Jonathan turns 9!

Jonathan had been looking forward to his birthday for a long time.  He was so excited, and he even knew exactly what he was going to get.  He was partly right.

He went to a birthday party for a friend a couple of weeks before.  He had so much fun that I decided we should do a friend party for him.  I've never really done friend parties, but if I were to do it for anyone, it would be Jonathan.  I was kind of stressed out about it, more than I was about Christmas.  I didn't take any pictures, but it went well and I'm so glad we did it.  He had a lot of fun. 

His birthday was on FHE so we had the whole evening.  We were even able to Skype with my parents so they could watch him open their present.

 I found this cool fort construction kit at Shopko.

He just knew that he would get Lego Endor for his birthday.  He had been looking forward to it for so long.  I was just going to get him Endor, but one of his friends gave him Bespin(the green one) for his birthday so I decided to give him Yavin 4(the brown one) too so he could have all three.  He loved them.

Then we sang Happy Birthday and blew out candles.

He saw the 9 candle at the store and really wanted to use it.  Makes blowing it out a lot easier.

Then we got to work building a fort frame.

 Of course we had to build the rocket frame first.

 It was kind of a tight fit, as you can see.

They still loved it though.  We tried the igloo fort next, much more roomy.

We didn't have to time to go to the Planetarium that day, but we went Wednesday while Nathaniel was at YM.  I think that worked out the best.  They had lots of fun and I was able to do a little last minute shopping there too.

Happy Birthday, Jonathan!

Getting Ready for Christmas

I love December 1st.  It's the day I decorate for Christmas.  This year, it fell on a Saturday so it was a perfect day for all of us to decorate.  I use the word "all" very loosely, it was mostly me.  But Jaaromy helped with some of the outside stuff.  We normally put up the tree on the following Family Night or weekend, which ever happens first.  But Jaaromy didn't like the idea of putting up our tree again.  I think it's a very pretty tree, but I'll admit, it's kind of a lot of work.  So, we decided to buy a prelit tree.  They were kind of expensive, but we found the perfect one at the third store we tried.

It's a little taller, but it's also a little wider.  We had to move the couch over even farther and there isn't much room left.  I'm happy with it, and it was definitely easier to put up.  So, we now have a 7 foot unlit tree that we don't need, if you know anyone.

I had plans for a photo shoot for Christmas pictures, but it fell through.  So I decided, somewhat at the spur of the moment, to take pictures of the kids myself.

 Brigham was pretty cooperative, thankfully.

 Like I said, it was spur of the moment.  I might have had them change clothes if I had thought about it.

 Jaaromy was asleep on the couch when I took this.  He snorted a little in his sleep and made Nathaniel smile.  Thanks Dad!

 It's not easy getting a good picture of the boys together, but we make it work.

Since it's a little easier to get us to hold still, I was able to use a longer exposure for us.  I'm really happy with how it turned out.

Brigham was nice enough to hold perfectly still for this longer exposure.  Seriously, I didn't think he would do it.

I had a lot of fun playing with my camera and the Christmas lighting.

These are some of my favorites.

Merry Christmas!

So Many Christmas Programs

I figure now is a good time to get started on the Christmas posts.  With another week before school is back in, I'll have plenty of time, right?

The first program of the season was Nathaniel's first concert with the Granite Junior Youth Symphony.  I'm excited for him to be able to play with them.

He did a great job!  It was the best group he's ever played with.

A week later he performed with the Kennedy Concert Orchestra.  He's only one of two 7th graders in it.  Although more will join next semester.  They did great too.  And can I just say, Nathaniel's two little brothers did a great job sitting quietly at both concerts.

A week later was Jonathan's program.

 He was trying to find me and was getting a little concerned when he couldn't.

His friend Nathan pointed me out to him.  He was so excited to see me, he kept smiling at me throughout his songs.  He sang the songs too, he did such a good job.  They even sung a song with the lights off using flashlights.

The next day was Brigham's.  I'm so glad it wasn't at the same time as Jonathan's.

 All the special needs classes sang a song with some help from 6th graders.  Brigham is the one in the back covering his ears.  He just doesn't like the gym.  It was still fun though.

After the program we went back to his classroom for a Christmas Party.

 Even though he doesn't look it, he was having a great time eating popcorn.

 Santa even visited Brigham's classroom.  He had a stocking full of toys and candy for each of the kids in the class.  I had to tear Brigham away from his popcorn so he could see him.

I love his teacher and all the aides, they are so wonderful.

Bring on Christmas!

I finally did it!

In case you didn't catch my Facebook post, I finally cut my hair.  Once I started sitting on it I knew it was time for it to go.  The only hard part really was making the phone call.  I hate making phone calls, which is pretty much why my hair was so long in the first place.  Typically, I would grow it for about two years and then cut it.  Well, two years turned into four and a half and as a result, my hair was longer than it had ever been in my life.

I had been itching to cut my hair for quite some time and I knew I was close to making that phone call, so I tried to be creative with my hair in it's last days.

There are definitely perks to having long hair.

But, as I said, I was accidentally sitting on it.  I'm willing to put up with some of the work that comes from long hair, but apparently, that is my limit.  So, I made the phone call.  My friend from Jr. High does hair and I was happy to have the excuse to visit with her for a while.

She did a great job, I think.  Just the way I like it, and it's not too short either.  It feels great.  So bouncy!

It kind of surprised me how much hair she cut off.  It was heavy too.  Although to be fair, it was wet.  But still.

I even mailed it off to Lock of Love in a timely manner.  My last pony tail never made it to the mailbox, sadly.  I don't mind growing it out to donate.  Fast growing hair is a blessing and I'm happy to share it.

Bouncing Off the Walls

Brigham's class went on a field trip to Bouncing Off the Walls a few weeks ago and his teacher asked me if I would like to come.  So I did.  When I got to his class I saw him at the top of the climbing mountain.  As soon as he saw me he covered his ears and wouldn't look at me.  He warmed up eventually and as we were getting on the bus together he kept smiling at me.  I think he was excited that I was coming with him on a bus ride.

I think he was in heaven.  He started out in the bounce house.  He quickly got tired of that though and went to the slide.

So fast!  He loved it and went down several times.

Next was a type of obstacle course.

 First a hole to climb through.

 Then a tunnel.

Then a climbing wall.

Then a slide.

Another smaller hole.  Then a forest of air-filled cylinders.

Then out another hole at the end.

He went through this many many times.  I had to go with him too because the foot holds on the climbing wall were really worn out and it was hard for him to keep his feet on them.  By the 15th time through or so he figured out how to do it without my help.  Thankfully.

We took a break from the obstacle course and went down the slide together a few times.  That was pretty fun.  I learned to always slide down on the right side.  I slid on the left side and ended up on the edge and skinned my elbow.  It's okay though, it's for the children.

There was also a basketball/football field.

He loved to run across it.  When he figured out he was supposed to put the ball in the basket, that's all he wanted to do and any kid who wasn't careful with their ball would find it snatched away by Brigham and put in the basket.

All the kids had fun, but I think Brigham enjoyed it the most.  He didn't even want to stop for snacks.

 We were also the last ones out.

 We had so much fun.  I'm so glad I could share this with him.

And I think this is my new favorite picture.

St. George Trip

We wanted to plan a trip for Fall Break.  Our original plan was to go to Arizona and see Meteor Crater, the Lowell Observatory, and Sunset Volcano.  On the way home we'd stop by the Grand Canyon.  It was a little ambitious and by far the longest drive we have ever taken.  It turns out that it was a little too ambitious and we decided to just go to St. George.  We were going to go over UEA weekend but it turned out that I had a concert that week.  So we had to go two weeks later when the boys had a Friday off which was also the day after Halloween.

If you remember from my last post, Jonathan was sick on Halloween.  He was feeling much better the next day, but unfortunately Nathaniel caught whatever it was that he had and stayed home from school on Thursday.  We were planning on leaving as soon as the boys were all home from school.  With Nathaniel home, we could leave earlier - assuming he was feeling better.

We decided to go anyway with the assumption that he would get over it quickly like Jonathan did.  For the most part, it went okay.  He had a little bottle of Sprite that he would drink from every 15 minutes and that seemed to work.  Around Nephi, he decided to try some goldfish crackers.  That turned out to be a bad idea and we had to pull over.  He went back to drinking his Sprite and we didn't have any more problems.

Somewhere in the middle of Utah, I took a turn driving because Jaaromy was getting sleepy.  Just after Beaver I realized that we were almost out of gas.  I really didn't want to turn around and go back to Beaver so we kept going.  Apparently, there is nothing between Beaver and Parowan.  Jaaromy checked his phone for gas stations and it said there wasn't one for 16 miles.  I was getting really nervous.  I had been getting sleepy too, but both of us were wide awake now.  Every little murmur in the car made me think that we were running out of gas.  We started to make plans for if/when we ran out of gas.  We could see some lights in the distance and we were really hoping that we could make it that far.  As we got closer they were definitely gas station lights.  Apparently Jaaromy's iphone app didn't know about this gas station.  We made it all the way.  We were so relieved!

We stopped in Cedar City for dinner at Wendy's and Nathaniel was disappointed that he couldn't eat with us.  He didn't feel like eating at all, but he was still disappointed.  We promised him that we would eat at Wendy's again on our trip.

We got to St. George just in time to go to bed.  I had originally reserved a family suite but for whatever reason it didn't take so they put us in two adjoining rooms which actually worked out pretty well for us.  I assumed that I'd have to share a bed with Brigham since that's what I had to do on our last trip, but he was perfectly happy to share a bed with Jonathan.  So, the boys were all in one room while Jaaromy and I were in another.  Pretty sweet.

It was warmer in St. George than it was at home but the mornings were still chilly.  Jonathan was dying to go swimming, but we said it was too cold.  Also, we happened to be sharing the hotel with a group of band students who were always in the pool it seemed.  We told him we would try later.

Our first stop after breakfast was Dinosaur Discovery.  I didn't know what to expect, but it turned out to be really fun.

 We came at the same time as a group of students from Dixie College so we looked around the lobby a bit while we waited for them to watch a video and move on.

 While we waited for the students, Brigham and I looked around the gift shop.  He played with this dinosaur head and was saying "rawr".  It was so cute that I was totally going to buy it for him before we left.  On our way out, I showed it to him again and he barely looked at it.  (sigh)  No dinosaur head for us.

 We watched a short video telling about the site where and how they found all the fossils.  Then we went to a room with a bunch of kids activities.

 There were a lot of fun things for the kids to do.

They had an impressive collection of fossils.

An actual skin impression!  I thought that was pretty neat.

This is the dinosaur character from the video we watched.

Brigham followed the footprints all around the room.  He'd start to get far away but I knew he would just follow the footprints and he always did.

Jaaromy would not play along when I asked him to act scared.

We found out that for $5 you could buy a foot print and write your name on it and stuff.  So Jonathan picked a foot print and sat on it until the museum guy could come with a pen.

  This is what we wrote.  So if you're ever down there, see if you can find it!

After the Dinosaur Discovery we decided to drive to Santa Clara and see if we could find the house Jaaromy's family lived in when they lived in St. George.  We found it easy, but the outside looked different and it threw Jaaromy off a little bit.  It was fun to see his memories come back.

We decided to drive around the red rocks that are north of the city.  We found a place to park and walk around so we did.

 Jaaromy wanted to climb up high.

 So the boys followed.  In fact, I have a lot of pictures where I'm down bellow, thinking that was as high as they would go.  But they kept wanting to go higher.  I was nervous to follow, partly because of heights, and partly because I didn't want to break my awesome camera while climbing.  But I always ended up following.

 The boys really loved to climb.  Jaaromy climbed up one rock and decided that it was too hard for the boys, then Jonathan popped up beside him and we couldn't figure out how he got up there with him.  Brigham started climbing up a couple of rocks and we had to stop him because there would be no way to get him back down.

 They really loved it.

 The view was amazing too.

 On our way back down we found this "cave".  A gap between two really big rocks.

It felt so good after being in the sun.

It was an unexpectedly fun hike.  We weren't planning on it but it turned out to be one of the highlights of our trip.  It wore us out though and we decided that now was the time to go swimming at the hotel.  The band kids were off doing whatever it was they came to do so the pool was empty.  Jaaromy didn't feel like swimming and Nathaniel forgot to pack his swimsuit, so it was just me, Jonathan, and Brigham.  This was also really fun for me because Brigham had so much fun.  He was grinning practically the whole time.  By the end I even got him to go underwater, and he even liked it!  Jonathan is still too nervous to go underwater but they both had so much fun, it was fun to watch them.

After swimming, I decided we were going to go to the Rosenburch Wildlife Museum.  Jaaromy didn't want to go but I showed Jonathan some of the pictures on their website and he was sold.

 They gave the boys their own set of little binoculars and an audio player that told you about each of the sections.

 There were some interesting animal poses.    This one was actually in semi darkness for effect, I'm sure, but the flash lit it all up.

 This raccoon was easy to miss if you weren't looking up.

The boys thought the baby skunks were super cute.  They had an impressive collection.  While we were looking around the lights turned off and there was some thunder and lightning.  I thought it was kind of neat, but Brigham had run off just then and I was worried it would make him nervous.  It didn't.  We were in and out pretty quick.  I wonder if we missed a room or something.

We went back to the hotel to play on the indoor playground.  Jonathan had been looking forward to it as soon as he found out they had one.  It was nice for Jaaromy and I to just relax while the boys played.  After that we went to dinner and hung out at the hotel.  What a busy day!

The next day after breakfast we went to see the temple.

 Another family was there taking pictures so we did a camera swap.

 Jonathan was really excited to see the temple.

We walked around a bit and then left to start our drive home.

 We drove by Brigham Young's winter home.  We didn't go inside which is kind of lame, but we were anxious to get going.

We stopped in Filmore to see the lava fields.  We looked at them on Google Earth and Jonathan was really excited to see them.  There are also caves but I had no idea where we were going other than towards the volcano.

 On one of the ATV roads we were surprised to see some tanks and other army vehicles coming down the road.

 It was pretty cool to see and one of the Army guys waved at us.

 Since we had no idea where we were going we decided to just pull over and take a look.  Nathaniel wasn't impressed so he stayed in the car.

 In these pictures it kind of looks like a hill but it's actually a fairly flat field.  It's just really big.

That's the volcano behind Jonathan.  If we had some 4 wheelers or something we could probably find the caves, but we really didn't have the time nor the inclination.  Jonathan took a couple of lava rocks as a souvenir.

Then we went on our way.  We were still somewhat full from breakfast but we made it a point to stop in Nephi so we could eat at Wendy's for Nathaniel's sake.  Even though we eat at Wendy's about every other week, it just isn't the same as eating at Wendy's on vacation.

It was a fun trip.  I'm glad we went and that it went well.  Some minor bumps, but overall a success.  I wonder where we'll go next.