More to Love...

(Once again spacing gets the better of me, so please just take what you get!)

On Saturdays, we clean house and then go walking/jogging together somewhere around the bay or the ocean. Here are some beautiful shots from our walk at Sunset Cliffs the other weekend (the one below and the one above). As a side note, I seem to be incapable of writing a post without adding millions of pictures, but I'm trying to hold it down.















I finally took some pictures of our new place, but only got as far as the kids' room before the camera ran out of batteries. Living room, etc. to come later.














I didn't realize this first photo was fuzzy, but I couldn't fix that tonight, so you get the idea.

This room we like to call "the study".

Why We Love San Diego

Reason #1: Sea World. Since we moved here three weeks ago, we have been there four times. It's now our home away from home (although it's only maybe two miles from our home). The kids both LOVE it and I love having something so fun and educational and curiosity-inspiring to do (is that the same thing as educational? I don't think so. Maybe there's a better word to describe that that I just don't know). Anyway, I haven't taken many pictures since we moved, but here are some from today's SW outing (in the rain, for the second time). BTW the spacing on this is making me really mad and I can't fix it, so sorry about all the wasted space.















Joshua takes this car everywhere he goes. At home, he also has to be holding a wooden oval from a puzzle we have. Always.




















Hannah's hair is growing out nicely. It's long enough to be messy now. And last week, for the first time, someone commented on how cute her haircut was instead of just assuming she was a boy!

There are lots of reasons we all love it here in SD. We are so excited at all the things to do. The kids love our apt and especially getting balloons at our leasing office. We love story time at our wonderful library, and when we have the car, we love taking walks along the bay at Crown Point (pictures to come later). We love our grocery stores and the 24-hour donut shop. :)

A couple of funny things from the children and I'll stop for now.

-At a ward activity last week, when people were asking who we were and where we were from:

Seth: I'm from the SF Bay Area.

Rebecca: I'm from Boise, ID.

Hannah: I'm from Heaven!

-Another time, the kids were goofing around in their beds instead of going to sleep. Seth went upstairs to listen and see what was going on. Well, Joshua must have heard the footsteps on the stairs and figured out that someone was listening at the door, because all of a sudden the playing stopped and he heard Joshua say, in his cutest little smart-aleck voice, "Go away, Mama!"

-Hannah's most recent thing, since she's been so into princesses I guess, is about being rescued. Instead of tattling on Joshua for what he is doing (annoying her, biting her, trying to take her balloon), she always comes running to us screaming "Mommy! Joshie's not rescuing me!" (from himself I guess? It's funny but it almost makes sense!)

-When I was changing Joshua's diaper in front of Hannah (certainly not for the first time):

Hannah (laughing): Mommy, look! Joshie has a tail on his crotch!

Hannah the lyricist

Everybody knows that Hannah loves to make up songs and adapt old songs to fit new situations. Today she came up with a good one that I couldn't resist sharing. (You may not want to read this if you have a weak stomach.) This will only make sense to those of you who are familiar with the Tigger and Pooh Super Sleuth theme song that goes, "when you have a problem, think...when you have a problem, think, think, think! Look at every clue like the Super Sleuths do, and just think,think,think!"

Anyway, Hannah was sitting on the potty tonight before bed, when she usually does her big job, and suddenly started singing, "when you have a problem, poop...when you have a problem, poop, poop, poop! (pause)..you can think about your poop, and just poop! poop! poop!

More Photos of Blackie (or Raw Meat, as Daddy calls him)

Our Christmas Eve!

We had a pretty fun day today. This morning we took some Christmas gifts over to our neighbors, which was a fun way to let Hannah be involved in the gift-giving/service aspect of Christmas. In the afternoon we got together with our best friends, the Nations, to do the traditional Nativity reading, with the kids acting out the different parts. They had fun, even though, with their attention spans, it only lasted for about 3 minutes before they were all distracted by other things. Hannah was very excited to be Mary and kept making some funny "sweet and holy" Mary face. It was pretty funny. Joshua was the innkeeper, which meant he ran around like a monkey until we dragged him over to say "No room!" After that, we got the three older kids (Hannah, Jonathan and Sam) to sing some Christmas carols while Joshua danced, and then they were done. So we put on Hannah's absolute most favorite movie, the Aristocats, and tried to play a game while listening to the kids act like cats (i.e., hissing, meowing, licking each other, licking the carpet...), scream, jump on the couch, etc. Needless to say we didn't actually get to finish the game! Then we headed over to some other friends' house for a special Christmas Ever soup dinner, which was fun until Joshua fell and smacked his face on the brick edge of the fireplace. It immediately swelled like crazy and he has a nice black eye now, which you can't see in the pictures because the flash was too bright. So we went home, let the kids open their Christmas Eve pajamas, and put them to bed. Besides that one little incident, we had a fun day and are so thankful we have such good friends to celebrate special occasions with. Mostly we are thankful for the birth of Jesus Christ, which gives us a wonderful reason to celebrate and to remember the important things in our lives, which can be so crazy, tiring, and frustrating at times. I'm grateful we have this time of year to receive an added measure of the Spirit to draw us closer to our Savior, and to each other, and to give us the boost we need to make it through another year! We have experienced a lot of changes, trials, and decisions to make since graduating from BYU a year-and-a-half ago, but we've learned a lot along the way and managed to come out on top so far. And it's not over yet -- Seth is starting another job and we are moving to San Diego in three weeks! So the new year will be bringing even more changes for us (hopefully good ones!). We are excited to go, but we will certainly miss all of the wonderful people we have come to know and love out here. We are so thankful for the things we've been blessed with, and also for the hard things we've gone through, which have also blessed our lives by teaching us to depend more fully on each other and on our loving Heavenly Father, who truly knows and cares about us and our family. Merry Christmas to all of you and we love you all very much!

Our first snowfall of the season...

The Experiment

This morning I woke up and decided that Hannah and Joshua need to learn how to share a bedroom. Anyone who's ever seen them do this, for example, when we're on vacation, knows that I must be out of my mind. But they both go to bed around 5pm and wake up around 6am, so I figured they might as well do it in the same room and give me some more space in my house.

So I tried to put them to bed as usual tonight... between the two of them, they've been screaming, crying, laughing, throwing things, jumping in their beds, and goofing around for the last hour...

Wish me luck.