Making GIngerbread Houses

This year we had a lot of fun building a little Gingerbread House Village! Each of us had our own house and they the perfect size for little hands. I'm sold. We will be doing these every year!

Melissa, Mommy, Abbie, Daddy and Kayla

Christmas with Grandma and Poppa

We had SO much fun during our visit with Grandma and Poppa this year. We LOVE Christmas time at their house!

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Our Christmas!

This is a super long video of our Christmas Adam's Eve, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Enjoy!

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Disney Princesses On Ice

On December 16th Daddy-O took all of his girls to see Disney Princesses on Ice. It was MAGICAL! The girls were squealing, clapping, cheering and laughing the entire time. Grandma and Grandma went with us and seemed to enjoy watching the girls just as much as I did. Abbie slept through the first half and didn't seem to mind the second half. We LOVED it! Thank you Daddy-O!

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Abbie Rae

Kayla, Melissa and I have SO much fun playing girly things with the baby... even if she doesn't always enjoy our ideas! Look at her hand in the bottom of the picture. She looks like she is saying, "Help me!" Poor thing. I did take her out right after this picture!

I LOVE this hat on her. She has a good hat-head. :)

Thanksgiving Turkey

Our Little Turkey!

(I am so bummed... this is the ONLY picture we took from our entire Thanksgiving visit. We had a great visit with Grandma and Grandpa with lots of tea parties and fun. Thanks, Grandma and Grandpa for having us!)

Letters to Santa

The girls have been working on their list for Santa for a few weeks now. They were quite the lists! VERY long and VERY detailed! The top three things on their lists were the same, Pillow Pets, Skates, and Easy Bake Oven. Nice, huh? I hope they straighten up and end up on Santa's Good List!

Melissa writing her letter to Santa:

Daddy helping Kayla write her letter to Santa: Melissa's letter ready to mail:

Ask me sometime about how traumatized I was after the mailing of the letters!

Computer Time

Our girls, all THREE of our girls, LOVE to use the computer!

I have been doing a lot of shopping online for Christmas and Abbie has really enjoyed helping me. She is such a good helper/drooler.

Melissa and Kayla enjoyed playing computer games a few days ago. They thought facing each other like this was hilarious!

Abbie's First Cereal

Abbie had rice cereal for the first time tonight! My baby is growing up WAY too fast. She will be 4 months old tomorrow. Sigh... Things need to slow down! I only cried a little.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Abbie Plays Dress-Up!

The girls have been looking forward to playing dress-up with Miss Abbie since the day we found out who she was. Last week they were finally able to do it! We pulled out the dress up clothes and played and played and played... Until Abbie started crying, Kayla started making weird faces and Melissa couldn't stop laughing... it was SO fun! I love that I am the Mommy of 3 girls.

This was a picture for the END of our photo/dress-up time. Notice the faces.

Melissa couldn't stop laughing, Kayla was being a goof-ball and Abbie was so "over it". Silly Princesses!

The Pumpkin Patch

We went to the Pumpkin Patch today and LOVED it! The following is a video of our fun. (We called it a Field Trip for Homeschool.)

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

A few of Life's Happenings

I haven't been updating the blog nearly as much as I would like since Miss Abbie Rae joined our family. Life has become SO busy.. not busy like leave the house busy, but busy with hundreds of little things that take up so much time. :) So, here is my small attempt to document some of the things we have done so far this month.

This morning my baby brother Jeremy left to serve the Lord for 2 years as a missionary for our church. I am so very proud of him and the man he has become. I don't think there are many things this fella can't do. He is going to be an amazing tool in the Lord's hands.

This is Jeremy at the airport with my Dad and Mom this morning around 4 am.

We went "home" to spend some time with Uncle Jer before he left. This was this past Sunday before we left. The girls love Uncle Jer Bear SO much! While home visiting with Jeremy we were able to go to my niece Addison's 1st Birthday party. Wow! Talk about a fun time! My Dad requested that all of the grandkids line up for a picture, oldest to youngest. It was chaotic, but fun! We have: Melissa, Kayla, Evan, Christian, Addison, Abbie and (in Laura's tummy) Lorelai. Aren't they adorable??

Abbie read/ate her first book all by herself!

I just love this picture of Abbie's Mohawk! and Kayla's pretty smile. She is IN LOVE with her sister!! *ignore the laundry basket please*

Melissa LOVES wearing her boots! This is her before ballet last week. By the way, the balloons in the background are from JUNE! Chris took the girls to the Dollar Tree to get them while I was in the hospital overnight. They are still alive!

This wasn't a "special happening", it happens every night. This is us studying the scriptures before bed.

Abbie Rae sleeping on Mommy's lap. I love that face! Abbie and Daddy after bath time

Melissa and Kayla ready to help Daddy cook

Kayla breastfeeding her baby doll. Though I think I teach by example, I have never actually put my head under the blanket! She came up with that part! :)

October has been good to us so far!

Fall Photo Shoot

These are some of the photos from our recent photo shoot with Uncle Jeremy.

Abbie Rae at 3 months

Our 3 girls Melissa 6 years old

Kayla 4 years old

Abbie, Kayla and Melissa

Abbie 3 months old

They really are out to get me!!!

We have really had some adventures in homeschooling lately. With all of the sickness, travels and difficult attitudes, I am surprised we have made it this far. I ask myself all of the time if I am sure I should be doing this. I always answer no, but when I take it to the Lord, He answers yes. I have a very head-strong 6 year old and even in the 1st grade she HATES to be taught anything because she thinks she knows it already... Gah! It drives me crazy. Speaking of driving me crazy, I found out my children really are out to get me. Melissa told me a few days ago that she was going to do her Math work REALLY slowly to try to drive me crazy. Grrr!!! At least she was honest. The following are some pictures from our homeschool days.

Abbie FINALLY likes the swing we borrowed from my mom and dad... it makes homeschooling MUCH easier! Isn't she cute?

Kayla and Melissa thought it would be a good idea to dress-up for school last week. Aren't they beautiful? And THIS would be the reason I really may go crazy... Melissa didn't want to do her math work. She thought about it for a few minutes, smiled, covered her paper and answered her question like this:

We have been doing these problems for a year and she KNOWS how to do them. She said, "I knew if I answered it like this it would drive you CRAZY!" Little booger.

Video of Melissa's 6th Birthday Parties

Make photo slide shows at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Creative Clothes

The girls have been really cute the past few days with the outfits they come up with to play in. I know that it looks like Kayla is wearing a scripture bag, a robe and carrying a recorder, but that isn't the case. When she wanted to be a magician these items became a magician's hat, a cape and a magic wand. Clever, huh? Melissa LOVES wearing the camouflage jacket Uncle Jeremy gave her for Christmas. She puts it on and becomes invisible. This time she was a seed planted in the ground under a pile of leaves. When the sun came out....

...she became a BEAUTIFUL flower!

Abbie Rae

Love this kid!

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Seriously Ridiculous

Oh. My. Goodness. This day has been..... ridiculous. Seriously ridiculous. I woke up this morning to the sound of giggling girls. Usually I LOVE this sound, but it worries me when it is happening before I am awake... that means much mischief is to be found. I crawled out of bed and found Melissa holding her ukulele in her ROOM with water DRIPPING out of it. Considering I had just gotten out of bed I think I handled myself very well. The room was completely silent when I took the ukulele and walked out. I didn't hear very much giggling after that. After breakfast I sat down to feed Abbie and ALL of the following happened within the 1/2 hour: The girls filled big plastic bowls with water, sat under the dining room table and pretended they were in a spa, soaking their feet. This wouldn't be bad except they REALLY filled those dang bowls with water so while they were carrying them from the bathroom to the dining room they SOAKED every inch of floor between the two. Grrrr. Kayla delightfully tattled on Melissa within minutes of their cleaning up the water telling me that Melissa was "chugging the honey" in the kitchen. And she was. Grrrrr. For some reason I told the girls they could draw a few pictures and make invitations for a pretend party they were planning later in the day with their good friend CheeChee. While making said invitations they also decided to make CONFETTI. Fun, huh? Not so much. They decided to decorate the ENTIRE living room with the fresh confetti. THE. ENTIRE. LIVING ROOM. Grrrrr. By this time I was getting pretty frustrated and decided to send the girls up to their room. MISTAKE. While I was switching out the laundry the girls took every bit of food storage out from under Kayla's bed and "decorated" their room. With food storage. There were jars of tomatoes, green beans, jams, etc. everywhere. Really???? Grrrrr. While they were cleaning up the food storage they stole one of the rolls of toilet paper out of the bathroom and decorated their room with that too. Seriously??? At this point, I really asked myself if this was really my life? I cried a bit and tried really hard not to yell at my children. Fail. Just after asking myself this I found an EMPTY bottle of hand soap in their room. I have yet to find where they emptied it. By the way, ALL of that happened BEFORE 10am. At some point today, I don't even know when, they broke the lid to the toilet seat, unrolled a roll of toilet paper under a table, around it's legs and all, wrote on the curtains and somehow cut under Melissa's eye. See? Ridiculous. Now, at the end of the day I am trying to find some way to put all of this out of my head. The party with CheeChee did not happen, the house is ALMOST cleaned from all of their mischievous acts and I am listening to Ray give the baby a bath in the kitchen sink. Reading over this ALMOST makes me smile and I cannot believe how blessed I am that this is my life. These are my babies... the ones I waited so very long for. The ones that were so very hard to get here. The ones that agreed to let me be their Mommy. They may drive me crazy, but at the end of the day, I am counting my blessings, their names are Melissa, Kayla and Abbie. (oh, and my hubby too!) Now, if I can only figure out how to get their art project off of it's surface... their tushies.

Fun, fun day!!!

The girls had WAY TOO MUCH fun at Grandma and Poppa's house this past weekend. We went there so Poppa could take the girls to see "Mary Poppins" live and ended up doing so many fun things! Friday morning Kayla played outside with Evan and Christian ALL morning while I took Melissa shopping. Friday afternoon Poppa took Daddy, Uncle Jer, Melissa and Kayla to ride horses over at Ms. Jo's. She and Lauren, her daughter, as SO sweet when we come to town. They meet us over at her brother-in-law's house (where she boards her horses) and lets the girls ride and ride and ride. This is the first time Ray was able to go and he had a lot of fun too! Evidently, his and Jer's horse were in some sort of competition, but that's a story for another time... The following are pictures of the horseback riding.

Practicing horse brushing by brushing the dog!!

After they got home from horseback riding Uncle Jeremy made a fire so we could roast some marshmallows.. YUM! Then Poppa let us set up his projector and Ray and the girls watched a movie OUTSIDE on the side of the house! Talk about fun! They loved it.

Thank you SO much for all of the fun Grandma and Poppa Bear!!