Currans 4th Birthday

I still can't believe he is 4 years old! He is so silly and so sweet! I sure love this little boy! He requested a spider man cake for his birthday and he wanted to go to Chuck E. Cheese for his birthday! So that's what he got! I am so glad my little strawberry blonde little boy came and joined our little family. It would defiantly not be the same without him!

Santa comes to town

Santa came to visit on the fire truck today! After Curran had his melt down about hearing the sirens we ventured outside to see him drive by! The kids LOVED it!

Katie the elf

The kids friends and cousins have an "elf" from the North Pole. So for a few years now the kids have been asking when an elf was going to come to our house! Well guess what? She came this year and she is doing some pretty silly things around here! The kids have named her Katie and they love waking up every day to see the silly things she does. Here are just a few of the things she has been doing around here.

Padre Game

This is just another long over due update.  My goal is to be done by Curran's Birthday so I don't have to add that to my list as well as adding Christmas to my list of updates to do.

So this is actually a pretty funny story.  Clint's Brother-i- Law called several weeks before the Padre game on September 8 and told us he had tickets for us to go to the game with the rest of the family to sit in a suite.  I thought about it for a while and thought I would just try and ask my aunt who works for Jet Blue if she had enough buddy passed to fly us all down there for the game.  Well, sure enough she did. 
We didn't tell the kids where we were going.  We thought it would be fun to surprise them with where we were going, and how we were going to get there. 
I told Callie to keep listening for clues to see if she could find out where we were going.  It wasn't until we landed and saw Clint's Dad that they figured out where we were.  They were beyond excited.
We met Clint's brother for Dinner in Orange County, and then onto Clint's parents for the weekend.  We got up the next morning and just hung out with family and let the kids play with cousins.  That night was when the game was.  The game was so much fun, the Suite was so incredibly nice!  It was really nice of our Brother-in-Law to invite us even though the chances of us making it were small since we live to far away.
We got home pretty late and went straight to bed.  We knew we were  going to have to be up at 4:45 to be to the Airport in Long Beach by 6 to make sure we made our flight.  We knew that flying stand by there would be a chance we might not get on the flight and there was a chance that only some of us would get on.  So Clint and I decided if they had any seats open at all, Clint and Callie would take them so he could get home to work and she could get home to school.  Sure enough, that's what happened.  They only had 2 empty seats on the plane, so Clint and Callie took them.  I quickly grabbed Callie and explained to her what was going to happen.  She was so devastated!  It really was heartbreaking watching the two of them walk on the plane and her crying for me. 
With stand by tickets when you don't get on one flight they roll you over to the next flight.  I asked the ticket attendant man if there was any possible way if they could just roll me over to the Monday morning flight and he told me the only thing we could do to be rolled over to that one was to come and try and get on the flight for Sunday afternoon.  So we had decided since we had about 5 hours to kill I had Clint's Dad take us back to the house, which is an hour and a half from the airport.  I showered and got the boys something to eat. 
I knew before we even went to the airport I wasn't going to get on the afternoon flight because it was already too full.  My aunt kept me pretty informed the entire time.  I was very thankful for her help.  Anyway, I got up there and of course missed that flight and we got back in the car and drove home.  I am also so incredibly Thankful for Clint's Dad for driving us back and forth so many times to make sure we were taken care. 
We got home and that night was fun because we had lot's of family in town and go to visit with them for the night.
The next day was a same repeat of the day before, 2 more missed flights.  By this point my Aunt just reassigned us to the Tuesday morning flight.  I knew for sure we were going to get on that flight  It was really ironic, because that was also September 11, and we were going to be flying.  Kind of stange.
On Monday I stayed up in Orange County with My Brother and Sister in Law since my brother in law had to be to a meeting right next to the airport the next morning.  It was fun to be with them and to let Curran play with his cousins.  Also I got to sleep in an extra hour by sleeping up there.
Tuesday morning came and we finally got boarding passes to board the plane.  AHHHH Finally, we're going home.  We got to the gate just to find out the flight has been delayed.  I paced the airport for 2 hours with Conrad.  I just put curran in a chair and gave him my phone to entertain him. Thank goodnees he was being good.
We finally got on the plane and Conrad was a little STINK.  He was a pain, screaming, climbing all over the seats, throwing things.  Oh my gosh, I was so anxious to just get home! 

I will tell you though, eating breakfast in the airport 2 days in a row, and changing our clothes in the bathroom stalls. rewashing the same clothes for 2 days was really frustrating at the time but it is really funny to laugh about now.  I don't think I will fly stand by again though.  I am thankful for the experience, but I really don't want to do it again.

Festival of Trees

One of Callie and Aubrey's favorite trees.  It was a tree decorated with Tangled stuff.

Lisa and I took the girls to the Festival of Trees last week.  It was pretty fun to see the many different trees and stories behind the trees.  The creativity that some people have is amazing to me.  Maybe because I am not creative.  One particular tree that I have here as my last picture entitiled "Heroes Tree" stood out to me the most and maybe it was because I had been following this story for the past several months and was very touched by it.  I am glad I was able to take Callie and teach her about the different stories of the trees and help her to have compassion for others that are sick or man have lost a loved one.

The Best Friends

It has been so much fun raising our three kids together and having them all so close, with the girls and older boys being only 2 months apart and the babies being a day apart.  We have watched them grow and play together and they all compliment each other soooo well.  

Conrad and Trey are seriously hilarious!  They love each other so much and they know they are best friends already. 

One of the the things I am most grateful for is being apart of little Trey mans life and how much he has changed my kids perspective on life on not judging others just because there is something different about them. Trey in my HERO, and I tell Lisa all the time that he has super powers and I have no doubt he will continue to change many people lives.  Lisa thank you for raising such wonderful children so that my kids could  learn from them.

5K foam race

 This race was seriously one of the funnest races I have ever done.  Lisa and I seriously kept throwing each other in the foam and and then we couldn't breath, because that was the number one thing they told you not to do was to inhale the bubbles.  But whatever, we got soooo muddy, and sooooo wet and sooooo foamy! We did giant slip and slides that were covered in foam, Giant bounce houses full of bubbles.  Crawled through mud, ran in water and climbed over giant walls.   I want to do this race again for sure!

Girls Weekend in St. George

Yep another long over due post.  But I am doing this not really for anybody else but myself so I can remember my kids being so little and the good times we had together.

This weekend in St. George started out so fun.  The drive down was a blast.  We had two cars driving down and we were sending messages back and forth towards each other and were all laughing pretty hard.  We stopped in Cedar city for dinner and then on to St. George for the night.

We got one hotel room for the 8 of us to share.  2 adults in each bed, and the 4 girls on the floor.  

L-R: Ella, Aubrey, Calli and Saja

We seriously did not plan on buying matching head bands we all bought them that day but all bought them at seperate times.  The matching outfits weren't really planned either.  The girls all look soooo adorable though.

Callie and Saja wanted to have matching necklaces so we bought them matching necklaces

Do you think the weekend exhausted them?

My travel buddy Tiffany

Callie and Ella are travel Buddies

We seriously sat and partied all night and jumped on the beds, laughed and just played forever.  It was seriously sooooo much fun!

We got up and had breakfast at the hotel, then went swimming.  We all had so much fun in the pool.  We went back to the hotel and got ready to go shopping.  We first had lunch at Kneaders and then onto the outlets.  

This is where my day turned bad.  Callie seriously turned into a little devil and had tantrum after tantrum.  I knew going into the weekend I was going to have to channel her emotions.  I know exactly how she reacts when she is overly tired and over stimulated.  I knew going into the weekend that's exactly what we were going to face, but it still did not make the weekend any easier even though I knew what to expect. It actually ended up being much harder than I had anticipated.  It was sad really, because I knew she was frustrated too.  She was not herself at all which in turn was hard for me to be myself and have a good time.  In no way do I blame her for having such a hard weekend.  I called and text Clint several times for the support to get through the day.

That night we went to Tuacahn to watch the show Aladdin.  The play was really cute.  Callie ended up falling asleep, which did not surprise me at all.

Callie was the first to wake up Sunday morning and I didn't want her to wake anybody else so her and I went down to breakfast at the hotel.  When we got back we got ready to go to breakfast and then headed home. 

Would I go and do the trip again despite how incredibly frustrating it was?  Honestly I don't know.  I do need to take into account that Callie had started school that week and the weekend before that we had just gotten home from spending and entire week in California.  So she hadn't had a lot of down time  for a few weeks.  So, I guess we will see how I feel if we decide to do it again next year