Ally's first hair cut

Ally never got her bath on Sunday. If you are wondering why, read the relaxing Sunday post. Anyway, I was giving her a bath on Mon. morning and decided to be brave and finally trim up her hair. The underneath hair would tend to lay flat and the top layer would curl up and really emphasize the difference in length. Ally hates getting out of the tub and is sometimes already dry by the time I can coax her out. (Good thing its warm here!) I thought I'd take advantage of this and just let her play w/ her cups of water - she could pour those things back and forth all day - while I trimmed up her hair. The only draw back is that it was hard to get her to be really still for any length of time.

Here's a before picture of her long hair after I poured water on it straighten it out.

Here's what I trimmed off.
And here's the after. From the picture it looks like I may have left the edges too long. It was really hard to tell. At any rate, it looks a little more even now when it's dry and since her baby hair still curls a little in the back, you can't tell that I didn't get it exactly straight.

Relaxing Sunday?

This Sunday was supposed to be nice and relaxing. We had Stake Conference, so I didn't need to teach and Travis didn't have any meetings. Well, while I was cooking dinner, I started hearing a crackly noise in the other room. I thought Ally had something w/ a crinkly wrapper and my hands were dirty, so while I finished what I was doing, I listened carefully to make sure the crackling didn't stop (meaning she would have gotten whatever it was open.). It was only like a min. or two, but when I went to go find Ally, this is what I saw instead!!!

Yep, that's water dripping out of the vent in the laundry room! I yelled up to Travis that the ceiling was leaking. He ran into the bathroom and found inches of water on the floor and the carpet outside of the bathroom soaked. He ran for a pile of towels to start soaking it up.
So what happened you might ask. Well, we had forgotten about baths on Sat. since we went to the adult session of Conference, so we had the kids take baths Sun. afternoon. Ever since Bryson had a bath in our big tub, he keeps wanting to fill their regular tub up high. We have told him before NOT to fill it up high, but he did anyway. So not only did he fill up the tub to the VERY TOP, he proceeded to splash around and "swim" in the tub, thus spill out water EVERYWHERE.

So, instead of having a relaxing evening, we spent it soaking up water, emptying buckets of water that had poured out of the ceiling, poking holes in the ceiling w/ a nail to make sure there wasn't water pooling up somewhere, doing several loads of towel and rug laundry, blowing fans on the carpet, and sending Bryson to bed EARLY.

The only reason I even thought to take pictures was because Travis' sister's 2 yr. old plugged up their bathroom sink and flooded their bathroom a few days ago. She said she had been too mad to take pictures. Well, I was pretty mad and wouldn't have thought to take any pictures either if I hadn't just read about her story. At least her mess was from a 2 year old, not a 5 yr. old who had already been told not to do what he was doing!

School Assembly

Maddy told me Friday morning that she was going to be in the assembly that afternoon. Nice notice! Jacob couldn't remember if he was going to be in it or not, so he put on his jump rope shirt just in case and went to school. Good thing I'm pretty flexible and was able to go because both kids were finally in the same assembly!

Here's Maddy demonstrating her mad jump roping skills. I could never have jumped rope inside of another rope, but she did great!
Nice criss-cross action shot, don't you think?
Jacob's partner was home sick that day, so he just did whatever tricks he wanted. He and his partner were supposed to jump side by side holding one handle from their own rope and one from their partners. Instead, I got some criss-cross shots. (I didn't get as good of pics. of Jacob because Bryson was bored and was pulling on me. What can you do?)

Way to go guys! You were awesome!

Fun dates

I had forgotten to do a post for the Mother-Son and Father-Daughter dances that the kids school puts on. Jacob gets a little shy about dancing in front of others, so he was really happy that they had 2 Wiis set up and he could play Mario cart instead of dancing. We still had a good time.

Maddy on the other hand LOVES any and all attention, so she and Travis danced the night away at their dance. They had a great time too! Travis figures it won't be much longer before she'll think dancing w/ her dad isn't cool anymore, so he'll take it while he can.

Easy way to follow blogs

I've had a few friends ask me about how I keep up with everyone's blogs. I use a program called Feedreader. You could also use googlereader. It is fantastic for following public blogs. Sadly, it doesn't work for private blogs. Here is a link to download Feedreader for free.

http://fileforum.betanews.com/download/Feedreader/1027544364/1

Just follow the instructions to download and install. Once you have installed Feedreader, you will need to input the addresses for the blogs you wish to follow by clicking "New Feed" in the file menu. The program will automatically look for the feed to that blog. It will give you a prompt where you choose the RSS or Atom feed. Travis says it doesn't really matter which one you click - it's just two formats for the same thing. Also, he recommends that as you set up each feed for it to check, set the update period for 10 mins. or any time period rather than leaving it on Intelliupdate. He says that sometimes that doesn't work like it should.


Click on "Manage Feeds" from the file menu to make any changes to the name of the blog, the update period or whatever. Make sure to click "save" on each feed that you make changes to. Then just click "cancel" to go back to the regular screen where you can check blogs.

Once you've typed in the addresses, Feedreader will automatically let you know whenever someone updates their blog. You will have a little cube in the system tray at the bottom of your computer screen. When it's yellow instead of grey, click on it and it will open feedreader and show you who has a new post by bolding their name. Just click on the bolded name and you'll go directly to the new post. Then you won't have to keep checking around all the time - especially at those blogs that only update every few weeks or months. The first time it checks each blog, all the posts will be new to the new Feedreader program, so just click through all the posts you've already seen.

I hope this helps. If you run into trouble, just email or call me and I'll help you out (or get my husband to ;)

Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!

We started celebrating yesterday morning before school since that's when the kids were passing out their Valentine's. Here's what the kids got for breakfast.

Last night Travis and I "Heart-attacked" the kids' doors. We wrote down some of the many things that we love about each of them. We had to do the boys' closet doors so that they could tell whose hearts were whose.

I forgot to take pictures, but we had heart shaped pancakes for breakfast. Some had M&Ms and some had blueberries. YUM!

Thanks to the fun hair blogs I frequent, Maddy's and Ally's hair have hearts in them.
Here are the kids in their cute Valentine's shirts from Grandma and Grandpa.

We hope you have a fun and happy Valentine's Day!

Day at the park

So we were at playgroup at the park today. While we were there, a father and son came with their horse, ooops, I mean dog, "Duchess". Seriously, can you believe the size of this thing?! You can't fully appreciate how big it was in this 1st picture since the dog is bending down. Check out the shot I got of Ally!

The dog really did tower over her. Her head came up a little past my waist! Fortunately Duchess was extremely calm and likes kids. I still wouldn't have let Ally pet her w/o me right there. That's my hand making sure that the dog didn't cover Ally's face w/ dog slobber. Her tongue was about the size of Ally's face. Not a pleasant thought!

Here's my "Beary Cute" girl sport'n my sunglasses. Silly girl!
We love the park and the beautiful weather!