January 2014

 Mark fell asleep this way

 Super happy kid at Oma & Opa's house

 Oma and Mark snuggling

 Everything goes in the mouth!

 The kids were thrilled to find Santa had left them a "boy kitchen" (or as Amy says it, a "boy chicken") at our house. Sam asked specifically for a boy kitchen so that Daddy would allow it :)

 Sam trying out his playdoh launcher and brick-maker he got for Christmas.

 I love the places these kids fall asleep!

 I got to do a Frozen cake the week before Sam's birthday. I was definitely proud of this cake, especially since I had not seen the movie!

 Sam wanted a Lego/Ninjago cake for his birthday, so I made the face of one of the Ninjago guys (you will have to ask him what the name of the green guy is, because I have no idea!)

 I was so excited when I found these superheroes for free! You printed, cut, folded, and glued them (which took way longer than you would think). They were pretty cool and worked well as our targets when we had "Weapons practice" at Sam's party.

 A group pic of the kids that came for Sam's birthday party. They had a lot of fun! I decided to do a Superhero Training Academy theme. They decorated their superhero licenses, did laser training, strength training, a memory game, and then we ended with weapons practice :) (sometimes I can be a cool Mom ;))

 The kids on a Kubota for Uncle Jake (who now works for Kubota in California) at the Potato Expo in Pocatello.

 We went to Flips one day with our friends. A local gym with slides, tramps, and a foam pit.

 Early morning in Mommy's bed

 The kids showing the aprons I made for them to go with their play kitchen.

Potter friends with Paco. He is a friend the kindergarten kids get to take turns taking home for a week and they journal about the experiences they have while Paco is at home with them. We tried to do lots of fun and different activities while Paco was with us like sledding and eating Aebleskivers.

Finishing off December

 I did a cupcake decorating class for my Beehives and they really enjoyed getting to play around with the different icing tips and then we delivered the cupcakes to those who didn't come.

 Sam got to be in the little mini Light Parade Rigby does at Christmastime. It was dark and snowy, so this is the only picture I got of the event. But he had alot of fun!

 Cute Miss Amy in a twirly skirt.

 Sam also got to go and sing one of his Spanish songs to the school board one evening. He is somewhere in this picture, but it also shows his two wonderful teachers: Mrs. Hale (English) and Mrs. Garrido (Spanish)

 Christmastime wouldn't be complete without some gingerbread houses!

 An adorable pic of Amy

 A card Sam wrote for me one day at school - LOVE!!

 Sam was very excited about his handprint Santa ornament he made at school.

 Happy Mark on the drive down to Arizona

 Sam and Mom being silly while waiting for everyone to catch up to us

 We have several pictures of Sam with Daddy's hat on, so it only makes sense to get some of Marky, too.

 A family pic at the top of the hill we hiked

 Sam and his cousin, Gracie eating nicely together

 Aunt Shanna is always the kids' favorite!

 Mark loved this jumper thing, but would get lonely, so Sam was playing closeby with his lego robot

 All the Skousen grandkids home for Christmas.

 The Skousen party pinata is a tradition and has instigated my kids' love of pinatas

While on our trip, Mark started eating solid foods because nursing just wasn't enough anymore - great timing, kid!

Brr!!!

 I love Christmas! Unlike many, I am insistent on waiting until after Thanksgiving to decorate or listen to Christmas music. I don't like to rob Thanksgiving of it's uniqueness and recognition. But I do love it when it comes time to bring out all the stuff and go get the tree (yeah, we're suckers and still get a real tree every year, although this is the first year we have debated on which to do)

 So here are just a couple pic's of how I "decorate" - I really wanted my nativity to be on my shelf, but after putting it up there, the shelf was leaning downwards, so I moved it to the piano, which I actually like more because you can see it better and it is the first thing you see when you walk in to my house. And don't worry, Mark has an awesome stocking just like the other kids waiting for him at Grandma's house.

 A pic of my YW at our Christmas kick off activity where I showed them some cake decorating stuff for cupcakes that we ate (of course!) and also delivered to those who weren't at the activity and to some of the leaders in the ward who do alot (like the bishop, YW president, Elder's Quorum president, etc)

 This a pic during the construction of a storage shelf in our garage Robert built himself. Don't worry, that 2X4 is just there for temporary support. It now has three chains going up into the ceiling for permanent support. We liked this concept so much when we saw it at my sister's house and Robert found it to be so simple and relatively inexpensive, so he built a second one on the other side of the garage. We are still debating whether we really need a third over the freezers on the back wall, but this simply fabulous for now. Very excited to have so much more storage so the garage won't be so cluttered!

 A horrible pic of the parade Sam was in last week. Our little town has a light parade every December and then what they call Midnight Madness after where most of the businesses are open until midnight and have sales and specials going. Kinda like our own Black Friday. Well this year they decided to do a float for the kids in the Spanish language immersion program. Sam had a blast riding on the float and throwing candy! He was so caught up in it that he didn't even see us even though both Robert and I were screaming his name at him :)

 A picture of our gorgeous tree this year. This thing was such a pain to decorate. I don't know why, but every year I forget to plug in and test the lights before I put them on the tree. Of course the top two strands didn't work. I get them off the tree and start going through them to try and find the broken bulb and Sam does something to make the other half of the string not work. Robert tried and couldn't fix them, so we were going to just get a new strand of lights. But everything kept happening preventing us from getting to the store to get more lights. During all of this Sam is bugging me every day with "Can we decorate the tree yet?" I finally just decided to take off the blue lights and only do white this year so we could just get the dang thing done.

 The traditional decorating sugar cookies with our favorite peeps! The reason why I say Brrr! for the post title is because we have been having temps in the single digits for the past two weeks. Not fun to walk Sam down and wait for the bus for 20 mins when it is -2 outside! And last week we woke up to no power. We went over to the Potter's house which was slightly warmer than ours due to their gas fireplace and hung out until after lunchtime when the power finally came back. It is supposed to start to warm up the end of this week coming back up into the 30's, which will be nice. But today is a great day because even though it is still quite cold, there are huge snowflakes gently falling outside. Makes it all worth it!

 Our cute Amy showing off the new skirt she got from our friends. I have been so grateful to have found a person who has 2 very girly girls that are just older than Amy to get hand-me-downs from! Just about all of our Christmas shopping is done and a few more projects to finish up before we leave town for the warm country next Saturday. Tonight Sam gets to go to the school board meeting to sing a song in Spanish so they can see how the kids are doing. Tomorrow night Robert and I get to go out for his work's Christmas dinner at Johnny Carino's (I know, I'm in heaven!). Then Saturday is our ward's Christmas breakfast. Let the holiday madness commence!!

November Wrapped Up

These are literally the only pictures I have taken the last 2 weeks. First Mark got a runny nose, then Mommy ended up with a head cold, and now Amy has a cough, too. It must be fall time. The last couple weeks of November whizzed by with not alot going on. We decided to stay home for Thanksgiving break, a first for us and it has been fun! Here, we went shooting with Robert's aunt and uncle and Sam is trying out Mommy's new handgun (more on that below)

This is Mark after the Thanksgiving feast. This kid has had a hard time sleeping lately, which makes it hard for Mommy to get better, but somehow we are surviving. We had Thanksgiving with our friends, the Potters and then on Saturday we had a second, mini feast of different appetizers - very yum!

And the aforementioned new addition to the family. My Christmas present! It is a Ruger SR .22. Which basically means it is a sweet little handgun that shoots .22 bullets so it isn't crazy scary to shoot and makes me feel like a bad guy in the movies and wanting to say "stick 'em up" :) Robert figured it was probably my turn to get a new gun since he has 5 guns to my (then) 1 gun. I absolutely love this little baby!!

And speaking of babies, here's our little Marky again :) We were having fun with this hat on his head one day :) When he isn't sick, he has begun to sleep 12 hrs at night - so very nice!! And that is about it for us. Hopefully we will get this sickness thing done and overwith this week and start cranking on all the Christmas projects I have started but not finished. Merry Christmas!!

First Part of November

 So at least I'm back again before 2 months went by. Here is a pic of Katie Potter "holding" Mark. She is around 18 months (but super tiny) and thinks she is big enough to hold Mark and be one of the big kids! She loves Mark so much, it's adorable to see how excited she gets around him!

 Mark had his 4 month check-up and the Dr. gave me a little rebuking because he doesn't spend much time on the floor and thus hasn't started to roll yet. So we went home and I put him on the floor and left him there for a while. He screamed and cried until he finally just gave up the fight and fell asleep. Not my favorite thing about being a parent - tough love.

 Sam showing me his creation with the cardboard from the new set of sheets I had to get for our bed (does anyone else have the problem of sheets only lasting a year before shredding? Even 500 count sheets!) He decided to make himself a weapon belt with hand granades and such drawn on. He was so devastated when I finally made him throw it away. Oh the joys of recycling!

 And one night I decided to try to make more of an effort to play with my kids, so we made a fort in the front room using the flat sheets we never use on our bed and chairs. Sad to say this is our first fort ever. Robert's mom made Sam a tepee for Christmas one year, so if they ever want one, we just set that one up. But now my kids can check that off their childhood bucket list :)

 Watching TV one day and I look down to see Sam holding Mark's hand to his face. I just love how tender and sweet Sam is with his baby brother. And Mark just adores him, too!

 For kindergarten, the kids brought home a turkey that they had to disguise however they wanted so their turkeys (named Tom) wouldn't get eaten for Thanksgiving. Since Sam was doing this for his Spanish class, we decided to do Vaquero Tom (or Cowboy Tom). He was pretty thrilled and I am learning just how little artistic skill I have (see later on for further affirmation of this)

 (not here necessarily) In planning for Christmas, I decided to try out an idea I found on Pinterest a while back to pay out Q-tips in a design and then spray paint on top. It looks pretty cool, but not quite what I wanted, so this idea is nixed for other people, but I think I will put these up in the kids' rooms

 And apparently this is what I look like when I am feeding Mark, because Amy told me she was feeding her baby just like Mommy. I guess I better work on my posture.

 And a couple pic's of the kids hold Mark. Sam can barely carry Mark, but he can do it. It just doesn't happen very often.

 If anyone has suggestions on how to keep Amy from picking at this sore on her nose, PLEASE HELP ME! We have tried bandaids (cute and regular), gloves, rewards, threats, etc. and we can not keep her from messing with it both when she is awake and asleep. It has been over a month now and is driving me nuts!!!!

 And the pic of the day I finally got our Gratitude Tree up. This is the further affirmation of my non-artistic abilities. But now there are many, many more leaves on our tree and it doesn't look so terrible. This year I wanted to start more of the traditions I see other people do with their kids because Sam is old enough to understand and Amy is old enough to be excited about whatever we are doing.

 A sweet little pic of how those mesh bumper pads don't always quite do their job. I have a pic of Amy asleep with her arm slung over it, too!

 We got our first snowfall and the kids were super excited to go out and play in it. The wind was blowing like crazy so I thought they would only be out for five minutes, but those crazy kids stayed out for over half an hour! When I finally made them come inside their hands and faces were so red!! But they had fun and every day Amy asks if she can go out and play in the snow. Soon enough, sweetie!

 When we were doing our shopping at Winco, Amy saw a little boy who had slumped over and fallen asleep on his mom's purse. So she wanted to give it a try and pretended to be sleeping. Hey, whatever keeps her happy, right?

My sweet little guy! He has been teething (at least the bottom two, possibly more), so has been fussy and sleepy and now has a little bit of a cold. So he has also been snuffly and sometimes chokes on the drainage, causing him to gag and choke until he empties his tummy all over me and the couch. Lots of fun.