybody what Livi did while we were making our spaghetti!" Fortunately we had taken out the noodles we needed already, so only about a pound and a half was dumped on the floor. :-) It would have made for a mad game of pick up sticks!

Livi and Her BumBum Jumping

I took this video about a month ago and I feel like she's changed so much since then. She has so many more words now and always loves telling us all about it.

Lessons from the Care Bears

A couple days ago, Carson was watching one of his videos and one of the previews was of a Care Bears movie. The theme song goes something like..."Wish all your troubles away, da da da da da..." and it went on about that and I got to thinking, hey, we don't have to wish all our troubles away, we can just give them to Jesus, in fact he wants us to give them to him because he cares for us. 1 Peter 5:7 says "cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you." Isn't that great??? We don't have to wish our cares away, we can actually hand them over to the One who is completely able and desirous (is that a word?) of them. So I mentioned to Carson how silly it was that they were singing about just wishing our troubles away, when we can give them to Jesus and he'll take care of them, and so he naturally wondered why the Care Bears don't just do that? Yeah, I wonder too, they'd be much better off. :-) But honestly, sometimes I do find myself just wishing (maybe not wishing per se, but maybe daydreaming) them away or something like that. Why? Why do I forget that God cares for me and wants to hear all the thoughts on my heart. So the next morning, I woke up early (must have been the Spirit nudging me cuz usually I don't get any quiet time in the morning before there is a cute blonde boy pulling me out of bed) and I got some really good time to just give all the things to Jesus that have been on my worry/burden list. It felt so good to just give my Savior all my troubles, knowing he cares for me and will work them all out in his time. So...thank you Care Bears for the lesson, if only you could know Jesus, too, you'd have a lot more fun sliding down those rainbows and jumping in the clouds, not having to worry about just wishing your troubles away. :-)

Colorado

We took a short trip to Colorado a couple weekends ago to spend some time with my girlfriends from college and it also was the weekend of my 30th birthday, so Jason and my parents threw me a fun party! It was so great to be in Colorado, I had been feeling pretty homesick for it and I was anxious to see my family and my friends and their kids. It was a whirlwind fun-filled trip. I didn't get any pictures of my times with By, Mis and Paige, and we only got a couple of the party, but we had some fun times with the kids at a creek in my parent's neighborhood and we had our camera along then. :-)

Bumpa has a good collection of tractors, Livi found the one that makes noises, she had a great time playing with it.

This is Livi's face when we ask her to smile!




The boys had fun exploring the waterfall and as you can see it progressed to Carson getting in the water up to his chest. It was a hot day and it felt so good to get wet.

Liv doesn't like the feel of the grass on her feet and legs, but she sure is cute.

We all got to splash our feet in the water, a good leg workout. :-)

Movie Night

We had our second movie night a couple weeks ago. It's so fun to pile up all our pillows and blankets and beanbags, etc. in the living room and sit and watch a movie with the kids. I think we are going to try to make it a monthly thing. The first time we got the Veggie Tales Jonah movie, it was great! We made pizza and had a picnic on the living room floor and made popcorn. Last time we got Toy Story. We had pizza again and we made popcorn (the old fashioned way with corn kernels and oil in the pot...it was much better than microwaved!) and then we had root beer floats. The kids love it and have managed so far to sit through the movies. Livi isn't usually too into the movie, but she sits pretty quietly with us. :-) She's such a snuggle bug and loves to relax.

The Boy's First Camping Trip!

Jason's been dreaming of the day he could go camping with his boy since long before we were even pregnant! (Good thing God gave us a boy!) So a couple weekends ago, he took Carson over to Henry Cowell Redwood state park (about 5 minutes from our house) to stay the night out in the wild! Carson was so excited and told everyone about it a couple days leading up to the trip. I took the kids to Gilroy Gardens Friday morning and they napped on the way home, so he was well rested when Jason got off work a little early to take Carson away for the night. I so wished I could have been a little fly on the wall of that tent to see his reaction to everything (we have to buy a bigger tent if we all want to go camping!). He had a great time. They played in the dirt, threw rocks and sticks, went for a walk, climbed on branches, etc. They roasted hot dogs and had s'mores. Carson snuggled up in my sleeping bag and slept all night long! Here are a few pics:

The Dress

Here is a picture of the dress I made for Livi. It's a little hard to see, but I love how it turned out, and the color looks so pretty with her eyes. I think it might even fit thru the winter and into next summer.

I just love this picture of Livi eating her breakfast in Carson's old sweatshirt, some of his things look so cute on her.

Dinner Antics

This is Livi doing one of her dinner time sillies, pulling her bib up as far as she can. At almost every meal, she'll come up with something funny to do and then she says, "loot, loot" (look, look). She keeps us laughing, which is why she probably keeps doing funny things. :-)

Remember this dress, Mom?

I was recently going through a bag of clothes my mom had kept from when I was a little girl. I came across this dress among other items that were too small, but this looked like it would still fit, so I tried it on Liv. It wouldn't work as a dress, but it sure made for a cute shirt! 28ish years later your little granddaughter is wearing it, Mom!...isn't that fun?! :-)

Posts to come...in case you were hanging on the edge of your chair waiting for a new post on our blog...here are 2 in process...I've been keeping a laundry tally for the last 7 weeks because I've been curious as to how many loads of laundry we actually do on a weekly basis. I've been reading lately on other people's blogs about the various types of laundry tacklers and I fit into the category of doing all of it at once, when it no longer fits into the hamper and things are dangling out and stuffed to maximum capacity and then some, so most of our laundry is done on Mondays after not wanting to do it on the weekends and on Fridays so I won't have to do it on the weekends and waste precious family time folding clothes, or maybe so it's so that I can do other more fun and selfish things while Jason is helping me with the kids. :-) But hey, it gets done and I am SO super grateful that we have machines that do all that hard work for us! So...I'll let you know what our grand average is in another week or so, I wanted to give it 2 months.

Also...I just finished knitting a dress for Livi. I've been working on it for a while, it was super easy, but it just took a long time to do. So when I get a good picture of her in it, I'll post it. It's so fun and satisfying to make things, whenever I complete something, no matter how hard or even mundane it was at points, seeing the final project always makes me want to start in on something else right away. She really needs a white sweater, so I was thinking of trying to make her one with a really simple pattern I have and some inexpensive soft white yarn I bought a while ago and my big needles so it will go fast. We'll see.