The Scarecrow Festival

Every year for UEA I take a deep breath, brace myself and offer to take my kids to see the witches at Gardner Village!  It's darling and the kids love to see the witches, but it's SO crowded!  All the other moms in the state of Utah with kids out of school and needing to entertain them and seem like a "Fun Mom" apparently have the same great idea I do!  Well, this year our school sent out a flyer for the Scarecrow Festival down in South Jordan.  I'd never heard of it before, but I held onto the flyer and convinced my neighbor to bring her 3 boys and try it out with us!  Holy cow!  We're never going back to the witches again!  It was AWESOME!!!  Instead of staying the morning like we had planned, we spent the entire day because it was so AWESOME we couldn't leave.  A school for struggling teens puts the festival on right in the middle of their campus.  EVERYTHING is FREE, well, except the food.  There were LDS senior couple missionaries there that help the kids at the school, and help them organize and run the festival.  What was great was that there was something for everyone.  There are little jump houses and tot areas for the little ones, and as you'll see totally awesome bigger things for the big kids.

 

 Jacob and his buddy, Tyler, got to run around in this giant gerbil ball!  It was hilarious to watch them try to stay upright in the ball.

 

 Jacob peeks out of the ball!

 

 The bungee jumping was fun but harder than it looked to do.  Jacob had a hard time actually making contact with the trampoline so he could jump.

 

 I love Sarah!  She's so tough!  We went with all these boys and while they were waiting in line to bungee jump they were bragging about all the flips and sweet moves they were going to do as they watched the other jumpers.  But when it was their turn they could barely jump.  It was hard!  Not a one of them did a single trick!  Then there's Sarah!  She flipped like crazy and did all the cool stuff!  She was the littlest and the coolest!  Way to show up the boys, Sarah!

 

Man!  Blogger's still flipping my pictures!  So annoying!  This is the Tower or Terror.  It's not exactly the scary tower I pictured in my mind when I heard Tower of Terror.  Fun terror is much better than scary terror!

 

 

Jacob at the top!

Sarah got to the top too!  There was no way Jonah would try that thing!  And I was fine with that because if he got stuck I didn't want to have to climb up there and fish him out!



Nathan and Jonah loved this little train ride around campus.  Thanks, Sarah, for helping Nathan!



The kids also got to make their own little rockets (for free!) that they got to take home and keep!  They put them on these rocket launchers and shot them WAY high up in the air!  So fun!  We were lucky enough to have perfect weather making it a super fun day!  There were lots of other things we did too that I didn't get pictures of.  We can't wait for next year, but SHHHHHH!  Don't pass it around too much because we don't want it to become too crowded!

Happy Birthday, Brandon!

This is so sad that I'm SO far behind on my blogging that I can't even remember what we did for Brandon's birthday!  This picture reminds me that he got the air mattress he'd been wanting for camping.  Other than that I'm completely drawing a blank.  I HOPE I took my wonderful husband out on a fabulous date!  Let's just say that I did so that his birthday wasn't totally lame.  There.  Done.  Brandon, I took you out on a fabulous date for your birthday last year, just in case you forgot!  That was easy! 

 

I almost didn't even post this, but I thought I would just to take to opportunity to shout out that I'm married to the most wonderful husband, father, provider, priesthood holder, son, brother, uncle and engineer that ever lived!  I love you, Brandon!  When we first met, dated, and even after we were married Brandon feared that I was so independent that I would never need him.  I think it's safe to say that he doesn't feel that way anymore.  I need him more than anything.  I couldn't live without him.  Thanks, Brandon, for all you do and for making me so happy!  Happy Birthday!

Fall Firsts

In an attempt to punch out a month's worth of blogs into one entry I'm going to see if I can get all these pictures to fit into the category of firsts for our family.  Here we go:

 

 Jacob and Sarah's 1st day of school!

 

 Jacob was excited to be in 3rd grade this year!

 

 Sarah was determined to be brave and make 2nd grade the 1st year she didn't cry on the 1st day of school.  She let me take her picture but was afraid if she smiled she's lose the battle to tears.  She did it!  No crying!  Great job, Sarah!  You're growing up!

 

 Here's Jonah on his 1st day of preschool!  He was so excited!  We mainstreamed him into a regular preschool classroom this year where he could still receive special ed and speech/language services.  I wanted him to get used to having 16 kids in his class while he still had several teachers in the classroom to help him in preparation for Kindergarten next year when there will be 1 teacher and 25 students.  To be honest, the special service teachers haven't been great this year, but his 2 regular ed teachers have been awesome, which has been okay since that's who he spends most of his time with anyway!

 

 At the young age of 4 Jonah lost his 1st tooth!  A week before the dental hygienist at his dental check up didn't believe me when I said it was loose.  Then when she saw that it WAS loose they ordered an x-ray of it convinced that Jonah must have bumped it.  Nobody listens to the mom who says all of her kids were early teethers and thus loose their teeth early too!  They may be the experts on teeth, but I'm the expert on my kids!  I had to bite my lip from smiling my I-told-you-so smile when the x-ray came back showing that indeed his permanent tooth was on its way in pushing his baby tooth out of the way.

 

 Brandon, Dad, Justin, Amy, Me and Mom for the 1st time to see Kristen march in the BYU Marching Band!

 

 Kristen, Mom and Jacob after Jacob's 1st BYU football game.

 

 Dad, Mom, me and Brandon to see Kristen's 1st Symphonic Band concert!  We're going to get so cultured having Kristen around to expose us to all this music!  Hurray!

 

 Jacob is our 1st son to earn his Wolf Cub Scout award!

 

Jacob pinning Mom!  The Scout Leader makes the boys choose between kissing their moms or kissing a toilet plunger.  It was a tough choice for Jacob.  He seriously debated.  Luckily, he chose me.  That's pretty sad that I almost lost to a toilet plunger!:)

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Apparently I'm a St. Patrick's Day Grinch because my kids wrote the leprechauns a note last night which I threw away.  And then this morning when they woke up they scoured the house looking for gifts the leprechauns had left them.  I sent Daddy to tell them that leprechauns don't exist.  His response was, "What?  And destroy their dreams?"  "Yep!" I said!  "We're not starting that tradition and I have no interest in entertaining it."  So we crushed their dreams of little leprechaun gifts, to which Sarah responded, "But Mom, they don't come if you don't believe!  This is all YOUR fault because you didn't believe!"  Oh well!  I'll be the Grinch for this holiday!

 

 I can't be all that bad because Sarah and I did make these cute rainbow sugar cookies I saw online for St. Patrick's Day.  It was a little labor intensive to make a huge batch, so we settled for a small batch and had a great time together.

 

 Sarah with an End o' the Rainbow cookie!

 

My mom even sent us a St. Patrick's Day package this week which was fun and very unexpected.  She sent green suckers and green bracelets for the kids!  Brandon got a green stick-on mustache while I got a green mustache necklace!  Wow!  Who even knew those existed?  It gave us quite a laugh!  Mom, you come up with some weird stuff!  I tried to convince Brandon to wear his mustache to his Bishopric meeting this morning, but he forgot.  Bummer.  I'm almost positive that wasn't on purpose.  Oh well.  Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!

Fun Fridays

We tried to do Fun Fridays this summer.  Every summer seems to get a little harder.  Here are pictures of some of the Fun Fridays we did where I actually took pictures!

 Kimber and I took our kids to the Aerospace Museum.  I think one of her kids is missing in this picture, but here's the crew:  Emma, Jonah (behind the sign), Sarah, Sam, William, Jacob and Nathan.  I seem to remember that it was a pretty quick Fun Friday morning.  We ran in, looked at stuff and left so Kimber and I could cross it off our list.  Hmmm . . . fun, right?

 Astronaut Jonah!

 Jacob and Samuel blasting off into outer space!

 It wasn't pretty getting Nathan out of here.  He loved playing pilot!  But he had a poopy diaper and was stinking the place up!

 Another Friday I took my kids to the County Fair.  They love the pony rides and I hate the line for the pony rides.  I really tried to talk them out of the ponies.  They're not THAT cool after all.  It didn't work.  Oh well.  It was worth a try.  Here's Sarah happily riding her pony.

 Nathan DID look pretty cute on his pony!

 Jonah loved the GREEN tractors!

 Another day we went to our city's new splash pad.  It was SO crowded, but pretty fun!  Jacob enjoyed tossing around his new water football with his friend.

 Sarah loved it all!

 Nathan didn't love it too much but squirting other people is always fun.

At least Jonah had fun and didn't even seem to mind getting squirted a little.

While Grandma Was Here

In August Grandma came for a long visit to bring my sister Kristen out to college.  It was SO fun to have her here!  The timing worked out perfectly for us to take her to the new Brigham City temple open house.  The temple was absolutely beautiful.  It was fun to have Grandma with us!

 I don't know what's up with Blogger!  I've tried everything!  Does anyone have any suggestions?  This is so annoying!  I don't know if you can tell, but Sarah, me, Brandon and Jacob are standing there in front of the beautiful temple!

Here I am with my mom, Sarah and Jacob.  We left the 2 little boys home so that we could enjoy the Spirit of the temple without the wrestling match.:)

 Then we HAD to make a quick trip to see Kristen's new dorm room!  Here are all the kids sitting up on her super high bed.  We LOVE having Aunt Kristen closer by!

This is supposed to show how high her bed is.  When I was in the dorms we used cinder blocks to make our beds high.  Now they have stilts which are much kinder to your toes when you run into them.  Isn't her bedding cute?  You get nice stuff when you're the youngest child!

 Grandma also treated us to an afternoon at the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point!  Amy and little Caleb came too, but I guess I didn't get any pictures of them.  Jacob and Nathan had a blast experimenting with sand and erosion.  Where was Daddy?  This is right up his alley!

 Sarah is building a sand dam.

 Nathan and Jonah in front of some dinosaur bones.

There were giant dinosaur puzzles to put together in this pretend digging site.  The older kids also got to make fossils.  After the museum we got ice cream cones and played in the water sculptures   Thanks for a fun afternoon, Grandma!

Jacob's 9th Birthday

Jacob also got a friend party this year as it was an odd number year for him also!  For his 9th birthday Jacob wanted a football party!  He was so excited.

 

 I don't know what the problem is with Blogger lately but it keeps flipping all my vertical pictures.  Oh well, here's Jacob with his football cake ready for the party to begin!

 

As the boys arrived they each got to make their own team pennant with varsity stickers, sports stickers, markers and puffy paint.  I had my doubts about doing a craft with 9 year old boys, and my husband REALLY had doubts about it.  But I'm happy to report that the boys LOVED the craft!  They spent much longer than I had anticipated, and some I even had to tear away so we could move on to other games!  I should have taken a picture of the boys with their pennants - they all turned out pretty cute . . . I mean cool.

 For our 1st game we played Locker Room Mix Up.  The boys each got a bag of miss-matched clothes to put on as quickly as they could.  Here they are all dressed up!  They were good sports and thought it was hilarious!

 

 You gotta love summer birthdays!  Its so fun being outside!  I then sent them to Training Camp where they had to do push-ups, sit-ups, chin-ups, high knee's, run, and some other exercises I can't remember anymore.  They also did passing drills and threw footballs through hula hoops I hung from the deck.  I loved that nobody (well, except for one) got really upset about the games.  They were all competitive but cheered each other on and just enjoyed playing.

 

 Jacob had insisted from the very beginning that he wanted to have a barbecue for his party.  Dad got a new grill this summer and Jacob loved having barbecues!  Boy, could those boys eat!  Even the veggies I threw out last minute from our garden they inhaled!  We had planned on letting the boys play a football game at the end of the party, but with all the time they spent on the craft and eating they barely had time to play!  Oh well!

 

 Jacob got some fun gifts and lots of footballs.  I never got a picture with ALL the boys that came to the party.  One had to leave early for his own football game, one came an hour late, and another didn't like being in many of the pictures.  But in all we had 7 boys, including Jacob.

 

 For party favors each boy got a soft football.  They were a big hit.  The party was a blast, definitely our best boy party so far.  We've had a hard time with the boy parties.  They're just so active, busy and loud.  The girls just sit quietly and wait to be told what to do.  The boys are a lot more work.  But with 3 boys I guess we better get learning, and this party was definitely more successful!

 

Grandma and Grandpa were in town close to Jacob's birthday so they got to give him gifts in person this year!  Jacob got Aunt Kristen's old (pink) iPod and a BYU tie from his grandparents.  He didn't care one bit that the iPod was pink.  He loves having his own gadget!  Mom and Dad chipped in to get some nice headphones and the cables he needed to download music and a charger (not very exciting, but necessary and kinda expensive).  We also gave him a flag football set.

 

We are so grateful to have Jacob in our family!  He is definitely full of life!  Everything is more exciting and fun with Jacob around.  He's a great older brother, loves to help in the yard as long as he's working alongside someone so he can visit, athletic, musical (although he resists this as much as possible), and a good example.  It's so fun to see him growing up, the thoughts he has about life and people and the goals he sets for himself.  We're so proud of you, Jacob, and the boy your are growing up to be!