Busy

When I was younger I remember my parents saying things like how they wanted life to just slow down for a little while, and how they just didn't have enough time.  I have to admit since I have been married and had kids I hadn't felt that way.  I remember when it was just me and James I would have to find things to do, and Doug would constantly tell me I needed a hobby.  I would read tons of books, and often had to read books over again just for something to do.  Well, sadly/happily those days are over.  Now it is difficult to find time for all the things I need to do, let alone all the things I want to do.  And now I have hobbies, that I have no time for.  So I often find myself dreaming of simpler times and wondering when things are going to slow down.  Blogging must be pretty low on my priority list since I really haven't been keeping up with our lives, and that is sad to me because I feel like there is so much I miss out on, and then when I finally get around to it I have either forgotten or don't want to have a huge-long post.  It is also sad because I love going back and reading old posts and remembering cute things my kids have done in the past.  So anyway, here are a few of the things we have been up to in the past month.

This month our Relief Society activity was about FHE.  I have to admit we have never been very good at this.  I get discouraged every time we try because we spend most of the time yelling at the kids to sit down and be quite.  But I decided we really need to be better at it.  This project has been on my to-do list for months so I decided to get it done and really try to have more consistent, thought-out FHEs.  And the past two weeks we have actually done this have gone very well.  The first week I read "You Are Special" to the boys and then we made felt puppets.  They loved it.  Last week Doug told the story of Ammon then we played a game where we had to try to scatter the sheep (throw all the stuffed animals out of the fence) while "Ammon" tried to stop us.  Again the boys loved it.

 Lately the boys have been really into water balloons.  Mikey is constantly wanting to "go to the dollar store and get water balloons".  If we have balloons in the house I have to hide them or they are always asking me to fill them up.  James always immediately takes them out back and pops them.  Mikey will play with his for hours until James eventually gets it and pops it.  I have had some "jumbo" balloons hidden for just the perfect day.  And that day was a few weeks ago.  It was so warm.  So I gave the balloon to Doug and sent the boys out back.  They had a blast.

James, Mikey and the "jumbo" balloon

Another thing James has been obsessed with is Scout.  This is actually Mikey's toy, but James found a Scout cartoon on Netflix and has been so excited about it ever since.  When he first discovered the cartoon (Phonics Farm) he wanted to watch it all the time.  One night we told him he could watch it in the morning after he woke up.  So he went to bed and was so excited to wake up.  After a little while he came out of his room and turned all the lights in the house off and told Doug and I to go to bed.  I asked James why and he simply responded "Scout" then went to bed.  Doug later explained to me what he was doing.  When you are a kid the best way to make morning to come faster is to go to sleep.  Then it practically takes no time at all.  So since then Scout does everything with us.  He goes in the car, he takes walks, James pushes him him in the stroller, he sits in Billy's high chair to eat.  Here are a few things James has done with him.

James giving Scout a bath in the sink

James having a snack with Scout

Billy has been doing a ton lately too, but I will post about him soon because he is turning 8-months-old next week!  But this is a picture I took this morning.  Silly boy.

How I found Billy sleeping this morning.

Finally a project Doug and I have been working on for months!  When we got home from Christmas there were toys everywhere!  I have always had a pretty unremarkable storage system for our toys, just diaper boxes on the floor and small plastic containers on a bookshelf.  Needless to say our "playroom" has always been sort of a mess.  After Christmas I was looking for a better system and came across this from Ikea and basically fell in love with it.  I showed it to Doug who responded, "I could make that for cheaper."  And I said, "OK, do it!"  So using our gift money from Christmas he did.  I had him add a long slot on the end for things like race car tracks and stick horses.  He was excited because he would get to use several of his new tools he got for his birthday and Christmas.  Including: the dado head on his table saw, his paint guns, his nail gun, and his new air hose.  

Cutting the dados in one of the sides

About a month ago we finally made it to Ikea to buy the bins and look at the actual shelf, we decided ours is better of course.  And of course we NEVER want to go back to the Denver Ikea again!  It was a zoo.  Finally last week the shelf was complete and we put it in place in the "playroom".  I used my Silhouette to make labels for all the bins.  And it is everything I hoped it would be, except I had planed for all the train tracks to fit in the blue bin, but they didn't so we had to shuffle things around a bit to make it work.  But I am loving it.

The completed toy shelf

Our "playroom" completed

Welcome to the playroom. No clutter on the floor!

All the toys put where they go

The bins just slide out and back in.
It makes it super easy to clean up, and
ask the boys to only get out one at a time.

Now Doug's next project is to make a chest for the dress-up clothes and we can get rid of the falling apart cardboard box they are currently in!  

Yesterday I had a bunch of ladies from the ward over for our cookbook club (Doug thinks I am a nerd for that) and they all loved how they kids kept most of the toys in the fence!  I loved bragging about my handy husband and showing off all his work.  And I was pretty pleased to show off our new playroom.    The icing on the cake...Mikey put himself down for a nap while everyone was there.  Doesn't get much easier than that!

Love.

I have 4 boys that I absolutely LOVE!  They make me so happy and I feel so lucky to have them all in my life.  Here are a few pictures from the past few weeks:

He was so tired, and sick that he just fell asleep!
He loves this chair and when he gets grumpy in the evening
I just pop him in the chair and he is content for awhile.

Mikey is at such a fun age.  He sings constantly, wants his
picture taken all the time, and loves to be involved with
everything!  He is definitely two!  He is stubborn and
wants to do everything himself.

These three boys LOVE each other.  They really are each
others best friends.

James asked me if he could play angry birds.  I was busy
with Billy so I told him to ask Dad.  The next thing I knew
the two of them had come up with this fun game. 

Mikey loves to help.  Mostly he wants to make sure it
tastes right every step of the way.  

 Billy turned 7 months on the 13th.  He is still so cute, easy, and so much fun.  I don't know how much he weighs but he is still a chunk.  He has been sick most of the past month so it hasn't been the greatest for us, but I think we are finally getting over it.

He was hard to get his picture this time because
he just wanted to roll over and eat those letters!

Then the blanket had to come to!

We had such a fun Valentines Day this year.  Doug and I don't usually get into it very much but this year we had kids who could have fun with it so I did!  

Heart cupcakes for James' class.  He always brings
cupcakes to his class parties because he LOVES to
bake and I LOVE to bake with him.

Chocolate covered strawberries for his teachers.  They were
pretty excited about these.  Also I made the box they
are packaged in!  I have to say I am LOVING my Silhouette.

Also with my Silhouette I decided to decorate the house.
I NEVER do this, but it was a lot of fun.  I cut out a ton of
different hearts and glued them onto year and hung them
up.  The boys thought this was a lot of fun.  

Finally one of my favorite projects I have done recently is this picture frame.  I originally made this for the boys room, but decided to put it on the mantle for now since it turned out so cute.  I just got some prints made of the boys together then used this quote that I LOVE.  It says "Sometimes being a brother is even better than being a Superhero."

JMB Ranch

In every house we have lived in we have had a "toy room".  A place out of the way to keep all the toys where they kids could play and we didn't have to keep the toys in the boys room.  It has been wonderful.  However in this last move our house now basically consists of 1 big room and the bedrooms.  So we set up a play area in the corner of the big room.  After our house was all set up Doug had a genius idea.  He wanted to build a little fence around the toys.  He liked this idea because it would contain the toys in one area of the house, I liked the idea because I thought it would be really cute.  Well 4 months later and the fence is done.  I give you:

JMB Ranch

 For Christmas I got my Silhouette machine and this was my first vinyl project.  I am pretty proud of how it turned out.  Especially since I had to make the cowboys myself.

6 Months!

I can't believe Billy is already six months old!  It seems like he was just born.  I am so busy with the other two that I am in no hurry for him to grow up.  

Here are his stats:

Height: 27 inches 75th percentile

Weight: 16lbs 6 oz 40th (ish) percentile

Head: (I think it was around 17 inches)

 Some things about Billy at 6 months:

• He sits up on his own and LOVES it
• He loves to eat, he eats peas, squash, carrots and rice cereal. 
• He LOVES his brothers and likes to watch them play and laughs and laughs
• He likes baths
• He is still the easiest baby ever
• He LOVES having his diaper changed and laughs and laughs
• He likes to yell and scream, just for fun

 Mikey loves that he can sit up now and always wants him to "tip over".  He also likes to play "monster trucks" with Billy so when he is sitting up Mikey always goes over and rolls on him to knock him over.  The other day Billy was just sitting in the other room yelling, so I told Mikey to go play with him and he decided to play bowling with him.  He got a bowling ball and used Billy as the bowling pin.  Billy thought it was hilarious!

 Billy loves making this face a lot now.  It is pretty cute.

 The other two have been up to a lot also.  James is amazing and always blows me away with the things he comes up with.  He loves to watch bowling videos or marble videos on YouTube and then tries to recreate them with what he has around.  He often comes up with some very cool marble runs.  That he builds by himself.

This marble run has two different paths. 

This one was really impressive to both Doug and I.
James was pretty proud of it too, he came out to get
Doug and show him.  Then when I got home from the
store he had to show me too. 

 Finally James and I bake all the time.  It is one of his favorite things.  So for the Broncos game yesterday we made this cake.  It turned out pretty cool looking, but didn't taste very good.  So James mostly ate the frosting.

As for Doug and I, we were both given new callings.  Doug was moved up to teach the 4-year-olds, and stay with James, but they split the class so he only has half of them which is much easier.  It has caused a bit of a stir since all the kids still want to be with him.  He is also going to be the Wolf den leader which he is pretty excited about.  I am no longer teaching Relief Society, which I was surprisingly sad about.  It was good for me to have to study the lessons and got me out of my comfort zone.  Now I am the primary music leader.  At first I was really nervous about this because it has always just seemed like a really hard calling to me.  Even though I love working with kids, it seems like the music leader has to be very enthusiastic and outgoing to keep those kids attention.  Today was my first day and I feel like I did a pretty good job and an pretty excited for it now.  One of the teachers even asked if I had done this calling before.  The primary is huge but the kids seem pretty good.  James had a hard time.  He was doing really well during sharing time, but as soon as he saw Mom he just wanted to go up with her, and because he couldn't he had a bit of a meltdown.  But he was better than last week and I think as he gets used to seeing me in there it will get better and better.

Christmas

This year we had a very busy, very fun, and not very relaxing week.  Our vacation started the week before Christmas because my sister was getting married on the 19th in Salt Lake.  James had a Christmas party at school on the 15th.  We loaded up the car, went to see James' program, which was super cute and hit the road.  We drove 8 hours to Cortez that night, stayed in a hotel and finished the drive the next day. The first couple of days we stayed with Doug's sister in Orem.  The boys loved playing with their cousins and it was fun to visit.  Saturday Jordyn went through the temple and it was neat to be there for that.  Sunday my parents rented a house and we all moved in.  

James at his school party.  The girl in the red shirt is his
favorite girl Mikiley.  He likes to hold her hand.

Monday was Jordyn's big day.  It was an early day and a cold day, but everything went perfectly.  And she was so happy.  Lucky for us we were able to take our boys to their Aunt Amber again so we were just able to enjoy the morning.  It was a good time for the whole family to be together before Chad and Shannon move to Denmark next month.  

Jordyn and Ben, the newlyweds 

The Family-only missing Alison, Jackson and June

 After the wedding things were supposed to slow down for a few days so we could relax.  That didn't really happen for some reason.  There was still shopping to do and of course bowling!  James LOVES bowling.  He is obsessed with it.  So we decided while we were in civilization we would take the boys bowling.  They LOVED it.  James was so animated and did well taking turns.  He probably would have stayed all day.  The only tantrum came when it was time to leave.

James and his "red" bowling

The next few days we just hung out with family.  We were FINALLY able to go to the Draper temple.  We hadn't been to a session there yet and it was really neat to go back and see the temple Doug had spent 2 years building.
Finally Christmas morning!  Since James and Mikey don't really understand Christmas and Santa yet we made sure to send a letter to him to let him know what the boys wanted.  Santa brought James a play kitchen and Mikey Backyardagain dolls.  Santa definitely did a good job picking out their toys.

James and Mikey playing with the kitchen

Now you will probably notice a slight change in the quality of the pictures from here on out.  That is because I got SPOILED for Christmas this year.  Doug was really sneaky (having his parents buy, wrap, and bring my present) and surprised me with a new DSLR camera.  I was pretty shocked and a little mad since I only got him underwear, jeans and a new frying pan which will mostly be used by me.  Not only did Doug spoil me with the camera, but my parents gave me a nice laminator (which I had been wanting but didn't want to spend the money on it) and Doug's parents gave me a Silhouette cutting machine.  Yes I would say I was super spoiled this year.  

James and Mikey "showing" Billy how to use his toy

Sometime during the morning James and Mikey ran upstairs fighting over a cannon ball that went to Mikey's pirate ship and James gave Mikey his first bloody nose.  It really seems like all those two do these days is fight.  It got on the carpet but lucky for us my Mom is good at getting blood out of carpet, you would think she raised a few boys herself. 

Remnants of the bloody nose

Mikey just being cute

I would say the most enjoyed present of the day was Billy's.  He got to have peas for the first time!  And oh man was he excited.  The first spoonful went in his mouth.  He sat there for a minute thinking the got this huge grin on his face and the peas all came right back out.  

Billy enjoying peas

 After Christmas lunch we went to Doug's sister's again to see his family and have Christmas dinner.  Mikey got his favorite toy of the day which was a penguin pillow pet.  He was so excited when he opened that.  I think because both James and Billy had already gotten stuffed Dogs and he was feeling a little left out.

Mikey with his penguin

 Billy and Adam got these teething balls which they both love.  They were laying next to each other chewing on their balls.  Adam dropped his, then reached over and took Billy's.  It was pretty cute.

Adam and Billy with their teething balls.

 After dinner we drove back to the house to pack up.  The time went way to fast and we had to drive the entire way the next day so Doug could be back to work on Tuesday.  The drive went better than expected and our van was so full of stuff there was no room to move around while we were driving.  But we made it and this week we have just been relaxing and playing with all our new toys.  Me mostly with my camera and it is easy when I have the cutest subjects to take pictures of.

Santa dropped this off on Christmas Eve and James figured out
how he could use the slide Doug made for his bunk bed as a
Bowling ally.  He plays this constantly.

STRIKE!

Grammy and Grandad gave the boys this Hot Wheels track
Mikey loves it. 

Just look at those eyes!  

The happiest baby in the world.

Playing with the penguin Grandma and Grandpa got him.

He really wants to learn to crawl.  I have seen him try to push
himself up on his knees a lot lately.

Mikey's "silly face".  According to Mikey this is the only way to
make a silly face.  

Overall it was a really fun week, but we are all happy to be home and relaxing.

Life Lately

We have been super busy this past month, and continuing to be super busy these next couple of weeks. I am pretty excited for January because then maybe life will slow down a bit so I can dig into my pile of things I have wanted to get done but haven't had the time.  So I though I would just do a quick update on what we have been doing lately.

Doug: Doug's birthday was just before Thanksgiving.  We had a really fun day.  He mostly got tools, well he ONLY got tools for his birthday.  He got to go pick out a new sander at Lowe's and go golfing.  Mikey pretty much planned the day.  He told me Dad wanted Pizza, Cake and Golfing ball.  And he was right that is exactly what Dad wanted.  He also successfully held his 2nd annual Pinewood Demolition Derby in Colorado over Thanksgiving.  Go here to see a highlight video.  Now he works a lot, and LOVES playing with his boys.  They have so much fun with their Dad.  Every night James demands that Doug "Snuggles" with them.  Really there is absolutely zero snuggling going on.  Last night Doug had me read them their story so he didn't have to disappoint them when he didn't stay to snuggle.  After the story James yelled "Dad, you're Snuggling!"

Natalie: I have been having a ton of fun with my boys.  We drove to Colorado for Thanksgiving, just me and the 3 boys, no Dad.  That was an adventure.  Not something I am wanting to repeat anytime soon.  I also was given the "opportunity" to play my violin in church last week.  Not an experience I would seek out but am willing to do when asked.  I actually enjoyed having something to practice and a reason to play again.  It wasn't anything spectacular but it was pretty fun.

James:  James has been busy, busy busy!  He is always inventing new games, mostly with marbles and bowling.  He also LOVES to cook lately.  Last night he helped me peel, cut and cook the potatoes for our mashed potatoes.  He always wants to make cookies and cupcakes.  Last night we were making these pretzel/hug/M&M treats my MIL always makes around Christmas.  I had Doug and the boys unwrapping the hugs while I ran to the store to get pretzels.  When I got home James yelled, "HI MOM! WE'RE BAKING!"  So cute.  He has also been making tons of progress at school.  He talks all the time, he always asks us to "come play" and makes tons of eye contact.  His teacher had the OT do a test the other day on his eye-contact and he said he made eye-contact 15 times in 30 minutes.  That is pretty good for him.  

This is pretty much how the boys room looks every morning.
James is always doing something fun in there.  He never gets bored.

Mikey: Mikey has been our comic relief.  He is always saying something to crack me up.  And he talks CONSTANTLY!  He also wants to do EVERYTHING James is doing.  It is pretty cute how much those two play together, but it can get pretty annoying how much those two fight with each other.  He is still super easy and basically puts himself down for a nap.  He also wants to be my big helper, especially with Billy.

I was trying to take Billy's picture and Mikey had to get his
camera to help.  Such a cutie!

 William:  Billy is 5 months old now!  He is still big, and I realized just how big he must look when I am holding him because I was watching someone else holding him and said how big he looks in her arms, the consensus was that he looks even bigger when I hold him.

He always wants to be watching what is going on with his brother so the second I set him on the floor he is on his tummy so he can see better.  It is pretty nice not having to push tummy time!  He is learning to suck his thumb which isn't great.  He also has started squirming when we are holding him, trying to get out of our hands.  

Billy watching Mikey play with marbles