Baby it's cold outside

Emily wanted to wear shorts yesterday to school. I told her it was cold outside and to change into pants and she replied that it was sunny. I said sunny doesn't always mean warm so I sent her outside in her shorts for a few minutes :) Evil Mommy trick. It worked. She put on pants right away :) Today she was more than willing to listen to me when I suggested pants and a long sleeve shrit.

The girls passed swimming

So Saturday was the last day of swimming and there was a little water safety workshop in the big pool. The girls practiced getting into and out of a boat, then went for a little rife in the pool. Then the class jumped in and swam around for 20 minutes. Both girls passed their classes and are now Eels! Yeah. We signed up for a second set of lessons. They start in 2 weeks.

Another thing I never thought I'd say

"Eat your dessert first". We were getting ready to run out the door for Choir practice, and Emily had a roll to finish and we wanted her to eat that in the car and eat her dessert at the table. But she was insistent that the roll/dinner be finished first! So she stuffed the whole roll in her mouth and got her ice cream sandwich.

Thanks for the comments

I love reading them, but can't figure out how to reply immediately to them using the website. If you leave a comment, can you leave me your email too, or can a more knowledgable blogger tell me how to respond to them!

First ever report card for Emily

She did wonderfully well on all the little check markable areas, but the teacher said "Emily is a pleasure to have in class" That is such a lovely thing to read about your child !!!

Congratulations to Karl

Yeah for Karl!! He has spent the last week at a very intensive computer class in PA. He has been studying all week so he can get some special certification in computers. He has Design Associates Certification and Network Associates Certification. This type of thing normally takes 2 years to study for and pass the test, buts in the immerison program it is over that much faster. Although we missed him here at home, it is better this way as there were no distractions. He got the best score in the class on his first exam, and passed his other tests easily. The certification is good for 3 years, but if he takes other classes/tests he can extend his certification. Hopefully this certification will help us in his job search once we leave the navy, but for now it will also help him in his current job here in the area.

In other news, Emily and Sydney are continuing to improve in swimming classes, and loving school. Emily is learning sight words now, and Sydney is learning to write her name. They still had a bit of a hard time completely getting back into our routine after being gone for so long. Hopefully next week will go smoother.

On a funny note, Emily got a book out on Lions and tigers (and bears oh my!) in August, which she promptly lost in her room a few days alter. (apparently my idea of having a spot library books live seperate from the bedroom was not as much fun as say, mixing them in with the books we own, or stashing them under the bed! Yikes!) We have looked and looked, and gotten the slightly nasty note from the library with a lost book amount. I had not intention of paying that since I knew I could and would find it soon. Of course I forgot to renew the thing to stop fees.

Well after we got all our mail back from our trip, I got a note saying "we are going to take you to collections for the book if it is not fixed in 2 weeks". I thought yikes, well I hate to do this, but I'll pay for a lost book. So I did that. Then talking to my mom about it, I felt that little nudge about the playroom (I thought I'd looked there on a recent cleaning, but I tried again) I found it in about 1 minute in the playroom. Arrgh, but ultimately that is good news. So I went back to the library and gave them the book, and they will send me the fine in a check sometime soon. Very odd system here. They don't collect fines for late books, only lost books. I've never seen anything quite like that.

I signed up for a few sessions with a personal trainer, and I am very excited about that. I will have to keep you posted. She is going to give me some exercises I can work on without her over the next few months as I try to get back into good shape. In an extra effort to help avoid the Halloween Five, I got toys to pass out instead of candy. I did buy some candy, but really gross things like oozing eyeballs, and gummy bone shaped things. Nothing terribly appealing to a Snickers/Milky way lover like myself!

Also, a very happy birthday to Heidi, my dad, and Madeline!

Family Vacation

So we left for the west coast about 2 1/2 weeks ago. We had a wonderful time seeing some family members and cruising from Vegas to Salt Lake City. The girls didn't exactly enjoy the ride out there, infact we discovered Emily needs Dramine before flying, yikes! We arrived late at night, rented a a mini van, and headed to the Benfields. The next afternoon we hung out at the park with Katrina and the kiddos. Ethan had a hard time with the water fountain-he tried getting a drink by licking water off his finger.

From Vegas we headed to St. George to hang out with Glen, Tammy, Brittney, Tyia, Natasha, Ryan, Ellen, Zach and Becky. Driving through the mountains was amazing. I took lots of shots of the mountains and rocks. Never having spent much time out west before, I was really amazed by what I saw. So many rocks and dirt, and funny cacti! The girls absolutely loved the giant green slide at Glen's house-I was a little worried about going down it without flip flops, and Sydney would not go down without riding on a lap or climbing up just a few steps and going down from there! Zach and Emily had no fear. Karl even managed to take out one of the chairs while going down with sydney on his lap, but she was ok!

We also got to teach Emily how to ride a scooter-usually Tyia's. I was amazed at how quickly she gained her balance and was zipping around in the wonderful backyard. She even made a few baskets in the backyard hoop.

After enjoying the beautiful weather in St. George we headed into a few dust storms on our way to Provo/Salt Lake. I saw my very first tumbleweed too! It was crazy looking out over the flat roads and seeing clouds of dust off in the distance. It was almost anticlimactic when we got to them though, I expected to hear the dust hitting the car. Luckily they weren't too bad and we were able to drive straight through.

After a dinner at another "Church of Mamma" aka Tyia's word for Chuck-o-Rama. We handed off the kiddos and headed out to Karl's missionary reunion. What we didn't know was that Karl's mom would get a nasty hour in traffic with a sick Sydney. Too much chocolate milk at dinner :( We bought a booster seat that night! Grandmothers should not have to do that! And many thanks to her roomate and friendly neighbor who helped her get Sydney and the car seat out of her car.

We got to attend 2-3 sessions of conference while we were in town. It was both of our first times at Live Conference, so that was really special. SLC was a little colder and wetter than we expected but after a quick stop in Tyia's closet, and DI we were ready for cold & wet! Let's hear it for the weather channel. They were so wrong!!!

My cousin Greg was able to borrow a car and come down to go with Karl in the evening. Who knew BYU wasn't in Salt Lake?? Not me! That was a surprise!! We also got to play a few rounds of killer Phase 10. Another interesting highlight was learning that the you can actually chose to skip whomever you want not just the person sitting immediately next to you! Lizzie and I unfortunately missed the object of fewest points possible and headed for the high roller points club instead!!! On Sunday evening, we got to see some of Karl's cousins he had not seen in years for dinner. We'll have to make sure we don't go so long next time.

On Monday we went back to Provo, met up with Greg and Cami for lunch at the BYU Creamery, then headed up to Squaw Peak for a beautiful view of the valley. Tha't where we got some great shots of the mountains, and of all of us. We kep on going through to St. George. Karl got to hang out with Glen & Rynn at work and go on a few jobs with them.
Wednesday we headed back to Las Vegas, but in order to get there we took a small detour through some serious back roads trying to get to the highway, after driving for a few miles in the mountains on dirt roads, we finally ended up going under the highway. oops! Then we ended up in a construction site where a very kind construction worker lead us out of the dusty mess. I should have gotten a shot of the car. It was absolutely filthy!

We ended up in a different time zone at Katrina's house. The kids all had a fun time playing together, but we had lots of rocks on Astroturf with 4 kids in a backyard with bulldozers and dump trucks. Back to the Benfields for the night, then a wonderful outing to the Las Vegas Strip. Lions, and tigers and bears, oh my! The kids Loved the Lion exhibit. We got there right as it opened, and the lions came out. The trainers had some toys and giant rawhide bones for them. When we were on our way back to the car at the end of our voyage we got to see the trainer curled up with his favorite lion sleeping. The lion had her her head on his arm, legs were intertwined and everything! So crazy. The trainer woke up first and decided to wake the other 3 up. He tickled them, grabbed their faces blew on them. Then he licked one of them right on the mouth! Yum. Lion breath! I also can't imagine kissing something that could bite your face off is she was annoyed with you!

We also went to M&M world, and walked up out of around there. Then we tired to hit a show before lunch, but failed. The show was cancelled for the day. We had lunch at my favorite Western invenetion! In-N-Out Burger. Yummy yummy yummy I got food in my tummy! Chocolate milkshakes and fry sauce! Then we hit an Old Nevada Mining town which we could not decide-was it run down deliberately, or was it just a run down place! The petting zoo was fun. We saw some really unusual animals, and a lot of animals wondering free. Since Karl has such a great history with llamas, when we saw one out for a walk, we had to get at least one picture of Karl petting the llama. That was a huge dust cloud coming off of it! Sydney also kept finding little goat pies or whatever critter, and then wiping her hands on her shoes to get it off, so nasty! After that Emily caught some sort of bug, and ran a fever, we had a fun little get together with all the Las Vegas folks, ate cake for Karl's birthday and then hung out with whoever was still up. I learned Madeline can lift her legs in all kinds of ways that you just don't normally see people do. Her goal is to be able to get both legs behind her head at the same time. just thinking of that makes mine hurt! I also learned about the many wonderful uses for a scroll saw. Wendy, I finished painting the Halloween ones! So cute!

We prepped the kids for the flight with Dramine and snacks for the flight home. We got off to a good start, but still managed to be at the gate with one a few minutes to spare. How that works I just don't know. We have a gift. Emily was still running a fever, so waiting in line was a little rough. We got on the plane, then Emily fell asleep. Sydney had a much harder time getting used to the plane but conked out on me for at least 75% of the flight home. It was a much better ride than the way out, but I think I'd like to hold off on flying with kids for a little while.

We are thrilled to have made the trip, and we definitely want to make sure we get out there much sooner than before.

On another note, we killed off our fish, again! The pond almost dried up and I added more water, and poof, they were dead the next day. So do we get more? We can clean out the pond and start over from scratch or just fill it in and add more lawn to the area, or build a sandbox.

For pictures of the trip go to my flickr page and click on the Family vacation block. If anyone wants more, email me and I will send you full size pics.

I never thought I'd say this but...

When Emily started school, I never ever thought I would hear myself say," Don't do your homework, go play with your friends." I also never thought that she would burst into hysterica tears that she couldn't go out to play because she had a lot of work to do was was very busy. this is with the friend in the house at that time. Fortunately she didn't scare off her friend who went outside and began playing with Sydney.

We are planning a short trip and will be missing some school so I had her teacher send home her work for the week today, and the sight of it might just have overwhelmed the poor girl. She dove right in though and was crushed that we weren't taking her desire to finish it seriously enough.

She ultimately calmed down and went outside to play but it took a lot of convincing. I still can't believe I said that though!