Last Post of 2007

Happy New Year's Eve!

Here are some quick pictures of the kids from the last few days.

In the bouncy.
Bouncy.
Bouncy.
Meadow bought a valentine blanket with some of her Christmas loot. And she had peanut butter toast for breakfast.
Peanut butter toast strikes again.
The boys.

Contemplating attack.
Mike helping Meadow with a tie-dye kit she got for Christmas.
Ta-da!

Happy New Year!

Post Christmas

Hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas - we sure did. Lots of family and food. We also got about 8 inches of snow. It was a beautiful White Christmas.

Santa came, despite our forgetting to put out reindeer food. Thank goodness! We'll have to put extra out next year.

Not much to say really, happiness hangover I guess. Here are some pictures from yesterday.

Hunter is checking out his Super Mario Galaxy guide book.
River digs his new phone.
One of the only pictures I have of Hunter without really bad red eye. Apparently coffee must be consumed before I remember to turn all the right buttons on. Bummer.
Meadow engrossed in a princess game.
River thought he needed a little extra cleaning.
Santa brought Meadow her mouse king.

Little dude couldn't wait to get into the toys.
Meadow and her My Twin.

Another My Twin outfit.
Santa brought River a bouncy thing. He thinks its cooler when one of his siblings is inside.
Hunter wanted proof of his ability to stand on his head.
I found another with relatively little red eye.
Merry merry to all.

Happy Anniversary baby! Can't wait to see what the next year brings...

Two nights before Christmas...

Merry Christmas! As I sit here wrestling with a buttered-up toddler for my spot on the chair (who put that in his reach?!), I am really looking forward to the next few days. I love Christmas. I like getting up insanely early to watch the kids tear through their presents in record time. I miss going to the movies with one of my brothers - a tradition we enjoyed when we were old enough to drive. I like watching the kids play with their cousins. I think it's great when they actually want to leave their new toys so they can spend time with family. I wish that more of us could be together in the same place, but I have really enjoyed how the family blogs serve as a pseudo-replacement for geographic closeness.



Typing can be difficult when you've got someone kicking your head. I can't believe it isn't naptime yet...



I will try and post Christmas morning pictures relatively quickly.



One of Meadow's nicknames is bean. I think the evolution of the name went something like this - Meadow, mellow, jello, jelly, jelly bean, and then bean. So the other day I needed to help her with a coat and this was our conversation:



"Come here Bean."

"Mom, you know why it's good that I'm a bean?"

"No, why?"

"Because I fart so much!"

*laughter*



Here are some pictures from the last week.





Hunter

Meadow
River
Avery and Meadow
Christmas tree. You can see the River line (higher than we thought it would be) and the uneven lights that are constantly being rearranged by tiny hands.
Nanny and Meadow backstage in her mouse costume at the Nutcracker.

She got 44 roses after all of her performances.
Nanny and the kids.
Merry Christmas everyone!!!

Winter Break!!!

I'm officially done for the semester! I had three questions left on my last final this morning when my phone started to vibrate... River is sick (explosive diapers - ick!) and had to be picked up from daycare. Poor guy. Thankfully, he seems to be in good spirits. Also, he won't tell anybody what I get for presents - even if he sees me buy them.

I've posted the first part of the Mother Ginger dance. The piece of video that has been up is the end of the dance. We really enjoyed the show and are so proud!

I will go through pictures later tonight or tomorrow to post. Until then...

Nutcracker/Finals Weekend

I'm having trouble loading video. There are three parts of one scene in the Nutcracker I'm trying to post. Whatever ends up getting on, I'll post the rest later in the week. I can't do any more today.

Meadow is a baby "spanish" bon bon who comes out from Mother Ginger's skirt. Mother Ginger, as told by Meadow, is not a girl. He has way too much hair and he's on a table and he farts too much. She tells it like it is.

Mike shot the video from the first performance on Saturday with the camera. It's not high quality, but you can see our gorgeous girl - which is the point.

Hunter and I are going to the last performance today and I still need to study for finals. More later in the week...

Crunch time

For the next 4 years I will have exams on Mondays when school is in session. Why I decided to post every weekend, I'm not sure. Perhaps I believed I was no longer prone to procrastination and would do it on Fridays (ha!). At any rate, the next two weekend posts will be brief. Next weekend is finals weekend and Meadow's Nutcracker weekend. Three shows plus dress rehearsal. Yikes. I'll post pictures from the show around the 20th or 21st after finals are over.

Yesterday was the photo shoot for the show. All the dancers had their outfits on and posed with their scenes as a group and individually. You may be suprised to learn that while Meadow loves playing to the camera at home, when a professional gets involved the story changes. Significantly. After two hours of coaxing her into not frowning (that was the best I could do...) I began to get nervous about next weekend. For those of you who have purchased tickets, I hope she doesn't freak out. I'm crossing my fingers...

The boys are good. River has another ear infection (I love daycare). Hunter is busy with friends and happy to be back in school again (they've been off-track). Speaking of school - we just found out the kids will be switching to a conventional or modified conventional calendar next year! I am so excited! I'm going to get to spend the summer with the kids now, which hasn't been the case since we moved to Colorado.

I should get to the books. Here are some pictures from this week.

Meadow and Lola

Hard to believe she hates taking pictures.
The tree. It smells so good. Every year Mike picks the PERFECT tree.

Tree with lights and star.
Need to buy more lights and decide where the River line is before putting ornaments on. Will post finished product when we decide.

Where's your belly button?
They're always cuter when sleeping.

Have a good week!

Seriously...

Okay, seriously. After tying the chairs to the table, the pantry had received renewed interest. I'm going to have to actually purchase hardware to make that door inaccessible. Anywho... I decide to answer some e-mail and I see that he's opened the door and gotten into Jenga. No big deal, I think. I'll just type for a few minutes and he'll play with the blocks, I'm okay with that. Three minutes later I turn around and this is what I see. Sooooo not cool.

Pictures

Had to have Meadow pose for a picture so I can turn a copy in for her holiday tree to be posted at her performances. Guests can sign it for her when they come - how cute! This is my Meadow.
This is my River.

Kitchen helper...
This is my Hunter. Loves taking pictures.
Kids in action.
This is how they pose for "a nice picture".

The coffee ground incident.

What a mess!
He's trying to make up for the mess by helping me clean. Yes, that's syrup and not dishwasher detergent. But he's trying.
See...
That's how it goes around here these days. Have a great week!

Busy!!!

Just a quick hello. I will try to post some pictures tomorrow afternoon. I've got a pretty important exam tomorrow and I need to study as much as possible. Mike's working this weekend so it's harder to study without him running interference with the kids. (Really just River - the big kids are good about letting me study.)

I don't know if it's because we always lived in ranch style houses when the older kids were this age or what, but River seems much harder than they did (or maybe I'm just that much older and slower...?). Anyway, I've tied the dining room chairs to the table because I'm tired of hollering at him and moving them back dozens and dozens of times a day. Oh, and it's really inconvenient that he's moving them so that he can reach all of the things we've put out of his reach in the kitchen. I just tied them up this morning. The last straw was when I was folding laundry in the basement and I thought he was having fun with his brother and sister down here. I must've left the door open at the top of the stairs, because when I finished folding the load I found him on the main floor, he had pushed a chair to the espresso machine in the kitchen and he was covered from head to toe in coffee grounds. There were grounds in his nose, under his fingernails... everywhere. Not really what I want to be cleaning up at 6 o'clock in the morning. He's already tested each chair to see if they will move! Is it wrong that I grinned with huge satisfaction that I outsmarted (for the moment) a toddler?!

I snapped a picture of the coffee ground incident, I'll try and put it up tomorrow.

I'm off to hit the books - more tomorrow after the exam...

Post Thanksgiving

We had a nice Thanksgiving. It snowed just enough to make everything pretty and not enough to be too problematic. Nanny and Poppy were here and did all of the baking with the kids while I was at school on Tuesday and Wednesday... it was fantastic! The turkey was pretty and we even remembered to get kale for presentation (per Meadow's request). We had dessert over at Lenae & Scott's and we all had fun watching River run around like a crazy man.

We went to the tree lighting on Friday and froze our buns off! The lights are really beautiful, but I swear it gets colder every year we go.

Mike bought a new camera so I'm just installing the software now. I haven't really played around with it yet to see what it can do, but I'll try more soon. Although maybe not until closer to Christmas since the semester is wrapping up and I'm pretty busy - we'll see...

On the domestic front, we found a magic (I swear) spot removal product. The ingredients aren't listed and I don't know what exactly is in it - but it works! We had a few grease spots that I had just resigned myself to living with until we replace the carpet - and they're gone. It's called Folex. Here's a link: http://www.folexcompany.com/

Here are a couple of snapshots that we took this week.

River is checking out the new camera box. He's got a thing for boxes.
Meadow was moving and the camera shot her and everything else looks like it was moving - weird. She's got curlers in her hair.
Hunter objects to having normal pictures taken, although he does seem almost amused.
Off to study before the Bronco game!