Christmas Program

The Kindergarten put on a Christmas program yesterday afternoon at the end of school. I taped a lot of it, but here is a video of just part of one of the songs they sang. It was really cute about Christmas in Arizona with a cactus Christmas tree. Lyla is in the front on the very left side, and Mckayla was on the top back row on the very right side, that made it tricky for videotaping.

Lost Tooth!

Lyla has lost her first tooth! It has been very loose and hanging by a thread for awhile now, but she was reluctant to try to get it out or to eat with it. It fell out while she was at school yesterday. She carried it around like a trophy and was again reluctant to part with it. When she was told about the process of the tooth fairy she asked when the tooth fairy would be bringing her tooth back. When the "tooth fairy" went into her room last night he found that Lyla had taken the tooth from under her pillow and was sleeping with it in her hand. Still, she was so excited this morning that she ran into my room to show me the money that was under her pillow.
She is the first of the twins to lose a tooth and Mckayla is extremely jealous. She is constantly checking all of her teeth to see if they are loose. Lyla's new tooth is already coming in, I don't remember the new teeth coming up that soon, but this one is already up and showing. It looks really huge compared to her baby teeth. Below are some pictures of Lyla showing off the new hole in her mouth. It was a little one on the bottom if ya can't tell. The tooth is in the ziplock bag, which made it easier to keep track of and easier for the tooth fairy to grab out of her bed.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

We put up most of our Christmas decorations the week after Thanksgiving, but there is always a delay from when things happen and when I actually get around to posting about it, in case you haven't noticed. Below is a picture of Jake and Jaxon enjoying the Christmas parade that was last weekend. I took pictures of some of the floats that were all lit up with Christmas lights, but none of them turned out. We had a fun time at the parade. Several floats threw out candy and we were right next to a group of handicap people that were very enthusiastic about everything. It really caught on and all the groups paid special attention to our area. It was fun.

These are my 3 adorable children who aren't photogenic at all. I really have to try hard to catch them in a good photo. The girls don't ever give natural looking smiles for pictures and Jaxon is still too young to hold still. Some of my sisters are lucky with kids who always take good pictures. I am very jealous of that.

Here is Lyla decorating her room for Christmas. We gave them the decorations out of the Christmas box that we weren't using to put up in their room and they really liked that.

Here is the shot of the living room all decked out for Christmas.

These are our Christmas lights for the year. It took Jake awhile just to get these all up and hooked to extension cords. I don't know how people do it who have lights all over their yards. We hope to build up our lighting display year by year, we'll see how that goes. Maybe next year we'll have lights going all the way down to the street, but that was out of the budget for this year.

As a side note: I'm almost completely ready for Christmas!!! YAY! I got all of my cards mailed out, all the packages sent, and almost all of my shopping and wrapping done!! We are going caroling tonight for FHE and handing out all of our goodies to friends around here, and then we're done! I really want to be completely finished by the end of the week so that next week we can really have fun with family and just focus on Christmas.

Thanksgiving

We hosted Thanksgiving down here in Arizona this year, and it was really the first time that we have ever had a big family gathering at our house (not just in AZ, but anywhere). Most everyone got there late Wednesday night. Katie and Gordon couldn't come until Friday because they were in Tucson with Gordon's sister, so we decided to have Thanksgiving on Friday. I really loved having a friday thanksgiving. On Thursday we all just chilled out and Amber made homemade pizza and breadsticks for dinner, plus we pre-made a lot of food for the next day. It was nice to have a lot of help with the preparation, especially with the pie-making. Then Thursday we went to the park to play while waiting for food to cook and ate and played games. Saturday we sortof chilled out again and we played rubber-band war. That is a game we used to play with my dad as kids where we'd set up army men in forts of styrofoam and after we're all set up we shoot rubber bands and catapult dog food (we used cocoa puffs though), and at the end whoever has the most army guys still standing is the winner. At night we had a birthday party for Abigail and Annika, and everyone left on Sunday.
It was so much fun to have everyone there. We had 14 kids (all 9 and under) and 13 adults over for thanksgiving dinner, and we were able to all eat in the house. Gordon's cousin Lisa, who lives here in Sierra Vista, and her 4 kids had joined us for all of Friday's activities. The girls really enjoyed having all of their cousins over. They all ended up having a big slumber party in Lyla and Mckayla's room. 8 little girls together in a room and they did all go to sleep each night (eventually). Also, Hannah joined us on Saturday. She had been in Mexico and Amber went to get her in Tucson where the bus had dropped her off. 7 of the 9 siblings were here and we all fit okay!
Here are some pictures of the kids making styrofoam forts for the rubber band war.

The guys decided to be manly and take a dip or two in the pool. Becca and Angela got in too. The water was cold!!!! Though our days are still pretty warm, it gets really cold at night and it isn't warm enough to heat the pool to a comfortable swimming temperature.

Several people also enjoyed the Turkey bowl on Friday at the park as well. That was the part Jake had really been looking forward to. They played pretty hard, so that most of them were complaining about being sore on Saturday.

I couldn't find my camera for much of the weekend, and have been begging for pictures from my sisters and mom who were constantly taking pictures. When I do get those pics I'll post 'em, but this is it for Thanksgiving pictures for now.

Pre-Thanksgiving

I am still trying to catch up on all of the November posts I had been meaning to write, but I am nearing the end of November. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Mckayla's class decided to do a Thanksgiving dinner with their 3rd grade buddy class. Only they were going to have to make a lot of the Thanksgiving dinner themselves. The class was split up into groups and each group made something. One group made cornbread, one made fruit salad, one made stuffing, one made pumpkin pie in a cup desserts (which were totally awesome), and our group made mashed potatos. We had to cut them and boil them and mash them. Once everything was cooking the kids paired off and went outside to make butter. I had never seen that before. But they just put heavy cream in a jar and the kids took turns with their buddies shaking the heck out of the jars until it clumped into butter. It could've used some salt, but otherwise it tasted great. The dinner was really good and we had some leftovers even though most of the unoccupied staff at the school came and joined in the eating. Below is Mckayla eating:

This is the spread of food they had, and Mckayla getting her plate filled.

This is a butter-shaking shot of Mckayla outside.

I really enjoy getting to go help out in the girls' classrooms. I like meeting their friends from school and talking with their teachers. I feel like it is important for me to be involved at the school so I know what is going on and how things are done there. It makes me feel like I am part of their education even though I am just sending them off to school.

Our School Carnival

Back in mid-November I helped put on a fall carnival for the girls' elementary school. I have been trying to get involved in the PTSO, and this was my first big event. I was put in charge of putting on all of the games. It turned out pretty fun, but it was a lot of work. We had 14 different activities for kids to do, and all came with prizes to win and such, so it was an ordeal to get together. Once things got going everything turned out pretty well. The High School ROTC group supplied volunteers to run all of the games and they were really great with the kids. I was a bit surprised to find out the day of that I would be the one responsible for 30 teenagers for the entire day. I thought they might have had some chaperones coming with them, but that wasn't the case. They were good though as long as we were busy. I only had a few trouble makers to deal with. Below is my girls running the relay race:

This is the "Electric Slide" (cake-walk) it was easily the most popular game around because we were giving out king size candy to the winners of the game.

This was the dinosaur dig game. It was very messy, but a lot of the kids really liked it. Jaxon kept going back to it to throw sand around.

This is just a snapshot of some of the other games we put on.

Jake was able to convince the people at his work to let him bring a display for the kids to look at, and he got the army unit to drive a humvee over for kids to crawl in and out of. That turned out really well for everyone. The kids really liked the humvee and the adults were really interested in the UAV display. Jake always had a crowd of adults around him asking questions. He brought a 3rd-scale UAV, which is just a smaller one that they use for training before flying with the real deal. It was awesome that he was able to do that. Below is Jake's display and a kid of a friend of ours who came to help him set up.

We also had a big craft fair with over 30 vendors, a silent auction, and we served pizza and drinks for lunch. The craft fair and the auction were for fund-raising, and we didn't charge for games or prizes and only charged enough to break even on the pizza. It turned out to be a pretty successful event where we were able to raise a good deal of money for the school, plus provide some fun activities for people to do. I am enjoying the PTSO, but I think it is sad that so few people are involved in it. At my first meeting there were only 10 parents, and there are 500 students at the school. They were excited that we had such a huge turnout. yeah.

Jaxon's not-so-new Trick

Jaxon has been walking for a few months, but I realized that I hadn't said anything when I was talking to a friend and she asked, "is that kid moving yet or what?" He really took steps here and there starting at 11 months or so, but he wasn't that interested because he was such a fast crawler. I am not sure what made him want to try it out, but it seems like he just took off one day. He has only been walking well since mid October or so, I can't pin it down to a particular day. He hasn't stopped since.

A Couple of Random Pics

Lyla has been trying diligently to learn to blow bubbles with bubblegum and has finally succeeded. She also has worked hard on snapping her fingers and is currently working on learning to tie shoes. I am not sure why she gets so caught up on wanting to learn little things like that. If only she wanted to work diligently on learning to read....
PS. please excuse the bags of trash in the background. We always wait until the night before trash day to collect all of the trash and get it out of the house, and that is evidently what we were in the middle of when I snapped this picture.
I don't really remember what we were doing that made Jake and the girls so tired but they ended up all falling asleep on the couch together and I thought it was really cute so I snapped a picture. I think they had snuggled up to watch a movie or something and ended up conked out.

Here is proof that I actually canned for the first time ever, and these are most of the things I canned. I did mild and hot salsa, and pomegranate jelly and juice. We'll see if I am ever able to expand my canning efforts.

I have had a few requests for pictures of my new bling... so here ya go! I love it a lot. I tried to get a non-blurry good picutre, but I am not much of a photographer obviously. But it is still an awesome ring and a really great surprise from Jake.

An Adventure with Ivan

A really good friend of ours, Ivan Marshall, came to visit back in October. He was one of Jake's groomsmen and has visited us several times. On his last day Jake had to works and we were trying to find something to do. I looked up somethings on the internet and we decided we'd go try and find a ghost town to explore. There are several of them around here, most are within 20-30 minutes of sierra vista. The San Pedro river used to be a busy trade route, but over-irrigation has turned it into a small creek and it hasn't been used as a trade route for a very long time. There are several ghost towns along ther river. Also there are a number of old mining communities that were shut down 100 years ago and are now ghost towns. Anyways, we set out to find Charleston, AZ. We drove to the river (only about 10 minutes from town) and tried to find a trail to follow. We learned that most of these towns aren't touristy ghost towns that are easily found, we tried to take our best guess at where we thought it would be based on the crude maps that we saw on the internet. After awhile of sloshing through the river we went up and started treking, but it was hard going and I had Jaxon strapped to my chest in a baby carrier. I wasn't expecting it to be as much of a hike as it was. The brush and growth was very thick and thorny so we had to give up. I just had capris on, because I really was expecting there to be some sort of trail or something, so both Ivan and I had cuts all over our legs. We headed back and just let Jaxon go crazy in the river crawling around and I snapped a few photos. I did some more research at home and just for curiosity sake looked it up on google maps. If you look at the satelite imagery part of it you can see some ruins of buildings, they are about a mile or so away from where google says the town is supposed to be, but it is the only thing that looks town like in the area. I plan to go back sometime with Jake to see if we can find it again.

This is a link to the google map of it: http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&q=charleston,+az&ll=31.635735,-110.176365&spn=0.002727,0.004726&t=h&z=18&iwloc=addr

Jake's Flying Lessons

A guy that Jake works with is a flight instructor and has opened a business teaching flying lessons on the side. Jake has been wanting to get his pilot's license for a long time. We really look at it as an investment because it makes him more valuable and versatile to his company. It also makes it easier for him to get positions working on other aircraft. So we knew this was something we wanted to do. He started a few weeks ago and has been doing great so far. We went out last Saturday to watch him fly. It was fun, but the girls were really disappointed that they didn't get to ride in the plane. I am not so disappointed because he is training on a light-weight aircraft that gets tossed around in the slightest wind. I am already a white-knuckled flier on big jets and I don't know if I could handle one of those things. He is doing realy well, on his third flight he did the entire take-off without any intervention from the instructor. Flying is something that seems to come very easily to Jake, so it makes sense for us to continue to have him develope those skills. I am happy for him and proud of how good he is doing. I just thought I'd show him off a little bit.

Mother's Immunity

I don't have it. My mom seemed to have an immunity to whatever disease we were carrying, and a very strong resistance to her gag reflex so that she could clean up whatever disgusting mess we made. I think it is assumed that since you are the mom you never get sick from your kids, and you are able to clean up everything. I usually do OK, but Jaxon started throwing up on Friday and has had terrible diarrhea all weekend. It has been gross. Then this morning Lyla woke me up very very early to say that she threw up. It was all over her bed. covered. I don't know how she had that much in her. I almost threw up when I was taking her sheets off, and had to take a break and go outside. I just couldn't handle it. Does that make me a bad mom? The fact that I have a gag reflex? Then Jaxon woke up with diarrhea running down his legs and all over his bed. Jake came home from work feeling awful and has been sleeping all day. It looks like we are gearing up for a fun week. I have been a little woozie and really tired, but no stomach problems yet. Let's hope my "motherly immunity" kicks in soon.

Crazy Costumes

We just went to the trunk or treat at the church this year and then stopped by a few friends houses to say hi and show off costumes. I was going to take the kids around the neighborhood a little bit just so that I would have a chance to meet some of the neighbors, but our neighborhood was dark. Almost no one had their lights one, which means that we shouldn't go to the houses. We didn't get a single trick-or-treater ourselves. We had decorated and put pumpkins out, and for fun I thought we could put a black lightbulb in our porch light. It wasn't until after that I realized that people probably couldn't see it from the street because our house is pretty far back, so they probably assumed we weren't participating. The kids did get loads of candy from the tunk-or-treat, plus we had tons of candy leftover due to the lack of trick-or-treaters.
Jake never dresses up for Halloween. But this year I did get him to put on the cheap mullet wig that I picked up at Walmart. He at least wore it long enough for me to snap some pictures.
He is trying to look hick-ish, too bad we don't have any flannel shirts.

I just got a t-shirt and a wig. I pinned on the picture of the skeleton to represent the baby. Almost no one got it though.

Lyla was an astronaut and Mckayla was bat girl. We just bought costumes this year for simplicity. Plus, they are starting to get really particular about what they want to be and how they want to look. Lyla knew she wanted to be an astronaut about 3 months ago. We went to the space center in Houston in May and she has been excited about space related things ever since. I'm not sure what made Mckayla want to be Bat Girl, but she decided that about a month ago as well.

Jaxon got stuck with the traditional pumpkin costume. I thought he looked adorable even though it isn't very original. He hated the hat. He kept pulling it off and trying to hide it.

Halloween Pictures

I am finally writing about our halloween. We had a pretty good halloween this year, there were so many activities going on that we had to choose what we wanted to do. Below is Mckayla and Lyla being goofy next to all of the pumpkins we got. Jake got really creative with his this year and it turned out really cool. I had the girls draw a face on a piece of paper and I tried to make that work on their pumpkin. They also painted mine and Jaxon's pumpkins for us. It was fun.
I spent most of Halloween day with Lyla's class, but I did sneak into Mckayla's for a little bit to take a picture or two. They had a party with their third grade buddies, they bobbed for apples and made cookies and listened to scary stories.

Lyla's class made pumpkin ice cream for a treat. They made them in groups of two. They put all of the ingredients in little cans, and shook them up then put the little cans inside larger cans that they filled with ice and rock salt. The teacher took time making it a science experiment and talking about salt and all of that. Then they went outside and rolled the cans back and forth with their buddy for 30 minutes or so. They all seemed to have a lot of fun with it. Then of course, we ate it and they played outside for a little while. I was skeptical, but it was actually really good. It was like eating a frozen pumpkin pie.

We don't have any nearby pumpkin patches, but there is a lot that is used for various commercial things. They put up a "pumpkin patch" and that is where we went to buy our pumpkins. The girls still had fun choosing the perfect pumpkin for everybody. Here's Jaxon exploring the pumpkins.

This is the girls with the pumpkins they chose.

Chore Charts

Shortly after moving in I decided it was time for the girls to really do their share of the work around here. They always help when I ask them to, and have learned to do many different things; but I thought it was time to make it official. I made up chore charts for them and everytime they do a chore they get to put a sticker next to that particular thing on their chart. The things they do are- cleaning the bathroom, cleaning their room, setting the table, emptying the dishwasher, and folding and putting away laundry. They don't do these things everyday, but they at least do one chore a day depending on what needs to get done. When the chart is full of stickers we get to go out and get a prize for them.

I don't want to always get them big prizes for doing chores, but we have been wanting to get them bikes. We have never gotten them real bikes and when we went up to my sister's for the 4th of July it was sad to see them try to ride a bike with training wheels and they couldn't hardly peddle it at all. Meanwhile, their 5-year-old cousin Megan was already riding a 2-wheeler without training wheels! We are pretty behind on teaching them that skill. We had gotten them plastic hot-wheel type bikes when they were 2, and they never really rode them so we never got them new bikes. Though kids bike from walmart aren't that expensive, it is a big deal to get a bike. But we didn't want to wait until Christmas because they'll only get to ride a few times before it is too cold. So we made them do steady chores for a couple of months so they could earn the bikes. About 3 weeks ago was when we decided to get them. We had a FHE on the importance of hard work, and then went out bike shopping. They were so excited. They are getting better at riding their bikes, though they still want mom or dad right behind them just in case (even though they do have training wheels). It is going to take some practice though because they just don't seem to have much natural skill in this area. We'll get it though.

Our 6th Wedding Anniversary

I can not believe that Jake and I have been married for 6 years already. Time sure flies when you're having fun! I love Jake so much and I am so grateful for a loving husband and a good, happy marriage. I feel like that is something that I take for granted sometimes, but the other day I was at Safeway and there was a couple completely screaming at each other in the store. Everyone was trying to look away and get away from them, and the manager had to ask them to be quiet or leave. I thought, "if it's this bad in public, I don't want to know what your home life is like." It made me so grateful for my husband and our happy family. We have our arguments, but we always refrain from yelling at each other and take a step back if we need to. We have always been able to work things out and compromise with each other. I am so grateful for that.
Anyways, I decided it was my turn to plan out our anniversary, and I thought that we had to get out for an over-nighter because we haven't be able to do that in years, and next year we'll have a small baby again. I was nervous though, because we have never left Jaxon overnight before. A couple of awesome, brave friends of ours, Kyle & Joey, watched the kids for the weekend.
We went first to an observatory on Kitt Peak. It is on top of a mountain and in the middle of an Indian reservation. It was a beautiful place. We got up there at about 4:00 and after a little intro went out for a sunset presentation:

We felt like we were on the top of the world, because this mountain was taller than anything that you could see and it was neat to be able to see so far. After sunset the big group split into little groups and we spent the next several hours looking at the stars and different things through huge telescopes. It was romantic, but also very very educational. I have never seen so many stars. There were lots of telescopes on the different tops, and they were being used by astronomers all over the world.
This is just a really pretty view from the mountain top.
This is us at sunset. It got really cold up there, and we were told to dress warm. Jake made fun of me for bringing hats, gloves, and scarves, but he was glad I brought them in the end. I wish I could have somehow taken a picture of the stars from that night, but that isn't possible, I don't think, with our type of camera. It was a great night.
The next day we just hung out in Tucson. We just did some leisurely shopping and ate out and saw a few things. That night we went to a little french restaurant that was super romantic and really nice. When they brought out the dessert Jake had had them put my present on the plate. A new wedding ring! I guess he said that he always felt bad that he had gotten me a super cheap wedding ring because we didn't want to go into debt and we had no money as privates in the army. So he bought me a really nice wedding ring. I neglected to take any pictures of it, but I'll post some when I get it back. I had to send it in to get resized and soughtered. I can't wait to start wearing it! It was an awesome anniversary. I love my husband!!!

Our Trip to Oregon

I tried making a slideshow because there were so many good pictures I couldn't choose which ones I wanted to use. We had a lot of fun on our trip. We left on a early Saturday morning and came back the following early Saturday morning. We really love Oregon, it is such a beautiful place. It was so nice to enjoy some fall weather, however we neglected to think about that until about 2 days before the trip. We realized at that point that we had no warm clothes for our kids. We had to go on a major shopping spree before we left, and I am so glad we did. It was cold! But it was nice to get some cold weather for a little while.
We had so much fun with Benita and Mark. They live in Welches, OR which is a tiny town (only on local maps) at the base of Mt. Hood and about an hour from Portland. We went to Portland a few times. We went to a huge open air market to buy crafts and we ate Portland-y restaurants. I tried oysters for the first time in my life. They weren't too bad, but I'd never order it for myself. We also went to the OMSI. It is a huge science museam that has exhibits for both adults and kids. We spent all of our time in the huge children's museam area and didn't see everything. One of our favorite things was going to Mark's park. Mark works for the BLM and manages several parks in the area. The most awesome one is in Welches and all of the nature pictures in the slideshow are from our visit to that park. We mostly loved just spending time with Jake's mom, Mark, and Markie. We played games every night after the kids were in bed and just enjoyed visiting and catching up. It has been too long since we had seen them. I won't be offended if you don't look at all of the pictures, there are a ton!

Catching Up

The other two blogs I stole my words from our family message board, because I realized I had wanted to write the same thing in the blog. So, my family doesn't need to read them. I am going to list the things I want to blog about now that I've finally gotten the pictures loaded onto my computer. I know it bugs people to be a serial poster, but I am way behind and this is the only sort of family memory book or journaling that I do whatsoever. So even if no one reads it, it is important to write it down.
1. our Oregon trip
2. our anniversary
3. the girls chore thing
4. halloween

Election Results

I had mixed feelings about the election results. I think that Obama's victory is something that our country needs right now. I think it is neat to see so many people getting involved that have never been politically active before, and the passion that Obama has created is really great. I feel like it is waking up the "American Spirit" and it will be good for our country to see so many foreigners that are going to gain confidence in the country and so many people "be proud to be American" again. McCain had some passionate supporters, but most republicans would not be crying and hugging in the streets if he had won. That is why he didn't win I suppose. I think it is great to have a president that people are so excited about, and that hasn't happened in a VERY long time. Most people say not since JFK. That is something we needed.
BUT I am really scared of what the fallout will be with the democrats in complete control. It is scary when a government has no checks or balances. I wouldn't want the republicans in complete control either -by the way- I think it is good when the parties can keep each other in check so things passed can be relatively in the middle. I personally am worried that the drastic increases in social spending will mean either lots more taxes or lots more debt for our country and that scares me. I don't think we need either of those things right now. Only time will tell on that as well.
We also had some heated local elections that I was excited about. We had a ballot measure on making marriage between one man and one woman part of the state constitution that passed. It was on the ballot 2 years ago and failed. But they simplified it and took a lot of things out and it passed this time. I am glad for that. I was disappointed that we didn't get an override passed for our school budget. I don't feel like this community is very supportive of the school system. This really could mean the loss of the Art, Music, and PE classes. They are taught as separate classes by different teachers right now, and they are usually the first thing to go when there is a funding problem. But the state still expects the kids to meet certain standards in those areas and it puts an additional burden on the teachers.
I thought it was also neat that the marriage proposition in CA looks like it will pass, though they haven't officially called it yet. CA is in a weird situation now though, because they have lots of people who are already married, so what will they do if the ban passes? Take away all of those existing marriage licenses? Though I do not support gay marriage I think that that particular situation is very hard to figure out, and very sad for those people whose lives hang in the balance at the mercy of CA voters.

Results

We had our ultrasound yesterday and the result was....... nothing. I am afraid that this election result is coming from Florida. We aren't going to know anything for several months as to be decided in the courts of the delivery room. The doctor's exact words were, "I think it looks like a girl, but don't go and paint the room or anything." That was about as definative as we had with Jaxon. Both Jake and I swear we saw something boyish right before he said that, and now we are left in the unknown. Plus, Gordon's cousin Lisa who lives around here said that this doctor is notorious in her ward for being wrong about genders. She said that he had told 6 women in her ward that they were having girls and 5 of the 6 had boys. We really are happy either way, but I was really hoping to KNOW this time one way or the other so I could get ready. I am glad that we didn't get anything ready for Jaxon, because the doctor was wrong in that case. But this race is officially too close to call, and time will only tell. I did include a cute picture of the baby sucking his or her thumb from yesterday.