Pioneer Day Activities

We started celebrating Pioneer Day this week by inviting my nephew over for a sleep over.  My brother moved from Orem to Rexburg this week and I tried helping him clean his apartment, but it was going nowhere fast with 4 kids.  So I offered to take my nephew home with me until they had everything packed and cleaned the next day.  Both boys were so excited to have a sleep over.  Emmett never once complained about missing Mom or Dad.  He was all smiles!

That night we were able to attend a family BBQ/birthday party on Jeremy's side of the family. I love that my children love their cousins so much.

On the actual Pioneer Day, I started the day by donating blood.  When I got there, I realized that it had been exactly one year since I last donated blood.  We found out we were expecting Jack just a short time after I donated. What a year this has been!
After I got back from donating blood, we headed to Seven Peaks with Dad!  The kids love it when Jeremy gets to come with us. Clara and Joe even tried the intermediate slides and Clara loved them!  I'm sure it won't take her too long before she wants to go down the big slides!

The next day was spent relaxing at home.  We finished up all our errands for the week the night before so we could just spend time as a family.  Oh how that was a much needed day!

Jackson is 4 Months Old!

This has been a super emotional week.  As we've talked to different people that had their children on oxygen for longer than normal, it seemed to be that 4 months was the magical time frame.  Since we've been giving him steroids to help his lungs grow, and he hit 4 months, I just knew he would be off oxygen this week.  The phone call telling us he still failed was a very hard day for me.  But I'm getting over it and so here are some things to celebrate:
This little cutie is now 4 months old:

He loves his feet.  He will kick and kick all day long.  He also loves to get his feet up in the air to play with his toys.  I'm amazed at how good he is at controlling his feet.  We put him into a sitting position the other day and he still wanted to get those little toes in the air!

He'll use his hands to grab things and hold on for dear life.  It seriously feels like a death grip every time he grabs something.  That includes his oxygen tubes.  His tendergrips (the band aid looking things on his cheeks) used to last about 5 days before they started to come off.  Now that Jack grabs his tubes and pulls as hard as he can, they are coming off every 2 days.  Which means his cheeks are a lot more red when they do come off.
He has the best giggle.  He usually is pretty easy to get to laugh too.  He was at his 4 month check up this week and kept giggling at his Dr while the doctor was just doing routine things.
Another good thing about this week is that instead of having to wait another 4 weeks to get any updates (which is what the original plan was,) we get to do more testing to see if we can figure out what is really going on with his lungs.  So we'll have a couple of different tests done in the next 2 weeks and then we meet with the lung specialist again to go over the test results and make a new game plan.
As we were getting registered for one of the tests that need to be done, we were told that we only had $20 left before we met Jackson's out of pocket expenses and only $100 left for the family.  So if any more tests are needed or anyone else in our family needs to be ill, now is the time to do it!

And so the other kids don't feel left out, here's a pic of all my kiddos:

And this was a conversation I overheard my oldest two having:
Clara: You are a little goo-goo baby
Joe: No I'm not
Clara: yes you are, you are such a cute little baby
Joe: Do you hear me talking?  See, I'm talking.  Babies can't talk, so I can't be a baby!

Well said Joe, way to use deductive reasoning already!

Clara's Princess Party

I received princess cookie cutters for Christmas this year.  Since then, Clara has been begging me for a Princess Party.  In February I gave in and told her she could have one, but I picked a date clear out in July. She was so excited to finally have the party!  She planned everything.  I helped make the invitations, but she told me what to put.  I bought a few things for it as well, but told her she would mostly have to do with what we had on hand.  The only things I did buy was the ingredients to make the princess cookies.  She did everything else on her own.

The girls came wearing their princess costumes, they colored princess coloring pages, made bracelets, wore them to a ball, got to decorate princess sugar cookies, and played a blind fold chasing game that Clara made up.  I think over all the girls had fun.  A few of them lived close enough that the moms just told them to walk home.  I had a hard time getting those girls to leave!  :)

Clara has also discovered that you can take pictures with an iPhone without having to know the code to unlock the phone.  She often takes my phone without me knowing and I find quite a few gems on my phone...  Here are some from this week:

Can you tell that she loves her baby brother?  She often asks me (and anyone who will listen) if I think Jack is the cutest boy ever.
And this las pic is just because I LOVE seeing my children play so well together:

Happy 3rd Birthday Joe!

I can't believe Joe is 3!  He seems too grown up. 
We started his birthday celebrations by having a family birthday party the day before his birthday.  He was so excited!

Jeremy decorated the cake for it himself:

The next morning, Joe insisted on blowing his bubbles first thing. He wanted to do it before he ate breakfast and before he got dressed too.

All day long I kept asking him how old he is, he would beam with excitement as he said, "3!"
We ended the day with some left over cake and him getting to open his gifts from us. 

 He got quite a bit for his birthday.

Some of my favorite stories about Joe:
1) He is a big tease.  He calls everyone by names other than what their name actually is.  For example, he will walk up to me and say, "Hi Dad!"

2) He came up to me wearing a shirt that had alligators on it.  He said, "This is not my alligator shirt.  It's my Mater shirt. I'm just teasing you.  Silly, silly me!"

3) He loves to do things himself.  He has to buckle his car seat him self, put his shoes on himself, climb up into the car by himself.  It takes me 3 times as long to get anywhere, but I will love his independence one day.

4) He loves counting.  He will often ask me to count things with him.  We have to count fruit snacks, bugs, cards, and anything else he cares about.

5) Before he can eat any fruit snack, he has to know which shape it is.  We bought him Cars and Planes fruit snacks and before he eats it he always asks, "Mom, who is this?" He will ask over and over again with each individual one until I answer him. 

4th of July!

We started the week off right by getting Joe's cast off! He took a few days to even walk on his leg, but I promised him that we could go to Seven Peaks as soon as he could walk on it, and that was motivation enough.  He still walks with a limp, but he's definitely more mobile!

We had a blast at Seven Peaks.  I was a little nervous to take 3 kids all by myself, but it couldn't have gone better!  Clara swims like a fish and it helps that she is now tall enough that the water level never goes about her chest.  Joe wore a puddle jumper (low grade life jacket) and by the end of the day, even he was swimming without me needing to hold on to him.  That meant I could just carry little Jack around in a wrap!

As we were playing in the toy room as family, Clara decided to recreate a scene from ET.  Can you find Jack?

To celebrate the 4th, we had a nice quiet day at home.  We got to sleep in and just hang out as a family all morning.  My brother and his wife came over for an evening BBQ and then we all headed to see the fireworks at Thanksgiving Point.  The problem is that the park we picked to watch them from had a TON of mosquitoes. So we decided to watch the fireworks from our van instead.

Hope you had a wonderful 4th too!