Hi, Blog! I miss you!

I really do miss my blog... and very soon I will begin the arduous task of updating it!  I am going to continue in chronological order.  At Jamie's house the other day she pulled out a scrapbook to show me something and I realized how negligent I've been in keeping my own family's records.  I have a scrapbook that goes from 1997-2001 and then it stops... and then I have my blog books that Aaron has had printed for me every year since I started blogging, but that's only since partway into 2007.  So... I'm missing 2001-2007, which were some pretty major years around here, and I'm missing everything that has happened since I last posted here.  Time to prioritize.... stay tuned.

Snow Day

During a typical winter we enjoy at least a few days of playing in the snow: we have a ski day and/or a sledding day in Arizona, and we play in the snow during a holiday visit to Utah.  This year when we were in Utah over New Year's, the only thing that marred an otherwise lovely trip was an absence of the fluffy white stuff.  And then, the stars didn't align for a ski day to ever happen - strange winter weather, Arizona snow when we weren't able to schedule it, etc.  By the end of March we knew that time was running out, so the last Saturday in March we were determined to have a sledding day.

After a long time of driving through parts of the state that we thought would surely have snow (it had snowed heavily a few days earlier but the succeeding warm days had turned the forest into a giant puddle), we finally found some!

See beyond the trees, beyond this pathetic patch -- real snow!  It was in a little ravine off the side of the highway; a little random but at that point we weren't picky.

 The hill was just right for a little late-afternoon sledding.  Here's a great action shot of Molly going down, Lucy getting up from her ride, and Noah running back up the hill.

 Cute twinners, loving the snow.

Deep enough for sledding, and snow angels... 

...and throwing snowballs. 

Before long they'd built a little jump and everybody got some pretty good air.  The dog, incidentally, was in heaven chasing the kids up & down the hill.  Whenever she got in the way though, a good trick was to throw a snowball into the woods and tell her to "go get it."  Poor thing fell for it every time. 

Noah's headed for a wipeout! 

Great air, Molly! 

It was a really fun day; it was just enough snow & sledding to make the drive to find it, and the hassle of dealing with soggy snow clothes afterwards, worth it.

the New Molly!

For quite a while, Molly had been talking about waiting to cut her hair until she had enough to donate to Locks of Love.  We decided that during Spring Break would be a fun time to get it cut, so that she could return to school the next week with a whole new look!

Look how long her hair had gotten.

 Now it's short & sassy!

 Also, Molly's vision had been getting worse over the past several months, to the point that she had to sit in the front row in class to see the board without squinting.  I finally took her to the eye doctor and she's thrilled about her new glasses and how well she can see now.  It turned out that her glasses were ready to pick up during spring break, so she had an entire new look when she went back to school on Monday! 

Here's the new Molly: short hair & glasses, and holding her braid to send off to Locks of Love.

Cute girl!

Radiohead show

Back in November, tickets went on sale for the March Radiohead show here in Phoenix.  Jake & Tiffany had already decided to come down for it, so we decided to go all out and get the best seats possible!  They sold "fan pre-sale" tickets a few days before the selling to the general public, and for that they tell you a date but not a time.  Apparently this often takes place in the middle of the night, US time (which is daytime in the UK where Radiohead is from).  Well, Jake & Tiff & I set our alarms for every hour that night (them in Utah, and me here).  I set my cellphone alarm so it wouldn't wake anybody else up and I slept (kind of ) with the laptop next to me, ready to refresh the ticket page to see if they'd gone on sale yet.  Crazy huh.  Well I woke up for the 1am, 2am, 3am, and 4am alarms... but by the time of the 5:00 alarm I guess I was too tired and slept through it.  At about 5:05am my phone rang and it was Jake, saying that the tickets had just gone on sale!  So we bought four tickets together right then, just seconds after they officially went on sale online. 

The lack of sleep and the great planning & coordinating paid off; we had seats in the 5th row in the closest section to the stage!!  It was awesome!!

Here are a few shots from the show; thanks Jake for bringing your camera since we forgot ours in the car!

Quite the array of guitars... there was a whole other rack with at least as many to the left of this one too.

 'ello, Thom!

 Sold-out crowd of around 19,000 (Jobing.com arena in Glendale)

I knew a few other people at this show; after the opening band while the roadies were getting the stage ready for Radiohead, a couple we know from church came over to talk to us for a few minutes, I texted with my brother to find out where he was sitting (complete opposite side), and a friend of mine from years ago stood up and waved from her seat which was way up high, while we were texting to locate each other.

The show was REALLY good; an excellent setlist and it was super fun being there with Jake & Tiffany too.  The last time Aaron & I saw Radiohead was in 2003... I was pregnant with Zoe & Lucy, and we took a trip up to Utah for it since they didn't play in AZ that year.  We went to that show with Jake too, along with a friend of his (that was long before he & Tiff were married).  Good times!

Visit from Jake & Tiff

Towards the end of spring break we had the fun treat of having visitors come stay with us for a couple of nights!  Jake and Tiffany and their kids came from Utah.  We first made the plan back in the fall when we heard that RADIOHEAD was coming to Phoenix.  For this tour they weren't playing in Utah, so Jake & Tiff decided to see them here and make a little trip out of it.  Great idea!  The first day they were here was Aaron's birthday; we opened presents and ate cupcakes in the afternoon, and that night the grown-ups went out to dinner and to the concert while our four kids and their two kids stayed home with a babysitter.

The next day it was a little warm out, but not unbearable so we went to Freestone park for a while.  The kids rode on a couple little rides:

 But they had just as much fun taking turns riding Aaron's skateboards down the long grassy hills.

 They fed the ducks and saw a couple of turtles too.

 After that we went to see how the new Gilbert Temple is coming along.  Then we went out to lunch at Smashburger (amazing) and headed back to our house.

The kids had a lot of fun together!  Even though Sloan and Owen are quite a bit younger than my kids, they were still able to all play together and have fun.  After the kids went to bed that second night, the grown-ups played a little Rockband... probably our favorite thing to do with Jake & Tiff!

They had to leave the next morning so it wasn't a very long trip, but we were so glad to have them here to visit!

Flat Iron hike

One beautiful Saturday in early March, Aaron & Noah (and Juno) set off for a tough hike in the Superstitions; Flat Iron trail. I think they had a pretty good time. There was a lot of steep climbing involved, as you can see in the picture below: Last Thanksgiving Eve, a small plane crashed in this area, killing all six people aboard: 3 adults and 3 children :( Aaron & Noah came across several small pieces of the wreckage near the trail. The rocks are blackened from the plane crash. Such a sad story; the pilot only missed clearing the mountain by about 50 feet. The kids were on their way to eastern AZ to spend Thanksgiving with their dad (who was also on the plane).

They're headed out to that point; that's the Flat Iron.

These guys love to hike! And it was a really nice day for it too.

"All-Star Mathlete"

In early February, all the 6th graders in ALP Math (advanced) worked on a tough word-problems packet, and the top six scorers from each elementary school qualified to go to the All-Star Mathletes district competition!

Well, Noah has always been pretty good at math and he qualified. The team, along with their ALP math teacher, took a van to a Junior High in the district and the competition lasted all afternoon. The girls and I went to watch... good thing they had their homework to do and I had my phone to play on because most of it was truly NOT a spectator sport!

There were a few different exercises; some individual and some as a team. First they did "mental math," where the announcer said a series of calculations like, "Start with 4. Multiply by 6. Add 9. Divide by 3. Add 40. Subtract 17. Divide by 2. Multiply by 3. Add 9. Divide by 5. What's the result?" There were 25 problems like this, to be done in their heads (no paper, and obviously no calculators) and they just wrote down the answer at the end of each problem. They might have been longer (more steps) than this; I don't know. So that was mental math.

The other individual thing was working on a big packet of word problems, similar to the packet they completed to qualify for the competition. I think they had 45 minutes to work on it and it was so quiet in the room during that time, you could hear a pin drop. That was the individual problem solving portion. (I took these pictures during a break.)

After a snack break they did some team exercises. Well, this one was really individual... playing "24." Their teacher put out these cards, one by one, each with four numbers on it. The first kid to figure out how those four numbers can equal 24 - using each number once - gets the points for that card. For example, the card they're looking at here has the numbers 3, 4, 6, and 8. I just figured out that you can make 24 by going (8-6)x3x4=24. The cards have different point values based on difficulty.

I love this picture -- I can hardly ever get him to give me a good smile and this picture looks like he's really enjoying himself (doing math).

Here's the room full of kids; each school's team at their own table. This was actually only half the elementary schools in the district; the rest had their competition a different day.

After playing "24" with their classmates they divided up into mixed teams (with kids from other schools) to do some other team exercises.

Then it was time for awards.... drumroll please....

Noah's mixed team got all of their team problems correct!

Noah got the highest number of points from his school team playing "24!"

Noah TIED FOR FIRST place for the Mental Math portion... he and this girl each missed only two problems out of the 25, and they had to order another trophy for him! I was so excited about that moment of him winning the mental math; I sat back down and put my camera away. But then they announced the winner of the individual problem-solving portion, and NOAH WON THAT ONE TOO!!!WOW! What a day. So, yep, he gets two trophies! Pretty exciting.

Here's the team from his school.

So basically my question now is... is there some way we can redeem those math trophies for college scholarship money??

Go Mitt!

I have been every bit as emotionally involved in this campaign season as I was in '08... but back then I was blogging about it all the time. I have spared you this year :) I am, still, a big Mitt Romney fan and I knew when he dropped out in '08 that he'd run again in '12 and that he would do better this time. I was so right! (I was right about a few other things too, like the fact that McCain would be our nominee that year and that Obama would crush him in the general.)

Anyway I'm thrilled that Romney will be the Republican nominee this time around (not officially yet but it's only a matter of time... and a few more delegates). He came to Arizona a few times leading up to our primary and I went to one of the rallies! My first political rally!

I brought my grandma with me and we had a good time.

Mitt, checking his notes

press corps
the crowd... this was in a small school gym (Christian school)

I learned a few things from this experience:

1. Being a candidate would be SUCH A PAIN! Constant travel, giving nearly the same stump speech multiple times a day, nothing but hotel rooms and plane and bus rides. It just goes to show how much these guys are willing to go through to be President.

2. The signs everyone was holding up at the rally were mostly not homemade & brought in by ralliers. They were all painted by campaign volunteers and then distributed on the way in; that's why they all looked the same.

3. The Secret Service is SERIOUS! We weren't allowed to bring in folding chairs (so we had to stand for 45 minutes... which my 87-yr-old grandmother wasn't thrilled about!), or camera bags, or big cameras, or purses... only cell phones and small, out-of-the-case cameras. There was a secret service guy standing right by us for part of the time and I wanted to get a close-up picture of his ear piece (with the little spiral cord that goes from the back of their ear down their neck) but I was too intimidated to take a picture of him.

The reason I want Mitt Romney to be our next President is because he will do the best job and he will really help our country.

The kids want him to be our next President because one time, two years ago, they got to shake his hand when they saw him at church in San Diego... and they think it would be pretty cool to say that they shook hands with our president!

Cute Molly

The theme of Molly's 4th grade music program was Arizona (and it was on February 14th, Arizona's 100th birthday!) They were told that they could wear something "western" or else Hispanic or Native American to represent the history of our state. We eneded up borrowing this cute square dance dress from a friend; it was way too big on Molly but with a few safety pins we got it to work just great!

Happy Valentine's Day!

For the past couple of years I've seen other kids' valentines like this, and I'd been meaning to try it out. I even set a reminder for myself for this year, for about two weeks before Valentine's Day... but that still didn't keep me from procrastinating! I snapped these pictures of the kids right after they got home from school, the day before Valentine's day... then I spent a few minutes editing & adding the words with Photoshop, ordered the prints from Walgreens online and they were ready to pick up by dinner time. After dinner I cut two slits in each picture with an X-acto knife while the kids inserted the suckers and some of them chose to write their friends' names on the back. Tootsie Pops were really too heavy for these and they kept falling out; next time I would glue a piece of cardstock on the back to make the whole thing more stable. But, I thought they turned out cute and it was great that we could get them done so last-minute.

Lucy loves shoes.

Lucy had a cough throughout much of January, and one day in early February her breathing started getting a little weird at night, which reminded me too much of Noah's episode in 2009 when he spent two nights in the hospital. So, I took her in to the pediatrician before it could get worse. She was fine; just needed a breathing treatment to clear her up and she used an inhaler for the next few nights at home.

She thought the breathing treatment was pretty neat-o, and here's her attempt at the same "Darth Vader" pose that her brother did when he was at the hospital 3 years ago doing the same thing. Silly.
Our pediatrician's office is very close to my parents' house, so any time my kids have had to go to the doctor it has been accompanied by a trip to Pamma's. This was especially awesome back when I had twin infants and my mom would help me, either with babysitting my older two kids, or with my twins at the doctor!

While were were visiting, Lucy found a pair of Pamma's shoes that fit her almost perfectly, thanks to my mom's tiny feet, and she wore these around for the rest of the time we were there.

She got a little bored with no other kids around to play with and me chit-chatting with my mom, so I gave her my camera for entertainment and she took several pictures of "the shoes:"

(There are actually quite a few more pictures, too).

What a silly; I love this girl.