It has been a while...

...since I posted pictures to this blog. I guess that I have just allowed life to happen and get the best of me. It's not like I've been busy for the past few months, right? Other than to try and recap everything that has happened since the last time that I posted, I figured that I would just start with what happened most recently.

Michelle, Rebecca and I went to see Wicked. It came to the theater at the UofA for three weeks. We went to a Saturday afternoon show. The theater was sold out. We got the tickets clear back in October when they first went on sale. We didn't know anything about the story, other than it was about the witches of Oz, set before the original movie. We are glad we went and that we took Rebecca. Tyler was pretty bummed that he didn't get to go.

Here is the view from our seats.

I am glad that I didn't have to sit behind this guy. He eventually lowered himself into the chair, but we thought for a while he wouldn't fit any lower.

Tonsils Part III

Yes, Tonsils Part III. This time it was Meagan. She got an ear infection while we were in UT this summer and it took a long time to clear up. The pediatrician suggested that she go see the ENT and have her tonsils and ears looked at. He decided that she didn't need tubes in her ears, but just like with Tyler, took one look at her tonsils and declared that they needed to come out. So, Wednesday they came out. She did really well and was really brave to go off to the operating room on her own. Here she is modeling the finest in hospital gowns and her special bracelet.
These are her tonsils just before they were taken out. She wasn't sick then and look at how large they were. I will spare you the after shots, these are bad enough.

Just like with Tyler, after he was wheeled away they sent us to the waiting room with a restaurant-like pager that would go off when she was in the recovery room. When the pager went off we had to drive down to the other end of the building and go in the back door to meet her.

She did really well the first day after she got home. Since then, she has had her ups and downs. Today was her first day eating something other than popsicles and Jell-O. We are hoping that she will be on the up-swing from here on out.

Erin

It was brought to my attention that I never posted any pictures of Erin when she was born. I wasn't keeping the blog up to date and I was too busy with life. So, seeing as how she is almost 9 months, I thought I would give you a few pictures of her as she has "grown up".

1 day

6 weeks

2 months

3 months

4 months (eating rice cereal for the first time)

5 1/2 months

7 months

8 months

9 months (almost)

Pest Control

Every home in the desert has some sort of problem with bugs. Most people have the bug man come to their home to spray insecticide to kill the bugs. Not us, we use a more natural approach. We leave the front porch light on which attracts all the little bugs. Then the bigger bugs come and eat the smaller bugs, and so on and so forth until you get to the top of the insect (or arachnid) food chain. Here is our form of pest control. We have a tarantula that comes and visits our front porch and gets his fill on all the little bugs.

Unfortunately there is nothing in the picture to give a relative size comparison. If I were to judge, he is slightly smaller than my flat hand. It is the biggest of the tarantulas that I have seen on our front porch over the years. I didn't tell Michelle about him because she made me kill the last one that she saw.

Monsoon

On Saturday evening we were just getting ready to run some errands. We had eaten dinner, got the kids ready, shoes and socks were on. We were just about to walk out the door. Then the rain came. And it came hard. We decided to wait until the storm passed to go run our errands. We all ended up sitting on our bed looking into the backyard through the window. We started to count the seconds between the flash of lightning and the thunder and it was getting closer and closer. Then came the 3/8 inch diameter hail. Then there were a couple of times when the thunder and lightning were simultaneous. The whole time the wind was blowing. The kids got to see the effects of a good windstorm as the tree fell over. I love the monsoons in the desert.

FHE

Last night our Home Teacher came over. Then some other good friends dropped by as well. Both times our kids did or said something that was inappropriate or embarassed us or something like that. So, tonight for FHE we decided that we needed to teach the kids how to behave when adult friends come over. We talked about some things and then had the kids role-play what they learned. When it was Rebecca's turn to be the friend and Tyler's turn to welcome her into our home he showed us just how smooth he is going to be. She came in and sat down and he was going to ask her some questions about how her day was. He couldn't think about what to say, so we prodded him a little and here is what he said. "Well, if it's a girl and we don't know her really well we can ask her for her name and then her phone number, and then we can call her up and ask her to come over and then we can do stuff with her." We didn't teach him dating 101, but that is what he came up with on his own. He spent our week at Fish Lake holding his 18 yr old cousin's friend's hand and now this statement from him. Should we be worried?

Back to School

It was the first day of school today. It is hard to believe that the summer is over. It went by really fast. The kids were excited to go back to school. Rebecca couldn't go to sleep the night before, she was so excited. It is going to be a hard year for Meagan. She wants to go to school, but isn't quite old enough. However, all of her friends at church started kindergarten this year so she won't have anyone to play with during the day. We are going to need to find her some new friends to play with.

Notice the bags full of supplies that Tyler's class asked each student to bring. Paper towels, Kleenex, copy paper, crayons, folders, markers, etc. Rebecca's class had a similar list. I don't think that there is any money in the budget for supplies so they are asking the parents to provide.