California!

Well here is the start of our trip, it will continue for a couple days, I need to make Fern's Halloween costume today so this is it for now!!

A couple days after we got to Calif. it was Fern's actual birthday! And since Jake's birthday is just a couple weeks away we thought we would celebrate with family and friends! Plus Aunt Mary & Grandma did the whole thing, so it may have been the most enjoyable birthday! :) We had planed to have it at Aunt Mary's but it was so pretty, plus that morning Aunt Mary had rescued a stray bull dog, so having the party in the back yard was not an option! :)

Fern enjoyed the park!!
Especially that their were willing grandparents to push her on the swing!!
We had lost of pretty girls! Here are Maya and Sahara, Fern's friends! It was great getting to see them and their parents!!
Aunt Mary and Novella!! I think Novella may already realize that her Mama is a little weird! :)
Aunt Mary bought these Tinkerbell head bands for all the girls, but the birthday girl refused to wear it!

Here is Fern mid-blow, blowing out her 2 candles!!!
And Jake so excited to dig into his cupcake!!
Here is everyone, and the only picture of Grandma at the party, she tends to hide from the camera!! :)

Fern loved her top, we usually do not do presents at birthday party's, but seeing that most of the party was family, I knew this would not happen! :)
Jake was so excited to get new "fastest shoes" and they are velcro so he can do them himself!! Now Riley wants some velcro ones too!! :)
Fern was glad the festivities continued into the night, balloons are so fun!! :)

Thanks Grandma and Aunt Mary!!

HAPPY early BIRTHDAY FERN!!

We thought we would celebrate Fern's 2nd birthday a couple days early so that Dad could celebrate with us!The boys were so VERY excited for Fern to open the gift they helped pick out!
Fern could not believe her eyes!! Her own baby doll! (She loves plastic head dolls and I have resisted it, you know me and the plastic thing, but oh well it made her very happy!)
Then she had to wait for Dad to get it out of the box, what an ordeal!
So happy!
Is this not the best picture!!!! She was bouncing and rocking just like I do when holding a baby!
On to the GOOD stuff! Chocolate cupcakes ala Dad!
But thankfully the doll I made last year for her has not lost it's place!

More birthday fun next week from California!

What's Up!

So what do you store in your food storage? You know they always say you should store something sweet!Here is Fern in her new jammies, they have the sweetest little owls on them (great-grandma J. would be proud)and they are organic to boot!
And well yes I am showing you a picture of our trash can, that little black thing, with the guts coming out is what happens when little brothers get your caterpillar. :( We had the most sad sobbing the other night! Here is how the other is doing.
:)

Our Week!

Who is that guy behind the ginormous carrot??? :) Well the kids and I worked on cleaning out the garden the other day, as winter is quickly approaching)! As we were getting the rest of out carrots out we found this beauty! It was 14 inches long and as strait as can be! This is quite a feat in this rocky CT. soil!! I sliced it up and we enjoyed it with our dinner!Here is Riley and Jake with their pets of the week! Riley has a Woolly Bear Moth Caterpillar, and Jake, I am just not sure it looks quite a bit like a Tomato Caterpillar, but it did not have the big spike on the back. But Jake was happy he was green! We had several friends come over to see the caterpillars.
After dinner the other evening we had a treat! Acai smoothies! Here are the three munchkins wearing theirs!

BREAKING NEWS!!!!!

RILEY GOT HIS TOOTH OUT!!!Here is the happy (but a little woozy) guy! This is his first tooth!!
Yea he asked me a few minutes ago to pull it out for him, but unfortunately it is the most truly EWWW! kind of thing for me! Yea I use to work in a dentist office and when the little kids came over and said, "LOOK!" and wiggled their tooth I would smile and hold back the puking! So thankfully he got it out all by himself from wiggling it! He is very excited that the tooth fairy will come tonight, what do tooth fairies bring these days, I was excited for a quarter when I got out a really hard tooth, but what would he buy with that now?

Cute Fern in the Fall!

I know it is a little dark, but her smile is so sweet!
I just love this picture, she is trying to put something in her pocket. The first thing she did was hike up her shirt and then try to twist over there, it was hysterical!
This is after our hike at the Rolling Brook Nature Center, she was telling us all about the turtle! He was trying to escape through the fence!
Here is our pretty fall inspired door step, in case anyone needs to recognize it when they come visiting! :) It was fun to buy mums for myself, I remember the first fall we were married and had just returned to Virginia we were staying with Debbie and Danny and they had just purchased their first house. Debbie and I went out and picked mums out for her door step and it always stuck with me. So here are my mums! The pumpkin is one from the organic farmer at the farmers market here in town, he always gives the kids free taste, cucumbers, tomatoes, you name it! And the corn stalks are the only thing I reaped from the corn in our garden, the raccoons got all the corn! Next year I hope to have a fence! Later this month we will be celebrating our 1 year mark in our house, what a year!
This weekend is General Conference Weekend, so I will be MIA, we watch it on the computer. But there are beautiful pictures of the fall colors and such over on our nature blog, maybe I'll get a couple more up too!

Adventures at Home!

So one day last week the kids and I spent the morning at the park and then had lunch with a friend, so in all we did not get home until after 1pm. A little bit later the boys were playing outside and came in to tell us that a tree had fallen and smooshed the fence the neighbor had put up. It is usually one of her trees but I went out to see. But it was in fact a LARGE branch off our Winne the Pooh tree! Here it is, it was mostly hollow inside the branch, we almost put a swing on it! Glad we didn't!
Here it is, the twigs poking up from the neighbors jewel weed on the left is the tip of it! It was a LARGE branch!
Unfortunately with the branch falling it stirred up an unknown (to us) hornets nest! Here is Dan doing battle, they were quite nasty! We have not been able to play in the yard all week, they just smell you and come attacking! It was pretty bad.
Finally they were under control enough that Dan was able to use his handy dandy new chain saw!
The boys could not get too close because the hornets were still attacking some. But we could not keep them too far, they LOVE Dad's new toy too!
So Dan was able to get the branch all out of the neighbors yard, but has not been able to get close enough to the tree to get it chopped up in our yard. So seeing that he is leaving tomorrow for the week, we will resume the adventure then! :)

BIG NEWS TODAY!!!

I am sure you all thought I had left the blogging world, but alas the fast is over. I also got my sister to post too! :) Love ya Mary!

Ok, and the big news stories today are... I started a new blog, yes I am crazy, it is a Nature blog. I hope you'll all check it out and enjoy it! :)

But the most EXCITING news is... Riley became a Tiger Cub Scout today!!!! Riley is so excited! I saw in the paper that all the town Girl & Boy Scout Troops were having a Camporee this weekend, so we went out to see it this morning, I asked all my questions and when it was all good we asked Riley if he wanted to be a scout. He gave me a huge smile and went for it! We put him in a city troop because the troop at church does not have Tiger cubs, they wait until the kids are older. So it will be interesting, Dan is now the Cub Scout Master for our ward troop at church, plus it will be interesting to see if Riley chooses to stay with he city or change to the ward troop in a couple years.

Here is Riley with our new bumper sticker that he is DIEING to put on one of our cars. We'll see.
Jake was full of the "me too's" today, so here is a picture of Jake too!

It was hard to not go talk to the Girl Scout Troops, but I have no time to volunteer right now, and I still have to wait 3 years before Fern is even Daisy age! But you better believe we'll be there, and maybe I will get another run at being a leader! :)

I have a million pictures from the last 2 weeks, so I will get them up soon, and hopefully Mary will keep up! ;)

Fern's Big Day!

Fern has had a hard time with the fact that Riley and Jake got new boxes of crayons for the new school year and that she had to use the old broken crayons. So the other day Fern and I went to the store and bought her her very own (and first) box of crayons! As soon as I gave them to her she wanted to open them, but I told her that she could not until we payed for them. So then she started saying, "Pay, Pay" in her own sweet way! :) Here we are at home, first things first lets dump them out!
So many colors!
And like the sweet thing she is, she put them all back into the box! What a fun girl Fern is!

More! More!

The continuing saga of our family outing... Here we are with two grumpy babes outside, but still on Liberty Island! Then we hoped back on the ferry and rode over to Ellis Island!
There are NO pictures to do justice to the building at Ellis Island. This is the room upstairs where immigrants were sent to be processed. One thing I really loved there were all the pictures of immigrants. There was a man who worked there at Ellis Island but was also a novis photographer. He enjoyed taking pictures of the immigrants in their traditional ethnic dress. They have blown up many of these pictures and have them on the walls. I would have loved to take these home, good thing I did not look too closely in the gift shop they may have had a book of them. Oh I would love that!
Here is one of the pictures behind Fern and I, isn't it beautiful that mamas have carried their babies throughout time.
Now here is a story for you! When we were in the big hall pictured above they had a large jug full of jelly belly jelly beans. There were two signs on it, one was how many immigrants were processed on Oct, ?, ????, I know bad mama can not remember the date. Then below there was a sign that said, how many jelly beans? It was good for the kids, although individuals with stories are nothing like a jelly bean! :) the answer was 11, 4??. Bad again! Oh well. Anyway Jake saw them and WANTED them! We saw the rest of the place and he was having a hard time at that point, he was tired and being the youngest boy you can imagine how that can go. :) So I thought I'd give him a leg up, so he and I went to the gift shop and bought 3 bags of jelly bellys! He gave one to his cousins Sam & Jarom, shared some of his bag with Mama, Fern, Dad, Alicia, & Aubrey. Of course all the boys scarfed them down fast and went after Jake, he shared a few but then I said Ok these are Jake's! He was so happy! So here he is outside on Ellis Island happy as can be, how many other little boys stood there happy as can be but for another reason?
Here is our ferry back to New York.
Jake savoring his last few jelly beans on the ferry. I brought home one pack to enjoy later! What a cutie!
After we made it back to N.Y. we parted with Donna, Jody and the kids, they made their way towards home, and we thought we would head home too. But N.Y. had other plans for us, we sat in traffic for an hour (our kids peacefully sleeping) and never made it past Manhattan! (We only live an hour and a half away!!) So we made a detour, and went to Times Square! We had dinner at Planet Hollywood (we let the kids pick other wise we would have gone to the European Cafe) but we enjoyed our veggie burgers and fries very much! It was fun to walk around and see where all the shows are! It was tourcherus not to go!! I have never been to New York City it was quite the adventure! We got to go into the Billabong store there in times square and see a few of Aunt Marys bags!! I almost bought one! :) Silly hu! :)
Here are the kids and I crossing the street in Times Square! It was a good day to go to N.Y. , between it being a Monday during the school year, a rainy day, and the day before Sept. 11, it was not too crowded.
As we were driving out we went right past the Empire State Building, Grand Central Station, and the United Nations Building. And then thankfully there was no traffic going home! We arrived home 14 hours after we had left! With a bit less money, (parking was the most expensive part, even more than dinner) some sore legs, super tired, but with a whole bunch of fun memories!

So What Did You Do Yesterday?

We got crazy! Aunt Donna, Uncle Jody, and the kids all came back to our house Sunday night, then we all got up early and went to New York City! I downloaded my pictures this morning, all 89 of them! So here are a few, and I will post more later today or tomorrow!Ok from the back left, there is Aubrey, Donna, Trevor, Alicia, then in front, Riley, Sam, & Jarom (that is the tip of Jake's head, Dan took this photo while I was nursing Fern)! This is the ferry to Liberty Island, Dan managed to not get sea sick!! Yea!!
Riley really enjoyed his cousin Aubrey, he held her hand all day. With as many little boys as we had we had to institute holding hands with someone older OFTEN! After Fern's meal on the ferry she enjoyed watching anything the other kids also found interesting!
And Fern and Mama, oh yea and I had Donna chop all my hair off Sunday night! :) But after being on a boat, in the rain, and walking quite a few stairs don't look for great pictures of my new do! :)
Here is our family in front of the original torch, with the electric light. This is before we got to the 156 stairs!This is a replica of one of Lady Liberty's feet! Here are all the "little" kids! From the left, Jake (3), Sam (7 I think!), Fern (22 1/2 mo.), Riley (6), & Jarom (6).Here is after we made it up the stifling hot, and tiring stairs! When we got out there it was pouring rain! But the cool air felt so good after the stuffy stairs! That is downtown behind us!Here was our view from up there of Lady Liberty!

More to come!!

The Day That Had to Come!

As much as I really did not want to and have put off, Fern needed a hair cut. Most of the time we could not see her eyes, and she refused to wear a barrette. None of the pictures came out well, but what do you expect, a 22 month old getting her first hair cut! Here is my girly girl sitting so well for Aunt Donna! We got a great treat, Aunt Donna, Uncle Jody and their kids left at home got in late last night and then we got to spend some time with them. They have since fled CT. for Mass. but we get to enjoy them again Sunday into Monday! :)
It has been impossible to get a picture of her hair cut today, I have tried several times, this one at least she is smiling and she is not wearing her headband! We ended up cutting the back a bit shorter than planned to make it all the same length. It is a cute little bob. It will grow out much nicer than it was! My baby is getting TOO big!!!!

So there is our fun for the day! Thanks Aunt Donna!!!

Riley's Favorite Thing... right now!

Before my battery died I got this video of Riley doing what he does almost the entire time he is outside! This was this afternoon, after I took this he got all the way around the table (where I was sitting) then around the shed and back up to the tree house!

So how do you like the new blogger feature to put a video up vs. photo bucket? :)