A New Year! Pregnancy Pictures, In Anticipation of the Upcoming Birth; Observation From a 3-year-old

When we had our twenty week ultrasound and found out Poppy was a girl (which I already knew anyway), it took them an hour and a half to perform the whole thing because of faulty equipment. To make up for it, they did some 3D images for free. It was the first time we had had one for any baby, and it was pretty neat! She was the cutest little alien I've ever seen.  

One day Eli was speculating about how they would open my stomach and take the baby out. I told him that they actually would not open my stomach to get her out, then gave a vague explanation to how she would make her exit. He promptly squatted down in front of me with a look of concentration on his face, then popped up and announced, "Poppy's gonna squish!" 

Christmas 2013: Our First Tree

Probably the most exciting thing about moving into our house was that it was the first time we would EVER have a full-size Christmas tree. And real one at that! Until last year we'd only had a foot-and-a-half tall artificial tree. We only even got that because it was given to us by a special Secret Santa (our bishop's family) in our BYU days when Seth was the EQP in the 201st ward. That was when Hannah was a year old, and we used it every holiday until last year. I think we'll continue using it on the side when we have space for two trees, because it's a special reminder of the days when we had so little but life was so simple.

We continued our traditions of gingerbread house making, gumdrop-cookie baking, visiting the temple grounds, seeing the Christmas lights on Garrison, and having a Shepherd's dinner on Christmas Eve (this time withe a tiny teddy bear in the role of Baby Jesus). That is always such a special evening. I think there are just no words to describe the feeling of Christmas with small children. There's just so much anticipation and magic and Christmas spirit (until someone picks a fight or throws a tantrum about something, but at least for a few moments in there somewhere, it's magical).

I'm sure our family looked like goons to the Santa we visited at Sea World's Snow World. Most kids, I expect, sit on Santa's lap and give him fairly common gift requests in relatively general terms, but our kids are a little unique. Joshua asked for a jetpack. Eli told Santa he wanted cereal. ("A stereo?" Santa asked. "No no, he said cereal"  the slightly embarrassed parents clarified.) Hannah plopped herself right on Santa's lap and gave this discourse: "I want a Little Miracles Zebra Gift Set. It has a big blanket, a big stuffed zebra, and a little stuffed zebra attached to a little blanket. It's at Costco and it costs $14." Santa looked like he thought we were all crazy at that point as he used his foot to shove us down the slide. (Not really, but that's the image that came to mind as we left the workshop).

Another special gift came to us at Christmastime: the landscaping in our backyard! We hired a man from our previous ward, Morgan Goff, to do the work for us. Eli loved watching brother Goff work and would work alongside him any chance he got through the whole process. It was such a wonderful climax of the project see my whole family out there helping to lay the much-anticipated sod in our backyard on Christmas Eve.

Pictures from the Tough Mudder and Thanksgiving

Seth participated in his first annual Tough Mudder shortly before Thanksgiving, on a team that included Ben and Tyler. He had a fantastically filthy time and he made it all the way through!

I love having Thanksgiving at our house, just our little family. I love Thanksgiving food, and I love cooking it all myself. That way I know dinner will include everything Thanksgiving dinner should include, and it'll be done the way I like it! And yeah, I know that maternity shirt made me look just like our turkey. Oh well.

Halloween 2013

Our theme for last year's homemade costumes was "sleeper costumes." We ended up with a zebra, an astronaut, and a birthday candle. This was during Hannah's zebra obsession. (She gets a new one every few months or so.) We participated in the ward's trunk-or-treat and also went trick-or-treating at Sea World. And of course, we went to the Fall Festival at PLNU, which we look forward to every year. Hannah surprised us this time by showing a fierce and uncharacteristic determination to climb the rock wall. She had never tried before or even expressed interest in it, but she trie over and over to get up that thing this year! Didn't make it as far as she'd hoped but we were proud of her for trying. They are such cute kiddos!

Horrors of Potty Training: Part 3

I hate potty-training. It's top on my short list of parenting jobs I detest. Sometimes people ask me for potty-training advice, and even with three trained kids, I still don't have any theories on how to get it done. But I do have advice now: just throw them out. (The underpants, not the kids.) I've always felt like you have to salvage and scrub out (or save for daddy to scrub out) the clothes they make messes in. But Eli did it SO often, I finally quit putting myself through that and just...threw them out. I dropped messy underpants in trash cans all over town, and it was a wonderfully liberating feeling.

He finally made it though, and here's a picture of Eli with his "I'm Finally Potty-Trained" Hot Wheels car and celebration cake. It was a pretty amazing cake if I do say so myself - moist, chocolatey, and filled with crushed oreos -  at least we got to enjoy half of it before the ants got to it. Grrr.

Trouble With Ants and Cats, or, Why a Seven-Year-Old Boy is Terrified of Cats

Besides the many projects that occupied tons of time when we moved into our new house (installing pantry shelves and various other shelves all over the house; learning how to/installing three ceiling fans in the house, landscaping, appliance shopping, lawn care/revival, etc), we faced a couple of other majorly time-consuming issues, one of them being constant ant infestations. Almost from the minute we moved in to the minute we moved out (more about that when we get to this year's posts...), we were overrun with ants more often than not, mainly in the kitchen (conveniently). (Yes I mean that sarcastically.) Ants, ants, ants, ants, ants, all the time. And following their trails and baiting them and wiping them down, over and over and over again, is incredibly time consuming and frustrating. It's a good thing I was over my phobia of black ants by this time, because from the time I was about 7 years old til I was twenty-something I was very scared of them because of a dream I had when I was a kid. I remember it vividly, still: I was standing out on the driveway at my (first) childhood house, and for some reason I was covered in tiny, tickling, crawling black ants and it was so awful. My grandpa was out there with me, leaning on a cane and laughing wickedly instead of wiping them off of me. (Sorry Grandpa, no reason that I know of for that!) That was a bad year for dreams, as bad as that ant one was it was nothing compared to the dream I had about the Oompa Loompas from Willy Wonka...anyway, I'm not going there. They and Gene Wilder still scare me. But back to the point, ants are awful.

Another event that ended up being very time-consuming, with long-lasting effects, started off rather innocently on a Friday afternoon in late September I believe. Our mini-van has a sometimes-automatic sliding door that apparently didn't get closed after the kids and I returned from school that day. When Seth came home later on, he noticed the door wide open, and closed it. We didn't think anything of it until around ten a.m. the next day when the family was getting in the car to go somewhere. Seth had gone around to the side of the house, but the kids and I had climbed into the car and were fairly settled when all of a sudden out of NOWHERE, this humongous, incredibly fluffy gray cat was wildly bounding around in front of me, back and forth between the driver's seat and all sides of the dashboard, "ROWR! ROWR! ROWR!" claws out, fur flying. I of course was screaming (having never been more surprised by anything, ever, in my entire life) and holding my hands in front of my protruding belly to protect it from frantically digging claws. By some miracle the cat never actually landed on me, and after what seemed like five minutes but was in reality probably around ten seconds, the cat finally jumped out the passenger side door. Thankfully in my awkward pregnant slowness I hadn't gotten comfortable enough to bother closing the door after me yet. Seth missed out on the entire thing, except for hearing the screaming, but once the cat was out the full realization of what had happened set in, along with the terrible, horrible, no good very bad smell that lingered in our car for months. You can imagine what that was from, having a cat locked in the car from 5 p.m. one night til ten a.m. the next day...yeah. Praise be, there was nothing in there that required scooping out, but the wetness was bad enough. It took many shampooings and vacuumings and months of air fresheners before it was mostly back to normal.

Unfortunately it will probably also take many months of therapy before Joshua is back to normal. The poor kids , although completely untouched by the cat, were completely panicked just from watching the chaotic scene and listening to Mommy scream. My kids, the boys especially, were already scared of dogs and wary of animals in general, which I am fine with, but after that, they all hated cats for a long time. I think Hannah and Eli are mostly over their real fear of cats, but I recall a time maybe four or so months back when all three refused to go out in the backyard because there was a cat back there and they instead stood just inside the (tightly closed) sliding glass door in the back quietly discussing the possible danger if they dared to venture outside. Joshua is still extreme in his fear; he absolutely refuses to approach a cat under any circumstances. Not two weeks ago he jumped out of the car at the house, started to go up the sidewalk, then doubled back to the car because there was a cat dozing near the front window. But it wasn't the same cat. I'm pretty sure we have not seen that once since it spent the night in our car. And as a family we have gotten much better at making sure the car doors and windows get closed!