Nauvoo

September 22nd was our stake temple day. We met at a part at 11am for a picnic lunch then Morgan and I went to the 1pm session.  Our friends the Evans watched our kid for us while we were in the Nauvoo Temple.

Once we came out of the temple they ran in and we watched all 7 kids. A couple of people we saw at the Family Living Center thought that all 7 were ours. The ages were right that there would only be 1 set of twins if it were true. We gladly told them they were mistaken and we were babysitting 4 of them.

Josh's 4th Birthday

We had a great time at Joshua's 4th birthday party.  We invited several friends of his and had a Ninja theme.


These first 3 pictures are from our family birthday night (on his birthday.)  For dinner that day he chose chips, pizza and soda.  I think we had root beer floats as a dessert that night and saved the ice cream cake for his party.

Ninjas have to be able to get an apple out of a tub of water by using only their mouths.

Morgan was a great Ninja. He got the apple out without biting the stem like the other kids did. 

This is Josh's homemade ice cream cake.  It involved mint oreos as the crust followed by mint ice cream, hot fudge and whipped cream topped with more crushed mint oreos.  It was DELICIOUS!

We also had Ninja Sushi as a treat for the kids. It was Little Debbie treats cut to look like sushi rolls. Eat kid also got chopsticks to eat their food with. It was nice to just put all the food out for the kids and let them pick what they wanted and how much they wanted.

This is my awesome Ninja pinata. I made it myself if you couldn't tell!  :)  It worked really well.

The birthday group!

Crazy Hair

Eli has wanted his hair to be more "cool".   He really wants to use gel in his hair to make it spike up. But since we ride bikes to school every day that doesn't really work.  So we settled with some racing stripes near his ears.

I just felt like posting tonight.  I have some pictures that I will post from our recent trip to Chicago, but I will talk about that more later.  (I will hopefully to it tomorrow...Sundays are a good day to update the blog.)

Anyway, life is going pretty well for me right now. I still have a lot of stress and things on my plate, but I feel very happy. I think a lot of that has to do with Morgan.

I am very blessed to have him as my husband. We are a good fit and very rarely argue. We have had some arguments and miscommunications this past week and we were able to work through them, talk about them and get past it.

My hardest part about getting upset is that I tend to dwell on the situation afterwards and I don't allow myself to get past it. I think it is my creative side thinking of my life as part of a story and how to make it better. Unfortunately I don't want to think of other things that I should have said in an argument, that is not helpful.
But I have realized that this week and when I started to dwell on an issue that was already resolved I told myself that I didn't need to think about that anymore. I try to forget our arguments. I don't want to know immediately what our last 'tiff' was about. I want to remember the last time we hugged and told each other that we love each other.

Tonight we went to a wedding for one of Morgan's coworkers. The DJ had all of the married couples come onto the dance floor to see who had been married the longest. At 11 years we were out of the running rather quickly.

However, I really enjoyed dancing with Morgan, even if Noelle was on my hip. He is a wonderful spouse and I feel so lucky to have him.

Funnies

Last night I told Morgan that I bought some new salad plates.  (We're trying to eat smaller portions, so smaller plates = smaller portions.)

Morgan asked how many I bought and I answered 5.

Eli then declared that we could now have five more kids in our family.

We talked about it and told the kids that we would probably have one more, but we weren't sure about any more after that. We asked them if they wanted another brother or another sister. Eli wanted a sister and Josh wanted a brother.

We needed to stop the conversation for a prayer on dinner and Morgan asked Josh to pray.  Josh started his prayer as he usually would. But then in the middle he asked Heavenly Father to send two more kids to our family, and a pogo stick.

Hopefully they will not all be sent at the same time.





When Noelle is done eating her food she usually drops it on the floor. I will clean up most of the mess on the floor and throw it away before I get her out of her seat.

Today I got her out before I cleaned up her bread pieces. Sometimes she will eat the food off the floor. Anyway, I set her down and she picked up all of her bread pieces. I thought she was going to eat them until I saw her carry them into the kitchen, open the cupboard and throw the pieces into the garbage.

I will take a cleaning kid any day of the week!

Noelle's 15 Months

Noelle had her 15 month doctors appointment last week.  I know that she is nearly 16 months now, but that is just how things go.

Anyway here are her stats:

Weight: 18.4 pounds (less than 5%)
Height:  31 inches  (61%)
Head:    18 inches  (41%)


So she is still a skinny little girl, but her height and head keep growing, so she is doing fine. Here are some recent pictures of my curly-haired girl.

Playing in the toy box.

Falling down after dancing.  She has also learned to say "Cheese!"

While we were redecorating she thought it was fun to climb through the entertainment center.  Unfortunately she also go stuck many times. 

We figured that Noelle was finally big/strong enough for her own bike helmet.
She LOVES it!

Noelle loves riding bikes to take her brothers to school.  When I had to take them in the car one morning because I wasn't feeling well she threw a major fit.  She knew that wasn't part of the regular schedule.