A turn of events

The first thing Emmy said when she woke up this morning was "Mom my body feels ouchie all over."

Hmmmmmmm.

I think too many Fruit Loops will do that to a little tummy that is used to organic oatmeal with raw honey for breakfast.

She threw up at breakfast, before she ate anything. Daddy made her some peppermint tea, but that came up too.

She was in strangely good spirits though (she was giggling in the above photo), so we weren't sure what to do with her. We kept preparing to attend church.

Then her energy melted away.

And she got a little pale.

And she got really warm.

Church was missed.

Luckily this little pill was just as weird as ever!

So we packed up the van and Daddy drove us home. Just like that.

He has to head back down there at 5am tomorrow, but it's nice to have him home for a few hours.

She slept most of the drive home (she was puking when she was awake, so sleeping was good).

Then once home she fell asleep on the couch. So while she did that...

Jonah whipped up some home made noodles! He's quite the gourmet.

It's nice when you can start dishing some of the work load off on the progeny.

This is what became of his lovely noodles, and it warmed and soothed and healed and mended a multitude of evils.

I have never claimed to be a great chef, but my chicken noodle soup rocks our world. I'm just saying.

And now Em is back to doing what she usually does best.

Although I am making her sleep on the couch tonight, because the idea of climbing up on the top bunk at 2am to clean up semi-digested soup doesn't thrill me.

Sorry, that was gross.

We are complete again:)

'Happy to see their Dad' does not begin to describe the kids yesterday afternoon when we pulled into Green River (not to mention how I was feeling). The drive was actually very uneventful - which is good, right? We didn't have to make any stops, Jonah had a great nap, all was great!

When Caleb got back to the Hotel that evening we went straight to the pool for a good 2 hours of happiness.

Little Jonah may be a Mama's boy, but even Mama can't give him all he needs. Papa joined us too!

We told him that swimming under the influence was dangerous, but he jumped in anyway:) Doncha just love morning face?

We checked out the breakfast this morning, and the kids ended up tasting Fruit Loops for the first time. It was a hit, naturally. We're on vay-cay! Yes, their forks are in their apple juice. Now we're doing Dad's laundry. He only brought enough clothing for 4 days (which was all he was going to be here) so we refreshing it. And we've taken over the clothes folding counter completely.

I'm not quite cool enough to have a lap top, so we're using the computer here in the Hotel Lobby. And it's okay that it took 25 minutes to upload these photos, since we're hangin out waiting for the drier anyway!

I am one dedicated blogger, I tell you what.

Four!

What?! Still no Husband!?

I recently talked to him, and he had just hit 50 hours for this week. And he's not coming home yet. So in the morning the kids and I are headed down there! Yes that's right, Green River is soon to be graced by a couple of raggedy kids and their rotund Mama.

This morning I sent them outside to release some energy on the snow instead of on the tormented cats.

Jonah made it his job to cover the front mat with snow. His ideas are a little different than what is normally socially acceptable, but we're working on it.

This evening we made the decision to head to Green River in the morning, so we went home to get ready. Pete came over about a half hour after us getting here and said that we had water again! Woo Hoo! So we're home for the night.

Caleb will probably have to stay down there until next wednesday, so we're going down for the weekend to be with him. I'm trying not to compare it with visiting hours at the county jail.

Woah, did I just type that?! Forgive!

It'll be great though! Anything is worth being a whole family again.

I'll probably tell you all about it.

Three's a crowd

Three is too many days.

Like I mentioned in my last post, I got a late night phone call that we were out of water, so Wednesday morning we headed to the thrift store, then up to Caleb's Mom's for some ease of living. Carrying gallons of water storage up the stairs so I could flush the toilet was only fun a couple of times - call me wimpy.

This is a friendly neighbor who dug a road through the 3 feet of snow up to the well, so the fixer guys could come work on it. The kids were enthralled - it was amazing how that cat went through that snow!There's the fixer guys, doing their job. I trudged up there through the mud to get the deets from Pete, who said it'd be thursday night at the earliest. Hence why we went to Lala's.

Trust me, we needed to bathe.

But don't you be thinkin' that the adventures ended there! The road grater had left a fresh wall of snow in front of the driveway! Now don't get me wrong, Party Van is pretty adventurous. But we discovered her limit.

So we found a shovel in the garage and dug our way in. I say "we" very loosely here. The kids ended up inside watching 'The Grinch" after about 2 minutes - the little slackers:)

See that large and in charge snow boulder in front of Emmy? I had shoveled across to it, and was standing there pondering what I was going to do with it, when the noisiest old beat up pickup you ever saw came up the road with a big plow on the front. I love those.

And he stopped.

"Hey, Want me to move that for you?"

"YES! I LOVE YOU! BLESS YOU!!"

And life was bliss after that.

What a gorgeous home to be "forced" to go stay in! We can't thank you enough, Mom and Dad!!

We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, to say the least.

And since Lala and Papa are gone with our Daddy, they offered us their King Bed! We loved it.

Mom: I promise they didn't jump on your bed.

Too high.

Lest you think too highly of me

I got a few comments on our family nights, so for those of you with little kids like mine - here's my tricks. This is so you'll know that I'm not really as clever as you might think I am. I just bought the books!

There are so many cutsie little FHE idea books out there, but really our favorite materials always come from the distribution center - and you can use them knowing that they are First Presidency approved and doctrinal stuff. Which is good:)

The classic FHE Resource Manual is intense. I couldn't believe how much stuff was in there! There's a bit in there about making family night fun for really little kids, but I think it's mostly geared towards families who are a little older than mine. Still good though, obviously.

This manual, on the other hand, changed our family home evening experience for ever:

It's the nursery manual! It's so awesome! If you haven't flipped through it before I highly recommend it. All the lessons are right there laid out for you, with songs, activities, coloring pages, the WORKS.

Makes you look like you spent all afternoon preparing. Who doesn't love that?

Flannel boards are something that you have to take a little time to make, but the effort has been very well worth it. I just Elmers-glued some flannel to a foam core display board - super easy. Then you get the card stock people from the distribution center, cut them out, glue on a little strip of flannel and wah-lah! Hands-on scripture stories.

This book helps me with telling the stories - and the scripture references are all there too so you can have your scriptures open and read the key verses along with it.

This is a major favorite of ours too - it's awesome for Sacrament meeting as well as FHE.

AND! In case you didn't know, all Distribution items ship for free! Just log onto lds.catalog.org and everything you could hope for and more is there.

Although I greatly doubt it, I hope there was something here that maybe you weren't aware of that can help you in your fhe endeavors.

Now I'm off to my Mother In Laws for the night because our well pump died (I promise that's not as rustic as it sounds) and we don't have running water! And don't know when we will!

More on this later, I'm sure:)

Two Days Too Many

Here we are finishing up day two of no Daddy, so here's the recap:

After a morning of avoiding the laundry mountain we headed to our favorite winter place: The Library! (In Summer it's our second favorite place. The garden holds the coveted first favorite spot)

Emmy was thrilled to discover that they had a new Corduroy book.

Jonah was thrilled to lay in this hole and 'read' books for the majority of our time there.

Emmy likes to try out lots of different spots. Basically where ever she picks up the book, that's where she plants herself.

I'm not eloquent enough to describe how much we love this place. I keep deleting my attempts, so I will attempt no longer. Just know that we love it.

Then we made a quick stop at the neighborhood redbox for some entertainment.

*sigh* Jokes! Not that redbox. This redbox. I'm about to watch the movie that I rented, and if it's really good then I'll tell you all about it tomorrow. If it's not then I'm saving myself some embarrassment. Not something I do very often.

Then it was a quick stop at Smith's for some food for our seemingly never satisfied tummies. We love food, what can we say?

After getting home we finally tackled the laundry pile. Literally, in the kid's sense. They were jumping in it like it was a pile of leaves until it eventually got small enough that they got over it. They're actually slightly helpful - their job is the socks. It takes them just as long to find and sort all the socks that it takes me to fold all the rest of the clothes, so it works out perfect.

Didn't you really want to know that?! I mean really? I'm signing off. It's becoming obvious to me that I don't talk to any one besides toddlers all day.

Day One

Caleb's gone to Green River until... we're hoping he'll be home by Thursday. Serious Hope.

It's a strange thing to be without him, since it doesn't happen hardly ever. He and I are a lot like Oreo's and Milk: Pretty useless with out each other.

These next few posts will document life in our home without our Dad.

This photo really doesn't have anything to do with anything, I just found it in a old file and thought I'd throw it on here for kicks. Made me smile:)

This incredibly flattering photo is us at 6:30 this morning just before he left. He made us our daily breakfast smoothies and was out the door. When I say daily I mean it. Every morning, there's a shake waiting for each of us. Mine is usually delivered to my bed since that's usually where I am at 6:30. How did I find this man, you ask? I was very lucky.

Family night was definitely not the same. Great still, but not the same. Here's the kids leading the songs - which they insist on doing from atop their stools.

The flannel board is another thing that they insist on. No matter what the lesson is on, there's always a flannel board story going along with it.

Tonight Emmy told the story of Ammon. We did this story last week as well, but she wanted to do it all by herself tonight.

And here we have the unfortunate de-armed Lamanites fleeing the scene of the crime.

Last week this lesson ended with major arm-removing-attacks on their Dad.

When I volunteered my arms for removal Emmy replied "You can't, you're belly's too big."

How do you argue with that?

Here's another example of Family night with Dad: He did the lesson a few weeks ago on Nephi building the ship to cross to the promised land, and he taught the kids how to make paper boats. Which Emmy decided to fill with Disney Princess Dolls. They made for some lovely Nephites, I tell you what! Or Lehites. What ever they were then.

Back to tonight:

We had Dark Chocolate for the treat. What did you expect?

Not sure why Em's glaring. Tired of saying "cheese" probably.

A quick bath, then Popcorn Time! Emmy was sitting right in front of the warm air, and wouldn't move even though it was drying out her eyes.

Is there anything better than home made popcorn? I mean really? *sigh*

Then we watched this:

It was SO good!! I had every intention of folding laundry while they watched it, but I couldn't leave. There were no words in it, just like the book, and it was 27 minutes of perfection. In my humble opinion. Talk about a magical story.

Emmy was grinning through the whole thing and Jonah kept saying "Woah, Mommy! See it?"

Any ways. If beautiful music along with delicious animation is your thing, this is highly recommended.

They're both conked out in their beds now, and I think I'll be doing that soon. Instead of folding the laundry:)

The way things are

I know I've been over doing it with the winter photos lately, but what else do I have to show you? Do you really want to see the photos of us laying around in our pajamas and crazy hair? Because that's the majority of our other activities.

I'll spare you. For now.

The lamp post in front of my Mom's house reminds me of Narnia every time I see it. I can't help but watch for Mr. Tumnus and his basket.

Snow removal is serious business when you live in the Northern Utah boonies way up on the mountain side with a dirt driveway that is a half mile long.

OKAY FINE. You asked for it: This photo, for example. Emmy dressed herself today, and seemed to think that Jonah's pants were better than her own. The princess shoes with socks really completed the outfit, I thought. And Jonah in his jammies trying to decide which game to play.

Needless to say, the outside photos are going to be plentiful around here for a while. Here, I'll give you a LIVE shot out my window right this very moment: What did I tell you? This is what we do! I can't tell you how great it is to have kids who love the snow. The money spent on snow gear is SO worth it. They stay snuggy and dry whilst rolling all around out there - it's awesome. I think that's what makes-or-breaks it for kids. Okay back to my Mom's: Cami and Emmy (well, you know, kinda Emmy) dug a wicked rad cave in the snow bank. I asked her how big it was inside and she said they were running around playing tag in there - so take that how you will:) This is the first "room" and it keeps going to the right there into another "room". The chillin's loved it. Back in Heber there's always plowing the driveway with Dad. Emmy lives for this. She begs the clouds to snow so she can help Dad plow the road. This photo is on the verge of making me emotional.

But then again, what isn't? Then yesterday afternoon Lala came to play with the kids, and Caleb and I sneaked off to Wasatch Mountain State Park for some snowshoeing. It was incredible - for lack of a better word.

Caleb can turn the calmest mildest activity into an adventure. This face perfectly describes the happiness we were both feeling at being outside. And it's not that the kids are exhausting or anything, but being just the two of us for a few hours was bliss.

He he, this was a cute little pose on top of the snow bank, but before Caleb could get the photo my feet slipped out from under me and down the hill I went on my rump. I'm pretty graceful these days:)

And how can you play in 4 feet of fresh snow without doing a front flip into it?

Nice photos Jayne!

Why thank you!

Happiness rules around here. Thank you for a lovely afternoon, Karla!