School PARTIES!

December 18, 2012
Harrison had a fun Preschool Pajama Party for Christmas!  This kid just warms my heart!  :)

He has the cutest teacher! They had been hard at work learning a Christmas song to sing for all the moms! :)

And of course, he got loaded up with all kinds of Christmas joy!  :) 

December 20, 2012
Jackson got to have a fun present exchange for his school party!  He was not disappointed! 

They also had more sugar than is probably safe ;) and he got some fun loot from his teacher too! 

He really loves his teacher, and she is so good with him! 

So much celebrating! It is so much fun to watch them make these memories! They both made us a gift at school.  Harrison made us a cute picture frame with a picture of him and his hand print! We loved it!  And Jackson painted an awesome ornament for us to add to our tree!  He did a great job! I love these boys!

Tis the Season...

Christmas season just settled right in.  We started with our Ward Christmas Party.... and Santa.  :)  December 8, 2012 

Jackson wanted a Lego set, Lord of the Rings Lego game and a fake deer to use for shooting practice.  (I assume that last one was in anticipation of his 8th birthday in May and his inevitable right of passage into manhood... the long awaited BB Gun. haha.)  He is a funny kid!

Harrison shocked me and everyone in ear-shot by asking for an IPod?!?  Not only was he not getting one, I didn't even know he knew what they were.  Yikes!  He also asked for a remote control jelly fish, remote control whale, and fake grass.  HAHAHA.  It's a good thing he isn't easily disappointed! 

Reagan... fell in love!  Haha.  She just wanted to sit on Santa's lap and smile and pet his beard!  :)  She didn't get upset until I took her away from him.  (Oddly enough, Santa happened to be the same person who had been Elmo on Halloween... Maybe she could sense it!)  ;) 

Miss Reagan has a lot of friends in our ward.  But one of her all time favorites is this guy (In case her face doesn't say it all)...

The Hunt family moved away shortly after this pic was taken.  It was a sad day for all of us!  But Justin will always have a spot in this little girls heart! 

And on a funnier note, our little community has quite the collection of Layton peeps!  It's kind of crazy!  Here are just a few of the LHS alumni in our ward.  :) 

We have the best ward!  I'm not just saying that either, it really is an amazing ward! I wonder if all of us super cool Lancers have anything to do with it!  Hahaha. 

New Bench - New Space

While my dad was here we did squeeze in a project... because we always do.... it's tradition!  ;)  This time what we needed in our home was a table that Reagan and her special chair could sit at with the rest of the family.  (Our dining table was bar height and didn't work for her.)  A neighbor of mine happened to be getting rid of the perfect table.  So I scooped it up... But without chairs to go with it,  needing a serious refinish job, and in my current unmotivated state... it sat and waited.  Enter Dad.  :)  I had a vision for the seating, I really wanted a wrap around bench with storage in it.  And of course, he delivered! :)
December 1, 2012
After a day of hard work, with Patrick's help, here it is unfinished:

Painted:

Glazed:

Installed:

And with said perfect (and still un-refinished) table:

About a month ago, while in UT for TOFW with my mom and sister-in-laws, I happened upon the PERFECT chairs to go with my perfect table and bench.  :) 

I LOVE IT!  And it's so nice for our family to be able to all sit together at the table!  I also love that whenever I get a crazy idea, my dad is usually as excited about figuring out how to do it as I am!  haha.   

ThAnKs to GiVe!

Thanksgiving Day we got to join some friends, the Harris Family and the Hoenes Family, for a wonderful dinner.  We did some eating and then some ATV riding and then more eating!  :)  It was so much fun! 

Later than night, Grandma and Papa Salisbury made it to AZ!  Which meant we needed to have a second Thanksgiving!  Obviously!  ;)  So we did a lot more eating the next day with them and the Christensens!  It was my kind of Thanksgiving!  haha.

We had a fun and relaxing time while Grandma and Papa were here!  They helped us get our Christmas decorating done!  (Which was a huge blessing because I still wasn't my normal self and it probably wouldn't have happened for a while without everybodys help!)

(And we only had one ornament casualty!  Glass and Reagan are not friends! haha.)

We had movie nights...

And we made a gingerbread village...

They turned out very cute!  :)

And of course we had a project in there too. More on that in another post. ;)  It was a great visit!  And we got to keep them for more than a week, which always makes it more fun! 

Thanksgiving felt like a crazy time for me, mostly because I couldn't keep up with life in general.  But it is one of my favorite holidays!  I love that we take the time to just spend time.... no gifts, no added pressure or stress.... just the people you love and food and time.  It makes it easy to be thankful.  Getting to just be with together.  They are all that really matter in the end. I am overwhelmed on a daily basis by how much and how often we are blessed!  It makes the hard things seem less hard.  And it makes simple things seem less simple.  And I'm grateful... endlessly grateful for all of it!  :)

My Excuse!

(November 9, 2012) 

So... the fall was kind of a blur!  I don't remember a lot of October or November!  I know that sounds terrible, but I have a good excuse!  :)  On September 7th, 2012 we found out we are going to add another little person to our family!  :)  Happiness all around, we are VERY excited!!  ...And then a couple weeks later, this sweet new little person inside me started trying to kill me slowly!  hahaha.  It was a very long few months!  I don't want to complain because I know it could be worse... But I will use it to explain my lack of cleaning, cooking, blogging, picture taking, etc.  I'm excited to say that we all survived my 17 weeks of light duty!  :)  ...The house is still recovering... but all things considered... I still call that success!!  :)  

This will be an exciting and interesting adventure!  :)  4 kids seems like a lot!  Especially when I count Reagan as 3 and Patrick is like the teenager I shouldn't have yet!  hahaha.  So what's that?  7.  Ya, it will be an adventure!  

We are due on May 18th, 2013.  The last week of school and the day after Jackson's 8th birthday.  We have impeccable timing. ;)  Although truthfully, the timing wasn't ours.  So it must be meant to be.  :)  

But now that I am mostly up and running again... until I randomly fall asleep... things should be more normal... Until May.  :)  

This is our first look at Baby #4. 

 

HaLlOwEeN!!

Halloween is so fun!  :)  It was pretty low key this year, not quite as busy as usual, which was a bonus!  We carved pumpkins with a group of neighbors and friends, it was a fun night!  The boys both did their own (or at least helped).  Jackson came up with his own design - Harry Potter.  And Harrison chose - a creepy spider.  ;)  They turned out very cool!

When it comes time to pick a costume, it's always fun and surprising to see what they end up as! Because it's never what I would have thought they'd pick! 

Jackson is still very into Star Wars, so he chose Anakin Skywalker. But it's not the Anakin from the movies, it's the Anakin from Clone Wars.  (I don't know what that means exactly, but it was important to him.)  :)  

Harrison really wanted to be a super hero, I thought for sure he would pick the Hulk.  But he finally landed on Thor... with muscles. ;)  They both looked very tough!  

Reagan is fun for me, because she could care less about what she is dressed up as!  :)  (As long as it doesn't slow her down!)  So I found this cute little jumper, and since it was unusually hot for October, she went as a very girly candy corn!  :)  

We had a great time at our ward Halloween Party and Trunk-or-Treat.  Patrick competed this year for the best pulled pork!  It was his first try at it and it turned out VERY good!!  After we ate we set out with the kids to get us some sugar.  :)  They loaded up!  Reagan even got into the fun for the first time this year.  She can't sign "Trick-or-Treat" so she went from car to car signing "Please".  :)  It was very cute!  

There is a super fun couple in our ward that always have the most amazing costumes!  This year was a big hit with the little kids!  They came as Elmo and Abby!  :)  There was a line of kids waiting to have their picture taken with them.  Harrison included!  :) 

Reagan happens to be obsessed with Elmo!!  So naturally she became very possessive of him!  Hahaha.  She didn't like sharing him and it took a LONG time to get her to come back to boring old mom!  ;)

The boys made out like bandits on Halloween night, making their way through our whole neighborhood!  (We had to get a picture with their pumpkins!) 

And Reagan stayed home and ate candy while I handed it out!  :)

It was a really great Halloween!  I loved watching all 3 of them get into it this year!  :) 

What a Bright Idea!

(October 9, 2012) When we moved into our house almost 4 years ago, we had to put in and/or replace a lot of light fixtures because the house had been finished quickly to sale when the original buyers fell through.  So some of the finishes are not real high quality, and a lot of them are on our list of things to upgrade/change.  But one of the biggest problems we had was light in our kitchen!  They put in this old school track lighting, on a vaulted ceiling, and that was it!  (This picture is old, but I forgot to take a before picture and you can sort of see it! :))  

So we decided to start there.  And with the help of a very good friend and an entire day of work...

Patrick and Darin made it look like this!!!  I LOVE LOVE LOVE how it looks!

Love these too!!  :) (I was so excited!  They match my paint color exactly!)

It took us a week or so to get used to all the light!  We all walked around squinting!  Hahaha.  But we are loving being able to see what we're doing!  It's amazing how much better everything looks with good light!  :)  Outstanding!  

Our Visitors.... :/

I haven't had any crazy creature posts in a while... and we've actually been avoiding them sort of.  But this year was a record year for us and rattle snakes.  We had our 5th... yep, there have been 5 in our yard in one season.  I seriously thought with it being the end of September we were past snake season, but I was wrong!  

This one made it all the way to the back patio.  I was folding laundry in our family room at about 11 pm and watching tv.  I could hear rattling (The tv was on and the windows were shut!!... Insert shutter here!) so I got up to turn off the fan thinking it was making the noise.  When that didn't fix it, I started paying closer attention.  That was when I heard the low growling coming from our dogs in the back yard.  I turned the tv off and then I could tell the rattling was coming from out there too. When I looked out the window both dogs were sitting very still about 6 ft. from the window facing me but staring at the bottom of the window. So I ran around to our bedroom back door to get a better view of the patio and sure enough... this is what was sitting there!

All coiled up and MAD! So I ran and got Patrick... I don't do the snake killing at our house!  :)  The dogs were getting way too close and not very calm, so we brought them in!  haha.  

And then Patrick and a friend, Nick, snake wrangled!  We had to get it away from the house and when it uncoiled and started to move... shutter again... we realized how big it was!!  He was a good 4-5 ft. long!!  Which is the biggest one we've seen at home so far!  (And hopefully ever!)

Long battle story short... the snake lost his head!  And his rattles made a nice trophy. :) 

I HATE SNAKES!!!