Quick Review

I don't have a lot of time to wax eloquent, and don't have any new pictures, but I wanted to post a couple of our latest happenings this week.

We so enjoyed spending a couple of days with Mom. She brought friendship, and support, and attention for all of us at a much needed time. Thank you so much for your sacrifice, Mom! In fact, we all went into a bit of a slump without her. We made our traditional DI run and even hit a few other stores. Kohls is having an amazing sale on shoes. Only with Mom do I have the determination and willpower to shop with my two youngest.

This kids had early out all week because of parent teacher conference. Landen is doing great and has accumluated the most points (again not for reading level but for actual number of books read and tested on) in her entire career. He is very careful and serious with his schooling and of course very competetive. Mom unknowingly created a monster when she introduced him to his Faith in God book. That is the program you work on at home after turning 8. He got excited and became obsessed-literally. The program is designed to pass off one every month or two, but he was trying to do like 6 a day and getting extremely uptight and emotional when things didn't go as quickly as he wanted. If there is a goal and incentive in sight he is nearly unstoppable almost to the point of emotional breakdown and complete loss of reality. Landen had a BBall game. He has improved a lot this year. The game they play looks completely out of control. Craig has been coaching and running most of the practices. Landen plays on his indoor hoop every chance he gets, calling it "practice." He cried very hard when we told him our baby was going to be a girl. We felt pretty bad. Time for a dog?

Breck is doing well in school. Math is her challenge and she needs to but some pretty concentrated extra effort in at home, but her reading score are always off the charts. She finished up her play this Saturday, loving every minute of it, but excited to get a little more sleep. Any free minute she has causes her to create something. Yesterday as the rest of us were doing other things she created a solar oven, a candybar made by sitting on various ingredients within a plastic bag till they melded together and then freezing them in the snow, and I can't remember what else. She is highly interested in composting and gardening and you can often find my gardening books on her bed. We just spent the last 3 hours together at the urgent care because she once again (yes-three times) has strep. She has a lymph node that is gigantic and had been falling asleep everywhere, a little feverish and just not perky. We are at our wits end with how to keep her healthy.

Thursday, we took the kids to the Draper temple open house. It was a very neat experience and the kids told me over and over thank you for taking them and how interesting it had been. As an adult, the one open house I'd been to hadn't affected me that much, but I loved doing it with children -especially curious ones- who could get some pretty solid answers to questions they'd had about the temple and feel the sweet peace that resides there. Breck asked me after seeing the 12 oxen holding up the baptismal font if the remaining back third of the oxen was inside of the font! Capriel loved riding the bus from the stake center up to the temple.

Friday I took the kids to the circus. In the past, Craig has always taken them while I stayed home with the baby. We had a great time. The arena was small, so we were plenty close to enjoy the show. Capriel was enthralled, especially loving the lions and tigers, and elephants. She was so emotionally involved with the show, excited, worried, thrilled, scared. As you can imagine the women were not completely clad and both Landen and Tali independently commented to me, "Mom, they are not very modest, but they sure are good." I wish they could understand the affect that skimpy dress has on little children. I never want to children to get comfortable with that type of dress. Breck is beginning to notice some of the tricks of the trade, and I got a kick out of her observant comments as to how they were pulling off some of the feats. Overall, we had a good time and the kids have been practicing keeping multiple hula hoops going at once and Capriel has even been trying to stack chairs on top of each other and climb them (both acts we saw)

That night Craig and I went to to sealings for a friend who had arranged a group to do some family names. We hadn't been for a very long time and though I was a little nervous about passing out (I have a tendency towards that and currently have a bad leg due to the pregnancy) we enjoyed the reminder of one of the most beautiful blessings of the temple.

Thursday was also our ultrasound. We took Breck which was fun just because it was all so new to her. I have to admit being quite shocked at the announcement that it was a girl. It has definitely taken me some getting used to mentally, but we are excited. Everything looks normal and healthy which is such a blessing. I am gigantic and often wonder how I can continue to grow for 18 more weeks. I've already gained the same amount that I did in Breck's entire pregnancy. Watch out! I have definitely started the "nesting" process and this week began to formulate a list of "before baby" things to do. Once again, 20 bucks to anyone who can come up with a unique girl name that we end up choosing!

Well, this is much more lengthy than I imagined.