Palm Desert Reunion

We're still here. Our laptop keyboard went kaput (I guess that's what happens when you spill water on it) and the last several post were done toggling between composing the text on the iPad (not easy unless you have micro fingers) and uploading the pictures from our computer. Sure, I want to preserve our special family memories, but I got lazy and waited until I could do it all on the computer.  Someday we'll buy a new one, but for now we bought a cheap-o wireless keyboard and it's resting on top of our laptop keyboard. Ghetto fabulous.

We had an awesome family reunion over the Memorial Day weekend in Palm Springs. It was H-O-T, but we were well equipped to beat the heat. The home we stayed in had a pool and Kate went for her very first dip, ever.

One day we went to a private lake.  There was also a pond, pool and cabin.

(I love that Kate is looking up at me in this picture.  That's because I'm her favorite. :)  And look at how Parker hooked his arm around Chloe's.  He was enamored with his cousins!)

On Sunday Grandpa Norm and Grandma Sue came over for the afternoon.  It was so fun to hear about some of the things they've accomplished in their lives.

As I recall, it was hard to get Parker to stand still- he just wanted to run away and play with friends, Chloe and Mae.  His shirt stayed tucked in for all of 20 seconds.

We brought Parker's Like-A-Bike and Chloe and Mae brought theirs too.  They were so fast and taught Parker how to balance and push off with his legs.  Since we've been home, he's really starting to get the hang of it.

The adults rode on bikes of a different flavor.  Paul has been wanting to rent Segways for years.  Leave it to John to fulfill our every wish!

Having a tea party:

Grandma gave the kiddos a special present- their very own bags (Angela made the girls' bags!) with lots of fun things inside.

Gathering around for a story before bedtime:

The cutest baby ever!  Since this picture, she's gotten THREE more teeth!

Looking through these pictures makes me think it's time for another vacation.  Maybe next time we can bring the party to England?!  

Utah!

Last month Parker, Kate and I made a special trip to Utah for the wedding of my friend's little brother... It sounds weird when I say it like that.  Because she's not just my "friend," she's my friend for life, my BFF.  And her parents are like my parents and her siblings are like my siblings and consequently, Parker and Kate have an extra set of grandparents.  Anyway, so of course we had to go to the wedding.  Unfortunately, Paul wasn't able to get time off of work so it was just me and the kiddos.  Within the first few hours of our trip I had three people tell me how brave I was to fly by myself with two small kids in tow.  We had a pretty easy time though, but it did take some advance planning to make things run smoothly.  For example, we had a late morning flight (Paul was at work), so I chose to park our car in the long term parking lot and take the shuttle to the airport.  I knew that Southwest had an outdoor check-in and baggage drop and so I planned on asking the shuttle driver to drop us off right in front of it.  Also, because we had two suitcases, two car seats, two backpacks and a stroller, I wasn't able to take all of our luggage to the shuttle stop in one trip, and I didn't want to leave the luggage or the kids unattended at the stop while I made a second trip to the car.  So, I parked in a parking spot that was close to where the shuttle exits the parking lot and had the driver stop at our car on the way to the airport to pick up our remaining gear.  The plan was to have Paul either move the car to a residential street near the airport or come with a friend to drive the car home, but wouldn't you know it, he couldn't find his car key. I'll give you one guess as to who hid the key. So, my great idea turned into a rather expensive one, but at least we made it to the airport happy and on time.

We stayed with Aunt Kim for two nights and then with Jenni's in-laws the next two nights (Jenni, Jake, and their darlings were staying there too).  My dad even came down from Idaho to see us!



He watched Parker and Kate during the sealing and was all-around incredibly helpful.  I think the trip would have been stressful if he hadn't been there.  We really had a wonderful time.  The wedding was lovely and it was so nice to be surrounded by loved ones.





It was so cute to see Parker and Scarlett interact with each other.










She was definitely the leader in their twosome.  Parker would follow her around and make sure she knew that he wanted to play with her.  We went to a park one morning and somehow Scarlett slipped away to a different play area without Parker realizing it.  He started wandering around shouting, "I'm looking for my friend Scarlett!"









Lucky for us we got to be there for Jenni's twins' birthday party!  

(Thank goodness there were presents x2 because apparently Parker has not mastered the concept of who gets to open birthday presents.)



They truly are the cutest twins you'll ever meet.  In college Jenni and I used to joke that we were the same person.  Living together sort of morphed us into one big, awesome super-nerd.  And then we got married within months of each other, got pregnant at the same time and had frank breech babies.  I was a little thrown off my axis when she announced that she was having identical twins!  I was secretly scared that the doctor was going to tell me that I too was pregnant with twins when I got pregnant a few months later. Even though they aren't as close in age as Parker and Scarlett, the twins are a little small for their age and Kate is a little big for hers, so all is right in the world. 

A huge thank you to Aunt Jami for the matching pajamas.

A Momentous Occasion

I finished Parker's church quiet book!  (Finally!)  It all started about a year and a half ago.  I had been toying with the idea of making a gospel-themed quiet book, but couldn't commit to such a big project.  Then, after watching the October General Conference, I decided that I would go for it.  It seems that everyone is touched by the messages of Conference in a different way; the major themes are so personal and varied.  For me, what stood out was that we need to be teaching our children the principles of the gospel at home and at an early age.  In the world we live in it's not enough to have their only exposure to Jesus Christ on Sundays at church.  I thought that a quiet book would be a fun, interactive way to teach Parker the gospel at home and on his level. But making a quiet book is a huge undertaking and so I decided to do a co-op.  Not only would this ease the burden (financially, creatively, time-wise, etc.), but it would also be a great way to make friends and get to know people in our new ward.  (We had moved in just a few months prior.)  So I sent out an email describing my plan and got a great response.  Each girl would make multiple copies of a single page and then we would all exchange pages to get a complete book.  I was so pleased with the results.  I think every girl could agree that it was a lot of work and we were thrilled when we were finally done.

But the funny thing was, we weren't done.  We still had to bind the book.  This is where things really slowed down for me.  So instead of having a church quiet book, Parker played with fraying church quiet pages.  I loved each page the other girls made, but there were some things I wanted to add to make it a little more cohesive.  Not only that, but I had no idea how to bind a book and because it was something so new and foreign to me, I just put it off.  I knew that I wanted to have a zippered book so that the pieces wouldn't fall out, but I'd never before installed a zipper.  That is, until a few months ago when I made throw pillows for our couch that have invisible zippers.  I found out that it's not that hard!  Also, instead of eyelets I originally wanted to make button holes for the rings to go through, but I had never made button holes.  For two days I practiced and practiced doing button holes with my sewing machine, but they never turned out right.  The tension was off and sometimes the machine didn't finish off the circle of stitches.  I troubleshooted until I was blue in the face and then decided that I'd just use eyelets.  Anyway, without further ado, I present to you, The Church Quiet Book:

I made this page after the fact, so that I'd have an even number of pages.  I love the way Moses turned out.  He's snapped onto the outside and can snap his way across the dry ground on the inside.  The sea creatures (from Etsy) are velcroed on and can be moved around.

I worked a lot on this page.  We were supposed to leave a half inch border all the way around our pages for binding purposes, but the girl who made this page didn't.  I ended up taking it apart, cutting back the felt, and re-sewing it on.  I embroidered the words onto the page and I also put vinyl on the inside of the water so that the fish slide out easier.

 
I embroidered the words onto this page.

Originally this shoe was on a page that said, "Tie The Shoe" written in marker.  I wanted to make it more church-themed and look a little nicer, so I put it on a new page and added the glove and the iron-on words.

I added the embroidered words to this page.  Originally there was an assortment of small plastic animals and finger puppets inside the ark.  I thought it would be fun to have animal pairs, so I ordered these from Etsy and added a few gender-specific details.

This is the page I made for everyone.  I tried a million and one different adhesives to make the vinyl stick to the felt and ultimately found that a very thick layer of hot glue was the only thing that worked.  After seeing the other pages, I decided that mine would benefit by being a little more interactive, so I added the fishes after the fact.

I added the embroidered words to this page.

And here's how it's all held together.  I really wanted rings so that I could add more pages in the future if I wanted to, but let's be honest, that's never going to happen.  I'm so glad to have this thing done and not continuously on my to-do list.

As this project stretched on and on, I kept kicking myself for spending so much time on it.  I mean, it's meant for children and is probably going to get thrashed, right?  In fact, a couple weeks ago Kate spit up all over the Peter Fishing page.  She had just eaten some squash and there were orange chunks all over it.  Gross. The point is to teach the gospel and certainly Parker won't care about some of the details I added.  Oh well.  I hope that it can withstand the use of lots of children and that hopefully they can learn from it.