It's Been A Long Time

It's been over a year so I figure a new post might be a good idea.

Here are some pictures of the girls decorating "gingerbread houses" (actually cardboard boxes I made into houses and decorated with frosting) on Christmas Eve:

You can tell that there was eating as well as decorating involved for Amelia.

Lily thought it was funny that I told her to go ahead and wear CT's Spiderman Apron.

You'll also notice that CT is nowhere to be seen. He put about five pieces of candy on his house and pronounced it a fully finished masterpiece. The girls got a lot more into the details. You can see that they were each determined to place one piece of candy in every single roof shingle. It took some time.

And here is CT one Sunday just being his cute self:

This story has nothing to do with the pictures, but it made me laugh (even though it is bathroom related, so be warned). Amelia is basically potty trained but still has the (daily) occasional accident. Still, she's doing a good job. A funny thing happened on Saturday. She said she needed to go to the bathroom so I took her in there. After a minute of her sitting there with nothing happening she said to me "Mom, you need to tell Dad to fix this toilet because nothing is coming out!".

Bubbles

We tried making a new bubble recipe the other day. This one had Karo syrup in it, and it was great. A lot of messy fun - definitely an outdoor activity!


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Pumpkins

This should have been with Halloween, but I forgot about it. This year we just drew on these mini-pumpkins instead of carving anything. I let the kids just do them however they wanted, and this is what we ended up with:

Lily's Pumpkin



Amelia's Pumpkin



CT's Pumpkin



I think the little faces Lily and CT drew are so adorable. But not as adorable as these faces:

Halloween

These were taken at our ward Trunk-R-Treat. CT is a dragon and the girls are cute little witches.

At The Fair

We went to the Texas State Fair last week. We picked the perfect day. A little bit cool and breezy, but no rain. The day before had been in the nineties with humidity you could practically see. We got into the fair for free because it was "Free Admission with a Cinemark movie ticket stub" day. Tyler went to the theater near our house the night before and found the extra ticket stub we needed lying in the parking lot. A little soggy, but still in tact.

They had a cute petting zoo area with a lot of baby animals, including a huge pig and her litter of 7 piglets which was the kids favorite. Amelia was very enthusiastic about feeding and petting any animal she could get her hands on, and even got CT to start petting animals, which is very unlike him. Here they are with some little greedy goats.



They had this giant cut-out of "Big Tex" that made for a good fair picture.


My mom was visiting us so she got to spend a day at the fair with us. It was great to have an extra set of hands there...actually the big kids didn't want anything to do with their parents pretty much and grandma did all the work.


They had a "panning for gold" exhibit we tried out.


I think they called this the "texas sized sand box" or something. It was a hug pile of sand with buckets and shovels for the kids to use. They had a good time there.


All in all, it was a good day. We managed to leave having seen a bunch of free shows and not riding a single ride. We even kept the fair food consumption down to corndogs and one funnel cake. Much better than last year, when Tyler wanted to try nearly every fried food novelty they were offering. I think that indulgence has cured him of fried food curiosity for a very long time.

If any one wants to come out and join us at the fair next year plan to be here during the first two weeks of October!

Hurray for Primary

I'd like to say a "thank you" to the Church's primary program. CT has been in Primary for almost 10 months now, and I continue to be surprised that he is actually learning things there. I have to admit that taking advantage of daily opportunities to discuss gospel principles is not really my strongest attribute. We say family prayer, read the scriptures every night before the kids go to bed, and have Family Home Evening, but other than that I don't think a lot about making sure I'm teaching my children major points of doctrine every day. I'm thankful that primary is filling in some of my gaps.

Last night for FHE we sang the song "The First Article of Faith" a couple of times. Then we discussed the fact that we believe in Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost. We were talking a little bit about each of these separately. When we got to the Holy Ghost CT said "You can't see the Holy Ghost, but you can hear him." Thank you, Sharing Time! Thank you, Sunbeam teachers! And then, in true CT style, he said something that cracked us up. He said "Now if everyone around here would stop being so noisy so I could hear the Holy Ghost!"

Puppy Dog Tales

C.T. was saying the blessing on the food at dinner last night. He is a very thankful child who always includes a long and varied list of things he's grateful for in every prayer. Last night he added a new one. He said "And thank you for my puppy". After the "amens" Tyler said "Did you say 'thank you for my puppy?' Because you don't have a puppy." C.T. replied "I know Dad. I was saying thank you for the puppy I'm going to get some day".