Visiting Santa

We took the kids to see Santa at Pro Digital photos in PG and it just so happened that our friend Jeri was taking the pictures. She emailed me this one of the kids. Lily sat right on Santa's lap and told him she wanted a baby. Calvin was a little nervous and just whispered to me that he wanted a Dragon Castle and somehow Santa heard him whispering it in my ear. It was amazing. Santa said his elves told him what Calvin wanted. I was pretty impressed.

Funny!

The other day Lily and I were going out the garage door to run some errands. The garage smelled kind of funny and Lily said, "yuck, stinky. Must be dad." I started laughing because Jon is always the one to blame for the stinky smells and I said, "Not this time, Dad is asleep downstairs" (He is working graves). And Lily replied, "It must have leaked up." I couldn't stop laughing, what a silly girl.

Super Lily wearing the cape Grandma Nancy made for her.

Chritmas decorations

We set up our tree the day after Thanksgiving and the kids had so much fun decorating it. They are at such a fun age. Jon's aunt Diane has sent him an ornament every year from the time he was a baby, he has some really fun things to put on the tree. And she has continued the tradition with our family and our kids. We love our tree because it has special ornaments from Aunt Diane. We have just added a few things of our own over the years.

We also wrote letters to Santa. Calvin wrote his own with a little help from me. We have a ceramic snowman bucket that the kids put their letters in and we tell them that when Santa gets here, he reads the letter and gets one of the requested toys our of his bag. I also have a couple little nativities that I love. The one on the piano has such beautiful detail and the other one is so little and cute. They are my favorite Christmas decorations.

Nativity

My mom gave us this cute nativity block set to make for family home evening. It is a nativity the kids can play with so that they don't want to touch my nice ones. They loved painting it and they love playing with it. Thanks Grandma!

Our beautiful new cabinets!!

We have been saving for a while to get our cabinets re-done. It has been one of my pet peeves since we moved in that the previous owners put a beautiful granite counter top on not so beautiful cabinets. The cabinets were the manufactured oak cabinets of the 90's, they were water washed and worn out in quite a few spots and the sun had turned them kind of orange-yellow. They just really clashed with the almost black granite. Because the counter top was already glued down we would have had to break it to get new cabinets underneath, and we did not want to do that.

So for the past 6 months I have been looking into getting our cabinets painted or refaced. Anyone who has been over has seen all of the different samples hanging up. I really, really wanted Jon's uncle David to reface our cabinets. He does custom cabinets and he always does such an amazing job. We knew he was trying to be done with cabinets, so we asked him expecting him to say no. But he said he would do it!!! Yay, we were so excited. After I chose the colors I wanted, he got started. I chose knotty alder with colonial maple stain, with dark glaze for the cabinets. And mahogany for the bead board under the bar. I love two tone kitchens and I think both of these colors are classic.

Everything went really smooth except for Jon putting his knee through our glass top stove when he was taking the microwave out. We looked into getting a new glass top and it was $500 and 3 weeks special order, we said "forget that" and went to a used appliance place and got another stove for $300. I actually cried when I bought the stove, I hate spending unnecessary money. I love my old stove, it was top of the line convection oven. Maybe if I can save up I will get a new glass top for it and sell our new one. Our new one is nice too, it is also a convection oven, I just loved my other stove.

All of our boxes stayed in except for the triangle one, I really wanted a flat box above the counter. He made all new doors and new pieces of wood to go over the frames. We even got end panels, custom bead board panels, crown molding, and baseboards. My aunt Bambie was so kind to give us her old hardware that was hardly used to put on our doors and drawers. Uncle David put so much time into making everything look amazing. He glazed everything by hand and the finish is a 5 step process. Thank you uncle David!! We absolutely love our new cabinets. Every time I walk down the stairs I smile because I love it so much. And now the counter top looks fabulous on top of these beautiful cabinets, everyone has asked if the counter top is new too!

(click on pictures to see them larger)

Before:

After:

Uncle David and Grandma Smith working hard.

Without crown and baseboard and missing some hardware.

Castle world

Tonight in Calvin's prayer he said "thanks for letting us go to Castle world when I finish my spaceship."

Calvin has been talking about Castle world for weeks now. It is a place in the sky by Heaven where there are lots of castles, and princes, and knights. He is determined to get there, so he asked Jon if he could use some of his scraps in the garage to build a spaceship. Of course Jon gave him a bunch of scraps of wood and metal and cardboard and string and Calvin has started building his own spaceship. He tells us that when it is done, we all get to go on a trip with him. He is soooo excited. I just love his imagination, he is so much fun. I will take a picture of the spaceship when it is done. And we will be sure to report on the happenings of our trip to Castle world.

Rolls

For Thanksgiving and Christmas I was on a quest to find the perfect roll recipe. I have made a lot of different recipes over the last few years but I had never found a roll I just loved. So the week before Thanksgiving I made like 6 different batches of rolls and I came across this one. It is the Lion House roll recipe and it is delicious.

Thanksgiving

We had two yummy Thanksgiving dinners this year. One with the Sudar/Pontious family the Saturday before Thanksgiving and one with my family on Thanksgiving. Both family parties were a lot of fun. We are truly grateful for all of our family members. We have wonderful families and we love them. We are also grateful for everything we have, especially the knowledge of the gospel.

Calvin learned a lot about the pilgrims and indians in preschool and he made so many cute Thanksgiving crafts. He also learned two thanksgiving songs. He was very excited for Thanksgiving this year but for some reason he thinks the Mayflower landed in Africa instead of America, he is pretty insistent about it too, it is funny.

I forgot my camera for the first party but here are a few pictures from the Nielson party.

We said we would never do it

When Jon and I got married we said that we would never buy a minivan. So, for the last few months I have spent quite a bit of time researching SUVs and driving them. For 2 years I have wanted a GMC Acadia. I just love those cars. But they are kind of expensive and after driving one with Lily in the backseat I decided they were not that great. The whole ride Lily was complaining because she could not see out the windows. I had never noticed how high the windows are in SUVs. And every SUV I drove had so many blind spots, it was hard to get the kids in and out and in most of them I couldn't keep two carseats by eachother and fold the other seat down to get someone in the back. I just decided they were not very practical because of gas mileage, price, and convenience for a young family.

So, I started test driving minivans. I actually really liked the Toyota Sienna. For many reasons, it has 3 bucket seats in the middle row, I can fit all three car seats by each other or take out any of the buckets and have a kid in the back or just fold one of the seats down. It has so many options. And it has stow and go back seats which fold into the floor. It also has decent gas mileage and not too many blind spots. We found a great deal on one and we got retail trade in value on our car, so we are now minivan owners.

Pros and cons: I don't love the look of minivans but this one is pretty nice. It is a 2007 Toyota Sienna with 39k miles. Everything about it just seemed to be right for our family right now. However, you are suppose to be so excited to get a new car and Jon and I were both actually a little depressed about buying a minivan. It was kind of a mid-life (not quite) crisis sort of thing. We both just realized we are getting older, we will have 3 kids soon, Calvin starts kindergarten next year and we now own a minivan. But I do have to say, that buyer's remorse wore off pretty quickly. We drive carpool for Calvin's preschool and it has been soooo nice to have the van. It also has a V6 which is more power than my car had and we also love that. The kids love riding it, probably because of the DVD player, but nontheless, they love the new family minivan!! Oh, and a funny sidenote, we bought it at a place called "minivans only." I think that is just funny, but the kids thought it was awesome because they had this fun play area for the kids to play in while we did paperwork.

4 months and counting

Here I am 17 weeks pregnant. I am feeling a lot better now. Finally stopped taking 1/2 a Unisom at night. I can eat what I want to and for the most part I enjoy it. I only get heartburn occasionally, which I know will change as I get bigger. I barely got sick with the other two kids, so this was a little harder to deal with. I didn't really throw up a whole lot, I just felt like I was going to all the time. And exercising made me want to vomit, which is such a bummer for me because that it what I love to do.

At my 16 week appointment I had gained 2 pounds. Which I don't understand because I feel a lot bigger than I was with my other two. I think it is because I have lost muscle mass from not exercising. And muscle weighs more than fat, right? All pregnancy symptoms seem to happen faster, stay longer and be more of a bother this time around. I am trying to decide if that is because this is my 3rd pregnancy or because I didn't ever really heal from surgery before the symptoms started, who knows.

The baby kicks all the time, which I love. Lily and Calvin are very excited. Lily always talks to the baby, it is so cute. Calvin thinks this is a boy and Lily thinks it is a girl. Jon says he doesn't know. I think it is a boy. Because of the following reasons: Now that I can look back on both a boy and a girl pregnancy I can see the similarities this one has to the boy pregnancy. I am carrying pretty high like I did with Calvin. I can still button my pants and with Lily I swear she was so low she was threatening to come out even at 4 months along. I didn't get hardly any sickness with either but pretty much non at all with Lily, I was more sick with Calvin. My ultrasound is on Dec. 17th, we are going to have the ultrasound tech write Boy or Girl in a Christmas card and seal it for us to open on Christmas morning (thanks Tisha for the fun idea), so we will find out what it is soon enough. Either way, we will be thrilled!

Potty training update

Lily did so great for 2 weeks. Hardly no accidents and she was very excited. And then for the next two weeks she has had accidents left and right. It is like the newness wore off and she was done with it. She would be busy playing and just pee as she was running to the bathroom, leaving a little trail behind her which was pretty funny, but it got old in a hurry.

Someone told us to do cold showers after every accident. At first, she hated this and she would say "why mom?" It was sad. And then after two or three of those she looked forward to getting rinsed off. Someone else said to give a treat for the successes, she loved that, and wanted a treat every single time she went on the potty. And that wasn't going to happen. Someone else said to do time out. She doesn't mind that too much and she wasn't connecting it to accidents. Someone else said to put a potato (a whole potato) in a diaper and make her wear it if she has an accident. We tried this yesterday morning and she was so confused, but she hated it! She said it doesn't fit and where are my undies. We told her pee doesn't fit in her undies just like a potato doesn't fit in a diaper. And that she can't wear undies if she has accidents. We put the potato on the back of the toilet as a reminder and gave her back her undies. And low and behold she has told us every time she has to go potty. It has only been like two days but it seems to have worked. She sees the potato on the toilet and says "I don't want potato diaper." Such a strange suggestion. But my friend swore that it worked, and so far it has. We will see how long this technique lasts.

She still wears pullups or diapers to bed because she is such a deep sleeper that she doesn't wake up even if she is wet. I figure this might take a little longer with her, which is fine. For the most part she has done really well and she is so dang cute it is hard to find the right technique for accidents. Because she always says, "Sorry" and "I was playing" and "I don't know why." She is just so adorable.

But I have to say whoever says girls are easier to potty train than boys, they are wrong. It depends on the child, not the gender. Calvin had like one or two accidents. He hated being dirty so he did not want to wet his pants. He did not pee the bed ever. Maybe 3 or 4 times in the last year and a half. Lily is just more carefree and so she doesn't care as much. She is a few months younger than Calvin was though.

My thought for the day is: Parenting is an adventure. No technique will work for every child. Every child is different and exciting. And we love them all for their differences.

Pictures

We took family pictures with my whole family about a month ago and the photographer emailed me a few of our pictures. Unfortunately, I do not have one of the whole group, I will get one and post it soon.