Mother of the year!

Every other Tuesday Grace attends a "Faith in God" activity at the church. It's for the girls ages 8-11. They get together and make goals and have activities. She really enjoys it. This week they got done with their activity early so the girls were just running around in the gym. Appearantly, Grace was racing some of the other girls from one end of the gym to the other and slipped because she was wearing flip flops. She reach out for the wall to stop herself from hitting it and bent her wrist back. My friend LaRae brought her home and explained what happened. Grace could wiggle her fingers and roll her wrist without too much problems so we (Mike, me, Julie and Micah) felt that it was probably bruised or sprained. I sent her to school the next day and the next day and the next (count 'em....that's three days). I even made her do a cartwheel the day that she was supposed to have gymnastics to make sure that she really couldn't participate. She was still really "babying" her arm after THREE days so both Mike and Micah (he is our friend who is a flight doctor) said that I should probably take her into the doctor for an x-ray. So, on Friday after school I took her in. They took the film and WHAT???? A buckle fracture of the radius and ulna. I am probably the best mom on the planet! I made the poor girl walk around with a broken arm for three days. She was super excited to get a cast though.

What am I gonna do with that kid?

Oh my sweet, mischievious Tyler! That's who I'm talkin' about, who else? My dear friend Julie Bahr is coming to visit next week and I really wanted the upstairs bathroom to be all painted and cute when she got here. But, Mike is out of town enjoying some "man" time. So, I decided to paint the bathroom myself. Jaike was down for a nap and the kids were all in quiet time. Well, of coarse by the time I was about done, all the kids were out of quiet time and Jaike was awake. I was finishing up the second coat of paint on the last wall and Emi says, "Mom, Tyler poured red juice all over Indiana (the dog). I took a deep breath and went downstairs hoping that the red juice incident took place outside. Lucky for Tyler, it did! But, my poor dog was all red as well as Tyler and my back porch. I couldn't really let Tyler in the house because his feet were all red and I couldn't clean him off because I had 75 seconds of painting left. I guess I could have stopped and cleaned him off but I didn't. Anyway, I locked him outside until I could deal with him, which was probably about 5 mintues. He stood at the back window and cried the whole time. I wish I had a picture of the red mess but I was too mad to stop and find the camera. Seriously, Tyler gets into these kinds of messes all of the time, huh Julie (purple glitter glue)? What the heck do I do with this kid? So basically, I have decided that this is all Julie's fault. Don't you think? If she wasn't coming to town and I wasn't so worried about having a cute house for her, none of this would have happened.

Close ups

I need new pictures of all my kids to hang on my family room wall. The one that's up there of Tyler right now is from when he was two and a half. The one's of the girls are from school the year that we lived in Oklahoma and the one of Jaike is from last summer. Mike took these ones for me last weekend. Now I just have to decide if they are "wall worthy." Here's the one problem that I see.....everybody is naked except for Grace. Can you tell? And what the heck is in Jaike's hair? It looks like a piece of rice. When Mike was taking these I didn't notice anything in his hair. I wonder if it's a reflection or something. Of coarse, I am NOT hanging the one of the dog on the wall. That's just dumb.

That darn dog!

As much as I curse our dog, he really is a good dog. Everytime I turn around, someone (usually Jaike) is laying on top of that poor animal. He tolerates it very well. The kids really do love him a lot. So, I guess we'll have to keep that darn dog around for awhile.

Tables

I have been eyeballing these tables out of the Pottery Barn catalog for months but of coarse I couldn't afford to buy them. I asked Mike to make them for me but knew that he probably wouldn't because he doesn't have a ton of spare time on his hands these days. While I was in Oregon Mike went on a rotation that gave him some more time at home than he was used to since his entire family was gone on vacation he used his spare time to make me these tables. There are actually two end tables but I didn't think that you needed to see a picture of both of them since they look exactly the same. Fun huh? Thanks Mike!!

Riley "Ranch"

While on our vacation we were able to spend some time with our cousins on the Neilson side of the family. They live in Eagle Mountain and have horses. Everytime we went over to their house, all the kids wanted to do was ride the horses. Poor Grace, now she's dying to have one and doesn't really understand why they can have horses but we cant. Let's see......I think it's called money and space. Aunt Jennifer and Kirsten were so great about taking the kids for rides. I'm sure it's not the most fun thing for 16 year old Kirsten to ride her 4 & 2 year old cousins around but she was so willing. Thanks Rileys! We had lots of fun visiting with you.

Yellowstone

As a part of our 5 week vacation we went to Yellowstone National Park with most of my siblings, their families and my parents. We all wore matching shirts and as dorky as that may seem, it really did help us keep track of everyone. The kids really liked the "stink pots", old faithful and the waterfalls. We stayed at a place right outside of Island Park called Henry's Lake. It was really beautiful and we had such a great time being with our family.