October 2009

We have had another busy month. Jason has done a lot of traveling this month. He and Katie went on a road trip together, cross country, at the beginning of October. He has done some kind of road trip with each of the girls at this age. It was Katie’s turn! He helped a co-worker move back to CA. He and Katie drove a Uhall truck to San Diego and then flew home. Katie was super excited…it’s all she talked about for a good month. As a thank you, Jason’s friend took them to Disneyland!!! They had so much fun together. It was a lot of driving in a short time but Katie was a real trooper and they made lots of memories together![slideshow=127]Jason also spent a week in VA for work last week and this week he is back in CA for another week of work. When Katie heard he was going back to CA, she asked “why didn’t you just do the work while we were there?” Good question! Work is good for him, he is keeping busy with several different projects. We are very grateful to have this good job.I feel like a taxi driver constantly taking the kids from one thing to another! I have also been busy with preschool, primary and I started a photography class that I am pretty excited about!  Preschool is going great, Xander loves it and the trade thing is awesome! We have had some fun fieldtrips together. I will do a separate entry for all of it! We had our Primary Sacrament Program a couple of weeks ago. It was wonderful. It was entertaining (I know it is not suppose to be but how can it not be when you are dealing with 35 kids!!!), spiritual, and very sweet. There were a lot of teary eyes in the audience. Especially when Xander sang a solo “I am trying to be like Jesus” It was the sweetest thing I have ever heard! All by himself!  After it ended Becca came to Xander and gave him a hug and said “Buddy you did so good, you made Daddy Cry!”We also celebrated our Anniversary this month…16 years!!! AND I got to see Jason in a Tux…haven’t seen him in one since…well 16 years ago at our wedding! He looked GOOD!!! He was asked to be a part of the Stonecliffe’s wedding who are some friends from our ward. We had a great time celebrating with them! I will include a photo I took of the newlyweds![slideshow=120]Susie is nearing the end of the soccer season. She has really enjoyed the new friendships she has made. Her music lessons are going great. The Bishop asked her to sing a solo for the Christmas Sacrament Program. She is nervous but excited too. Her life right now is horses. She loves the time she spends each Saturday at the barn. She is considering switching from English riding to Western. There are not many options for Western here so we will see what happens. She says she is drawn more to Western. She dreams of riding in a Rodeo. I tease her that she was born to the wrong mom/sister in my family, I am the least into Agriculture in my family!!! Unless you count gardening…Susie finally got around to painting her stool, and herself and Becca. It turned out beautiful. She is so talented![slideshow=116]Becca’s soccer team will play in a tournament this Saturday to finish up the season. She did really great this year. She played a lot of both offence and defence and one day her leg was hurt so she play goalie. She did awesome, she stopped several from scoring! Way to go BEX!!! Becca chose to not do fencing this year. Daddy was disappointed but we left it up to her. Becca started up a club for kids to do crafts. She is calling it Kids Craft Corner or KC2 (squared).  She needed to come up with a way to earn money so she can pay her parents back for a HUGE phone bill! I gave her the idea from my niece Ashley, she has been doing it for a few years now to earn money. We are very proud of Becca, she took that idea and ran with it. She planned it all out, looked up fun activities online, made supply lists – even planning to use leftovers from one craft to do another. Made invitations with a calendar and everything…all on her own. She did a great job and has had two successful crafty afternoons![slideshow=117]Katie came home from school with some great news. She was the only one in her class to get straight A’s! They made a huge fuss over her and she felt really special! We are so proud of her. Her strengths are math and reading. She really loves school. They have gone on a few fun field trips too. One to Camp Don Lee and today she went to the NC Aquarium because she made honor roll. Fun stuff! Katie loves fencing…unless Daddy is gone then she doesn’t like it too much. And she has been coming to Xander’s swim lessons and playing with friends in the pool, she is almost as excited as Xander when Tues. and Thurs. roll around! Katie and Xander also talked me into setting up a sprinkler for them on Halloween afternoon. I know strange… the weather has been so weird lately. We had a few really cold weeks, the tree’s started changing colors, it was beautiful, felt like a real fall. Well then it heated up again, 80 degrees on Halloween. We had friends over after trick or treating and it was weird having our fire pit going because it was not cold at all!  And now it is cold again…wacko![slideshow=118]Xander is doing great. He is such a funny kid. Still into dressing up. He was so excited when his costume arrived, put it on nearly every day and slashed his sword around the house fighting the bad guys! He would be Cap’n Jack Sparrow then take off the dread locks and become Will Turner or how Xander says it “Will Tunna” trying to have a accent! He was so cute on Halloween! We have a Xander story to tell…a few Sunday’s ago Xander kept telling me that he has a surprise for me and that I needed to go take a nap so he could do my surprise. He was so excited. Well guess what the surprise was, you will never guess…he talked Jason into giving him a mohawk! I am sure he didn’t have to talk too hard, but that is what they did. They sent me off to take a nap and shaved Xanders head! No I am not kidding!!! I was not happy. Poor Xander was expecting me to be thrilled and I wasn’t!!! So after Jason and I had gone the rounds we decided that, ok ok I admit…I decided that he could keep it for 3 days and then we would shave it off. Xander was happy with that, he was able to go to school and show his friends. When I picked him up from school he ran and gave me a hug and said “Mommy, I didn’t let my hair make me be bad!!!” Lesson here: don’t argue in front of a 4 year old!!! He had obviously heard my argument that he looks like a punk, kids are going to treat him like a punk  and he’s going to act like one! There is also a picture of Xander and his green tomato family!!![slideshow=119]