Cassie's Birthday

Cassie turned two on the 27th of November. And boy, are we seeing it! But, we love her anyway. She has so much personality! She loves to be silly and make everyone laugh. She sings to herself ALOT and is getting over her shyness around women, but the men...well, she still hesitates around them. I won't be trying to talk her out of that anytime soon. We had a birthday party at our house before we left for Thanksgiving at Grandma & Grandpa Miller's house. We didn't do the birthday cake thing, because the cake never gets eaten, and we were going out of town for a few days. Instead we had birthday ice cream! This was such a great idea, we just might do this more often...

Cassie opening her princess wipes. I know, I know. Wipes? But, I'm practical. And she loves that the container has princesses all over it.

I love these pictures. They are of her reaction when we pulled out her last present... a shopping cart!

Cassie doesn't look too thrilled at the fact that Jason and Lexi like the shopping cart, too!

The Craziness!

It's that time of year, again! I can't believe how fast time is flying by. We try every year to take Christmas pictures of the kids. This time we tried to do them as a family. It did not go very well. We had some happy times and not so happy times, as you can tell. I don't know if there was one picture in the whole group that everyone was happy in. Ugh...why do we put ourselves through this!

Happy Halloween!!!

We had a lot of fun this year on Halloween. We carved our pumpkins the day before, so they wouldn't be wilted by the time Halloween actually got here. Cassie took to trick-or-treating like a fish to water. She thought it was the coolest thing that all you had to do was knock on someone's door, and they would oogle at how cute you were and give you candy. i took the girls around the neighborhood, but Jason only lasted for four houses! He said that he had some candy and he was really nervous about all of the dogs in our neighborhood! haha!

The girls love their tutus and headbands I made.

I think they'll go in the dress up box for year-round fun!

Slacker!

What a slacker! Okay, so we have established that I am not very good at updating this blog. So, every few months or so, I'll get to it. This fall has been pretty busy. The kids started school at park View Elementary in Payson. After a couple of weeks, we switched to a charter school, C.S. Lewis Academy. Then after a few weeks of that, we started homeschooling. We have now been doing it for about six weeks. For the most part, we are really enjoying it. I really didn't think that would be something I would do and enjoy, but so far, it's working out really well. There are obviously days that the kids just don't want to do school, or Mom has had enough, so we mix things up a bit and get out of the house. In fact today we did math at wal-mart. I taught the kids about name brands vs. store brands and comparison shopping. Usually, it is very structured, as we are doing an on-line school with all of the materials a regular public school has, and marking attendance and progress. It is a decent amount of work for me, but I think it is worth it. :)

Here are some pictures of an activity we did with our new on-line school.

(We went with a group of home-schooled cousins.)

These are pictures of the kids' first day of school at Park View Elementary.

CRAZY SUMMER!!!

So, It has been one hectic summer for us, which I'm sure it has been for most people. After three and a half years living in Provo, we decided to move. We moved down to Payson, so we could be closer to J.J.'s work. (He had been commuting from Provo to Payson to work every day.) So, now that School has started, maybe I can be better at updating this blog. The kids sarted school two weeks ago. Things are going okay. I guess every kid has the emotional meltdowns and mood swings at the beginning of school, right? (And Moms do, too, right? ha, ha)

So, sometime during our move, we lost the cord that hooks our camera up to the computer, so we're going to have like 300 pictures from this summer to put on here. We just found it yesterday, but I've been swamped with other things the last day or two. I'll post some pictures up later on.

These are some pictures of us at a Rock and Gem Show a week or so ago. We had a lot of fun. The kids loved it!

There isn't too much going on right now. We all are hoping that Spring will come back to Provo. We are sad that those wonderful Spring days of a couple of weeks ago are gone and replaced with snow showers every other day.

We have had a few changes to our lives recently. Cassie has decided to become a big girl over night. She is running everywhere, and talks almost non-stop. Granted, most of the things she says are not real words...but her vocabulary grows everyday. Her biggest news is that she now sleeps in a toddler bed (she kept trying to climb in and out of her crib).

Lexi and Jason are both doing very well in school. Lexi reads the newspaper with Dad alot, and Jason reads everything on the computer monitor when Dad or Mom get on the computer. It's kind of interesting that they have their preferences in their reading material. But, everyone in our family LOVES to read books. unfortunately, books can be found on almost every surface in our home. Lexi, Jason, and Cassie drag their books all over the house (and sometimes I do, too).

Lexi's Birthday!

These are some pictures of Lexi's fairy birthday party. She had so much fun! I can't believe she is seven years old!

Cassie is so silly! Lately she has been climbing into the teeniest boxes, trying to make herself fit!

We just laugh and tell her how cute she is!

My kids are so cute! Not the best pictures in the world. In fact, there really weren't very many good ones at all. I should have had Amy, my sister-in-law, the professional photographer come take pictures of us. Oh, well. Life goes on.

Cassie playing Peek-a-boo!

I am a little behind, but in all honesty, I don't think I'm doing too horrible. The month of December was... what can I say... FUN! We were all sick with this terrible cough for almost the whole month! It was awful, but Christmas came, and made us all better! We had toys, toys, candy, and more toys littering our house for days! I love that! Yeah, right! :) I get to a point where I just want to throw everything away, including the new junk we got! So, this week, I have been working on deep cleaning my house, one room at a time. I have polished off the kitchen, and yesterday I was going to start on the office, but... well.... the computer is in here, see. And things just don't always turn out the way I had planned. Today I had the same idea, but... as you can see... I'm here again. Plus the kids didn't have school today, so I never get done what I plan when they are home. It's just all crazy! But, we love life at our house!