3... 2... 1... Let it Rip!

For Christmas Corbin's cousin, Trey, whom he idolizes, asked for Bey Blades, ergo Corbin now loves Bey Blades. We had never heard of them... it is basically the latest Japanimation cartoon, where kids battle tops by spinning them in a plastic basin and seeing which one can outlast the others. The show has marketed little metal tops with rip cords that kids can use to battle their own tops against their friends. So Corbin got two Bey Blades for Caleb for Christmas :) He has since dressed up as his own version of a Japanimation character and spent the day running around the house screaming "Let it rip!" and proceeding to launch his metal top across the room.

Christmas Vacation

On Christmas Eve we all sat down to enjoy our Mary and Joseph dinner. We ate bread, fish, rice, olives, avocados, nuts, dates and grape juice. We turned off the lights and ate out of wooden dishes (minus those plastic cups of course :) but the kids' favorite part was getting to use their fingers for the entire meal.


We also wrote up some Christmas wish lists for Santa, that we hung up after dinner.



Then we read the story of Christ's birth and let the kids open one present each, which just so happen to be a pair of new pajamas. Then we loaded into the car and drove around town admiring every one's Christmas lights until all three kids were finally asleep. Then we headed home and bedded down to wait for Santa's arrival.

Christmas isn't Christmas at our house without Corbin getting sick, so he woke up a few hours later puking. Joy.

We had such a rough night that we actually had to wake the kids up early in order to let them open their stockings before Makelle and I went to church. Santa also brought them a kinect so that the kids can now play games on the xbox. So after church we got that all set up and then finally started opening gifts around 1 o'clock pm.





The rest of the day was spent cooking up a storm and playing with new toys as we hung out and enjoyed our fun, lazy day.


The week after Christmas most of Caleb's family was able to come into town and visit, so we got to spend a few days hanging out with them, playing lots of games, watching a lot of football and taking a trip to the children's museum.

Food, Glorious Food

We started Seth on solids. His first food was ground amaranth cereal. Followed by oatmeal, carrots, tomatoes, cabbage and potatoes. He also is starting to self feed crackers and suck on pieces of fruit in his little mesh pouch. Luckily he is a pretty good little eater, which is a relief since he still refuses to drink from a bottle.

"Seth Did It"

Our devious little daughter has been working on the art of deception lately. She is now old enough to get in trouble when she does something wrong so to avoid a time out she will try to accuse Corbin. However, Corbin is old enough to respond and defend himself and he usually has a good alibi and is able to catch her in her deception. So last time she snuck a treat and knew she couldn't blame Corbin, who was allergic to it, she tells Caleb, "Seth did it!" So Caleb gave her 'the eye' - the, "I clearly don't believe that Seth was capable of climbing up onto the counter and taking the cookie and eating it" look. And before he can even say anything, she quickly adds on, "Seth grew up and did it!"

Gingerbread House

We made our annual gingerbread house using all the leftover Halloween candy.

Basically, Corbin meticulously attached piece after piece of candy, while Makelle non-meticulously ate piece after piece of candy :)

Princess Festival

So far Makelle and I have NOTHING in common. She loves pink, babies, princesses, dresses... pretty much everything I detested growing up.

The other day Caleb was playing video games with Corbin in the living room and Makelle was begging me to let her help fold laundry, and she told me, "it's boring being a kid, I want to be an adult so I can take care of the babies." WHAT?! After wards she brought me a tiara and asked me if I would play princess dance party with her. So somehow I ended up doing chores and pretending to be a princess and Caleb got to play video games. I should have been a boy :)

Later on we were given free tickets to the little princess festival in Provo so Makelle and I had a girls' night out. It was a ridiculously long drive for a low quality production, but she has never been happier.


They had a little princess store set up in the mall where she got to look at tutus, dresses, crowns, necklaces and more. Then we went into the back were they did a little interactive play about a princess that was all clumsy and it turns out she just needed glasses. Makelle is so painfully shy, yet when one of the princess characters came and asked her to dance, Makelle suddenly became the bravest kid there and ran up to the dance floor. The entire time she was clutching this girls' hand and just sort of staring up at her in awe.



After the skit part the girls got to make little snowflake decorations and a Christmas card for someone. Makelle made hers for Corbin. Those two still remain unbelievably good friends, it seriously baffles me with just how much they care about each other.


Then we went to the food court and got a smoothie and discovered that Makelle loves window shopping. I was just rushing along through the crowded holiday foot traffic in the mall, simply trying to get from point A to point B as fast as possible when I noticed Makelle kept stopping and looking at all the little window displays, pointing out shirts that she thought were cute, completely the opposite of me!


It was fun to see how excited she got getting to go to a "real" princess dance party, and she hasn't stopped talking about it since and is already asking about when we can go again. I guess I am going to have to learn to care a whole lot more about make up and clothes and princesses in order to relate to her :)

Decorating the Tree

We picked out a tree for family home evening, but by the time we got home and got it set up, it was getting pretty late, so we told the kids we would put on the decorations and finish it up tomorrow.

The next morning I came out and found Corbin directing Makelle to hand him ornaments while he hung them up. I had to explain that we were actually going to wait until that evening when Daddy got home to decorate it.


I love how they got the stool specifically so they could reach up high and not just have to put them in a cluster on the bottom were they could reach, so instead we ended up with a cluster at the top, because they really liked climbing up the stool.









Poor Mr. Sethers was just too tired to stay up and help decorate his first tree and we lost him about 5 minutes into it. I had great visions of him playing with the little bell ornaments as they jingle while he looks on with a grand vision of awe and wonder at the simple joys of the Christmas season, but no... turns out he couldn't have cared less :)


It is already beginning to feel a lot more like Christmas, especially when you first walk into the house and smell that wonderful pine scent again and again. I love it!

Thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving morning we woke up and drove down to the Hoogle Zoo and met Dave and Tiffany and their boys and Tyler and Tori and their kids. The zoo keepers served all the animals a Thanksgiving dinner (which we discovered basically meant their normal meals, in a pumpkin shell). It was cute though getting to watch them eat and the zoo has always been a favorite outing for our family, so it was fun.





Then we went to the Grandma Lloyd's house for dinner. Lots of yummy food and a kid table, makes for a great meal.



After we ate we all gathered around for the Lloyd family's traditional BINGO game. This year we decided to transition into the next generation and just got prizes for the kids. We sort of over did it though because someone got blackout before we even ran out of prizes so no one had a chance to steal, which Corbin was a little disappointed about. But it probably worked out for the better with little kids involved and Corbin found some money in his mystery prize, so he was happy.

Bean's Birthday

Corbin turned 5. Wow. His two best friends also happen to have birthdays the same week as his. So we all got together and took them to the Kangaroo Zoo during the week to celebrate. One kid is named Corbin and the other is Ethan (Bean's middle name)... they almost have too much in common, I guess they were meant to end up as friends :)


They had lots of fun running around together and I felt a little less guilty for not letting him invite friends to his party, like we have been promising him he could do starting on his 5th birthday. But we are still in the small condo and the weather is too cold to take them outside and I just didn't have the energy to host a gaggle of small children indoors in a tight space. Instead we ended up having a family dinner at Grandma Lloyd's house on Sunday with the Lloyd and Miller cousins. We let him choose whatever he wanted for dinner, which meant we once again had breakfast for dinner.


Bacon, fruit, hash browns and pancakes. Then we opened far too many presents... he got A LOT of cool stuff.






And finally, cake and ice cream.




He probably changed his mind about a dozen times in the weeks leading up to his birthday, but in the end decided on a Toad cake from Mario. We own nothing Mario related, but he LOVES to play the video game at his friends' house, and for some reason especially likes the Toad character. He came out a little pink, because it turns out all natural beet extract coloring doesn't make a vibrant red. But he didn't seem to mind. He also selected the flavor of the cake, and settled on banana. So we really made frosted, whole wheat banana bread and the kids thought it was so cool that I let them eat "cake" for breakfast the next morning... little do they know :)

Angry Halloween!

For Halloween this year our family dressed up as characters from the Angry Birds video game. At first it was looking like I might have to let go of my control issues and give up the whole family theme idea because Makelle was dead set on being Princess Pink (her favorite character from Daddy’s make-believe bedtime stories) and Corbin was dead set on not being anything related to a princess—certainly not Prince Charming, but we couldn’t even talk him into a knight or dragon or anything. So I was already to give in and let them each pick their own costume when one Saturday afternoon as I was getting ready to head to the fabric store to buy lots of pink they were playing “angry birds on dad’s phone” and one of them commented that they wished they could be an angry bird and the other one chimed in that yea that would be cool and mom and dad can be the pigs and we can “get them!” So I jumped on that one and ran off to buy the supplies before they could change their minds, thereby securing one more year of family themed costumes. They actually ended up loving their costumes and running around the house like little summon wrestlers the rest of the month, bouncing off of each other.


Like always, Halloween seemed to last all week as we attended scary story time at the library went to a neighborhood kid party, attended the ward party, went to a family dinner in costume and then of course went trick-or-treating on Halloween night. Living in condos without many kids around we decided to let them go around with their cousins, who also happened to own a golf cart, which made for a pretty fun and efficient night gathering treats. We now have about enough candy to last until next Halloween, minus all the chocolate pieces that I may or may not have already eaten :)

Pumpkins

For Family Home Evening we carved pumpkins. For the 4th year running we again had to force Corbin to touch the gunk inside under threat of skipping the carving, but this year Makelle jumped right in on her own and actually helped pull out all the seeds.




Corbin has now decided he is big enough to make his own jack-o-lantern and set out to create an elaborate design. Unfortunately, he sort of had a hard time understanding that you have to just draw shapes that are independent of each other and can be cut out, so he experienced a bit of frustration as time after time we kept saying, “nope sorry, that one won’t work.” He finally came up with a good design that worked well though and I was able to cut it out for him.



Dad helped Makelle create her red angry bird… she was so fun, working hard to trace her design just like Dad and Corbin were doing. I am pretty sure she thought she was doing all the work while we acted as her helpers, and she was probably right :)



After they finished their designs we made caramel apples while leaving Daddy to finish all the hard work of actually carving out the elaborate angry bird.



He did a great job and has far more patience than I :)