Chaos Coming

I've been such a blogger dud lately, but Danny insists that I blog this most recent excitement in our lives.

We are expecting twins girls, and I am due June 16th! Crazy right? I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the idea of going from five to seven in the family. Thankfully all of the worries that I have had concerning these little ones have been put to rest. Both babies are healthy and developing as expected, with no sad complications or such. Such a relief and a blessing! The ultrasound today was amazing and so neat to watch. It's pretty near the top of my awesome/memorable events list to see my two new babies kicking and jabbing one another. When we went in today, we had been told that one of the babies was a girl from a previous ultrasound, but we didn't know the gender of number two. Now that we know, Mary is THRILLED to have two sisters on the way. We are all excited for this new phase of chaos and craziness that these girls will surely bring into our lives. Grandparents are also super crazy excited, especially considering that we are in Utah and not Ohio for these births.

So, all of you out there that have friends, family or acquaintances with advice about twins or whatnot, send them my way. I need all the help I can get :)

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.