Too big too soon! Corbin

This little dude of mine is growing to fast! We are pretty sure he is our last and I am just enjoying him so much. He is such a momma's boy and I love that!! He started crawling around 6 months and around 7 months started standing up holding on to things. He has the cutest smile and laugh! He adores his olders brothers and try's to run away from Jaylee. She try's to be his 2nd mom! :-)




In this picture he is trying to find
Leftover zucchini muffins crumbs. Those are his favorite!


We took him swimming for the first time this summer and should I really have been shocked another one of my kids loves the water?! All of my kids are officially fish!!

Softball night!

If the games are early enough we try and go watch Ryan play softball. The kids love it! They can't go in without first playing on the larger than life baseballs in the parking lot.









Corbin was sleeping or you know I would have propped him up for a picture!

Easter 2011

We had Easter at our home this year. The weather, food and company was great! Didn't get as many pictures as I was hoping! Easter fell on a Sunday with 8 am church. Yikes!! Should have told the Easter bunny to come while we were at church. Instead my kids had chocolate for breakfast and Jaylee even managed to get it on her new Easter dress! :-)








My sister Jacki got a bunny for Easter. She wanted a baby. Guess she will have to settle for this for now !


Corbin missed most of the excitement while taking a nap, but look who is eating solids now and has 2 teeth! He also started to hold his own bottle and crawl. Slow down!!! This is going way to fast for me!! Corbin 6 months








Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Jaylee is potty trained!!

Never thought this day would come. Jaylee you are 3 and almost 3 months old. We have been potty training you for 9 months off and on now. Having a baby and you needing surgery has made this an almost impossible task! Last week I put the diapers away and you were going to be potty trained at any cost! :-)

You knew I meant business this time and after 2 days you had it!!

So today ( a week later) you are "pooping" in the bathroom and I hear " mom hurry I am going to throw up" I run in. You had looked in the toilet and saw/smelled your "poop".

Really Jaylee.... I have been changing your diapers for 3 years!!! A little taste if what I went through!! Oh you crack me up!!

Girls trip 2011

Every year the girls I grew up with (from basically the time I was born) get together at Krista's beach house. We are usually nice enough to bring our moms too!! :-). Lots of sun, laughs, shopping and lots of incredible food. What happens in Newport stays in Newport. Thanks girls!!

This year we saw the broadway play "wicked". I thought it was good. Phantom of the Opera is still my favorite.

This was my first year bringing any of my babies. Corbin got to tag along and was literally an angel! Did not cry once! Even on the plane ride he was amazing. Thanks Corbin, you knew mommy needed this vacation!

Wow! It's been 2 years!

Seriously has it been 2 years! Yikes!! So going to give this blog thing another chance. I sadly have no other form of journaling and it makes me sad to think of all the memories not being written down. You think you will remember all if them but I just went back and read my previous posts and that is just not the case.

So now that iPhone has an app for blogging I am back in business. Seriously. If it's an app I can make it happen. Now if someone could just turn visiting teaching into an app I would be 100% for the year! Gotta love technology!!

So do I just proceed with recent happenings or try and catch up. Oh what to do?! I think we will do both so here is to new happenings and some "flashbacks". After all we did add another baby boy to the clan. So welcome Corbin to this organized chaos household!

Grown Right Before our Eyes

I didn't really get to post everything I wanted to when Jaylee turned one so I thought I would post again. Better late than never!

It is amazing to me just how fast our little ones grow. Literately right before our very eyes. I feel I have really been able to enjoy every little milestone with Jaylee. It has been so different for us just to have 1 baby this time. I felt like with the twins I was always waiting for that next milestone; can't wait for them to sit up, can't wait for them to play with toys, can't wait for them to start crawling, can't wait for them to feed themselves etc, etc. I was always hoping things would get easier and sadly found myself missing out on the small stuff and really enjoying it. I was more like in survival mode the whole first year. Don't get me wrong they were a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. Ryan and I kept telling ourselves when friends and family members were saying how hard one baby was, "could you imagine just one baby, sorry don't feel for ya, try that x 2!!" We now know what it is like to just have one baby and it is pure heaven. (maybe it's because it's a girl!!!)

So here is our little princess growing like a weed ( maybe more like a rose) over the last year!









I know this one is not of her face, but really shows her personality. This was taken at the boys soccer game. Her favorite thing to do there was to push her stroller around and hang from it!

Some of the things about Jaylee . . .
* she loves food. She has always been just a tiny petite baby until recently. At around 11 months she has discovered she enjoys food. She sometimes eats more than the boys and finally it is starting to show up on her little thighs and booty! Finally something to pinch!
* Adores her brothers. She thinks she is such a big girl and wants to do everything they do. And when they tease her, she can hold her own. (yesterday she threw the remote and Logan and it split his lip!)
* Loves the outdoors. She is always trying to escape. If she hears a door open she is b-lining it at full speed.
* Loves the quads. If someone is riding the quads she throws a fit till she has a turn and then again when you take her off
* Loves dogs! When we visit our 140 pound st benard up at the cabin she climbs and hugs all over him. Even back when she was only 8 month old.
* She is a good sleeper. She was sleeping through the night at 11 weeks. (Thanks to the book baby wise!)
* She has a major underbite that she is always showing off. One of these days I will get a picture of that.
* She likes to make others laugh. She is always making this very cheesy huge smile and then when you laugh she keeps doing it. If she starts making weird noises and the boys start cracking up she will get louder and louder.
* Just recently she became a huge daddy's girl!! She prefers him over me now!
* she stares people down until she knows their motive. If you are here to babysit, she knows!
* loves her jogging stroller and loves to run with me.
* favorite video is Baby Einstein, we think its a crack up when she will be watching it and then all of a sudden she is laughing so hard!
* After 12 month of hating shoes, she has finially realized how fun they can be and trys to put them on herself all the time.
* favorite toy is her play baby stroller. She pushes that thing all around the house. Although it must be empty. If you try and put her dolly or toy in there she throws it out right away!
* After 13 month of spitting up, happy to report she doesn't smell like puke anymore!

Next post, birth story and hospital stays . . . ( i know lots of info, but hey this is my journal!)

Jaylee Turns One !!

My baby is "ONE"!! crazy how fast time flies! Jaylee turned one last month and it was fun to have all the family over to celebrate. We had dinner and of course "cupcakes" for the cupcake themed party. The day before Jaylee turned one she also started walking. She took her first step at 11 months, but decided crawling was faster. She must of known her birthday was approaching because all she wanted to do was "practice" walking. Too funny and very entertaining to watch. She became a pro in no time!

At first she was very girly like and just kind of picked at her cupcake . . .

Then is was to "heck" with that and chowed down. You go girl!

Jaylee's favorite gift was her own little chair and a fake set of keys and cell phone. (which she still prefers to play with my real cell phone and car keys!! . . . and yes old cell phones don't work, she know's the difference!)

German Shepherd + Poodle = Shepadoddles!!

Yes there is a tiny pup in the car with Logan in the back!

NO I did not make this name up folks! It is a real breed. How our little shepadoodles came about is pretty funny to us. We are the owners of a german shepherd named "TALA" my inlaws own a stadard poodle named "Rex". Our german shepherd was in heat and on like day 11 or 12 we decided to go to the cabin. Us not knowing too much about dogs didn't think she was very fertile anymore. In fact we tried to get an appointment to get her spayed and found out there is like a 4 month wait!! Back to story . . . my inlaws where also up at the cabin and they had their black and white standard poodle there with them. I am yelling at Ryan the entire time to make sure nothing happens and to lock up "Tala". My in laws tell me she is rejecting "Max" therefore she's not intrested and "it" won't happen. I am still NERVOUS because who is going to be taking care of puppies?!?! ME!

So come lunch time we are all at the dining table by a very large window overlooking the wrap around porch and what is going on right in front of our eyes?? Dog porn to the max! AHHHH! My mother in law runs out there and starts pulling on his tail to "unhook" them. NO such luck. Lets just say the rest of the trip was a little tense between Ryan and I.

Low and behold 8 weeks later we have 7 pups! Its kind of funny now because the whole time I am thinking we will have to pay people to take our 7 mutts into their homes until I started to doing some research and found out that these babies are designer breeds! And sell for over a $1000 on the internet and are hard to find!

"Tala" did an absolute wonderful job giving birth (and I mean wonderful . . . not even a yelp out of her!) to all these puppies and did an amazing job taking care of them. It has been an unforgettable experience for our whole family.

We started finding them new homes last week and we only have 2 males left at this point! They are the cutest pups I have seen! We sure will miss all of them!

Christmas 2008 in a nut shell

Polar Express trip- This was our second year taking the family on The Polar express train ride. They absolutely just love it. Even Jaylee got into it! This year there wasn't snow so it just wasn't quite the same but I don't even think my kids noticed.

Riding by the North pole to pick up a special visitor . . .

Too funny! Doesn't everyone have one of these photos of you crying sitting on Santa's lap, or in this case Ms. Clause? She did this as you will see in all the following pics that she would scream at the top of her lungs every time we made her sit on Santa's lap. We are so cruel!!





We tried to take our kids snow sledding, which is hard to do when there is no snow, however this cute little town had a small ski resort with year around sledding (its white carpet). I think I actually like it better! And of course the day after we left it snowed for 5 straight days!!!!!




Cookies with Santa- My in laws old neighborhood neighbor hosts this special cookies with Santa date. Their backyard is every kids dream as well as every mom's dream for there kids to have. I wish I took more pics of it, but lets just say they had a zip line, a 2-story kids play house with a slide from the 2nd story window, 2 different playgrounds that were nicer than any playground I have ever seen, huge swimming pool, sand areas, fire pit, and places to ride bikes and plenty of room to run around.


Breakfast with Santa at Joshua and Logan's school- (notice Jaylee not crying in this picture, but look closely at whats in her hand with a big smile on her face!)

Jaylee wore this cute santa dress to a couple of family parties . . . I think she liked it!

Sunday before Christmas-

Don't these little boogers look like future missionaries in this picture!

Christmas Eve- Every year on Christmas eve we spend at my parents house where a special visitor brings new pajamas, however we broke tradition this year because we gave them their jammies on the night we did polar express so they could wair them on the train . . . and yes this would be Jaylee crying again! She really is an easy going baby!!


Christmas morning- We mostly video taped Christmas morning so I don't have a lot of still shots. I thought I took more than this, darn it!



Joshua and Logan got a air hockey/foosball table, remote control buggys, video games, legos, oh and a live turtle from a gift exchange game!
Jaylee got a ball whirly spin thingy and few other small baby toys
I got a baby seat for my bike, clothes, Wheel of Fortune video game (love that show) and Dove chocolate
Ryan got James Bond 007 series DVD set, clothes, outdoor cd/ipod radio, and a remote control buggy that matches Joshua and Logans but double the size ( I didn't want Ryan to feel left out when he takes the boys to use theirs!)

We had a wonderful Christmas that seemed to last the whole month. I look forward to this time of year every year. I love being with family, giving to others ( love finding that perfect gift!), yummy food, christmas movies, the decorations and lights, the music, giving and receiving neighbor and friends goodies and christmas cards (I think I checked the mail everyday hoping to find another one!) I especially enjoyed this year watching Joshua and Logan learning the true meaning of Christmas. They were finally old enough to understand it's more than just about santa and presents under the tree.

Only 335 or so more days till christmas 2009!