Our House!

We moved in to our new house Easter weekend. It still didn't have appliances, shower glass, some tile, etc. but it was done enough to live in. The contractor has been in and out finishing things up and we still haven't gotten all the way unpacked, but we are loving our new space.

Everyone keeps asking to see before and after pictures. Originally I wanted to wait until we got it all decorated and bought new furniture to show it off but since its been a month and we still haven't even started decorating I realized that could be awhile so I thought I would just go ahead and post some pictures now.

Old mudroom:

New Mudroom:

Old Bathroom:

Old Half Bath:

New Bathroom:

Old Hallway:

New Hallway:

Old Bedroom:

New Bedroom:

Old Bedroom:

New Bedroom:

Old Master Bedroom:

New Master Bedroom:

Old Master Bathroom:

New Master Bathroom:

Old Nursery:

New Nursery:

Old Study:

New Study:

Old Living Room:

New Living Room:

Old Dining Room:

New Dining Room:

Old Entryway:

New Entryway:

Old Kitchen:

New Kitchen:

Old Rec Room:

New Rec Room:

Craft Room:

Toy Room:

Deck:

View of the Equestrian Stables:

It is still a work in progress, but it looks MUCH better than it did when we bought it 6 months ago!

"Oops, I forgot!"

We moved from a 940 square foot condo into a 4300 square foot house on 3/4 of an acre of land. To say we have more space would be an understatement and I guess we are all still adjusting to a more spread out and spacious lifestyle.

This morning I spent over an hour on the phone with our insurance company and asked the kids to be quiet and play nice together while I was occupied. Once I get done on the phone I go downstairs to check on them and discovered that only Corbin and Makelle are playing in the toy room. I can't hear Seth anywhere else, so I ask them where he is and Makelle jumps up, "Oops, I forgot, we were playing a game together in the nursery and I left him there! I told him I would be right back, but I forgot." (Not surprising knowing how easily that girl gets distracted.)

Since I didn't hear him crying to get out and I know he can't open our doors on his own yet I got a little nervous and rushed in there to find him asleep on the floor. Apparently he got tired of waiting patiently for his sister to return and finish their game and decided to go to sleep rather than yell and knock on the door for someone to let him out.

"Elle, you can't just leave him stuck in there and forget about him!"

"It's okay, I turned on the heater first, so he wasn't cold."

That is beside the point, but good job... I guess.

What?!

Seth is 20 months old now, but hardly talks at all.  As such I think we assume he doesn't understand much, since he doesn't tell you much. However, tonight Seth gave Caleb a little letter O from our magnet collection on the fridge and said, "O!"

Ever since he stopped taking his morning nap and I have been homeschooling Corbin and Makelle in the morning he has started watching some little alphabet shows that we have to keep him occupied and distracted while we work.  We also have the magnetic letters on the fridge the kids play with a lot, foam letters in the bathtub and lots of books about letters that we read, so he has been pretty well exposed to the alphabet letters.

Still, we assumed it was just a coincidence, since 'O' is one of the sounds he can easily make, so to test him we put the O back on the fridge with all the other letters and mixed them up and told him to find the O again.  This time he grabbed the O and the zero and handed them to Caleb.  We tried a few more times and he found the O or 0 every time.

He was unable to find any other letters we asked him for, but I was still a little amazed.  I forget that just because he doesn't talk, doesn't mean he doesn't understand.

(Even in his baggy hand-me-down pajamas with an irritated runny nose, he is still so dang cute!)

Yea!

Seth usually tells us when he has stinkies.  The past few times he told us right before he went to the bathroom in his diaper... ergo it is time to start potty training again.  The first time I put him on the potty he freaked out and wouldn't stop screaming and trying to get off.  So we have let him play with the potty like it was his personal little chair for the past couple of weeks and then today I decided to get brave and take off his diaper.  He had three accidents on the floor, but he used the potty twice.

He throws his hands in the air and says, "Yea!" whenever he is proud of himself, so we all gave him an overly enthusiastic "Yea!" for his success.  We have a long way to go still, but with any luck he can be close to potty trained by the time this baby gets here in three more months.  I dread the thought of two in diapers!

Bites

We have a rule in our family that you have to eat one bite of each food on your plate per year old that you are.

This afternoon at lunch Makelle didn't want to eat her potatoes and was disappointed to realize that she now has to eat 4 bites, rather than 3, since her birthday was on Saturday.

So while she sat at the table for longer than necessary trying to choke down an entire extra bite of food the kids came up with a new song:

You've had a birthday, cry boo hoo.
You have to eat more food today.
One year older and one more bite,
Happy Birthday, to you!

School Work

Looking back I want to document the kids' progress in their school work, so for my memory's sake here is Makelle doing her reading for today:

Makelle Turns 4!

Makelle's birthday still isn't until the end of the week on Saturday, but we celebrated a little early this year with a family dinner for her and her Uncle Tyler at my parents' house on Sunday.  I went completely overboard and much to Caleb's dismay bought her a GIANT dollhouse that I found for a steal of a deal on KSL.  Caleb was a little mortified by the sheer size of the thing, but since we will be moving to a much larger house with plenty of space in a few short weeks, I think it is perfect.  As does Makelle:

 

Rather than showing a lot of emotion when she is really excited about things, Makelle often gets really timid and her little hands always go to her face when she is really happy, really mad, really sad or really scared.  We are assuming it was really happy this time :)

We won't tell him when he is older, but I think Seth was even more excited about the giant dollhouse than Makelle.  He had his little horse and action figure running up and down the stairs continuously most of the afternoon.

Makelle also got a lot of fun new dress up clothes from her Grandma and Grandpa Lloyd and cute owl blanket/costume from her cousins. Let's just say we have yet to see her in normal clothing since Sunday:

(Being a "Married Girl")

(Being Strawberry Shortcake)

My brother's family gave us a book of kids' cake designs awhile back and Makelle has been leafing through it the past few weeks trying to decide what kind of cake she wanted this year.  She couldn't decide between a pink flower and a Barbie doll cake.  Loving a good theme I tried pointing her towards the Barbie cake to go with her Barbie dollhouse, without giving anything away and finally won her over when she realized that we could make the doll's dress any color, not just the blue in the picture.  In the end she requested a 'Princess Pink' cake.  (Princess Pink is the imaginary character that appears in all the bedtime stories that Caleb tells Makelle at night.)  And this is what we came up with:

Makelle helped me bake and decorate the cake.  She insisted upon wearing her own real apron and pulled up a chair and sat watching it cook for a solid 30 minutes while she absently brushed her doll's hair. I am pretty sure she was switched at birth, because her interests are NOTHING like mine!  But despite the pink obsession, refusal to wear pants and love of all things domestic, I couldn't love her more!

Little Figure Skater

Makelle really wanted to take dance lessons.  I really didn't want Makelle to take dance lessons... sitting through all those recitals is going to be brutal :)  So, for now I convinced her to at least wait until we moved and she could get into a more permanent class.  While she patiently awaited her much anticipated dance class we appeased her with some figure skating lessons from the local rec center.  In the 3-5 year old class it was less figure skating and more 'not falling over' but she LOVED it!  And is determined to stick with it until she learns how to do spins 'like the big girls.'

Day one she couldn't even stand up on the ice without falling and once she fell, she could not, for the life of her, get back up... every effort to do so resulted in doing the splits with her hands on the ice and her bum in the air.

(My camera settings got messed up and it is super blurry, but you get the idea.)

Five lessons later and now she can move around with little marching steps forward and backward without falling and without the use of the walker:

And her favorite part was beginning to learn how to spin:

Looks just like the professionals, right?  :)

The Littlest Nursery Boy

The week after Makelle left nursery to start Sunbeams, Seth hit 18 months and got to start nursery. I have been teaching primary since before he was born, so Caleb has spent the last 18 months taking care of him during church and was quite excited that he was now old enough to start going to nursery. Old enough, but not necessarily big enough. We've been to several specialists, but have yet been able to figure out why our little man is so little, so at a whopping 18 pounds we were glad that he at least had to wait until the bigger three-year-olds moved on before he started going.

The first week we took him, he was obviously excited to see all the toys and started playing right away. Then from the hall you could hear the exact moment he realized that we had snuck out without him and he burst into tears. When we picked him up the nursery leaders said he was too cute and little and they felt bad making him calm down on his own, so they took turns holding him and comforting him most of the time.

Since then he cries and tries to escape every time we get close to the room, but he settles down and starts playing pretty quick these days and does just fine. He definitely looks tiny compared to everyone else, but it is fun to see him get older and conquer new things.

Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam

Makelle FINALLY got to start Sunbeams this year. Last year all the little friends in nursery that she played with started without her and she was quite sad. In fact in December they start bringing the kids into part of Sharing time so that they can get used to it and last year they brought Makelle along for a few weeks before I discovered it and had to inform them that her birthday wasn't until after the new year and it was devastating to have gotten her hopes up. I took her to the bathroom and asked her if she was having fun in nursery and what she was doing and she said, "nothing, just waiting for the big kids to get back to play with me." It was rather sad. So after a mere 12 months of waiting she finally got her turn and LOVES primary.


She has thee best teacher ever, so I think that helps :) I thought I was being released as the Sunbeams teacher, but there are about 18 kids on the roll this year so they decided at the last minute to split the class and asked me to keep teaching for a few weeks until they found a second replacement as well. So until we move I get to hang out with sweet Makelle in primary, which is fun to see her smiling non-stop and so proud of herself that she is with all the big kids. We set New Year's goals and Makelle suffers from being EXTREMELY shy, so she decided to help overcome that she wanted to try and raise her hand and answer at least one question every week in primary. So far she is doing really well, she is very soft spoken when she talks and always brings her hands up to her mouth the entire time so you can't always understand her the best, but we are proud of her for pushing herself to get better. She is so precious!

Little Brother!

We found out that we are having another little boy in June!

We told the kids last night and Makelle was sulking. Caleb asked her if she was sad it wasn't a girl and she said, "No, I'm not sad, I'm MAD! I hate it!"

Corbin immediately stepped up to console her and said, "But it's going to be a baby when it comes out and you like babies?"

She looked up and her perma-smile came right back, "Oh yea, I DO like babies! I am excited!"

Crisis adverted, thanks Corbin!

Happy Birthday to Me!

I turned 28 this year, which is close enough to 30 to make you start to feel old!  We celebrated with a family dinner at my parents' house between Matt and mine's birthdays.  Caleb slaved away all day to make me my favorite cake... which isn't actually cake at all, but rather a delicious combination of fudge, ice cream and candy pieces shaped like a cake.  It was so good! The kids are still at that fun, cute age, where they are more excited about your birthday than you are and they made me lots of cards and pictures to show it.  It was a fun celebration and reminder of how blessed I am.

Then on my actual birthday, we ditched the cute little kids and went out on a double date with the Walkers.  Kids are sweet, but sometimes it is nice to getaway and reconnect with adulthood :)

Weirdo

Seth is a thumb sucker, he NEVER took a pacifier or bottle, just that little thumb of his. Recently he has also developed an obsession with strings. He finds drawstring shorts in the laundry, people's shoes, the ends of some toys, whatever sting he can and carries it around the house for comfort. Even more recently, he sticks the end of the strings in his ear... tell me that's not weird?

New Year's Eve

On New Year's Eve we went up to my parents' house for dinner and games for awhile. Corbin played Telestrations (kind of like Pictionary) with us, it was... interesting :)

Afterwards we went over to Sam and Benson's house to plan out the details of our upcoming Legoland trip. The kids played in the basement and even Seth was up at midnight to help ring in the New Year.

Under the assumption that there was no way he would stay awake during the car ride home, I promised Corbin he could stay up as late as he wanted, and he fought hard to take advantage of that and came home and played his new video game til past 1 am, after we had all gone to bed. We found him asleep on the couch in the morning (he had turned off the TV and put on pajamas :), but he sure loved staying up later than Mom and Dad for the first time!