First Day of School!!

The girls were so excited to start school they could hardly sleep Monday night. They had picked out the clothes they were going to wear and laid out their backpacks and everything. If I had pictures of them that morning, they would have looked extremely excited and happy. BUT...
I am the one mother who didn't have a camera when dropping my kids off for the first day of school. Actually I did have a camera, I took the battery out to charge it so it would be ready. Then we went to school without the battery the next morning. So I got pictures of the girls after they had had their first day and it's not quite the same.

Lyla did really well and was excited, but Mckayla didn't do so good. She got in trouble and was throwing little fits and stomping her foot towards the end of the day. So we didn't have too much success in helping her to be happy and pose for "first day" pictures. We were trying to decide what the consequence should be for acting up at school. Any suggestions? Though Jake said he couldn't even talk because he broke some poor kid's arm on his first day of kindergarten and got sent home after the principle threatened to kill him. So a little tired fit is nothing.
She tried to be happy though, after I begged her to give me a smile.
Lyla tried really hard to help Mckayla cheer up. We decided to put them in separate classes. It was hard for them to be separated for the entire day. Both teachers said that they were asking for their sister. I think it will be better for them to get their own identity. In their preschool class none of the kids could tell them apart, so they were just called "twin girl." The teacher tried, but she didn't always get it. Mckayla can also tend to dominate over Lyla, and they can be a bit bullyish towards other kids when they are together. Anyways, I hope we made the right decision; only time will tell.
I took pictures this morning when the girls lined up for classes. It is funny because all of the kindergarteners look so lost and confused when they line up.
This is Mckayla in line for her class. She concentrated really hard on staying right behind the girl in front of her. They had been working on "how to walk in a line" ( I know because she sang the song for me last night), she followed the other girl really good, though that girl kindof went off to the side leading Mckayla and a few others that way.
Mckayla had a much better day today. She is so exhausted when she gets home from school. Lyla doesn't seem to be as tired or grumpy. But both days of school so far Mckayla has fallen asleep in the car on the way home. The girls really want to be able to ride the bus home, but that will have to wait until we move into our house.
We have managed to be early both days so far. Now I just have to figure out what to do with my free time. The house was so quiet! I got really bored too. I don't know what to do with myself. Jaxon got bored too. As much as he whines and complains when the girls touch him, he kept crawling into their room to see if they were there.

Back to School Shopping

I took my girls shopping for back to school clothes and supplies for the first time. I remember going shopping with my mom, so it was neat to take my girls. I had them pick out some new outfits and shoes. Plus we had a list from the school to fulfill. My girls are born shoppers. I haven't ever been a hard-core, love-to-shop kindof girl. But Mckayla and Lyla are different stories. They went around the store picking out clothes like pros. It was funny, also I wanted to post a story that I had shared with my family on our family website:

I don't let my girls watch spongebob or cartoon network or any other mindless cartoons. I feel like if they are going to watch cartoons it should at least be teaching a moral lesson or have a point. Spongebob regularly came on after the dora/diego on Nick Jr., and that is when we'd always turn it off. Everytime the girls asked why we couldn't watch spongebob I would say that we don't watch it because it is a stupid show. Even listening to it really annoys me. so, we were at the store doing back-to-school shopping, and they of course had lots of school things in the spongebob brand. Everytime we saw something with spongebob the girls would loudly comment with one of these, "we can't have spongebob, because he's stupid" or "spongebob is for stupid people" or "we hate spongebob, he's stupid." They would shout these things out, and attract a lot of attention, maybe offending some nearby spongebob lovers. The word stupid certainly is what stuck with them. Maybe I'll try different explainations, though we are in school now, so no chances for spongebob run-ins anymore.

Announcement

Well, I think I have caught up on things that have been going on with us except...

WE'RE PREGNANT!

Yep. Most everyone knows by now, but I figure that I had better put it on the blog, for those who may not know. Because Jake came home early to surprise me, I couldn't be as prepared as I may have been otherwise (know what I mean). But we had been going back and forth about whether or not we'd have one more. In the end I think we knew that this was right. I grew up with siblings close to my age, and think that Jaxon will love having someone close to his age as well. Now he will no longer we the third wheel child. So that is our news for those who weren't in the loop.

My Carnivorous Children

All 3 of my children have shown a love for meat very early in life. Jaxon loves it when we have ribs and give him some to chew on. Our girls were the same way. While we were in a hotel we were eating out quite a bit, and everytime we asked Lyla what she wanted to eat she'd ask for either steak or bacon. Mckayla has been asking to have her own salad that she doesn't have to share lately, but she still always wants bites of Daddy's steak.

A couple of more awesome AZ pics

One of my favorite things about Arizona is our awesome skies. Texas doesn't have skies like Arizona. They are especially awesome during July and August's monsoon season with the huge pilling clouds. We've been enjoying the views since we arrived.
This is a lizard picture from the hike, taken on behalf of the girls. But it was a pretty cool shot, so I threw it in here.
Awesome mountain views from our hike.
More incredible sky pics.
This is the girls on a huge rock. (As if I needed to write that.) Hikes as a family are really slow because they love to look at nature. They kept trying to find bigger and bigger rocks, and were very excited when we came across this one about 10 minutes into the hike.

Fun in Arizona

For fun, we went on a hike up Ramsey Canyon, right in Sierra Vista. It is a wildlife preserve for hummingbirds. It is home to several (I don't remember the number) different species of hummingbirds. It is also a very beautiful hike, though it turned out to be a bit more challenging than we originally thought. But we all survived alright. The overlook is in Cornado National Forest, but it is a really pretty view.
This is Jake being a daredevil.
This is just a really cute pic of Lyla. They were a bit camera happy the whole time and kept posing and asking us to take pictures. Not to mention the dozen or so pictures we took on their behalf of cool rocks, leaves, beatles, etc. But I'll spare you those shots.
This is just a shot of when the trail began to get a bit steeper and turned into more of a hike than a nice weekend stroll in the mountains.
This is Joey and his fiance Ashley who came on the hike with us. He is being hired by Northrop Grumman and will be moving here in September. They are really awesome, and we are excited to have them move to Sierra Vista.

Jake's real Birthday

We celebrated Jake's real birthday in a hotel room, but we had a great time. We went out to dinner and then came home for cake and presents. The girls of course had to lend a hand in the opening of the presents.
We got a birthday cake from cold stone, though the old geezers' candles nearly melted the ice cream cake.
We nearly set the smoke alarm off with all of those candes, but at least he got to make a wish!

Back to Arizona

After our quick stint in Utah we went back to Arizona for Jake to start his new position with Northrop Grumman. As we continued forward with the purchase of our home, we ran into more than a few snags. The home inspection showed us that there were several several home improvements we would need to be making within a short few years. And on the third visit to the home we were measuring rooms when we discovered a large number of scorpions littered the edges of the home. We found over 20 scorpions inside the house! We understand that we live in Arizona and that is part of living here, but Jake talked to everyone at his work and there were only a few who had seen more than one scorpion ever. There had to be something going on. I think if our kids were older we may have gone for it, but we decided to pull out. It really stank that we had to start all over again. But we did find a house and we are supposed to close on it by August 19th. Here is the link to this house:
http://www.longrealty.com/Listing/ListingDetail.aspx?Search=9fed9591-aa2f-42dd-ad86-c3d9809a11f9&Listing=32509847&IRPAgentID=&Image=1&First=1&Last=1&pagesize=10&SearchType=geographic&ListingDistrictTypeID=&FirstLetter=&Sort=6&Cookies=&UseColorBar=false

Jake's Birthday

Because Jake's birthday was coming up on the following week, we had a birthday party for him on the day after the fourth of July. I didn't get him a lot of presents then, because our car was packed to the max with all of the stuff we thought we'd need for the next month. There was hardly any room to spare. But I did get him pushup bars and we made him do 25 pushups for his birthday. For the last 5 he had to do them with 80 pounds of twin girls on his back! But he made it! That's my tough sexy hubby!

But to pay us back for the pushups, he started drill sargeanting everyone else who wanted to try them out. Below is my sister Hannah on the bars (she is the tough sister).
And my niece Annika gave it a shot. She actually did pretty good. She is also another one of my extremely photogenic neices. She always takes cute pics.
My sister Amber is a fabulous cake maker (for those who don't know), and she made 2 awesome cakes for Jake. One was a Butter Pecan cake, because that is his favorite ice cream, and the other was a real-honest-to-goodness cheesecake. Not the cheap crap that I always make. WE all sang to him, and AMber and Gordon got especially into it: (see below)
This is what the family thought of their singing:

We ended up leaving Saturday night around 11:00pm which actually shaved a couple of hours off of our driving time. Night driving is so much easier with kids because they are sleeping the whole time. We got in Sunday afternoon and Jake started work on Monday.

Fourth of July

After we got things going on the house we left for Utah for the fourth of July weekend. We decided to go to my mom's house because 7 of the 9 of my siblings were going to be together which doesn't happen very often. Plus we only had a few days because Jake had to be back by the following Monday. So we went up to see everyone and we had a great time. It was nice to see everyone, and it was nice for Jake to get to see my family. It had been a long time since he has seen any of my family. We stayed with my sister Amber and her family in her new house.
Angela let everyone ride her horse, which the girls loved the best. They kept asking when they would get to ride the horse. Angela is brainwashing all of her nieces to become mega-horse lovers like her. We went to a parade on the 4th of July in Kaysville and unbeknownst to us they have a tradition that at the end of the parade the whole city gets into a big waterfight with the fire department. It was funny, because we didn't notice anything unusual the whole time, until all of a sudden at the end of the parade everyone around us was wearing bathing suits and holding water guns. People had brought huge buckets and tubs full of water. I hadn't even noticed them. It was a very fun parade. The kids enjoyed it too. Mostly because almost every groups was throwing candy to kids, and they all ended up loaded.
10 of the 12 grandkids were there, and we all stayed in the same house. So things got pretty crazy. The girls had a lot of fun playing with their cousins, and have repeatedly asked to go back to play with them.
The day after the 4th we had our own waterfight/games and had a family kickball game. The water games were really fun, the kids especially liked "dribble, dribble, drench." It is like duck duck goose, but you are going around with wet sponges. Kickball didn't work out too well, because most of the kids had their own idea of how to play it.
This is just a really cute picture of my niece Abigail. All of the Thompson kids are especially photogenic it seems. I am lucky to catch my kids for a picture.