Neighbor gifts...

Mia helped me do our neighbor gifts this year. We were trying to figure out what to send and since I am trying to avoid sweets, I wanted to do the same for my neighbors. I asked Mia what we should give and she said, "Bandaids." So that is what we did. I found cute first aid kits and mini hand sanitizer at the dollar store and attached half of the following tag to them. It was fun.



Some of the fun things we got:

An umbrella (we have needed it so badly here!!! Seriously!)

Dish towels

Lots of gum and mints from a family named Wrigley

Pancake mix

Hot cocoa mix



And my favorite....

A CD of a neighbor girl singing Christmas carols....

It's BAAAAAAACK and Sea World Pix

The camera is back, in time for our trip to San Diego for the BYU game. However, after Sea World, the USS Midway and torrential rain....we didn't actually make it to the BYU game, though that was the sole purpose of the trip!! The weather was threatening, and we were exhausted so we just headed up the coast to Balboa Island!!!

BTW: To my Grandview friends---Ashley Lueck had her second baby, a boy named Colton, on Nov 25th. She had another C-section but without the drama of hypertension.

Out of Order

After one too many tumbles, my digital camera is en route to a week long spa treatment at Olympus camera repair. Therefore, this post will be photoless. You won't get to see the Thanksgiving banner I copied and made from potterybarnkids.com, nor will you get to admire the poster Ava and I making for her week as VIP at kindergarten.

Congrats to all the babies! All boys, nonetheless too...Crystal and Fin, Mary and Isaac, Katie and Ben!

Next up, Ashley Lueck and her boy!

Halloween

Here are my ferocious pirates on Halloween night! They even have the rotten teeth to match now, I am sure...

10K race

On Saturday, Mark, his brother Spence, nephews Dan and Stephen, and niece Rachel ran in a 5K/10K race in Chandler. The girls and I hung by the course (correction: Ava and I hung by the course, Mia hung by the bagel table and filled with bottom of my stroller with about 6 bagels with 1 bite taken out of them!) Mark and Dan finished in about 47 minutes (a 7:47 mile pace) while Rachel won her age division in the 5K and Stephen finished second (5K also)!

Good job dudes.

There were some pregnant ladies stretching before the race and I started to feel a little guilty and inadequate until I saw that they were only walking at a snail's pace.

Me at 24 weeks!!

This is for you Leslie. I know you are envious...

By the way, as a math-minded person. I am 60% of the way there!

Preschool Field Trip

Mia and I went on a field trip to Mother Nature's Farm and Pumpkin Patch with her preschool class. It was hot, and smelly, but fun. Mia got to pick a pumpkin then decorate it with foam stickers. I was gathering stickers for her from neighboring tables and returned and found that she had put letter stickers on her pumpking reading, "FUC Q". Should I be alarmed????

Ava, what am I going to do with you?

I opened a kitchen cabinet this morning, and found this graffiti, painted in Sharpie, on the inside of the door. I need to teach the perpetrator to cover her tracks better, I guess...

Winter grass time!

So Mark spent three hours scalping our lawn yesterday, in preparation to seed it with Rye grass which will grow like a Chia pet for the next 9 months, then die away revealing the summer grass which is all yellow and coarse anyway. My question is: Can't we just have permanent winter grass? We don't need summer grass anyway because it is too dang hot to go outside and enjoy it.

And I thought the cockroaches were gross...

Check out what my brother, Marshall, found slithering through his yard in Orlando, FL.

Chuck!

Our neighbors, Chuck and Traci, get a little too excited about Halloween, and deck their house and yard out with inflatable pumpkins, cats, and a giant Frankenstein. This year, they added a graveyard with a talking skeleton in a cage. We appreciate Chuck going so over the top that we don't feel the need to do anything except add a pumpkin outside our house.

Mia and Ava like to take nightly walks to Chuck's to check everything out.

We are really grateful that our bedrooms are in the back of the house so that his lights and ghoulish sounds don't keep us up.

Chuck's Halloween display is rivaled only by his Christmas with 2 Nativity scenes among other Christmas things.

We'll add the night shots later so you can see the inflatables in all their glory.

Mia is 3!

Miss Mia turned 3 today!! She is quite excited! We are going to Makutu's Island for her birthday and having a big family party tomorrow.


However, with this birthday, the "Binkie Fairy" will make her appearance tonight, taking all of Mimi's binkies with her. This will be a traumatic event so wish her parents luck!

When in Rome...and if it ain't broke...

Wow, such pressure to start a blog, but I hope you enjoy it. It is probably a good idea to do it this way since the chances are great that my phone battery will die mid-conversation. (I am not sure why Mark and I can't keep our cordless phone battery charged!)

Big news is another little girl coming around February 13!! The ultrasound showed a healthy baby girl who wouldn't stop grabbing her face.

School Daze!

I am so spoiled right now. Ava attends kindergarten at Challenger Basic every morning and Mia goes to Wiggles & Giggles Preschool two mornings a week.

We do have to set the alarm every morning, but no tardies so far!

Mia is one of 2 girls in her class of 10 so I don't hear about anyone but "Camerly" (Cambrie).

Ava is baffling her teacher with her reading as she reads a Junie B. Jones book a day. I was having her read the Ramona series, but I guess it is a little outdated. She asked me what long underwear was one day, and the dad smokes in Ramona and Her Father, which made for an interesting conversation.