Chocolate!!

My dad brought home a chocolate sucker for Maren yesterday. Well she really got into it as you can see from the pictures. Us women love our chocolate!

Dinosaurs, Yeah!!

This week was the last $2 Tuesday at Thanksgiving Point so we went to the Dinosaur Museum there (Museum of Ancient Life). Well if you check the blogs of every other mother within 50 miles you will see that they ALSO were at Thanksgiving Point today. The line to get in wrapped all around the entire building. Did that deter us, NO!! We had to see the dinosaurs. So we waited, along with everybody else for 40 minutes to get into the museum.

When inside it was a barrage of toddlers (older kids are at school), babies and strollers, with their harried mom's trying to follow behind them. But despite all of that, we actually had a pretty fun time. There were enough dinosaur "fishy" and real "fishy" to keep Maren entertained.

Ashton really liked that he could touch almost everything. I think he liked to look up at the really big dinosaur bones the best.

We went with my friend Misty, and she brought 4 kids (2 of hers and 2 neighbor kids). I don't know how she did it but she did. I was having more trouble with my 2 kids than she was with her 4. We were going to top off the outing with a trip to McDonald's for lunch, but 2 of Misty's kids fell asleep on the way home. But mine are asleep now so it all works out.

First Day of School

When I woke up this morning at 7:00 a.m., I found Logan all ready for school in the outfit that we had picked out last night. He had on his backpack and was just waiting to go to school. Unfortunately school didn't start until 9:00, so after a bath, breakfast, and a room straighten, it was finally time to walk him to school. Of course, he didn't think he needed his mom to walk him to school since he did it all by himself last year, but I exercised my mom rights and walked him anyway. He is in second grade this year and is in class with all his friends. Which is good, I think. As you can tell from the pictures, Logan had to have a Pokemon t-shirt, a pokemon backpack, and a pokemon lunch box. I will be glad not to hear about Pokemon all day long, but I feel sorry for his teacher.

Ashton, who starts kindergarten, won't start until next week and was very disappointed that he didn't get to stay at school. Maren on the other hand was very angry that she even had to wake up for this event that didn't involve her. You can tell from the picture that she is not very happy. Even if Maren isn't happy, I am happy for school to be starting. YEAH!!!

Shut the Door

We now officially have interior doors in our house. Right now they are installing all of them and putting the trim around the door frames. Each little step really makes a big difference in being able to envision how our house will look once it's done.

Splash and Dash

We had tons of fun at Thanksgiving Point on Tuesday afternoon. I guess that all exhibits at Thanksgiving Point are $2 per person on Tuesdays in August. So since my sister-in-law Emily and her daughter Martie were in town this week, we went with them and my other sister-in-law Deanna and her 3 kids to the gardens at Thanksgiving Point. I had never been there and was pleasantly surprised.

The gardens were not as extravagant as I thought they might be, but they were pretty. We got to see the largest man made waterfall this side of the Mississippi (or so they claim). The kids enjoyed looking at the fish in the large lilly pad pond and rolling down the large grassy hill.


In addition to the gardens they have a water area that includes a "Noah's Ark" boat that squirts water into a shallow wading pond. The kids thoroughly enjoyed getting wet with their cousins and the moms (and Ryan) enjoyed resting on the bench.

Pinks, Blues, and Tans, Oh My!

Well we have moved on to the painting stage of our house, which has been really exciting for us. We have gone with a tan color (lightweight beige) for the walls and white for the ceilings. Pretty much like everybody else. The tan was a little darker than we originally thought it would be, but we like it. It is so hard to tell what color you are actually going to get when you look at those little paint squares from the paint store.

We painted Maren's bedroom pink and will be decorating her room in Little Mermaid. Now you may think this is because she loves Ariel, but that is not the case. She loves fish. "Fishy" is definitely one word that she knows. She has fallen in love with Flounder from the Little Mermaid. So her room will have fish and Ariel in it when we are finished. Her bathroom will also be decorated in "fishy."

As for Ashton's room he wanted a Diego room. Well actually I wanted him to have a Diego room since I found some killer deals at Toys R Us. I found a Diego wallpaper boarder, a Diego lamp, a Diego laundry hamper, and some wall decorations on clearance. So we painted his walls tan with a little blue at the top. We will put the boarder in between the blue and the tan. Hopefully it will look good.

Logan and I both just wanted our rooms boring tan, so that is what we did. Ryan on the other hand wanted his closet a different color. He wanted it a burgundy-ish color. Don't ask me why he just wanted his closet a different color and why such a dark color. I don't understand it myself. But anyway after it was all painted, he wasn't sure that he liked the color he chose, so who knows if it will be repainted before all is said and done.

Maren's 1st Haircut

My little girl got her first haircut today. We put it off as long as we could, but she was beginning to look like she didn't have a mother that loved her, so we took her to get her hair cut. She did so well!! As you can tell from the pictures, she was smiling, eating her sucker, and watching Dora. A perfect combination. Let's just say that this was a much better experience than when the boys got their first haircut. I guess it's just a girl thing.

The only thing that went wrong was that Roger (the barber) collected some of her hair so that I could put it in her baby book. Well on the way home I dropped the paper that had the hair in it. So I may never find her first haircut hair. I'm such a bad mom.

There's a monster in my closet

Well, I got my built-in closets done this week. I love them. I got shelves in my pantry and game closet. I have a coat closet and a art supply closet and even a utility closet. My linen closet upstairs has a place for a vacuum so I don't have to haul it up and down the stairs. Yeah!! It's amazing how much the little things make you so excited. My boys love to hide in my closets now. Logan had to get his picture in every closet so I called him, the monster in my closet.

We also had the walls and ceiling textured this week so we should be painting next week. Yeah!! You can tell that I'm happier this week than last week. Things are actually going better.

Stoned!

Well as most of you know, the stucco guys put the wrong color of stucco on our house. So for about 3 weeks we have been trying to find out what went wrong and who was going to pay for it. You know the negotiation thing, because they wrote down the color that they put on the house so they didn't think they were at fault and we thought we told them the right color so we didn't think we were at fault. You know those kind of things.

Well after many headaches we came to a middle ground and we actually got our house the stucco color we picked out. Yeah!! It's funny because it took me and the supervisors 3 weeks to talk about it, and the worker guys only about 4 hours to do it. Go figure. Anyway, they have almost finished up the stone work on the house as well. We are really really glad that we had them change the color of the house. We like it so much better.

Now the "we" I am referring to is Ryan and I. I am sure that there are many people (including my dad) that liked the other color better. But believe me, after all the headaches we are not changing it for a long time.