Mommy in training

I'm so glad I waited to put Anne in kindergarten and kept her home with me.  I know she'll be ready next year, but it's been so fun having her help with Daniel at home.  She wants to hold him first thing when she wakes up in the morning.  She even likes to help change diapers.  She's going to make a great little mommy.  She's wanting to learn how to cook things, but she doesn't like grocery shopping....just like her mom. :)

 

 

 

 

She's good at taking naps with Daniel.

So funny...she kind of fits in Daniel's baby carrier.  She's so small.

I love how his feet are in her face....so darling!

Buttoning onesies is so hard.

What baby doesn't enjoy a little harmonica music to put him to sleep. ;)

Big Snow

The first big snow storm of 2013 dumped about 10 inches on us.  Boy was it fun.   It was a weekend so Jeff was home and he got to do all the fun snow duty.  Aren't dads great for playing in the snow.  I go out for about 15 minutes and I'm done but Jeff stays out there with them all day.  I just can't understand how those kids can be out there so long and never get cold.  They'll come in for hot chocolate and go right back out.  Kids are great!! 
Jeff piled up all the snow and made a hill for them to sled on.  Then they got to work shoveling the side walk.  Note to self: don't buy a house on a corner...you have twice as much sidewalk to shovel when it snows.

Snow angels

Jacob ate a lot of snow

 

Jacob made one run on the hill and he was done. :)

Anne shoveling snow.  It was so funny cause the snow was so heavy and tall.  She looked like
a 2 year old trying to shovel snow.

Look at her go!!!

Christopher taking a break.  We found out later he had an ear infection and possibly strep. 
What a trooper.

 

And this is how Daniel stayed cozy all day.  The life of a baby is great.

Isn't it Perplexing

What a fun and frustrating game.  It's called Perplexus.  It's a huge maze inside this ball that you have to get a small metal ball through.  It's a little bit addicting and the boys are better at it than I am.  You can tell when someone is working on it because you hear across the house, "Aw man!!" when they fall off the track.  I like it for hand eye coordination though.  Michael is pretty intent on getting through the whole thing.

 

A little bit of Jacob goes a long way



Jacob has personality...lots of personality.  One minute he's giving me a big hug and telling me I'm "bootiful" and the next minute he's in time out for hitting Anne.  But he's growing up so fast I can't believe it.  He's going to be a great person...I can just tell. 

 

Look at this big boy...finally potty trained.  I was wondering if it was going to be a rough process, but he did it in about a week.  He likes his big boy underwear.

Anne took these next 4 pictures all within a few minutes.  The range of emotions in his face is funny to see.

He does this when he's either sad or frustrated with us.  It's actually kind of cute.

 

Jacob is a fun little helper in the kitchen...as long as I'm making something "yummy".  Here he is helping me make muddy buddies.

 

Shake, shake, shake

 I love it when I see this though.  He does like to sit still for a story....about all I can get him to sit still for.

Happy Valentine's Day

sorry for the boxes in the background...we still haven't totally unpacked. :)

The move back East

The story of our move will mostly be told in weird pictures.  It was a long move, delayed by snow a few times.  We stayed an extra day in Utah after Christmas because of snow and then we got stuck in Kansas during a snow storm too.  I can honestly say I don't want to drive cross country again.  We've done it 4 times now....that's enough. :)

I just have to record the funniest things from our trip.  Believe me, plenty of it was frustrating, but mostly I remember the funny stuff.  The top three funny things from our trip were...

1.   At the first hotel we stayed in Jeff went across the street to get some dinner.  He was trying to somewhat healthy food at McDonald's, (hard to do, I know).  He ordered chicken strips, salads, etc.  Anyway, when he got back and I started unpacking it I asked him, "Is this really what you ordered?"  He said "sure".  Then he looked at it.  We ended up with 10 cheeseburgers and one box of chicken nuggets.  We laughed so hard.  Who orders 10 cheeseburgers?  The McDonald's cheeseburger has to be the worst thing on their menu and we had 10 of them.  We did get the fruit salads that he ordered but everything else was wrong.  What a hilarious meal.  The weather was bad so we weren't sending him back to fix it.  Needless to say, I'm never eating a McD cheeseburger again.

2.  Jacob was riding in the moving truck with Jeff.  Now, I know he really should have been potty trained by this time, but he wasn't.  Give me a break, we were moving, new baby, etc.  Those are my excuses.  ;)   Anyway,  he ended up with a messy diaper in the moving van.  But this was when we were white knuckle driving in Kanses in the snow and we were trying to not crash and find a place to pull off and get a hotel so he ended up not getting a diaper change right away.  When we got to a hotel and pulled him out of the car....it was everywhere....and boy, did it smell bad.  We didn't want him to walk into the hotel like that and so we were stripping him down at the door of the moving truck.  But it was freezing outside and blowing snow everywhere so we had the heater blaring on him and he was being such a tough little guy while mom and dad were laughing and trying to clean him off.

3.  We were at a hotel on New Year's Eve and we were trying to find something for the kids to watch on TV.  But of course, there is nothing good on TV ever...another reason we don't have cable.  So we had stopped on some station having a telethon with some really old singers.  I thing Aaron Nevil was singing at the time.  The kids were not really watching, but Michael looks at the TV for a few minutes and then says, "Mom, this is so sweet.  Old people singing."  I just laughed so hard.  You had to hear him say it.

Here we got with the picture chronicle of our trip. I have to explain here. We love to take sleeping pictures. Jeff thinks it's funny to take pictures of us when we sleep, plus our kids are crazy sleepers so it's funny to see the positions they are in. So, most of our trip pictures are of us asleep in a hotel.

They got to watch a lot of Max and Ruby while we packed up the truck.
I guess Jacob was feeding the baby.

Loading the car onto the dolly...which by the way, the clutch went out on Jeff's car when we
got to NJ...totally wish we hadn't towed the car all the way across the country.

We got to see our friends the Reed's right before we left.  Such cuties!!

 

No joke - Michael is asleep here.  No where else to sleep...the house is empty.

These two were sleeping on a towel....so funny.

Kids sleeping all over the place in weird places.  At least Daniel got a bed.

First hotel.  We were still in Colorado actually.  This was Sunday.  Jeff has some real deep reading there...
haha, he was reading to the kids.

Daniel wanted to drive the car a little.

Serious...they are asleep like this.

Getting lunch at a Pizza Hut in Kansas.  The snow was so bad.  We stopped at a hotel not long after this
because I was too nervous to go any farther, plus they were closing the roads.

Jacob riding in the truck.

They weren't always this pleasant in the car, believe me. ;)

Bubble time.

Pretty normal sleeping

Not so normal sleeping

Anne riding with dad in the truck

The cool hotel in Ohio where we stayed on the 12th floor.  The center of the hotel was open to the
ground floor.  It was kind of creepy to look down.

We stopped and saw Karen, Rhett and kids for a few hours.  Our kids just
love them.

Kissing Daniel good night.

What a hilarious picture, but this is pretty much how we all felt by the time we woke up at the last hotel
in Pennsylvania on our last day of driving.

More hotel sleeping, but now we are finally in New Jersey

The end of the sleep pictures.  Seriously, that does not look comfortable at all...but he's asleep which
is all I cared about at this point.