week 10

March 18 - 24 

Benji's dad was telling us a few stories he shared in a talk in sacrament meeting at church. They were special stories about when he was called to be bishop. Just as he finished, Jordan immediately announces, "Now are we done!?"


When I keep track of these stories, I will usually log in to my blog and make a little note of what was said so I can remember it when come back later and write the full story. I don't remember exactly what was happening in this next story, I just know both boys were on a naughty streak all day, so Benji told them if they can't obey he will give the rocket they were building to boys that do obey. Jordan, being the thinker that he is, immediately pipes up with, "Sam obeys!" (knowing that if Sam got the rocket, he'd still be able to see the rocket launch.)



Me: "Jordan, did you know that Tuesday is the first day of Spring?"
Jordan: "NO! (hiding under the kitchen table) There are thunderstorms on the first day of spring!"


Benji was telling me what he wanted for his birthday. Jordan asked, "What about a lighter?" Jordan thinks when you get older you ask for things that only grown ups can play with.


One day we made our own little band. Jordan was playing a toy guitar, Sam was on piano and I was playing the drums. Jordan suddenly stopped and said, "Oh! We're the White Stripes!"



Benji was reading bed time stories to the boys one night and there was a pyramid in the story, Benji asked, "Do you guys know what a pyramid is?" Jordan said, "Yeah, we lived in one when I was two."
(He mixed up pyramid with apartment.)


There is a girl in our ward named Jordyn. Jordan was talking about how they have the same name, and I was thinking he would feel bad that a girl had the same name as him, so I was explaining how Jordan is a boys name, but some girls are named Jordan as well. I guess I don't have to worry about him feeling self conscious about that right now because all he said was, "Well, Jordan is a nice name."


We've been working on numbers 10-20 with Jordan. One day I said, "you have a 1 and a 2 on your shirt, what number is that?"  "Two-teen." 


We have a lot of construction going on around our house. One day a tractor was pushing dirt around for some reason and Sam was watching. It would be visible from our house for a second before it disappeared from our sight while pushing the dirt. After it did that for a few times, Sam said, "The tractor is playing peek-a-boo!"


Jordan is in a phase where he says "guess what" all the time. He was telling Benji how Sam and him were pretending that our house was a hotel and each part of the house was a different area of the hotel. Benji asked if the kitchen was the pool. Jordan said, "Guess what? No." He's even using "guess whats" in his answers.


Sam came up to me the other day with his cross eyes and asked, "why can't I see my eyes?"


I had just made lunch for the boys and started to nurse Hannah before I was going to get myself lunch. Sam walked in the front room where I was nursing Hannah and asked for more lunch. I told him first I had to finish feeding Hannah, then I was going to get something to eat. He looked at me with the most confused expression on his face and said, "but you can't feed yourself like you feed Hannah."


Benji's parents are in Ukraine for a few weeks teaching classes for the Leavitt Institute. Before they left we had one of Benji's former classmates over to their house for dinner because he went to Ukraine on his mission. Jordan and Sam are already friends with their kids and was surprised to see them at Nana and Grandpa's house. Jordan asked, "He's your grandpa too!!?"



Sam has an Iron Man action figure that says, "I am Iron Man" when you press a button on it. One day Sam was pushing the button and after Iron Man talked he would exclaim, "He is Iron Man!" So for about five minutes the other day I heard this:
"I am Iron Man!"
"He is Iron Man!"

"I am Iron Man!"
"He is Iron Man!"

"I am Iron Man!"
"He is Iron Man!"

It's a good day to be a little boy on our street.

 There is a lot of construction going on our street and my boys are loving it.

Easy like Sunday Morning

We have been given orders from Hannah's pediatrician to keep her home until May. That means keeping her away from any family gatherings, public places, and church. Also, he told me not to send my boys to church so they wouldn't bring home germs. Oh, and Jordan can't go to preschool. Then he made sure to add, just live life like you normally do. Ummmm....yeah, staying home from church for months at a time is not normal to me.

It's a good thing I like him or I might get a new doctor. I understand where he's coming from, Hannah had a life threatening illness and it was scary and we don't want to go through that again. But at Primary Children's the doctors told me over and over again, not to worry about going on with normal life once we got home. They meant our real normal life, like going to church and the grocery store.

But we have kept Hannah home, because the thought of her getting sick again made me sick. I'm not sure if I can make it until May though. I might have to make it to April and be okay with that. Our Sundays have been far from normal and I'm ready to be fully active again. Not to mention I have a calling that requires me to be in church on Sunday without putting tons of extra responsibilities on someone else. Thank goodness there are wonderful people in our ward that have filled in for me while I've been out, but I'm ready to normal again.

Anyway, so lately we have been doing a switch-a-roo at church every Sunday. One of us goes to Sacrament meeting, takes the boys to their classes and then the other person goes to Primary and brings the boys home. It's been working, and I don't feel guilty because I know Heavenly Father understands we are doing what we need to do to keep our baby girl healthy, but like I said, I'm ready to go stop the Sunday madness.

And besides, I'm getting cabin fever like you can't imagine.

Anyway, on Sunday my boys looked so adorable in their white shirts and ties, so before they all headed out the door I had to get some pictures. The only problem is they had a hard time sitting down, and took turns being silly:

Then when they were standing they looked cute, but a little uncomfortable

So I just told them to jump off the stairs.

Oh my, they make me so happy!

Hannah and I stayed at home and hung out.

Good thing she sleeps in her own bed

Doesn't she look comfy? Makes me want to stretch out and sleep.

Hannah's first laugh

Hannah loves her brothers so much, but they rarely sit and chat with her. The other day Jordan was sitting by Hannah and I pulled out the video camera to get a video of her smiling at him. While doing that I accidentally recorded her first laugh. I was a little bit surprised, if you can't tell.

Room preview

This is just a preview, there will be more to come, but I am so excited with how things are looking in Hannah's room that I had to post one picture today.

So while Hannah was in the hospital, my wonderful sisters-in-law, my niece and my mother-in-law, worked hard to strip wallpaper and paint Hannah's nursery. It was a wonderful surprise to bring Hannah home to a crib and beautiful room.

I've been decorating it, but trying to do it as cheaply as I can because I don't want to spend a ton of money on her room in case we move soon. I made those chevron stripe wall hangings out of shoe boxes! Those only cost me $6 for spray paint. The tissue paper flowers cost me $2. There are a few more things I've been doing with her room, but I'm not done, so I will post more pictures later.

Also, I'm not quite done with the chevron shoe boxes, I need to fix some of the white stripes on them because the spray paint bled through.

Anyway, it's nice to not have such a ghetto nursery anymore. Remember this?

Crop circles

Look at these crazy cool lines on our back lawn. Our tree was taken out a few years ago and we think it might be the roots decomposing and fertilizing the soil. Or it's an alien growing beneath the surface of our lawn. Both are plausible.

Bath!!

All bundled up after her first bath in FOUR weeks! She loved being in the water.

Hahaha....I don't know what's going on here!

P.S. I guess I should clarify, she couldn't have a bath because of her PICC line, not because I was neglecting her! :)

Week 9

 March 11-17

Jordan and Sam were eating smarties in the truck one day and had this conversation.
Jordan: Smarties make me smart about candy.
Sam: Smarties make me smart about what words to say, and what words not to say.


Jordan: Did you know we take a shower after swimming.
Me: Yeah, why do you think you do that?
Jordan: Because when you get out of the pool you are wet and then you get more wet to go home.


I had a doctors appointment that I took all three of my kids to last week. I bribed Jordan and Sam with Happy Meals if they were good the entire appointment. They did great, so on the way home we picked them up. Sam ate most of his at the kitchen table and then decided he would rather eat outside so he started packing everything back in the box to take outside. After putting his burger, fries and apples in he dumped his chocolate milk out of it's carton into the box and started to carry it outside. I still can't decide why he did that. We actually had to have a conversation about drinks staying in their own cup or carton.


Jordan had Kindergarten roundup last week. It was so fun following him around to all the different stations he had to go to and hear what he would say. In the assessment station the kids are asked to identify all the letters of the alphabet, the colors, the numbers 1-10, shapes and to see if they can turn pages in a book. Jordan did really well. At one point the lady dumped out a tupperware box with plastic bears in it and told Jordan to count them as he put them back in the box. Jordan took about 3 minutes to line all 20 bears up in a perfect line before he counted them and then put them back in the box. The lady asked if his room at home was perfectly clean. (It isn't.)


In the speech station at Kindergarten round up the lady asked Jordan if he knew what rhyming words are. He said, "Yeah, like Jordan rhymes with Gordon!" So she told him that she was going to say a word and he needed to tell her a word that rhymed with it. Jordan did really well with the first three and then the last four he completely messed up. So messed up it was cute. I don't remember all of his answers, but when she asked what rhymed with mouse, Jordan said Mo.


Sam was coloring with crayons one day and kept asking for a shaver. I told him he couldn't play with a shaver. He kept getting more and more agitated and started yelling for a shaver. It took me awhile to realize that a shaver means eraser.

One day we were passing by Bushnell Motel in town and Jordan pointed to the sign and said, "Oh look! There is Hollywood!"


Jordan asked me one day, "remember when there was a fire in Dewey Village?" (It's really Deweyville.)


One day I entertained the kids by pressing the scan button on the radio and keeping it on the station for one second before changing it. They both thought each noise they heard on each different station was so funny and soon all three of us were laughing so hard that we had tears in our eyes.


"I have a cool idea for when we have our Easter egg hunt, how about when you find an egg, it explodes." -Jordan


Benji reads chapter books with the boys each night before bed. Sam was so excited to go to bed one night and said, "We get to read another tractor (chapter)!"

Happy St. Patrick's day!

In our house we celebrate two holidays on March 17th. It's St. Patrick's day and our wedding anniversary. I was going to start celebrating St. Patrick's day on the 16th so we could pack the day full of fun things and not have a date get in the way, but I just decided to do it all on the same day.

We (or maybe just me) had so much fun this year. As my boys get older I can be more creative with holidays because they can do more and they enjoy it more. I started the day off with a little leprechaun mischief and a scavenger hunt/maze type thing. I used my circle punch and punched out about 400 "gold coins" that I put all over the house. If the boys followed the coins it would lead them to a little treasure that the leprechaun left for them.

Is it sad that now-a-days whenever I do something super fun for my family I get excited that I didn't get the idea from Pinterest!? Well, this one didn't come from pinterest, this one is my idea! :)

Anyway, the gold coins went everywhere in the house. 

The leprechaun turned the basketball hoop upside down!

 

He even turned our kitchen table upside down. (A HUGE hit, by the way)

 

He even hung toys from the pot holder!

He turned the water in the potty green. (This idea did come from Pinterest, I just didn't add the leprechaun feet, because I didn't want my kids to think it was pee. haha)

 And he left a little message on the mirror.

 Eventually all those gold coins would lead the boys to the laundry room where they would find bags of goodies in the dryer.

Here's what they had in their bags. A lot of green goodies and some chocolate gold coins.

 In the morning Sam woke up first. It was so funny to hear him run down the hall yelling in excitement. When I went in the kitchen he was pointing at everything saying, "Jordy has to see this!" It was cute that he was thinking of his brother! Jordan eventually woke up and the boys started following the gold coins.

 

 The leprechaun also hung toys from the light downstairs.

They found their treats!

Then we had breakfast. Rainbow fruit and Lucky Charms!

 

My boys don't like milk in their cereal so of course they only picked out the marshmallows.

For lunch I made this little lovely

As a child I hated when people called me "carrot top" and here I am making a leprechaun with carrot hair. Oh well.

He was so proud that he made his marshmallows into a rainbow shape.

We were going to make noodle necklaces with green noodles and shamrocks, but it just never happened, but I think we all still had an enjoyable day.

Sam wore a kilt for part of the day.

We got this cute family picture taken, but in the sunshine my eyebrows disappear and my face looks really weird. I've been playing around with Sepia and black and white to see if I can make it look better. It's not quite right, but here is this one.

Then Benji and I went on a date for our 6th anniversary.

Helicopter

 Most of my pictures of Hannah at the hospital are on Benji's laptop, so I haven't had the chance to add the pictures to my blog because he always has it. I finally have the chance tonight so I'm going to try and get the rest of the pictures posted. It sounds easy, but I took about 500 pictures at the hospital. I have to go through all of them. 

The whole meningitis experience was difficult, but I think the hardest thing was when we were at the emergency room in Brigham City and they told us they were going to have to fly Hannah to Primary Children's hospital. I knew it was serious, but once I heard the word helicopter, I knew it wasn't good. I don't even know how to describe the feeling, it made me dizzy and want to throw up all at the same time. It really was like a punch in the stomach. I thought Hannah had the flu, but babies don't usually get a ride in a Life Flight helicopter for the flu. 

Looking back, the helicopter ride is what saved our baby girl. She would not have made it if she wasn't flown to Primary's. She almost didn't even make it on the helicopter.  So the helicopter ended up being a great thing and I will forever be grateful for it and all the people that got her on it.

My boys are jealous that Hannah got to ride on a helicopter, but I hope no one else in our family ever has to again.