Happy Birthday Morgan

4 things I love about Morgan on her 4th birthday:

1. I love her double dimples. Instead of two dimples one on each side she has two on one cheek and none on the other. Her nickname is double dimple and I just love them. You can kind of see them in this picture.

2. I love that she burps at every meal as loud as her father. As much as I protest I secretly think it is hysterical. I keep trying to get it on video but I have not caught it yet, but believe me you have never heard something so loud come out of someone so little.

3. I love that she spontaneously falls asleep in the oddest positions and places. Here are just a few shots of some of my most recent finds.

4. I love what a little dancer she is. If there is music playing you can bet her little bum will be shakin'!

*I love you Morgan*

Pumpkin Patch

We recently made our trip to the pumpkin patch. I seriously LOVE this time of year. Each day as I pull down my street I see all the orange, yellow and red trees and I am amazed at the beauty of where we are so blessed to live. We have spent the last few weeks enjoying parks, apple orchards, pumpkin patches and playing in the leaves in the backyard. We hope you all are enjoying your fall as much as we are!

Emergency Preparedness

Has anyone ever heard of emergency preparedness causing an actual emergency?

Let me back track a little.

A few weeks ago I attended an Enrichment Night where several women presented different outdoor cooking methods that could be used for fun or in case of an emergency if you had lost power or gas. One of the methods was an apple box oven. I had never seen anything like this before and it looked like a great thing to have on hand in case of an emergency.

So my good friend and I decided that this conference weekend would be a great chance for us to make our boxes and give it a try.

Here is a picture of the first step in covering the box with foil

Here is a shot of the completed boxes in the process of cooking our food.

This is our finished meal. Yummy chicken enchiladas and peach cobbler!! We were amazed at how quickly the food cooked and how well it turned out. It only takes about 10 coals and the food only cooked for 30-45 minutes.

So what was the emergency you may ask......

Well, after we ate our delicious meal we gave ourselves a pat on the back for learning a new skill and then went out to clean everything up and this is what we found. Yes, those are actual flames coming off of the box!

One may wonder what was under the flaming box.

Well, under the flaming box was a flaming deck...Uh oops!

So we had fun but learned a few valuable lessons. I don't think we will be cooking on the deck next time around! Don't you just love projects like this where you take one step forward and then two steps back?

I have a feeling that our next learning opportunity is going to be in deck repair :)

The Snake Whisperer

1 snake + husband in Europe = a very freaked out Brook

Yesterday I heard 4 little elephants running up the stairs screaming at the top of their lungs. What were they screaming......"THERE IS A SNAKE IN THE BASEMENT!!!!!!!" Normally like any good mom I would have shut the door and waited for hubby to come home and promptly send him right down the stairs and tell him not to come back up until said snake had been caught. Oh but I unfortunately did not have such a luxury seeing as hubby won't be home for 4 more days.

So I put my best "mom" face on and pretended like it was no big deal while inside my heart was POUNDING. I grabbed the biggest pot I could find and made my way down the stairs. I had the kids point out where it was and I saw it. Sure enough a living breathing slithering snake was curled up behind some toys. Ok so I must admit it was not a large snake. Seriously any husband would have laughed and picked it up and thrown it outside. But hello......I am not a husband. I feel fine admitting that I am a girly girl and I don't enjoy slithering creatures in my house.

After a few minutes of snake wrangling I caught it under the pot. I told Abby to sit on it and not move. I taped together some fedex boxes and slowly slid them under the pot. SUCCESS! I then carefully carried it outside and let it go out in the woods where it will hopefully stay.
Don't ask me where it came from. I seriously don't want to know and pray that it was a freak circumstance. I can now add one more notch on my mommy belt as doing something I NEVER thought I would have to do but some how managed to keep a smile on my face while doing it.

This is the closest picture I could find of my little friend. Needless to say while a snake was in my house my first thought was not to grab my camera and take a picture of it. Please don't laugh you will just hurt my feelings. Doesn't it look deadly?????

Hysterical Cards

Ok so I just found some of the funniest cards I have EVER seen...I had to share. I will for sure be picking some of these up! Check out the rest of them at http://www.lineuponlinecards.com/.

1st Day of school

The summer is over :( It all went by too fast. I really enjoyed having the kids home and I loved that they got to spend some great quality time with the new baby. But alas....the new year has begun.

Abby started 2nd grade. When she got home she said, "Mom, I know you are really nice but I think my new teacher might be even nicer than you". Well, I guess I'm glad she likes her teacher!

Ethan started kindergarten. What a big day for him! He was so excited to ride the bus he could hardly stand it. I love that Abby gets to ride with him and walk him to his class each morning. It was easier to let him go knowing that big sis would be watching out for him.

Morgan is in preschool and LOVING her new teacher. She also has a good buddy in her class with her and I think they will have a great year together.

I look forward to a few hours each week with only 1 child instead of 4. Wow grocery shopping is going to be a breeze!!!!!!

Bad Luck

Last time I checked I do not recall walking under a ladder or breaking a mirror or even seeing a black cat cross my path but I still have managed to apparently bring upon myself a streak of bad luck.

Let's recap shall we....

1. Replace a $500 pressure pot in the basement that was never broken in the first place.

2. Water problems that led to our hole digging extravaganza.

3. I lost my cell phone

4. While biting into a raisin...yes a raisin...I broke my tooth on a pit that has led to several dentist appointments and a crown.

5. Our lovely night at the movies that I will now refer to as Butter Fest 2008!

Here is our new list that I have not blogged about yet...

6. Our lawn mower has decided to be temperamental and will only work if you cut the grass at the highest setting so it looks like you did not even cut the grass.

7. Our dishwasher started leaking and the racks were all rusted out so we decided to get a new one. Yay new dishwasher right????? Well some of the buttons are already not working so here I am blogging away waiting for someone to show up to "FIX" our brand new appliance.

AHHHHHH and now we arrive to this morning.....

My husband has BAD luck with car keys. The stories begin with just plain loosing them, to throwing them away in the trash at work, to leaving on a business trip and taking BOTH sets of van keys with him leaving me stranded at home with no transportation until the FEDEX envelope arrived the next day.

So this morning I get up and managed to get 5 people dressed, fed, teeth brushed and ready to go by 8 A.M. Before Charlie left he pulled the van keys out of his drawer and set them on the counter and left for work. I hauled all the kids in the car and was feeling like a proud momma to be ready for the day so early. Then it happened....

I went in the house to get the keys off the counter. Hmmmmm no keys. So I start to look around. Still no keys. Ok...no problem I will just use the spare. Hmmmmmm no spare either. So I start to call Charlie. No answer. Finally he calls back and sure enough in his pocket are the keys that after he put on the counter he immediately picked back up and left! So there he sat with his keys, my keys and yes also the spare keys! He brought them home and we got Ethan off to his class an hour late. And so my day continues.....

I admit that all of these things are really mostly minor irritations, and for that I feel lucky, but I am ready for the streak to end. Maybe I should go buy myself a rabbits foot and search out in the yard for a four leaf clover :)

Wish me luck!

May I have some popcorn with my butter?

If you go to the movies and decide to get a tasty treat and there is a very blond girl behind the counter helping you when she asks, "Do you want butter on that?" say NO!!!!!

I should have known something was very wrong when I went to fill the girls drinks up and I looked down and the baby's brand new car seat was COVERED in melted butter. It was a good thing the canopy was up or I would have had one slippery baby.

I was smart enough to take Morgan's box back and ask for a new one (minus the butter) but for some reason I never thought to take back Abby's as well. This is the sight I saw after the movie was over.


How Abby managed to get it all up her backside as well is a mystery to me. It was also all over their shirts but you can't see that in the pictures.

So after our girls night (the boys were at a father son camp out) I got to go home and scrub and scrub and scrub some more. Things are looking a little better today but I think I still have some more work to do if I want to try and make their clothes wearable again.

I jokingly referred to my girls as butter ball turkeys for the rest of the evening. What a funny night!

Nauvoo

We are home from our family reunion in Nauvoo and Chicago. This was the first time my whole family was all together in several years so it made this trip extra special. We all had a blast and the kids (even the baby) did so well given the long car trips and long hot days outside.

We woke up one morning in Nauvoo to a ton of fog. Charlie ran down to the temple and got some really cool shots. I loved this one of Joseph and Hyrum.

This was one of my favorite moments in Nauvoo. This is an area where they have lots of pioneer games and dress up for the kids to just play with. My kids could have spent all day there.

I loved these pictures of our adorable pioneer girls!

Here are a few of our attempts at getting some family pictures...boy was it hard!

This was Samuel's baby blessing. Charlie's sister came with her kids and her new baby that was born just a few weeks after Samuel. It was so nice to be able to bless the baby with family around.

The kids all played a big baseball game in the backyard and the girls were the cheerleaders.
I could not have asked for a nicer trip. I only wish I could see them all more often. It was hard to say goodbye this time especially since I was saying goodbye to the home I have many wonderful memories in. My parents have moved to Utah and the movers came the day after we left. Charlie and I have been making the drive between my house and his for over 14 years!!! This was the house where we had our first kiss, where I got my first car, where I blessed two of my children....the list could go on and on. It was wonderful to say goodbye on a good note all together as a family.

This was taken on the front porch of our beautiful home.....what great memories!!!!

HOLES!!!

Have you ever seen the movie Holes? Well, Charlie and I have been playing the lead roles in the reality version of that movie for the last two weeks. Over the last 14 days our lives have consisted of spending every spare minute we had digging hole after hole after hole and paying a lot of people a lot of money to fix NOTHING!!!!

I hope you enjoy a visual documentation of our not so fun adventure :)

This is where it all began...hole #1


Here we are at lovely hole #2

This is hole #3 but it was already filled in

Welcome to hole #4

We are now approaching our final destination at hole #5

And then it happened...we finally found it! The cause of all of our problems.
I have never been so thrilled to see a nasty dirty ball of roots in all my life. I could hardly believe my ears when Morgan came running in the house saying, "They fixed it, they fixed it!" I am so glad that the digging has finally ended and the holes are close to being all but a memory. I have to give one more big shout out to all of our friends that helped us dig all of our lovely holes. It would not have been possible without them.

We are going to celebrate tonight by falling into bed and watching the movie we rented....Holes! It should give us a good laugh at the very least!

Two new favorite finds

Here are two of my new favorite finds:

#1 Sam's Choice Towering Apple Pie

I for one happen to LOVE a good apple pie but I am not one to spend hours in the kitchen making one. So I have been in search of a good frozen apple pie. Most of the ones I have tried have been quite good but I finally found one I loved. They sell them at Walmart and everything about it is yummy even the crust. Give one a try sometime they are only $4.98 and all you do is throw it in the oven. YUMMY :)

#2 Blockbuster disk repair

Our Blockbuster video has just started offering a service where if you have scratched Cd's, DVDs or video games they have a special machine that takes the scratches out for only $2. I took in one of my kids music Cd's in that has been scratched forever and it worked like a charm. The disk I took in was badly scratched not just a little scratch and it works just like new. I am now going to round up any other disks I have and take them in as well.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Why it is the worst of times....

1. Monday...replace entire water pressure system just to find out that all we needed was a $7 filter. We are still waiting for the bill to come but it is not going to be pretty.

2. Wednesday...Charlie runs over his golf clubs that had fallen down in the garage breaking several of them.

3. Saturday....I loose my cell phone.

4. Saturday afternoon....the basement is not flooded but having a major water problem that has done quite a bit of damage that we are in the process of trying to remedy.

5. Monday....I get to spend the afternoon at the dentist getting a crown.

Why it is the best of times....

1. FRIENDS!!!!!!!!

2. FRIENDS!!!!!!!!

3. FRIENDS!!!!!!!

We ended up not being able to go to church on Sunday because of the water problem in the basement. One of our good friends had come over the night before to let us borrow his wet vac and I guess spread the word of our issues at church that day.

About an hour after people got home from church our phone started to ring. Men started showing up shortly after with shovels and were ready to work. Wives showed up ready to help keep kids busy, help with food, hold the baby...and most importantly keep me from breaking down in tears.

We could have NEVER accomplished what we did yesterday without them. Thank you does not even cover the amount of gratitude we feel for these amazing families. Thank you to the wives who were willing to give up their husbands on a Sunday even though all of them have many crazy things going on in their own lives right now. Thank you to the husbands who just showed up without even being asked and never complained once. Thank you to our sneaky friends who did the dishes when I was not paying attention.

Thanks for answered prayers that no one was hurt and that the men managed to not blow up the house or drop Charlie down the man hole as they dangled him by his feet!

I really can't express how after a week like this I am more filled with gratitude than frustration and it is all because of our friends. THANK YOU!!!!!!!!

Here is part of our wet basement

The STRONG men digging away. Notice the smile on Rich's face. Believe it or not I think they were actually having fun!

Notice how carefully they are digging around all our cable and power lines. This picture was taken before they discovered the gas line!!!!! I still have no idea how they did not cut a single line but I am soooooo glad that no more problems were created while trying to fix this one :)

Here is to hoping that this week goes a little smoother than last!

Spur of the moment fun!

While I was out this morning with friends one of them asked if she should get her ears pierced. We all agreed that it was a good idea and that we should all be there to go with her. So off we went in our caravan of cars with our 10 children off to the mall. We were all like giddy high school girls, picking out earrings, taking pictures....it was so much fun. I never thought I would be in my thirties taking a friend to get her ears pierced! What a fun memory with great friends!

Here she is all done. Now we just have to get her to leave them in. Apparently she blocked from her memory that she actually has done this before but took her earrings out within hours of having it done! We are so proud of you and they look so cute! Oh and if anyone who reads this knows her hubby keep your lips zipped.....we want to see how long it takes him to notice!