From the Mouth of Babes...

On Monday I took Sam and Tallie to see the Draper Temple open house. As we were getting off the bus to enter the temple Tallie looks up to her cousin Becca and says.... "Church is really, really important! And that's why it is so boring!!!" hmmmmm sometimes they just call it like they see it.

The Story about our Cougar

For those of you who don't know the story of the cougar, I will explain, but first you might need a little background. Jake HATES Pottery Barn, but unfortunately for him, I don't, and since I decorated our whole house, just about everything comes from that one particular store (and yes I know I am getting ripped off, but I don't know how to decorate so I just copy the catalog and there you go). So Jake knows how much I HATE dead animals- especially stuffed and displayed all proudly- like it took some great skill to go out into the woods and hunt down some poor defenseless animal with a gun. (And no I am not all anti-gun- and I am actually a pretty good shot thanks to my dad taking me out of French on Thursdays to go the the gun club with him on a regular basis) I just think it would be more of a fair fight if you were to take on the wild animal with say a knife.

Okay- so Jake decided to vex me and my Pottery-Barn-Decorated home by placing a big-ole-dead-stuffed Cougar right in the middle of my family room. You can see the cougar from every room in the house. Also, I guess, I should mention that Jake is a huge BYU cougar fan and the my Dad did actually kill the cougar (horrible- I know) and that it was the biggest cougar in Utah ever killed (186 lbs) so it kinda needed to stay in the family, but as my parents moved last year, my mom put down her foot and refused to let the thing come, our little Paul Anka found himself homeless. So Jake and my brother (and Matt- I will get you back for this one day) put the cougar up on the ledge in my house when I was 8 months pregnant with Tessa and couldn't do a dang thing about it.

So long story short, my shopping at pottery barn gets on Jake's nerves, so he put up a dead animal in the middle of my beautifully decorated home to vex my nerves, so then to get even with this, I started to decorate or (desecrate) the cougar to once again to get under Jake's skin. It is a vicious cycle I know! Good Fun! Anyone seen any cute cupid costumes for sale lately?
If you can't read the santa hat it says "Bah Humbug" fitting don't you think?

Tallie

The snow and cold weather in Utah persists. At first the snow may bring about some nostalgia in November and then it is a little exciting for the Christmas season while we are dreaming of a White Christmas and all. But now it is January with nothing to look forward to but snow shoveling and freezing for three more months. So what is a mother to do to get through all the yuckiness? Well Ski Lessons of course!

The first Wednesday in January always brings about our annual tradition of the first day of ski lessons. What could be more fun then bundling up 6 year-old Sam and 4 year-old Tallie? I had these two so layered they probably could have withstood several weeks on the Siberian Tundra.

I have been nervous for weeks after enrolling Tallie as this would be her first year skiing. I could just picture her as a pink snow suited heap bawling in the snow and that is providing that I could actually get her to walk from the car to the slopes in her ski boots which, by the way, is no easy feat! For weeks she has made us call her Dasher (her favorite reindeer because on the PBK plates, Dasher is skiing). She was convinced she would take to it and be an absolutely awesome skier. This attitude kept up until we were on the way to rent skis and Sam told her that she was going to crash when she went off the cliff, and that it was going to "hurt so bad- but it's okay, you just have to try again!" Tallie immediately began to get all worked up, and the North Face poster of the skier going off a 100ft cliff at the ski rental shop really didn't help matters much. She was terrified to even try on the skis at Park Sports. But after about a 25 minute pep talk/bribe/treats, I did manage to convince her she would not be faced with any cliffs for at least a year and that the bunny hill was an okay place after all.

Well I will stop going on because a picture tells a thousand words right? In the end, she did absolutely rock! We are so proud of our little Dasher as she now makes us call her. So far we have gone skiing 3 times and she has already mastered the "pizza" and "french fries" and can do all with out the help of the wormie! (the little purple rubber tube that ties the two skies together)

This is Tallie's first day of skiing, she loves to ski way too fast and discovered when she goes to fast, she can simply sit down and sled on her skis, then with the help of her ski boots she kind of just raises herself back into standing position once the terrain flattens back out. It is the funniest thing to watch!







I don't really have any pictures of Sam skiing because he just takes off down the mountain and I am lucky if I catch him before he just hops back on the lift. But he and Tallie did turn into a pretzle and the bottem of the lift last Friday


I love the lift rides- it's the only time during the day I am not constantly hollering "Pizza!" "Red Light!" "Look out" "Sam SLOW DOWN!" "Pizza Tallie" "Don't eat the brown snow" etc etc. although trying to get the two kids on the lift by myself is insane. I have to actually lift Tallie up and try to shuffle in my skis to the red and green "Stand Here plaque" and then with one hand try to give Sam a boost up as he is not quite tall enough to get on by himself. Last year I actually had a little neighbor 5 year old girl fall off the lift when I was trying to get them both on- so scary!


Okay, if you are not sure what you are looking at, this would be Tallie after- going way too fast down the mountain I had to jump in front of her and ski backwards for a while trying to stop her. She ended up stopping by in between my skis by grabbing my feet while laughing her head off. It was so cute I had to take a picture!

Oh how I hate Mondays!!

I always believed that Mondays would just get to be so much better as a stay at home mom. Really- shouldn’t we celebrate sending the kids back to school?

But I think for me, Mondays stink because after a long weekend of everyone being stuck in the same house and hosting people over on Sunday dinner- not to mention keeping the Sabbath holy by trying not to clean up (and yes I have to TRY not to clean. Whenever I see a mess I naturally gravitate towards righting all things in the universe- and yes, I know I have a mild case of OCD…and yes, I also really like run on sentences) ANYWAYS…what I am saying is that our house is always a huge mess come Monday morning, which makes me just plain grumpy.

And my Monday’s always start off with Carlee (my trainer whom I love--but she is just way to happy and perky- especially for someone who never ever touches Caffeine) kicking my butt for a solid hour. And Mondays also happen to be my turn to drive the carpool- and I have yet to meet anyone who actually enjoys trying to strap up to 7 children (once it was 8-illegal, I know) in car seats into a Honda Pilot, which although it is advertized as an 8 passenger car, the fine advertisers at Honda forget to mention that it would be nice if 3 of those passengers do not possess legs. Okay, so back to my ranting… so I am driving all the 4 year-olds to school, which just gets Tessa totally off her nap schedule- and as any seasoned mother can tell you- you must be very wary of the wrath of a sleep deprived one year while trying to cram in 7 stores in the 2.5 hours before you return back to the preschool to begin the 15 minute process of loading them back into the car (This process can easily be stretched into 20 if Katelyn wants to sit by Tallie, but Tallie only wants to sit by Dylann and Tessa, but Avery doesn’t want to sit by boys and Gavin and William want to watch Pokeman but all the girls want something with a princess- you get the drift. I usually just give in and bribe them with cookies the size of their heads from Kneaders. )

Once back at home 4 hours later comes grocery unloading, dinner, homework, FHE, scriptures, teeth flossing, etc. etc. etc. Today, I am finding myself particularly cranky because to add insult to injury, it snowed, A LOT! And it took me about an extra hour to go the usual 10 miles, and when I was trying to walk with Tessa in my arms, I stepped on some black ice and totally bit it, landing kind of on Tessa and a lot on my knee, which is now swelling and throbbing and turning all various shades of black. Well, I probably should go, because I also get to add attempting to find volunteers for Sam’s school, as well as un-Christmas Decorating to today’s line up. Which is so depressing, once the holidays are over, we just get to look forward to snow shoveling and freezing for the next 10 weeks.

The silver lining? My mom found me some really cute Ugg slippers from TJMaxx- I just might have to lift my ban on that store. And the 1^st episode of the Bachelor is on, and it is always so fun to mock those poor women- I’ve only seen a few minutes for far- but Natalie has such a bad spray on tan…- you see where I am going with this.

Okay, so in my very long attempt to make a slideshow of my children in Hawaii back in October. I somehow dumped this photobucket onto my blog (as seen below) and now have absolutely no idea how to get it off. I keep messing around with it and finally decided what the heck- the first picture is a little blurry- but if you click on it, you can see our kids playing on the beach only about 21/2 months later.
I guess you can look for Christmas pictures in about March at this rate!