Mobile Moments January 2013

January was one crazy month.  The sad thing about my January phone pictures is that my phone REALLY died this month.  It has been freezing up on a daily basis for months now, but if you pull the battery out and restart it, it is fine.  Not this time, it was blue screen of death dead.  So that means I lost a whole bunch of pictures for the month.  :(
Here are the pictures that lived through the wrath of the phone.
New Year's Day Eve there was a fire in our Costco.  I was impressed that they flipped that store around and cleaned things up in 48 hours.  You would have never known there had been a fire.  The only problem was that they hadn't had the heater on and I really think that it was 6 degrees inside the building just like it was outside.  I think the milk freezer was warmer than the rest of the building.

We bit the bullet and switched Nick's crib to a bed.  No more climbing in and out of the crib for this boy.  He has done great.  This is where the no naps help us.  He is so tired at night that he falls right asleep.  Too bad he still rolls out all the time.  It is good that he doesn't have far to fall.  Crazy that he never wakes up when he falls out of bed.

I cleaned out my closet and got rid of a ton of clothes that I never wear.  Look at all the hangers I have now!  Too bad I hate shopping or I would have fun filling those hangers up again.

 Nicholas decided it was time for breakfast and went down to help himself to a banana and cereal.

 Nicholas is climbing on everything, and driving me nuts.  The stools end up like this a lot of days just so I don't go crazy.  Nicholas gets mad and just hangs on the counter.

 Anna was a trooper night after night while I was trying to find the perfect combination of curlers for her dance concert.

 We had some pretty good laughs as we learned what size curler worked best.

Another dance costume pose.

 She makes a really cute ladybug.

 One Sunday afternoon Devin showed the kids The Phone Call. I think this movie is where they got the idea for Napoleon Dynamite.

 We did eventually figure out the right combination of curlers.

 Devin did all the video for the dance concert.  I helped him as much as I could.  I am much better at cutting out fliers than I am at videoing.

 Anna and Stella were so cold waiting to practice their dance.

Their class is pretty cute.

 Make up on, all ready to go to the concert.

 Nicholas loves it when I drag him around on my foot.  With a smile like that and the cutest "please" ever, I have a hard time saying no.

Anna has been playing doctor a lot.  She loves to tie her baby or animals up so she can do surgery on them.

 Anna's friend Korver came over for Co-Op.  She just plopped down and watched him for a good ten minutes.

 Anna had fun teaching Korver all about Legos.

 It has been so cold outside.  Somedays we just don't know what we should do for fun.  Anna asked me to do some math problems for her.  She has some pretty good strategies.  I love that she asks to do math every day. I will always be a math teacher at heart.

 Anna wanted to dress up in her Tinker Bell costume from two years ago.  I wasn't surprised that the costume doesn't fit her anymore.  She was content with the hat, belt and shawl.

 Here we are again doing the math and loving it.

 I attacked our huge stack of boxes.  Nicholas loved playing in them.

 We live probably five minutes away from a Pizza Pie Cafe. We have never been there.  We have been to the one in the Idaho Falls area tons, but that is it.  We thought it was time and so we went.  It tasted exactly the same.  The building itself is huge, way nicer than the one in IF.  We are glad we went when we did, because the line was crazy later.

 Anna worked really hard to earn money for her new princess.  She was thrilled to finally have enough money.

 Some times Nicholas is so tired in the afternoon that I can have him watch one Piano Guys video and he is out cold.  He just falls asleep right in my lap.  I have found that this works much better than going for a drive.  Much cheaper too. Anna loves watching the Piano Guys, she could watch them all day.  This video is not one of the more calm videos, but it is Anna's favorite lately.

Nicholas loves Mater.  You know this because 1. He is wearing his Mater shirt.  2. He is holding one of his Mater trucks (he has a few). And 3. He was sharing his Cheerios with Mater, that is a lot of love, no one touches Nick's Cheerios.

We have had some really good snow storms this year.  Anna is such a good helper and helps with shoveling the driveway.  After one storm the pile was almost as tall as she is.

Anna was having a hard day and fell asleep in the "Happy Chair."  Sometimes I wish I could just fall asleep in the "Happy Chair."

Anna and Nicholas love watching our neighbor drive his four wheeler.  They love it when he does donuts.

Nicholas was really mad one day when I took the kitchen stools away.  He was trying so hard to get into the laundry room where I put the stools.  He was just hanging on the door knob screaming.  Poor kid.

Anna loves playing with her princess Legos.  I think they are really cool myself.  The only problem is that Nicholas usually comes through and knocks everything down.  Anna is really good about not getting too mad at him.

Two things that make Nicholas happy: 1. A box that is big enough for him to fit in. 2. Having his socks on his hands.  I am not sure why he likes to have his socks on his hands, but most days that is where they end up.

On the way home from library Nicholas fell asleep.  He kind of woke up when I brought him in the house so I just put him on the floor.  Well... and hour and a half later he woke up.  Crazy!  Anna and I had a really nice quite lunch the two of us while Nicholas was out cold.

 We are so glad that it is warming up a bit (40 degrees).  The sun was out and it was above 40 so we went out.  The kids were in heaven riding their bikes.  The only problem was that there was tons of slush.  They both ended up soaked and I didn't want them to get too cold.  But they had fun.  It was wonderful to get some fresh air.

Nothing too exciting for January.  We made it through the month.  Yeah!

Snow, Snow, and More Snow

I remember it snowing a lot when I was a kid.  We use to get TONS of snow.  But I haven't seen snow like that for years.  The last few years there hasn't been hardly any snow.  I really can't remember the last time we had a white Christmas.
Well, I guess it finally figured out how to snow in Utah again because we are just getting dumped on this year!
Several weeks ago this is how much snow we had.

 We had a few days with lots of rain and we were excited to see our grass again.  Well Sunday night that all changed.  Salt Lake got slammed with snow and Tuesday is when we were dumped on.  Devin shoveled before he went to work.  I shoveled when Anna left for preschool, and then we shoveled again later that afternoon.  This was the snow on our garbage can, all from that one storm.

 Anna and Nicholas love playing in the snow.  I am glad they can play while I shovel.

 Can you see how high the piles of show are?

 Anna kept falling in the snow and had a hard time getting up because it was so deep.

These are the cool icicles that form in my tree.  Pretty cool! 

 Tuesday after I shoveled our driveway for the third time this is what the pile of snow looked like.  It is almost as tall as Anna.  We had a lot of snow again last night and the piles are even bigger now.

 Our nice neighbor went out and plowed everyone's driveway and sidewalk and the whole cul de sac today.  The kids loved watching him plow, and do donuts.  He was spinning pretty good today.

As much as I love the snow, I sure hope the groundhog DOESN'T see his shadow on Saturday.  I think we are about done with winter here.  But I must say, the snow, as long as you don't have to drive anywhere, is really pretty and it sure warms things up.  I don't know if I can take much more of these single digit days.  

Mobile Moments December 2012

Here they are, the long awaited phone pictures for December 2012.
Anna loves to draw.  Her pictures are so much fun.  I love all the detail she is adding.

 Nicholas was having fun playing with the Nativity set.  He got rid of the wise men and replaced them with Lighting McQueen, Mater, and Francesco.

 Anna and Nicholas love Blues Clues.  It is even more fun to watch when you have your own Handy Dandy Notebook to draw in throughout the show.

 Nicholas was reading stories to his friends one morning.  It was so cute to watch him "read" the story and point out different things in the pictures.

Life has been crazy, and I was really far behind with my quilt class.  I was able to catch up.  There are a lot of really fun blocks that we have been doing.

 Every once and a while we get lucky and we get free bananas at Macey's.  Anna and Nicholas were so good the rest of the shopping trip.  Perhaps it was because they were too busy eating their bananas to bug each other.

 Anna and Nicholas were putting on their own Primary Program.  They even dressed up.  They had so much fun singing lots of primary songs.

 This is one of those pictures that I will be putting in Anna's wedding video someday.  I love Anna and this picture shows why.

 Ever since Nicholas gave up napping, we have been doing some very structured Quiet Time.  Anna loves it.  The rule is you stay on your bed until the timer rings (30 minutes...sometimes more).  I give Anna a stack of books and she is does great.

We had a movie night with the Curtis family.  The kids loved eating popcorn and watching Frosty the Snowman.  We tried hard to play Rook while the kids were watching the movie and playing.  Next time we play we are going to make sure the kids are sleeping so we can really play.  It was a fun night even if we didn't get to play cards much.

 The kids were pretending to dive out of a plane with parachutes.  I still can't figure out where this game came from.

 I was playing Uno Moo with Anna one afternoon.  I love that Anna is competitive and talks smack during games, it makes it so much fun.  She told me I was toast.  She was right, she won.

 Anna loved making gingerbread houses with my family.

 Legos are the popular toy at our house.  Anna and Nicholas play really well together with the Legos.  Anna loves her princess Legos and Nicholas loves his farm Legos.

 This is what Anna looks like each week when she goes to dance.  I love the boots!

 Nicholas was having fun calling people one day.  He kept saying, "I'm on the phone!"

 Anna was pretending to go to a party.  She looks ready for a party.

Nicholas loves trains.  I am glad that we have picked up lots of extra track.  We need to have enough track to make a path that he can sit in.  He likes to be in the middle of the train tracks.

Radek came over one afternoon and we introduced him to the wonderful world of Play Doh.  He was in heaven.  My kids both love Play Doh.

 Devin handed Anna the Eddie Bauer catalog and told her to pick out some new clothes for him.  I showed her how to dog ear the pages that she liked.  By the time she was done she had dog eared every page in the catalog.  I feel the same way Anna, I love EVERYTHING at Eddie Bauer.

 Nick's hair was getting long so I tried to spike it.  Yup, pretty silly looking.  I think we are going to stick with the buzz because his hair is so thick it won't do anything.

 Trains are even more fun when you have friends over to play.

 This is my little writer/artist at work.

I love Nick's little Christmas outfit.

 We went to Idaho for my niece's baptism.  We left right after church.  The roads were clear and it was sunny when we left Ashton.

 We are glad that we left when we did because the pass was not so clear and sunny.

 Nicholas makes a really cute witch/Wonder Woman.

 The nerdy "I'm the mom and not the teacher" was pretty excited to make cute Christmas gifts for Anna's teachers for Christmas.

 Anna was thrilled to bring home her costumes for the dance concert.  She had to try them on as soon as we got home.  Here is the bear costume.

 And the Lady Bug.

 Devin's mom made this AWESOME green jumpsuit for Devin when he was little.  I wish I had the picture of him in it.  It is so cute.  She found the jumpsuit and gave it to us.  I had to try it on Nicholas.  He was not happy from the minute I started putting it on him.  He was really freaking out poor kid.

 This was the "please just smile I will give you chocolate" picture.

 Anna was teaching Nicholas how to change a diaper one afternoon.

 Grandma and Grandpa Baldwin gave us some new cute clips as part of the 12 Days of Christmas.  Nicholas thought they were great.

 Anna looks pretty awesome first thing in the morning.

 We slowly started to figure out the curler thing for Anna's dance concert.

 I made my first banana nut roll.  Oh how I wish Missy would have been around to give me some pointers.  I have made lots of notes in my cook book of what I would do different next time.  It was still really good.

 Nicholas and Anna were having a really good time looking at Christmas books one afternoon.  They decided to spread them all out so they could see their choices better.

I finally got a new camera bag.  I like that it is small and I can fit my video camera and my camera in it.

 I had one of those days when there were a million really important things that I should have been doing, but I decided to scrub down my oven and stove top.  It looks so nice!!!!

 I love coming into Nick's room to find the kids reading scriptures together.

 Anna was having fun making Christmas treats for her friends.

 After waiting ALL year it was finally Anna's turn to give the talk in primary.  She was SO excited!

 Christmas time is a time of baking and cooking, which also means LOTS and LOTS of dishes.

 Anna needed to write a few last minute things to Santa before she went to bed.  She had to make sure he knew where the ice cream was and that she wanted him to wrap her presents in the green wrapping paper.

 Just like every kid, the boxes were a favorite thing to play with on Christmas day.

The kids loved that they could fit into the boxes.

 Both Nicholas and Hayley fell asleep on the way down to my mom's house Christmas day.

 We have had so much snow lately.  We bought little shovels for the kids so they could help shovel the snow.  Poor Nicholas fell flat on his face just as I was taking this picture.

 Anna is a great helper when it comes to shoveling snow.

 Nicholas was really tired one afternoon.  I thought for sure he was going to fall asleep eating his yogurt.

 Our neighbor has a four wheeler with a snowplow.  The kids love watching him plow...and do donuts.

 Anna loves taking pictures.  She is getting pretty good at it.

 This was the snow in my planter boxes after one storm.

 Nicholas was so tired one day that he just dropped dead right on the rug.  Poor boy really could use an afternoon nap, but he just won't take one in a traditional way.

We finally made it up to the new Scheels store.  We all thought the fish tank was the best part.  It is the coolest tank I have ever seen.  I love that it arches over you and the fish swim over your head.

 David and Marthe gave us the game Tenzi for Christmas.  It is a really fun fast paced dice game.  I love that Anna can play along with us.  Nicholas has a hard time not stealing the dice from other people.

There you have it. December randomness.