Church

Sundays are a funny day for me. They are the best and the worst most weeks. It is the only day I get to sleep in the whole week. Todd leaves for meetings early and the kids like to just sit around and play so I usually get to sleep until almost 9. Heaven. Then the kids and I always have a fun breakfast, usually it consists of waffles, strawberries and/or bananas and whip cream. If they eat all their waffles they even get one more squirt directly in their mouth. They LOVE that.

Then we rush to all get dressed, get hair fixed, snack bags put together, backpacks checked, shoes on and we're off to church. I like to be 10 minutes early for church (we make it about 90% of the time). Not bad for a mom and 4 kids, who has a hubby at meetings most of the time. However, more often that not in order to make it there early I end up getting frustrated because one of the kids is taking too long to put on their shoes or they are dawdling on their way into church.

Then church starts.....UGH! My kids are all so little and have so much energy trapped in their bodies that sacrament is just so hard. Luke and Claire can sit and color the whole meeting without making a sound. But if you put either of them by Tayson or Sophie then it doesn't work. We can usually separate Tayson from the other kids and he'll stay in one spot. He has a really hard time sitting still and I have to have something different for him to do every 20 minutes or so (snacks, mazes, drawing, cars, etc). He's a bit old for this...but I have to pick my battles. And then there is Sophie. She canNOT be contained. She drives everyone crazy by taking their stuff, coloring on their pages, stepping on them, pulling their hair, etc.

Yesterday I brought some new dress up dolls for Claire. I knew she would sit and play with these the whole time from after the sacrament until the end. I even thought that if there were 2 dolls Sophie would play a little. Silly me. In a split second Sophie grabbed the small open baggie of shoes and hats and while trying to steal them flung the entire bag up in the air. It was like a small explosion. Small magnetic wooden shoes and hats went flying way up in the air and then landed all over people in the pews around me. I heard bursts of giggles from kids and adults in all the pews behind me. I was so embarrassed. People came up to me for the next 2 hours of church telling me how funny their kids thought it was. Sophie single-handedly disrupted the entire meeting. Timmy took her out in the foyer and then Claire and Luke quietly played dress up with the dolls. Luckily we only lost 2 of the shoes.



After church is always a little stressful too. I usually get out of YW a little late so my kids are almost always the last ones in their classes. I have to check on their behavior and dread what Tayson's teacher is going to tell me. Then we rush home at 2:00 pm fix the kids lunch as fast as I can and put Sophie down for a long overdue nap. She either sleeps for 30 minutes and is horrible the rest of the night or sleeps until it's time to go to my parent's house for dinner and then isn't tired when it's bedtime.

Sunday dinner is great. It's fun to all get together and hang out and have a nice big meal that I don't have to fix by myself. We stay there until it's time for bed. Which means hurrying to get everyone in bed which usually leads to yelling or fighting. I would really rather not end my Sabbath day like that ... but it just seems to always end like that.

Maybe when my kids get older Sunday will be a day of peace and reflection and rest. Maybe....

Fry Sauce

The kids cleaned, organized and vacuumed the playroom so as a treat we went to Carl's Jr. for lunch so they could eat and play at the play land. So worth it for them to do as much work as they did cleaning. Child labor at home is a great thing.

While we were there Sophie was dipping her fries and chicken stars in the fry sauce, licking it off, dipping them again, and occasionally taking a bite of the actual food. Then I look over at her and rather than spend time dipping she was just sucking the fry sauce right out of the cups. So gross and so funny. She loved it. I hurried and took the other 3 full cups away so that she wouldn't eat those too. Such a silly girl.


While we were there she didn't really want to play in the toddler area so either Tayson or Todd would help her get up the big kid area then she would run around up top and come down the slide. I knew where she was most of the time because of her Indian battle cry. She was so excited and had so much fun.

Makeover time

Claire got a fancy new makeup set at Chuck E. Cheese today. So after dinner we decided to have a makeover party.

Claire doing her kissy face

Sophie doing her kissy face (hilarious)

Now the girls are all set up to make me BEAutiful

I'm not going to lie....she pushed so hard it hurt my eye.

As soon as we were done showing off how beautiful we all looked to the boys in the house I hurried and put the girls in the bath and washed it off my face. Even after washing their faces with a washcloth they both still had rosy cheeks for the rest of the night. Oh how I love my girls!

My teenager

funny things about this picture:

• her diaper is hanging out the bottom of her miniskirt
• her nails are painted
• she looked like she was texting when I saw her on the phone

Lions Pride

Everyday Tayson comes home with a note from his teacher on his behavior that day. If he gets a + he gets to stay up late a - and he has to go to bed earlier. Luke on the other hand just goes to bed at the same time every night. I realize this isn't fair for him. It doesn't matter if he is good or not his bedtime is at 8:00. But let's be honestly you just can't parent each child the same. When I was a kid I found this horrible (Danny had totally different rules than I did cause he was a trouble maker...just ask him). Now as a parent I realize it is the only way to teach your children. You have to be willing to mix it up and find what works for each one. Simply put Luke is an easier kid so I don't have to be as creative with him. Hopefully someday my kids will understand this.

Anyway...every night when Luke says his prayers he always prays that Tayson will get all pluses and no minuses and that he will get a Lion's pride note (this is something his school does for something exceptional...so it's not an everyday thing). He came home with a Lion's pride note today and he was so happy. We even let him stay up until 9:15. Hopefully that will last the rest of the year for him.

Another funny thing Luke does is that he is always praying for somebody. Most nights it depends on who he sees when he peeks during his prayers.

A few funny ones he's said lately are:
*please bless Sophie that she won't be messy when she grows up
*please bless Sophie that she will behave better when she grows up
*please bless Amy to have her baby and everyone else who is having a baby too

Fat

Luke has always been obsessed with fat. Maybe it stems back to his birth when he was a chunky monkey and was the biggest kid in the nursery that day (weighing more than 9 lbs). Maybe it's the fact that most of his life I've either been prego or on a diet trying to lose the "baby fat". Whatever the reason twice in the past few days he has used "fat" inappropriately. Once after I asked him if so-and-so had their baby yet and he replied "no she's just fat". And the second time when we were talking about some of the Olympic athletes legs - they were HUGE muscles. And Luke kept calling them fat legs. I kept telling him they weren't fat they were muscle but he just didn't get it.

So last night at dinner I decided to teach him "hands-on" the difference between fat and muscle. Here's how the conversation went down.

Me: Luke feel my arm and how hard the muscle is (while flexing my really big strong biceps)
Luke: OK
Me: Now feel how soft this fat is (while grabbing a good chunk of the tire on my stomach)
Me: Do you feel the difference?
Luke: Yep.
Me: Good now you understand the difference and that people who are big or have lots of muscles aren't fat. You shouldn't call them fat. Actually a good life lesson is that you should NEVER call a girl fat.
Luke: You're fat mom and you're a girl (in a totally matter of fact tone)

My fault for doing "hands-on" with a 5 year old and showing him my fat. It was so funny.

Good Morning Sunshine

This morning I heard Sophie in her bed yelling for me when I walked in she was pulling her PJ shirt off. She had thrown everything (blankets, stuffed animals, binkies, pj's) out of her crib and undressed herself and was ready to get out of bed. She loves to take her clothes off. She also loves to put other people's clothes on. She can often be seen with a pair of Claire's panties over her pants or a second shirt over her head and always someones shoes or shoe on. Silly girl.



I'm sorry that almost every picture in my 2010 challenge is Sophie....but she does more funny things than anyone else in the house these days.