Foliage

The leaves up here have been gorgeous lately!! I can't get enough of them! About 5 minutes to the Draper Temple, there is a trail head up in the mountains. It's totally kid friendly and basically consists of just a bunch of little trails in and out of the trees and sagebrush. For FHE we had fun finding acorns, sunflowers, all colors of leaves, sliding around in the dirt, watching a spider in it's web, having a picnic in the back of the van pre-hike, running, jumping off "big" rocks, and all sorts of stuff that required a nice bath after we got home. It's impossible to get a good picture of them together, so here are all the attempts, and then some. :)

Everyday Love

Miles is a "sometimes napper". I've really had to adjust to this, but for the most part he stays in his room for "quiet time" even if he isn't napping. The other day he had come out more than I would like and I was getting angry. The next time he came out, he told me I needed to come to his room to see what he did. He had found a pen somewhere in his room and colored all over everything! His horse, his bed, and a huge mural on his wall. You could tell he was proud of it, but he knew it was wrong. I grabbed a magic eraser and told him to get started cleaning it up. A few minutes into the process, when my blood wasn't as boiling anymore, he told me all about his picture. It was a picture of Curious George riding a rocket around the earth. ( A scene in a library movie we rented) He knew what every little squiggle was, and then I felt really guilty for not letting him keep it on the wall. At least I snapped a picture before it was all gone. The picture doesn't do it justice, it was huge and it took forever to clean off.

Wednesday mornings are a big deal around here. I know the suspense is just killing you, so I'll just tell you. It's because the garbage truck comes! Without fail he comes during our Wednesday morning breakfast. Gwen's keen ears pick up on the ever so faint, "beep...beep" long before it gets to our street and they run to the front window and get a good seat for the show. I love it.

The evolution of a wake up.

Gwen has started self-potty training. I'm not sure how to process this. Miles was so horrendously difficult to potty train that when Gwen was about 6 months, I went to a little class put on by our ward about infant potty training. Figuring anything would be better than what we did with Miles, we started potty training Gwen, not super seriously, around 6 months. We stopped after kids got sick a few months later and we went into survival mode. But I think something stuck because for the last month or so, she'll come to us, lift up her shirt and make a sound like a snake. :) We humor her every once in a while and take her potty and 70% of the time, something comes out and we make a big deal about it. I think a big part of it is that she thinks Miles is so cool and she wants to be big and cool like Miles. Whenever parents complained about their children starting to potty train themselves before the parent was ready, I just got irritated. I thought, "How is that even a problem?? They are so lucky!" But I'm changing my tune. I'm still recovering from 6 months of cleaning poop out of underwear, I'm not sure I'm ready to take it on again. I know I need to capitalize on this momentum, but I'm just so tired. These pictures crack me up!

Labor Day

This blog of mine is so predictable. Sometimes I think of writing something thought provoking, or something that would let the whole blogosphere know my inner-most thoughts. But then I remind myself what this blog is for. It's for our family history, so it reads like a chronological journal. (Is there any other kind?) I don't want to be reading our blog book 50 years from now and think, "Why in the world did I write about that???" Although, I'll probably do that anyway. I guess time will tell. I'll save that stuff for my memoirs that will make me rich and famous one day, and you can have a regular ol' post about what we did over Labor Day Weekend.

We went to St. George!! Hooray! I felt like I was seeing SG with new eyes for some reason. Maybe it was because I was so homesick. Suddenly the weather was better than I remember, the scenery was more beautiful, the shopping was better, I even missed seeing bats in the early evening. Didn't even realize I found them endearing! Shocking!

I'm not going to try and match captions up with pictures, but in no particular order we stayed up late and girl-talked, had Sunday dinner with everyone, went shopping for clothes and home-decor. As a tangent, all us girls talked about how we never feel so poor as when we go shopping. Oh money. The boys took the kids to the splash park, we hiked the DIXIE rock, we had an adults date and got an actual babysitter that you pay for! (Total splurge for us), watched movies, ate good food, you know the usual stuff. The only downfalls to the entire trip were that we missed my parents who were in Iowa visiting my brother and family, and Gwen cut her hand real good on a mason jar. It was (and continues to be) pretty sad. We were so thankful it happened at Adrienne and Chris' house so that we had access to actual medical supplies (since then we've become more prepared ourselves) and a nurse. I would have had no idea what to do otherwise. It doesn't seem to be healing, so I think we'll have to take her in to get stitches either today or tomorrow. This baby girl is just super accident prone. She ALWAYS had new bruises and scrapes. The day we got home she was brushing her teeth while standing on the toilet lid, fell off and busted her bottom lip wide open. Poor thing.

2 Dollar Tuesday and Swimming

Thanksgiving point was advertising all their venues for $2 every Tuesday in the month of August. The last Tuesday of the month, we managed to sneak down there and enjoy what would have cost us nearly $30 or more for about $7.50. The only problem with $2 Tuesday is that all of us cheapskates are crammed in tighter than we'd like. Richie and I enjoyed some wonderful people watching while the kids saw lots of dinosaur related displays, "dug for fossils", checked out their newest display, "The Science of Listening", and topped it all off with 25 cent cones. Miles is still talking about it. Success!

With no set schedule/play dates/friends around, we're (and my "we're" I mean mostly "Me") going a little crazy. I only have so much motivation and we've been canning up a storm, so when my friend Jenna invited us to her apartment complex to go swimming, we jumped at the opportunity. I warned her that both kids, Miles especially, were fearless in the water. She was such a good sport because we both had our hands full the entire time. Then we ate lunch with her and watched part of a movie. This is how Gwen felt after the outing. I should have taken a picture of Miles bawling I guess. He was so sad to leave. But to make himself feel better, he keeps reminding himself "Maybe we'll go back another day Mom." Jenna snapped picture of me with the kids, which is a rarity, so thank you Dog. :)