Out of Pocket

I knew that having a baby would max out our insurance deductible and the kids have needed their tonsils out for a while so this was the year to do it.

The Tuesday after school got out we headed to Logan to get our tonsils out and ear tubes for both kids. People thought that I was crazy to do both kids at the same time but it wasn't bad at all. 

It didn't take long for the kids to heal and get back to their wild and crazy selfs. 

4th and Final

I miss blogging and now that I finally downloaded the app maybe I can stay caught up. 

The biggest thing that I guess I should mention is the arrival of our 4th and final baby. 

Kaden Brock was born Friday June 28. He weighed the exact same as Tray did 8 pounds 8 ounces. He was named after my brother Kade who I completely believe was his guardian angel the day he was delivered.

He had the most terrifying delivery of any of my babies. He also was my hardest pregnancy. 

I have his birth story written down for me but I'll just share the short hand version of it.

Due to breathing complications and Tremonton not being equipped to handle our situation Kaden was life flighted a few hours after he was born to McKay Dee Nicu where he stayed for 4 days. 

Luckily my doctor released me after 24 hours so we could go to Ogden to be with him.

I was also given the news while I was being worked on that my uterus was about to rupture and if I would have waited 5 more days until I was originally scheduled for delivery that there would have been devastating results. 

Looking back on my whole pregnancy and the week of his delivery I see so many miracles that I didn't know where happening at the time.

Kaden is perfect ending to our baby making chapter. We couldn't be more thrilled to have him in our family.

Lost in Space

Hello out there!!!! It's been a long time since I've even logged on to this thing. Life's been crazy busy and the only camera I've had for a year has been on my phone. Here's a quick recap of the past few months.

August - We finally decided we wanted to build a house, so we put our house on the market and the next day we had an offer. They at least gave us until October to be out.

September- The kids started school. Tray is in 1st grade and his teacher is Mrs. McKnight. Kinlee did another year of preschool and her teacher is Miss Nicole. Both are excelling and love school.

October- Ran a 5k the same day we moved out of our house. Dylan turned 2. The kids had a great time trick-or-treating 4 different times this year.

November- Took Dylan to his well check and his doctor was concerned with his lack of speech so we were scheduled with the Up to 3 Program for an evaluation. Had Thanksgiving with Travis's family then celebrated the next day with my family and announced my 4th pregnancy. Ran another 5k that will probably become a yearly tradition.

December- We are only weeks away from our new house being finished. Dylan has numerous evaluations with Up to 3. It's determined that he qualifies for speech therapy. I celebrated my 30th birthday. Travis got me a new camera. Had a wonderful Christmas with the kids. Went to the doctor for the 1st time and learned there is only 1 in there.

January- Numerous tears were shed over the stress of building a house. January 25th we signed the papers and moved in that weekend.
Dylan had his first speech thearpy session and was given the quick initial diagnosis of having Speech Apraxia.

Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a neurogenic communication disorder affecting the motor programming system for speech production.^[2][3] Individuals with AOS demonstrate difficulty in speech production, specifically with sequencing and forming sounds. The individual knows exactly what they want to say, but there is a disruption in the part of the brain that sends the signal to the muscle for the specific movement. Source: Wikipedia
"Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a neurological childhood (pediatric) speech sound disorder in which the precision and consistency of movements underlying speech are impaired in the absence of neuromuscular deficits (e.g., abnormal reflexes, abnormal tone). CAS may occur as a result of known neurological impairment, in association with complex neurobehavioral disorders of known or unknown origin, or as an idiopathic neurogenic speech sound disorder. The core impairment in planning and/or programming spatiotemporal parameters of movement sequences results in errors in speech sound production and prosody."
— American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Ad Hoc Committee on Apraxia of Speech in Children (2007)

So far we are just doing speech therapy and we go to music class every Friday. There is a possibility he will go to daily speech therapy or preschool when he turns 3, but for now he just has therapy once a month and it's up to me to work with him daily.

Tray and Kinlee both had birthday this month. I can't believe all my babies are growing up!

I hope now that I have a normal camera, and internet that I will be better at keeping up on this. It's really easy to fall behind especially with how much I use Facebook or Instagram, but I love looking back and reading how much our family has grown.

Biggest Loser Contest

I'm putting together a Biggest Loser Contest.

My friend Chelsey did one last Spring and it helped me lose almost 30 pounds and I need to get my flabby butt back into shape.

If you're interest and want to join let me know soon. It's kinda short notice but we are starting Monday January 2. You will have to come to my house to weigh in that night from 5 - 8 and also bring your money with to be considered a contestant. (I'll message you my address.)

The buy in is $20 and the more people we can get to join, the bigger the pot will get. So spread the word.

After the 2nd you will just weigh in at home and send me a text with a picture of your weight on the scale by 10 am. If no text is received from you by 10 am I will just enter a zero for your weight loss. The contest will go for 10 weeks with the final weigh in also being at my house. You can bring your own scale to the weigh in also.

No one but me will ever see your actual weight. I will be posting percentages lost so there is no need to feel embarrassed.

RULES.....




*No fast fixed diets!!! No HCG, cleanse, detoxes. This contest is to help you have a healthy lifestyle. So please be honest!

*If we do catch anyone cheating you will be disqualified and you will not receive your money back.

*If you chose to drop out of the competition your money is {non} refundable......NO EXCEPTIONS



If you have any questions let me know. Have a Happy Healthy New Year!!!!

Oh Christmas Tree

I get to decorate my tree every day. Thanks to my tiny helpers.

3 Little Monkeys

My Favorite Things

Dylan has a lot more favorite things, but these are things that he does daily.

Hoarding

Pinterest is turning me into a hoarder!!! I've been saving milk jugs, formula cans, cardboard, cereal boxes, etc. My project list went from 0 to 500 and most of them are Christmas things. I have crossed a few things off my list though, which I'm proud of. But for every 1 thing I cross off, I add 10 more!!!
I need to go on a crafting diet!!!!

Halloween 2011

My Princess

 Frankie

 My cute spooks

 Monkey Man

 Kinlee's loot after trick - or -treating at Travis's work. We still went to the church and around the neighborhood after that.

Kinlee's preschool party.

Happy Birthday Baby Boy!

Happy Birthday to my (mostly likely last) baby.

The party was a success. I'm just sad I didn't take more pictures of the final product. The party post is coming up soon.

All Great Chefs Have Scars Right?!?!?!

I really did a doosy to my finger while making dinner the other night. I only blog about this because I haven't had stitches since 5th grade and I was still a boob about it.

Too bad I waited too long to go into the doctor and the stitches did nothing to close the wound. As soon as I took them out that bad boy popped right open again.

It will leave a nasty scar I'm sure, but that just a cooking battle wound that when I'm a famous chef I can think back and remember cooking for my family. (Or maybe it's just a mommy scar, and I'll never be a famous chef)

Family Reunion - 2011

As you can tell from my video, our family reunions are a riot! We always have something fun planned and this year was no exception. We had a presidential theme and it was fun being visited by the "President" and receiving our stimulus packages. We had great food and a good time. I only brought my camera out twice. When we went to the cemetary to make rememberance flags for Grandpa, and when my kids did their talent. So here are the few pictures that I do have.

 Siblings

 Cousins

 Great-Grand Kids

Dylan and Kelton entertaining eachother

A Day of Firsts

Kinlee had a busy day today!!! It was her first day of preschool and first day of dancing. She has been looking forward to both for weeks now and it did not disappoint.

 Classic Kinlee picture, hurry and look away as soon as I take the picture.

 Dancing queen. Kinlee will probably kill me for sharing this when she gets older but it's too funny to not write down. I was really worried about her not being able to make it to the potty at dancing because she has to take her whole outfit off to go. So I made sure she went before we left home. Well I go to pick her up after an hour and after all the little girls run out I can't find Kinlee anywhere. I look for about 5 minutes and finally a teacher said that a little girl had to use the bathroom. I poked my head in and asked if she was in there. She said, "I've been waiting here forever!" Poor girl needed to use the bathroom and was waiting there for someone to wipe her bum. She missed the last part of her class sitting on the toilet. Guess it's time for wiping lessons. And I'm not entirely sure she could have gotten that outfit back on by herself either.

  It was a crazy day for sure, we had to pick her up from school, rush home, eat and change, and rush to dancing. Tray asked why we had to be so fast today. Tuesdays are just going to be a busy busy day for me.

School Daze

I can't believe Tray is in Kindergarten!

 He couldn't be happier. His favorite thing is riding the bus to school.  He loves going to school everyday. His teacher is Mrs. Roberts. He can recite all the classroom rules word for word, although I'm not sure if he grasps their meaning but it's a start. He is so smart and thrives with learning. I couldn't be more proud of him! He has 2 of his friends in his class, Lyvie and Jace. Jace even rides the bus with him. He's made 2 more friends already, Justin and Hallie. I'm sure he'll have loads of friends by the end of the year too.

Family Reunion Fun!

Skip right to 10

I guess I missed Dylan's 9 month mark. I was waiting til after he went to the doctor to post all his fun stats and then I just got so busy that here it is a month later and still no post.

9 month stats
Weight - 22 lbs 64%
Height - 29 in 65%
Head - 48 cm 97%

I'm amazed that he isn't higher in the weight and height. He always seems so big to me!

A few things about Dylan
Dylan is like a magnet to the dog food. Whenever he spies the dish on the floor he makes a beeline right for it as fast as he can just to splash in the water and try to shove some food in his mouth.
He has 8 teeth now.
He eats mostly table food now and loves it.
He said his first word on August 23rd. He said mama followed shortly by dada.
He can crawl so fast. And an update, he took his first steps on September 2nd. He loves to walk along the walls and almost prefers that to crawling anymore.
loves to walk along furniture and walls.
He loves his blanket (swaddling blanket - aden and anais) and I'm so glad that I 4 of them to rotate through.
He is just my busy body. He loves to be where ever the other kids are and loves to use his voice. I love to lay in bed in the mornings to listen to him babble to himself.
He is such a mellow baby. People always comment on how good he is. He really only cries when he is hungry or tired. Never just to whine.
He is so fun and I still love to kiss on him all day long.

Sometimes I Can Craft

Sometimes I catch a crafty bug - it's kinda like the flu, it hits hard but doesn't last very long. Here are some things I did while I was in the mood.

Gallery Wall-
I had a lot of family pictures that I was in love with. I couldn't pick just 1 of each kid to display and I have a billion frames in boxes in my storage closet. So I decided to take my big wall of my family room and make it a gallery wall.
I started with pulling out all my frames so I could pick what ones to use and I knew what sizes I had so I could print my pictures. I laid them all out on my floor and did a rough design with them. Then I used my awesome artistic abilities and drew my design on paper so I could map out my pictures. I had to decide what kid to put where and make sure I didn't have 3 of the same kid clustered together.

I had to paint some of my frames and I wanted to add some color to them so I picked 4 frames to paint blue and painted the rest black. That's what the green outline is, showing which frames to paint blue.

 I printed my pictures at Mpix and I love the metallic prints! So I got all my big pictures in metallic.

Then the fun part. Tracing all the frames onto paper so you have templates for hanging your frames. It was a pain in the butt but so worth it. I only ended up making one mistake by not making one template the exact size so my spacing in one spot was off and I ended up with a visible oops hole. I made sure to mark where the hanging hardware is on the templates so you can just nail through them and not have to do a lot of work putting nails in.

The finished product. I love how it turned out! And I loved that I got lots of frames out of my storage and onto my walls.

Chair Redo

                             Before                                                                           After

My work was going to throw this chair out and I knew I could do something fun with it. So I snagged it before we put it in the dumpster. It only had it about a month before I got to work on it. I got my fabric at Wal-mart. I think it's darling. So after sanding and painting all the wood, and running out of staples for the staple gun so I had to use tack nails to finish, here is the final product. I had originally wanted to put it in the toy room but I don't think it would last too long before it was colored on, or ripped, or spilled on, or something else to stain it. So I'm keeping it downstairs for a while.

More Family Pictures

Here are more family pictures. I love love love them! Dylan was being a stinker towards the end of the night so it was hard to get a good shot of all of us. But Jaci is awesome and caught some great moments!