picture over load from March

My Brother Soren and his new bride Jessica at the Temple right after the ceremony March 13, 2009

Theo likes his new hat and thinks preston should wear it too.

oh my goodness someone caught a smile on camera!!!

Theo conducting the music in his head from the laundry basket.

Theo and his uncle Neal. Couldnt get a real smile out of either of them!

Our little family at my brother Soren and Jessica's wedding.

My sister Thora's hair at said wedding. I wish i had long pretty hair to do cool things with like this! She let me do her hair, isnt she nice? I love to do peoples hair. I am still pining away for a daughter!

At the temple. How to fit three kids on a single stroller... that is porter in the basket and the baby on top in his carrier. We got lots of looks from people who must think we have too many kids or just need to have a bigger stroller!

Traditional sister picture. Amy, Halley, Tali, Mary, Mandie, ME, and Thora. We are missing Catherine and Katy.

my mom took this.. she thought it was funny we were all nursing. You can tell how we feel by Thora's expression... and me all flashing the camera! lol.

Papa loving having some grandkids stay at his house!

Nana doing the same thing!

This is Thora. She is awesome. I was so glad she came into town. She and I talked and talked and talked and i think we almost made up for the past 2 years we hadnt seen each other! That is her daughter Elishava. Her older daughter and husband couldnt come.

Elishava loved crawling on top of Preston. Her sister Lydia always does it to her so it was fun for her to be bigger than someone!

Everone always wants to be in my lap. Here are Theo and Preston asleep.

Porter and Theo sleepin in Papa's lap.

Oklahoma

I cant believe we are here. It didn't really sink in that we were moving for me until halfway to Denver. The drive started out great. I drove the Hyundai with Preston who slept the first three hours. Cory drove the van with porter and Theo happily watching new movies on the DVD player. I love technology. How the pioneers traveled for days on end with kids is beyond me. I suppose then they were going so slow the kids could walk and so as a parent you didnt have to hear them whining the whole way. The hard part for me was when Preston woke up from his nap. The crying started followed by a scream. We stopped and i nursed him and we were off again. At this time i realized my silliness in not having his carseat on the right side of the car. I could not reach him to help him get the binky back in his mouth. Finally out of desperation in the middle of no where i stoped on the side of the road and took everything out of my car so i could re arrange it with the baby on the right side of the back seat. I then drove for the next three hours with my right hand reached back there so he could clutch it with both his arms. If i moved it he would cry. My shoulder is still sore from driving in that position!

Denver was awesome. Our hotel was really nice, think granite counter tops and dark hardwood headboards. I was so sick of driving i was ready to just move in there! Theo was up till 2 am, i guess he had slept alot during the day so he was a bit wired. The second day of driving was a little better since Preston and i had figured out the arrangement of him holding my arm in desperation while i sang every hymn that i could think of. I had to drink a mountain Dew since thats the only drink i like that has caffeine in it and i was trying to stay awake by this point. I have not had caffeine in so many years that after only half the drink i was wired! The main reason i was trying to stay awake is because Kansas is so boring ( no offence to people that live there) Its just miles and miles of flat nothing ness with an occasional farm on the side of the road. It was really windy too and my car was shaking.

The third day we finally arrived in Oklahoma. Its just like anywhere else... super walmart, sonic, KFC, McDonald's, bestbuy, home deopt. When did we become so commercialized that all the cities in the US were the same? Since our truck was not going to arrive for a few days we had to figure out some bed arrangement. We went to get some bunk beds for the boys but everyone ( even walmart!) was out of wood beds. Well that's not entirely true i could have bought one for 800 dollars but i was a bit too cheap for that. So we just bought two twin mattresses and put them on the floor pushed together. We slept on that the whole family, well we are still sleeping on it and will until our stuff gets here which has been delayed till Friday. (grrrr) So if you didn't know that we had more stuff coming we look pretty poor and white trash. We are all in one room sleeping on the floor with nothing on the window but tin foil to keep out the street light at night. Our living room has nothing but suitcases, laundry, and a few boxes strewn about. we bought a card table that we set our computer up on and also we eat at it. We have all paper plates, cups, and bowls. In the living room is a big window and for privacy at night i wanted to hang a sheet up over it. But we didn't have anything to hang with. So I taped it up with box tape. Lovely black sheet TAPED to my wall. Seriously we are living the white trash life!! We even bought a wireless thing for the computer and taped it to the window so we could use the neighbors Internet ( don't worry they know we are using it at least!) Hopefully the cable guys find time to come to our house soon so we can stop mooching.

The people are all really nice here. We live in a four plex basically. The people across from us are Spanish, underneath us they are black, and the fourth family is from Irak and really friendly and nice. They came and introduced them selves. Its sad because they both have degrees back home but our country doesn't recognize them so they have to go to school all over again here. I asked them why they moved to the US and the dad sarcastically said " well there is this little war going on back at our home... have you heard of it??" The wife said she misses her family terribly but its too much money to go back and visit them. They have a little boy that is three that my kids have played with. Across from us there is a Jewish family ( practicing since the guy wears the yamika all the time) and another Spanish family. So its a pretty diverse place.

Surgery

This picture was taken moving week at our old house. I took it because this is how it typically looks at my house. Cory with three kids piled on and around him. He is a wonderful father and the kids are like leaches attached to him at all times if he is home. He is always carrying them around, lifting them on and off things, lugging them on his back up and down the stairs... you get the picture.

So this past Tuesday Cory had to have his appendix out. It was the middle of the night when we went up to the ER and 6 am by the time he had surgery and 11 am when they finally let me see him again ( he had some problems coming out of the anesthesia so that's what took so long). I used to pull all nighters in college all the time and was fine, but apparently i am OLD now because at 28 i thought i was going to die if i didn't sleep soon! I think i finally caught up on the sleep, i even went to bed at 8 pm one night and if you know me at all you know i usually don't go down before midnight so that is extremely early for me! Anyone that has had surgery knows that the first thing they say is not to lift anything for two weeks. So after not seeing Cory at all for a few days he comes home and the kids want him to hold them and to pick them up. Which he cant do! He tries to sit next to them on the couch which ends up them pushing on his incision and him screaming and them crying. Its going to be a long 2 weeks for us all! Thankfully Cory is healing and we hope he will be tip top in time for his class to start. Also what a blessing for this to happen now and not in Oklahoma, or halfway to Oklahoma!

Also this has pushed our move date out a little bit. We figured Cory might not be up to driving 18 hours this week. We are going to leave the weekend of the 21st now. I am so excited to get to Oklahoma and be one more step done with this crazy limbo phase of my life!

Moving stage 1 of 3

This last week was the longest, most exhausting week I can remember ever having. I have moved many times but this is the first time I moved with three kids and the least amount of help we have ever had. Three nights in a row i was up until 2 am cleaning/painting. It was at times like that i wish my dear sister Thora lived here as i know she would have helped me out and given me some company to chat with while i worked! My step dad and mom did countless hours of work to help us and let us use their truck as well as let us move to their house and i am so grateful that they were here. I am eternally indebted to my friend Catherine who watched my little monkeys for days ( and I am sure she is really rethinking having more kids at this moment after having mine all over there!) I am happy to report we are done though! Well except for the last load of random things in the back of the van that I am hoping to get to tomorrow. All or our belongings are piled up in my parents garage with the exception of what we are using to live here for the next 5 weeks. My parents have graciously allowed us to overtake their playroom where we have stashed our king size bed in a Corner and the rest of the room is boxes and clothes and dressers. Preston and Theo are sleeping with us in the bed and we have a twin mattress we throw on the floor at night for porter. Its a bit like little house on the prairie days when the whole family lived in one room. I kind of feel like I am camping too because its cold in the room and there are a million windows that let in way to much sunlight at the break of dawn! I am going to cover them all tonight with foil so I can sleep in tomorrow morning! I was never a good morning person, i am all cranky pants if its before 9.

I am glad that my kids will get loads of time with their grandparents before we leave. Porter is old enough he will have these memories when he grows up. Porter thinks its fun to sleep over here, and is loving all the cool things to do here so much that he hasn't even noticed there is no TV to watch. In case it gets bad though i can always through a DVD on the computer ( i know i am such a lame mother to use it as a babysitter but sometimes i need a shower/nap/sanity )

In mid march sometime we will be off to Oklahoma for stage 2 of our move. We will only be there three months so I am not excited for the hassle of moving in and then starting to pack back up after a couple months. I seriously am contemplating selling off most of our possessions on Craig's list and just being paupers till Texas and then buying new things there. The pioneers used to only take what they could fit in the wagon. I got me a mini van about that size, wonder if i could live off of only what i could fit in my van? I am seriously contemplating this. When i cant sleep at night i think of all the things to get rid off... like maternity clothes ( what if i DON'T have any more kids?) and baby clothes, my box of size 6 clothes ( hahahaha like i am ever going to fit those again anyways!!) all the weird appliances i never use like the pop corn popper pan that is super cool but i never pull out. Oh and what about the 8 boxes of scrapboking stuff? I mean i love it sure but its been about 3 years since i even took it out of the boxes. 3 YEARS!! I keep saying when i don't have a baby i will scrapbook. problem is i keep having another baby!

anyways i don't really have a point to all this just rambling on here. This post is more like a journal entry than anything else. I would of written it in a journal but i don't know what box that is in at the moment!

cute babies

My cute lil preston is already 5 1/2 months old! Time flies when you have a babe and I am trying to soak it all up and enjoy everyday ( spit up, diapers, no sleep and all!) you talking to me mom?? i was telling him to smile but this is what i got instead. He is such a baldy its weird to us since the other two had so much hair as babies.

Hmm i will use my monkey feet to pick that up!

This is my "skinny" baby but as you can see he still is a chub by most people's standards. At five months he weighed in at 16 lbs ( porter and theo were both 20 lbs at this age)

5 months old and already trying to play video games! boys, i tell ya!

I love preston so much, he is the best baby and he is smothered with love by all that know him. Poor kid gets kissed all day long by me and his brothers! When I hold him now he plays with my hair and tries to grab my face. He can roll over both directions and this morning he rolled from tummy to back and then tummy again to reach a toy across the room. He tries to sit up but cant do it unassisted yet. He loves to eat crackers or gnaw on a chunk of apple, but is pretty uninterested in baby cereal although the spoon is pretty exciting!

We found renters!

So I posted my house on KSL Thursday night and Friday morning we started getting calls about it. The first couple that made it over to see it loved it and wanted to move in! They had the deposit and first months rent to us within an hour and all the paperwork was filled out. The father is a manager at a restruant and even treated us to dinner that night! We are so blessed that it came together so easily for us. They are the sweetest people. I actually talked to the woman today on the phone for three house... as Cory puts it I can instantly be best friends with perfect strangers. I like them so much i am a bit sad we are leaving! Of course they are living in our house so we kind of have to. They came to church with us today so they could see where it was and meet the Bishop. They are moving in on February 7th which is earlier than we wanted but they have some poor dogs that need a yard so we agreed to the date.

So big stress number one out of the way!! Now on to other fun stresses like the fact that i have 2 weeks to finish painting the house and pack everything and move it to my mom's garage. Yep that is right we are going to crash at her house for the next month till we leave. twill be interesting ( and a bit crowded) but i did want to see alot of her before we moved and i wont see my mommy hardly at all after that.

We are going to leave for Oklahoma mid march, pretty much right after Sorens wedding ( my older brother and its on Friday the 13th and yes they are cool with that date they got engaged in a cemetery after all!)

This is all seeming so much more real now!! Ack! I am really excited for the adventure ahead of us though. Never been to Oklahoma so really its like a three month long vacation!