Leaves...and lessons

Last week on one of the few days Nathaniel went to school, he saw a mom taking pictures of her kids in some leaves under one of the trees there. He wanted to go home and do that. Heaven knows there are plenty of leaves in our front yard...and they aren't picking themselves up and putting them in bags! Quite a switch from last fall where the house we were living in had two tiny little saplings (being generous) that I doubt that all the leaves that fell off of them would have filled a lunch bag. Anyway, then he got sick again...and other stuff has been going on. Finally, yesterday, he was feeling better and needed to get outside. And he'd done a ton of make up work (from being sick at the end of Sept/beginning of Oct and again this past week...he has attended school more days than he's missed this month - barely). So I told him that after I picked up Joshua and more (!!) make up work for him, I'd rake the leaves and he and Grace could come outside and play. They were ecstatic. Not so the cool middle schooler when I picked him up and told him what would be going on when we got home...he was grateful to have science homework and trumpet practice. But as you can see by the pictures - he did have fun. I think he thought I was wanting him to do the raking.  Our front yard is well, steep, to put it nicely...so I was raking uphill (both ways!!) Then the fun began. Of course, I kept nagging on them to not hurt each other (when all three decided to jump in at once...who got hurt - Nathaniel of course...), to not sweep all the dirt out of the "flower bed" (But momma, I'm makin' a special path...), to cooperate and actually look in the same direction of the camera - with not just their faces but their eyes too..to smile, for reals, not just fake. They're all great fake smilers. I was tired and cranky and achy...but looking at the pictures now as I uploaded or downloaded or whatever, I saw the joy on their faces...and I hope I didn't take all the fun out of it with my nagging at them and trying to make them be "perfect". They aren't and I'm sure not. I unsubscribed to a couple of the "mormon mommy blogs" I used to read because I got so tired of feeling like crap and a horrible mom because I didn't do art projects to go with each conference talk so my children had last conference memorized or whatever.  Not that I blog all that much or anything, but seriously, these "serial bloggers" were killing my self-esteem. And then I thought about how my trying to make the kids fit in to the little slots I had in my mind of how they should look in these pictures...well, I was doing to them what the stuff I'd been reading was doing to me. So I'm going to apologize to them tomorrow. And thank them for the lesson and the reminder that I really need to chill out!

Soooo, don't know where that all came from, not what I'd been planning to type and I should erase it, but I'll need to read it again - two or three times a day for the next 50 years probably. And since probably only about 5 people read this, no biggie. 

And here are our photos...leaves are fun, don't taste great, (the wind can blow them up your nose apparently), get in our shoes, our socks, our hats, our hair (well, if you're a girl and it's long...not too bad if dad just cut your hair the other day and it's nice and short), our pants(!) and if you jump into the pile after it's been stomped down a bit - not quite as cushiony as when it was in the nice big pile Mom first raked up.  Oh, and a side note...the cool middle schooler who didn't want anything to do with this project at first...yeah, he got the great idea to rake them back into a big pile (which he did with some sibling help) and then he was going to climb one of the trees in the front yard and jump into the leaf pile. This is the boy who is smarter than many adults...yet under all the brains he's 11. I realized what he was planning as he reached for the lowest branch and grabbed his arm. Informed him I didn't think so...then the 7 year old figured out what his brother had been planning (a little too smart for his own good too sometimes) and tried to make it to the tree. That was about the end of our leaf jumping - and I convinced them to go in and get showered and we'd have french toast for dinner...think they forgot all the nagging and griping I did at them with those words because I got hugs. I love my kids...the forgive me easily most of the time - especially when I feed them :)

Sorry there are way too many pictures...but I wanted to include plenty of the not-so-perfect as well as the almost-perfect since that was part of my ramblings above...

Milliseconds before crash



Looks like he's laughing - but he's really not...he's crying

Last year's hats I crocheted for them still fit - barely.

Attack of the little sister...

Attack of the little brother

The boy doesn't hold still...and if he does, we know he's really sick...

Jog-a-thon

Nathaniel's new elementary school has one big fundraiser every year - a jog-a-thon. They get sponsors or donations for every lap they run. We weren't sure how many Nathaniel would be able to run as he'd missed over a week of school prior to the event due to his double ear infection and strep throat. It happened to be a day when Dad was home, so he had three people cheering him on. Grace and I even ran a few laps with him and Brian helped count laps. Nathaniel ended up running 11 laps around the course that was set up! He was pretty excited. He was the only one that had a cheering section with a poster :) The school's goal was to raise $20,000 dollars and they raised $25,700.65! Impressive. He won several prizes and got to go to the Fun House party last Friday - batting cage, blow up fun house, bingo, a movie and pizza and ice cream afterwards. I think there were some other activities in there, but I can't remember all of them.

I went for the last hour or so and sat with him and his friends while they ate pizza and ice cream. It was good to see him talking and laughing with some kids. He has been having such a hard time adjusting to pretty much everything lately, that it made me happy to see the old Nathaniel peeking through - we're not seeing much of that at all most days.



Silly kid pretending to hold up the basket on the wall...this was after his party last week - I wanted to get a picture of him by their earnings chart :)

Mission Calls....

In this post I added a few pictures at the end that I called a little teaser about the MTC activity the kids had done in Primary. I was planning on posting the rest of the story sooner, but moving kinda' got in the way.

Here the boys are opening their calls - I didn't get a picture of Grace - she was sitting behind me in the car, plus she can't read so I'd opened it for her.  She was called to....HAWAII. Yep. Mom and Dad would definitely be picking her up :)

 

Slight confused look on Joshua's face? Because he'd gotten called to Africa - Angola to be exact. ("Mom, where the heck is that?")
Cool fact - he'd speak Portuguese
Not so cool fact - rather violent, war-torn country...we'd pray hard he'd come home 'cause we wouldn't be going to pick him up!

Nathaniel was really excited - hope he's that excited when he gets his real one in 11 (yikes) years.
He was so excited as he read it - China!! He got called to Hong Kong and thinks that is cool.

All dressed and ready to go. The boys had Brian's old tags on and Grace had one of mine. The boys were able to keep theirs on since their name was the same, but I made Grace put on the cardstock one I'd made. Wrong last name and Spanish...not quite right for Hawaii.

Conversation with Grace...

Grace and I were just looking at pictures on the computer of her first couple of months of life. She loves looking at her baby pictures. We talked about how I've saved some of her clothes and blankets for when she is a mommy with her own kids.  She loves that idea...and then we had the following conversation:

GRACE: Mommy, know what I'm gonna' name my daughter?
ME: No, what (figuring it would be Grace or Olivia - her two go to names for all her dolls, or sometimse Sofia from her new favorite disney princess)
GRACE: Sunny.
ME: Sunny, really? Okay.
GRACE: And know what I'm gonna' name her brother?
ME: No (seriously was not expecting her answer)
GRACE: Cloudy.
ME: Really, that's interesting. (Hey, she's got the correlation of sunny and cloudy down...that's good)
GRACE: Yeah, like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
ME: Ohhh.

Yep, she's a fun one. Hopefully in 20 years or so when she's a mom she's come up with some other names. And if not, hopefully her husband has some better ideas :)

At the park down the street from our house a couple of weeks ago.
Nathaniel had been home sick for over a week with ear infections and strep throat and was finally feeling better and the weather was nice, so we had a picnic lunch and played at the park on Dad's day off.

Nathaniel's birthday

Being as, for the third time, we were moving around Nathaniel's birthday, we decided to celebrate it a week or so early. Which turned out to be a good thing because on his actual birthday we signed papers on our rental in Grants Pass and it was kind of a chaotic day.  So about a week and a half before we had the great-grandmas and grandma and grandpa over for dinner and cake and ice cream before we really got packing.  Hard to believe that he is seven already!!

I found an Angry Bird t-shirt (not that he needed more t-shirts) in his FAVORITE COLOR.

Grandma Lorrayne crocheted him a loony bird tooth pillow...hopefully he'll start losing some teeth pretty soon!  He's like Joshua in that department...Joshua was almost 8 before he lost his first tooth.

Reading one of his cards...he loves to read.

Angry Bird game for the computer from Grandma and Grandpa

This kid is hard on backpacks!!  This is his third one in 4 years I think. Skylanders is quite the favorite in the house :)
But he's still using the Cars 2 lunchbox that came with last year's backpack.

He requested a Finn McMissile cake this year.  So with the help of a coloring book picture and someone else on Pinterest that had had my same idea of altering the Lightning McQueen cake pan I already had, I made Finn.

Guess he looks good enough to eat :)

Blowing out the candles...Grace is there ready to help if needed.

Up to something...

First picture in our new house!!  Grandma and Grandpa brought a load of our stuff up for us the day we FINALLY were able to get in to our house. They got him a cake on the way up so he had a cake on his actual birthday too!

This is Nathaniel...silly goofy cute kid! We've missed this Nathaniel the past few weeks as he has been battling double ear infections and strep throat as well as adjusting to new school and everything else. But we're starting to see this Nathaniel coming back :)