I'm Sorry Mary

I have allowed my blogging laziness to expand to unacceptable proportions. I not only forgot to blog about Mary's fifth birthday, but I have been putting it off ever since. So, I'm wanting to jot down a few things about Mary that I don't want to forget about her, and the little individual she is right now. Her most favorite things to do are ride her bike (which she taught herself to do this summer after Danny took off her training wheels), read, play with her baby dolls, color and watch a movie with her family. Mary is a wonderful helper to me and to her brothers. She is so responsible for a five year old, and is continuing to accept more responsibilities and earn the trust and privileges that come with them. She constantly wishes that she could be in school this year, and I wonder at times if we should have started her in a private school. However, I am happy with the time she has been able to spend with me and her brothers doing "School Time" as we call it. Since, we have become more settled in our home, Mary has become a social butterfly. She has many friends and likes to play with them all. I am proud to see her include everyone in play (her brothers too). Most of all, I am happiest to see her testimony of Christ and His love for her develop into true knowledge. She chooses to pray about anything and everything that is going on in her life or bugging/bothering/scaring her. Her faith is amazing, and she is such an example to me. I am grateful everyday that she was born into our family, and that she is the spunky little girl that she is.

I think that sums up some of the thoughts I have had going through my head lately. I want to post some pictures from her birthday, too. We'll see if the happens. :)

For Kari

And anyone else out there that needs a pick me up. These cookies will do the trick :)

Halloween Chocolate Roll-Out Cookies

1 C butter
1 C sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
2 tsp baking powder
3 C flour
3 oz (squares) melted, unsweetened chocolate

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar. Beat in egg and vanilla. Mix in melted chocolate. Mix in baking powder and flour. Blend in last of the flour by hand. The dough will be very stiff. Do not chill. Divide dough in to two portions. On a floured surface, roll each portion into a circle approx. 12 inches in diameter and 1/8 thick. Bake cookies on ungreased cookie sheet 6-7 minutes.

I like to make my cookies thicker, and I don't cook them quite as long either. It makes for softer cookies. These cookies hold their shape very well, so you can cram a ton of them together for faster baking too.

Sorry, I has taken me so long to get these cookies posted. Hope they help you feel better, Kari!

Happy Anniversary!

Yesterday was our eight year anniversary. We were planning on just seeing Harry Potter, but my mother-in-law was kind and came over early enough to watch the kids so we could go to dinner too. Dinner was great a had this tie pepper dipping sauce that was to die for! I am glad we got to go to dinner, because when we got to the theater we were told the projector was malfunctioning. Our options were to see the 10:30 showing or get a refund with a couple of freebie tickets. We had to do the refund, grandma couldn't stay that late. I was bummed that we couldn't see the movie like planned. I was really looking forward to it, since I have heard from so many that it is the best of them all, and has been done really well. At least we got a couple extra movie passes. The thing is we have free movies coming out of our ears. Not that I'm complaining, it just that we are not huge movie buffs. Typically if we have enough time to see a movie without the kids, we usually need to go to the temple more.

Another Running Ooops

Tonight, while running my typical route on a park path, I noticed some guys loitering at the far side of my loop. I didn't feel good about running by them. I decided to turn off the path sooner and run through a neighborhood that I haven't been through before, but knew it opened out onto a main road, so I could get back to my home that way. Anyway, the neighborhood ended up taking me WAY further south than I expected. Furthermore, when I got back to the main road there wasn't a sidewalk and it was getting dark. I didn't want to run in the road at that time of night so I got to walk through the weeds until the sidewalk returned. My typical twenty minute run turning into more than an hour and a half, which I haven't done before. Also, by the time I got back it was completely dark and had been for quite some time. Oops. Sorry, Danny to make you worry.

Derrick's Three!

I can't believe my Derrick dude is three. Where has the time gone? Well, I figured that since I've been trying to catch up on things I had better get Derrick's birthday posted before I get lazy again. This is a great picture of Derrick with his "dump dozer" cake. When I was asking Derrick what kind of cake he wanted it was always a dump truck or a bull dozer. However, when we originally were planning on having both sides of the family come over to celebrate, I figured I could make both cakes. Then I had to go and ruin everything with a migraine the morning of the celebration, and we had to cancel the whole thing. Fortunately, everyone (except Uncle Tim and Aunt Jenelle, with a darn good reason to excuse them) was pretty flexible. So we had Danny's family over the following night, after I was feeling much better, and I made this dump truck cake. But because I had already told Derrick that we were having both cakes, he kept asking about the bull dozer cake and eventually just ran everything together, thus the "dump dozer" cake. If you look carefully enough you can see Derrick's fat lip and huge bruised forehead. I won't tell you how he did it yet, because it happened over the 24th of July Pioneer Day celebration weekend that I also want to post about.Derrick got a sandbox from mom and dad. The two boys in the picture are next door neighbors Kyler and Josh, and Derrick was constantly over in their backyard playing in their sandbox. I think that it is fitting that they were around to watch Derrick get his sandbox. Sadly, I had no clue how to wrap or even hide this from Derrick, so we just had Derrick open the trunk. He didn't know what it was until Kyler helped him out by saying, "It's a sandbox!"At this point I think Derrick finally figured out what it was that we gave him, and he seems pretty happy about it too.Such fun in the new sandbox! Thanks Uncle Tim for the insider tip about the "sand".After playing in the sand for a little bit, Grandma and Grandpa Waite convinced Derrick that he wanted to open his present from them. It was pretty big, and Derrick was super excited just by the size of this gift. He figured out what this gift was a whole lot faster than the sandbox. Grandma and Grandpa Waite have two red ones of their own. It's a wiggle car for those of you who can't tell what it is. Derrick loves wiggle cars just about as much as playing in the sand.The Sunday after Derrick's birthday we were able to celebrate with Grandma George, Uncle Trevor, Aunt Natalie and Uncle Tyson, but I completely forgot my camera. I am still kicking myself over it. Grandma George took lots of pictures but I don't have them yet. At this second celebration we made Derrick's bull dozer cake, which turned out just as cute as the dump truck cake (thanks for your help mom). Derrick was in birthday bliss for more than a week, because after celebrating on Sunday with my family, Aunt Carrie visited with her boys the next week to give Derrick's his gift. I think the wrapping job is just about my all time favorite. Not only did Carrie use Christmas wrapping paper, but she also used stickers to tape it up because she couldn't find her tape! Oh, the ingenuity of mothers. Overall, I think Derrick had a great birthday, especially in the way it seemed to last forever. I'm just hoping that for Mary's birthday we can actually plan and have one big party with family. That much birthday just makes me eat too much cake and ice cream.

The Fourth Continued

I was WAY to tired last night to be blogging, yet alone trying to do two posts at once. After finishing I realised that I left out all of the fireworks fun. Uncle Tyson and Aunt Natalie brought up tanks to light. Of course, the only way to light tanks is to have them fight. As you can tell Derrick was still quite apprehensive about fireworks. Thankfully, by the end of the night they didn't bother him so much.Something that I didn't know about tanks is after you light them and they have duked it out, you stack them all together and light them on fire - or at least this is what Uncle Tyson decided to do :)

Sparklers were another fun part of the evening. Mary enjoyed doing them ALL. Derrick wouldn't touch them, and I didn't want to let Allen even get near them. Mary enjoyed spelling out her name, once I showed her how. Then she wanted to spell out all of the other words she knows, and was sad when we ran out of sparklers.

Allen decided to go to bed at his typical time, but not before he had fun playing with several glow sticks all connected together. I think this was his favorite part of the day. When the other kids were playing with the glow sticks earlier, he didn't get a chance to have more than one. At this point in the night, however, everyone else is outside and he got to have as many glow sticks as he wanted.

The Fourth Of July

I am obviously too tired to be trying to compose multiple posts at once. These pictures belong with the previous post, and I don't really want to fix it at the moment. Sorry:)













P.s. I know it is sad to say this but, don't you just love my new carpet!?! I know I do!

We had a blast with my family this Fourth of July! Grandma George, Aunt Natalie and Uncle Tyson we all able to come up and spend the weekend with us. (It is so nice to have enough space to do this comfortably.) I don't think that my kids have had so much fun with family sleeping over! We decided to try out the North Ogden parade, and it was perfect for the kids and adults. Aunt Carrie, Kambrya, Caleb, Ryan and A.J. also drove down from Brigham City, that morning to come to the parade. Mary and Derrick would have had fun at the parade no matter what, but having grandma, aunts,uncles, and cousins made it SO much better! The cookies that Derrick is munching and Allen has all over his shirt are all because of the generosity of Smith's employee's and my crazy sister Carrie. Smith's was handing out cookies, and the employee's doing so were telling everyone to take as many as they want and if they want more just ask. So, Carrie pipes up and asks for more, like in a sealed box, so she can take them home for another Fourth of July party. The employee's were all smiles and said no problem. The next thing we know we are being handed a huge box full of cookies, with a question "Is this enough?" There were well over a hundred cookies in this box, and they wouldn't take them back once they had given them to us. So needless to say, Mary, Derrick and Allen ate WAY too many cookies at this parade. At least one child had a cookie in hand the entire parade! On top of the cookies all of the floats were tossing out candy to the kids, which we knew was going to happen, but again I didn't realize the massive quantities of candy my kids would be getting. They all had so much fun picking it up.

All Things Crafy

Once again, I'm playing catch up on my blog and the oldest pictures that I want to post are all of the crafty things I made for my sister-in-laws baby shower, and other things. Since then I have slowed down with the crocheting, but I am planning on making a baby blanket for my other sister-in-law who is having a girl and due in November.

I made the monkey and the parrot for my sister, because she was throwing a baby shower for a best friend from high school and wanted to do a diaper cake with animals too. All of the others are for our toy room which I am still meaning to hang up from the ceiling. I will post pictures when I get it all done, hopefully it looks as cute as I think it will be:) These fish also have other friends now, I think I have fifteen or so aquatic items to hang up.
Sorry, I didn't have the eyes stitched on the elephant and the hippo when I took the picture. Eyes made them even cuter!

Chicken Salad Recipe?

Does anyone have a tried and true, yummy chicken salad recipe? I have tried several over the years and I still haven't found "the one" that is what I like for chicken salad. You know you want to help me out and post your recipe to our buckeye friends blog or leave a comment.

P.s. This would be something that would be easier posted on a Facebook account. Sorry. I still haven't talked myself into one yet:)

The Magic Circle and Invisible Decrease

No I am not blogging about kama sutra (although that might be a fun way to get a response from my readers:), these are two amazingly awesome crochet techniques I am learning! These techniques allow you to crochet amigurumi without holes and gaps in your crocheting. I have recently picked up my crochet hook, after years of neglect, and had forgotten how much I enjoy crocheting! My most recent projects were for my sister-in-laws baby shower. The shower was a jungle theme and I found TONS of cute and free patterns online. I just couldn't stop myself from making a baby elephant, giraffe and hippo. Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of my finished products - yet. I need to get the pics from my mother-in-law. But they are just as cute at you can imagine. Now, that I have found these extra neat techniques, I'm sure another crochet project is going to be in the works soon. I think I am going to make several under the sea themed items and hang them up in our toy room. I just can't decide which items to make. What are your favorites?

mary.

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nap

Happy Memorial Day

It was a happy Memorial Day weekend even though it was kind of weird and bittersweet to have a grave to visit now. In the past Danny and I have just tagged along for the ride to visit graves of people I didn't have the chance of meeting before they passed away. This year my family all got together to visit my dad's grave. It was a good experience for me and for the kids. We got the kids pinwheels to place on Grandpa George's grave. They liked being apart of the Memorial Day remembering. The cemetery looked amazing with all of the flags placed upon all of the veterans graves. It reminded my how blessed we are to live in a country with the freedoms to live and worship the way we choose. It also helped me be that much more appreciative of all of those who die for our country.

I still feel incredibly sad when I think that my children will most likely not remember their grandpa George when they are older - especially Allen, since his name is my father's middle name. However, I find immense peace in knowing that we are an eternal family and eternal families can be together forever.

Our family with Grandma George at Grandpa George's grave. We love you and miss you Grandpa!

P.s. It was my birthday too, and I couldn't have asked for a better way to spend it. The entire weekend full of good BBQ food, and I didn't have to prepare a single meal.

Chalk It Up To Experience

I will spare you the details. Don't run with a full bladder.

Why Oh Why . . .

Why in the world can I never get my picture labels to work out properly? I have tried and tried and now I just don't care as much. O.k. that's not true, it actually drives me nuts, but I don't know what else to try. Oh well, maybe next time.

Allen's Birthday and Mother's Day

Unfortunately for Allen his birthday will always be linked with Mother's Day. There is just no way around it when you are born on the day. So this year even though his birthday didn't fall on the same day as Mother's Day we still celebrated both together- with both families too. Everyone was spoiled, especially Allen. On Sunday, Grandma George, Uncle Trevor, Aunt Carrie and Kambrya all came over for dinner and to celebrate. Danny was going to use all of his dutch ovens and make a magnificent meal for us. One the I wouldn't have to cook too. Well, the weather had other ideas, and it rained all day long. So, scratch that idea. We had lasagna, rolls and a fruit salad instead. For dessert Aunt Carrie made an awesome birthday cake for Allen, which looked and tasted amazing! After dinner we opened presents for all mom's and for Allen.

Grandma George opening her Cricut. Yea for being able to use/borrow your mom's things!
Allen "opening" his present.
Discovering his cake.

Enjoying his cake. Enjoying the cake on his truck :)

Today, on Allen's actual birthday, we got together with Grandpa and Grandma Waite, Uncle Tim and Aunt Jenelle and celebrated Mother's Day, Allen's birthday and Jenelle's birthday. We first had a yummy dinner of pizza - which I think Allen might have eaten more of than his cake. Then we opened Mother's Day gifts, and then Allen's presents and then Jenelle's. Then we ate cake and ice cream. We have lots of cake leftover. I wish that I knew more people around here so that I could give it away, or better yet invite them over to share. I made Allen a train cake. Which was a lot of fun making and putting together. Either the cake was just real easy to do this time, or I am getting better at making birthday cakes. Hopefully, a little of both. Anyway, on to the pictures.

Grandma Waite opening her Mother's Day gifts. Daddy helping Allen with his presents.

Allen getting help with presents from Grandpa Waite and Derrick too.

Allen after he has completely enjoyed and demolished his portion of cake.

Highlights Of The Past Few Months

With moving, and then not having Internet access for a few weeks I have gotten even more behind on blogging than usual. I even have several posts that I really want to do, instead of just squashing it all together. But before those, I am going to highlight a few things.

Tent time - Mary and Derrick made the tent, but Allen enjoyed playing in it the most.Danny's Birthday - the kids loved looking in and banging on Danny's newest dutch oven. Fish Farm Preschool Field trip - Mary caught the fish by herself, and then I took the hook out by myself. It was the first time I have touched a live fish in a VERY long time.St. Patrick's Day - in all it's green breakfast glory.
Pi Day - I don't remember exactly what kind of pie this was, but it had a cheesecake layer, two chocolate layers,and crushed Snickers in it. It was a slice of heaven :)Mary's bird's nest - she made it out of branches pruned from the apricot tree. Enjoying the weather after Aunt Natalie's Graduation ceremony.