The Self-Esteem of a 6-year-old

This is a conversation I heard today while we were driving to the doctor's office (Tori has 2 ear infections):

Nicole: Tyler, did I tell you that there is a boy in my class at preschool named Tyler?

Tyler: (exasperated sigh) Yes, Nicole, you told me a thousand times!

Nicole: But he doesn't look like you at all. And he's younger than you.

Tyler: Yeah, well, not all kids can look this good.

Nicole: Yeah, you're probably right. You're pretty hot.

Tyler: I know.

My kids are awesome.

Confession

I have a confession to make:

I like to make lists. That's not the confession, if you know me at all, you know that I love lists. But sometimes, my list looks a little overwhelming, so I put things on it that I've already done that day just so I can already see some progress. 

Am I the only one who does this?

Gingerbread Houses and Gateway Discovery

Today was a fun filled day in Utah. We woke up to the smell of gingerbread baking. Grandma Debbi makes her own gingerbread for gingerbread houses. We always used graham crackers. I must admit that I didn't know what gingerbread was until I saw her make it for the kids a few years ago.

Instead of doing 4 houses (one for each grandchild) we did one big house and everyone helped. I think they were excited.

Tori mostly just wanted to eat the candy. One piece on the house, one piece in my mouth...

After that excitement, we went up to Salt Lake and went to Gateway Discovery (the childrens museum) and the kids had a blast. Nicole isn't feeling very well, so she took things a little slower. She contented herself with picking flowers and playing house (or just snuggling with me on a bench).

Tyler found some friends in the construction area and they built some kind of building together. He loved it!

Tori, well, she was Tori. She loves to run around and climb on everything. Luckily, they plan for that kind of thing at the childrens museum. She liked the climbing wall. When she got down she said, "No Mommy, we don't climb." See, it's funny because I constantly tell her that we aren't supposed to climb on stuff.

We only have a few days left of our vacation in Utah and the depression is starting to settle in on everyone. Whenever we have to say goodbye, everyone pouts for a few days and then we eventually get back to being ourselves. But first there's the pre-goodbye depression. You know the one, it's the depression you get at anticipating the goodbye. Whatever. Let's just enjoy our time together and then we'll pout about it later.

Turkey Cookies

When I heard "turkey cookies" I immediately thought about cookies made out of turkey. That does not sound appetizing. I should have known better.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

First snowman of the year

We are in Utah right now and on Sunday morning, we woke up to snow! It was such a fun surprise for the kids. Tyler was dressed and out in the snow before anyone else was even awake. Nicole at least waited until after church.

Cutting down the cherry tree

I meant to do this post like 3 weeks ago, but hey, it's better late than never.
I have a huge cherry tree in my back yard. Actually, that's not entirely true. My neighbor has a huge cherry tree in her back yard and it's right on the fence line. It's seriously messing up the fence, it drops leaves onto my roof, gutter, and yard. It drops cherries all summer which attract bees and stain my kids' feet red. Then in the spring I have 10,000 miniature cherry trees growing and I have to pull every single one of them out. But in May, this tree is amazing. It's covered in white blossoms and with just a tiny breeze, they come floating down around you. It's amazing. I endure all of the other inconveniences just for those 2 weeks in May. But, as I said before, the tree is in my neighbor's yard, not my own. So when she wanted to cut it down, I couldn't do much about it. Truthfully, it'll be nice to not rake 8 bags of leaves, pull 10,000 mini-trees, or scrub my kids feet raw. But I will seriously miss the shade it gave us and, of course, the month of May.

The utility guys come over once a year to trim the branches away from the power lines. It's a little lopsided to begin with:

But then the real chopping began.

And now it's gone. All the way gone. Am I sad about it? Yes, now I have to look at that ugly cell tower instead of a pretty tree. But, let's look on the bright side: my neighbor is going to plant some giant palms in it's place. So now it'll look like I'm somewhere tropical when I look outside! Oh wait, it'll probably just look like someone accidentally planted some palm trees and it'll look really weird. Sigh. Oh well.

School Pictures

I LOVE when school pictures turn out cute! It's always a little scary. Now I need to order a bunch of prints for Tyler to give to his friends (Kayley). He's getting so big! Wait, let's rephrase that, he's getting so old! He's tiny. He only weighs 45 lbs and he's 6 1/2 years old!

(Don't worry, I bought the copyright release for this picture so I'm not doing anything illegal)

Baby Goth

I made the mistake of not locking my bedroom door while I was taking a shower. I got out and came to check on the girls and found Tori like this:

When I asked her what she was doing, she looked at me like this:

It looked like she was hiding from the paparazzi! She's my little goth drama queen.

Ear Tubes and Adenoidectomy

Tyler hasn't been able to hear properly since May. It's November. He's done being deaf and I'm done hearing "what?" after everything I say. The doctor recommended the adenoidectomy as well (as long as he's in there, might as well). I was more nervous than Tyler. We told him that he gets to stay home from school, eat jell-o, popsicles, pudding, and ice cream instead of real food, play video games, stay in his pajamas all day, and watch movies in his bed. What could be better than that?! We also explained that he wouldn't feel anything. They would give him some medicine that would make him fall asleep and when he woke up, it would be all done. That's the easy version. We decided not to tell him that he would feel like crap when he woke up. Here's our little guy waiting for his turn:

Thank goodness for video games. He was scheduled to go into surgery at 11:15. It was almost 12:30 before he went in. He hadn't eaten since 8:00 the night before. I'm glad we had something to keep him distracted. They finally took him back and I went off to find Ben and I a sandwich. I had barely finished half my turkey and swiss before the doctor came back and said it all went well and we could go back to the recovery room in a few minutes. It was a huge relief to me.
When the nurse came to take us to him, it was all I could do to walk calmly behind her. She said that our faces would be the first thing he saw when he woke up. Not true. I heard him coughing and crying while we were still walking down the hall. I wanted to push her aside and run to my little boy! But when we got there, he was still pretty out of it and disoriented. He had a sore throat from the breathing tube, but mostly just wanted to go home. The promise of popsicles and spiderman tattoos helped.

He needed a little oxygen, but that's okay. We told him it was like a Darth Vader mask. That made it a little more tolerable. (The blue wrap is covering his IV)

Daddy even took a couple hits of the oxygen. Crazy Daddy will do anything to make his little boy laugh. I think he's secretly been working on his Darth Vader imitation, it's getting pretty good. He kept asking when we could go home. After a little while they took out his IV, we put on his spiderman tattoos and put his pajamas back on. The nurse wheeled him out in a wheelchair. On the way home he asked if we could stop at Burgerville for a milkshake. That's my boy.
We dropped off his prescriptions and came home. He went in the house and I got his backpack out of the car. When I walked in the house I saw him dribbling his soccer ball all over the house. I think he's going to recover quite quickly.

We've been home for about an hour and he's already had a milkshake, a cup of jell-o, 2 popsicles, and a pudding cup. I'm glad to see he's feeling better and has his appetite back.

Thank you all for your prayers and well wishes. It's much appreciated.

Blazers vs. Lakers

I'm from Oregon/Washington. I like the Blazers. The Lakers are the worst. I hate them. So, needless to say, I was really excited to see these taped to my house today:

 Did it help? No, not even a little. We got creamed. Oh well. We'll get 'em next time.

Grocery Store Frustrations

One of my biggest frustrations in life is getting home from the grocery store and realizing that I have forgotten something absolutely crucial to my menu for the week. Like wanting to make carrot soup and forgetting to buy carrots. Not really any way to get around that. Even worse than that is when I get home and get my ingredients that I already have at home and then realizing that I don't have enough of it! Liquid smoke is not usually something that I run out of. You know why? Because I hardly ever use it. I made BBQ meatballs today and I make homemade BBQ sauce to go with it. This sauce is NOT BBQ sauce without liquid smoke. I need 2 tablespoons and when I was ready to add this key ingredient I opened the bottle and found this:

Nothing. Empty. Crap.

Love Notes

I can't believe that this is happening already.

Today I worked in Tyler's first grade classroom. We had fun priming & painting pumpkins (they will be globes when they're finished). The kids went out to recess and I helped Mrs. Williams clean up. I saw a post-it note on the teacher's desk and decided to leave my little boy a love note from his mommy. I wrote 'I Love You. Love, Mom'. When Tyler got home from school, he pulled a post-it note out of his pocket that said, 'I Love You To Mommy. Love Tyler" Then I saw the other two post-it notes that he pulled out of his pocket:

He confessed that a girl in his class named Kailey gave it to him. I met her today. She hugged me when I left and thanked me for helping her with her pumpkin. She's a very cute girl. I suppose if a girl is going to love my little boy, she's a good one. Mrs. Williams told me today that everyone in class really likes Tyler because he's so sweet and nice... especially the girls. He tells me all the time that girls like to chase him at recess. I can't believe how big he's getting! Pretty soon he's going to have girlfriends and go on dates and get his heart broken. Yikes, wish us luck with that.