My memory lane is under construction can I use yours?

Here I am again. Writing again!! I wanted to know what it is about brisk fall nights that causes one to reminisce about their past. Erin and I were walking around outside and our thoughts were forced into memory lane mode. It was weird.

The trees in Midway have started to turn colors. I saw my first one today! It won't be long before we are pelted with tourists looking at the colors. This usually isn't a problem except it lowers the speed on the roads by 20 MPH. You can always look in their car and see them talking as you are patiently driving slow behind them.
"Ohhh look at the pretty colors Gertrude!"
"They are simply remarkable Ferdinand!"
"Have you ever seen such a shade of orange."
"Do you hear that honking from behind us?"
"Yes I do, it is coming from that nice looking blond fellow. He looks like he is really wanting us to see the colors also!"
About this time I ram them off the road. Well, I'm not that bad. I am more patient then that. REALLY!

We learned a lot about buying things this past month. We bought a no name digital camera for cheep! I think that anyone knows that this is a big no no. Need less to say that all the pictures were dark unless the flash was on. Then the flash would bleed out the entire picture so you could only see white. So, we did the only sensible thing and sold it on ebay. We lost $20 on the deal. We ended up doing more research and found a sony that was the right price and had the option that we wanted. We also spent a long time looking at reviews. Yep, I'm an idiot. Just don't let it get around.

Fall semester keeps getting harder. I don't know what I was thinking. I have a stats class that I thought was going to be a breeze. The teach just stepped up the pace and I'm lost. He was writing equations on the board that I have no idea how to work. I have been through calculus and I still have no idea what he is talking about. Well, I hope to soon. Next week starts my tests.

Matthew is mobile! He can crawl, sit, and pay for his own bus fare! We only see him about 1/2 the time anymore. He is always going somewhere. He smiles a lot! You only have to look at him to make him smile. It is awesome.

Emma is doing well. Her speech is improving. She has also developed a twisted sarcastic sense of humor. I blame that on Erin. We got ice cream cones yesterday and Emma grabbed hers and said "CAKE!" We corrected her and said it was ice cream. She got a weird smile on her face and said "CAKE!" again and started laughing. She was doing it on purpose. Apparently she did that to Erin the other day as well. Erin was going over her colors with Emma using flash cards. Erin held up a pink and Emma looked right and left and started to smile. She yelled "Purple" and Erin corrected her and said it was pink. Emma yelled "Purple" again and started laughing. It was after 3 times that Erin found out the Emma was playing with her. Too cute.

I hope that I told these stories bad enough for Erin to write something. Her stories are better anyway. Have a good day!

FINE I'll WRITE!!!

Ok, After several posts from Erin I thought that you would like my point of view on things. Get out your grammar marking pens because here we go!

Funny things are going on at home. Matthew is almost crawling. It is fun to watch him target on something, get up on his hand and knees, and lunge at it. I am happy to think that we don't have any small furry creatures any more that he would terrorize. He is so happy all the time. The only time that I have not seen him happy is when he is hungry. Yep, he is my son. He has a great love for his sister. We will catch Emma in his crib with him. He will be laughing and giggling. It is fun to watch. Well, it's fun until we need to punish Emma for getting in his crib. That is the way things go with kids though. Most times we are hiding our laughter as we escort Emma to the time out chair.

Erin's uncle said that Emma was aggressively cute and this still holds true. When ever she finds me she says "Hello Daddy!" It is a small phrase, but for daddies it pulls at the heart strings. Her grandmother gave her a little purse with some bracelets and a necklace in it yesterday. She has not been able to put it down. She woke me up this morning with the necklace saying "daddy, pretty!" and pointing at it. We were at the Provo town center mall buying clothes for Erin's brother Ian last month when Emma found a new friend. We had parked the car and entered in through JC Penny. Sitting on a display rack was a small pink purse with flowers on it. She grabbed it and carried it all over the store. We had to leave that store and look at others. Emma put it back and left (we couldn't afford it). We had to return to JC Penny again en route to the car. Emma's eyes found the exact same purse again and she grabbed it with her tight death grip. I could barely pry it from her hands. Emma had a very painful goodbye as we left the store without it. The nice thing was that she forgot about it by the time we were at the car. Being broke stinks!

Erin's brother Nathan is currently in Korea on his mission. He has 8 months left to go. He sent a very scathing letter because..........well, here is what he sent. Apparently this was posted in the Ensign that came out when he was born. He thinks it is some sort of sign or something. So let this be a lesson to all of us.

Instead of writing to him though, I am updating our blog. That'll teach him.

School starts again on TUESDAY! I can't tell you how excited I am. WAIT I can. Here goes........(sigh)...................There, that is how excited I am. I have two Chemistry classes, an advanced computational tools class, statistics for engineers, and Pearl of Great Price. I wanted to take Badminton, but it was full. I am still upset that I wasn't able to see Badminton being played at the Olympics.

Erin has been running every night. Well, almost every night. Her and her partner left me at home with the kids while they when to "work out" at her partner's house. They did work out, but spent the rest of the time playing "Rock Band" or something. Slackers. The running is doing Erin a lot of good. She looks great and her mood is perfect. They are ready for a 5k now. It is exciting to see the progress.

Life is going well. We have a camping trip tomorrow! Since we live in Midway, we are right in the middle of all the Swiss Days magic! So instead of having to endure some 500,000 people, we are going camping. Erin and I have volunteered to make scone dough on Friday though. We get a free hat! We will be posting pictures of the kids during the trip. Be excited for that! That is all the time that I have. I have a prompting to write a missionary.

Potty training! Oh what fun!

Painfully cute, that is how Mike has just described our little girl. Boy has it been interesting the last few weeks as we've started potty training... At first it was hard, we put her in cloth training pants and let her run. Every time she would wet she screamed and yelled, "Poo!! Pooooed Mommy Pooed!!" So I would go change her and help her sit on the potty and give her a sticker for trying. She didn't like it. So I backed off for another week until she started wanting to sit on the potty again, then I started putting her in the training pants again. This time it has seemed to do pretty well. She still wets her pants, but when she needs to go she will actually take her underwear off and run into the bathroom and sit on the potty. She still hasn't gone, but I think we're making progress. She can tell when she needs to go, so that is good. And she likes sitting on the potty now, so that is great! Anyway enough about bathroom habits. :) One good story I need to tell is that I went to check on her before I went to bed one night, and she heard me come in and got a little confused. I went over to soothe her, realized she was still asleep and before I could help her lie back down she did this huge stretch and croaked out, "CAKE!!!" Then she smiled, rolled over and put her thumb in her mouth. I laughed and laughed.

Matthew is doing very well, he is now semi-crawling, scooching himself all over the place, forward, backward, wherever he wants to go. I would say he will be crawling at any moment. He was doing it today minus pushing off his knees like he's supposed to. I'm amazed at how fast he is developing these skills. It has also been fun feeding him solid foods. I haven't been buying baby food this time, I've been making it all, which I actually don't mind doing. It's nice to have it home-made and fresh, I know the veggies or fruit are good, and I can prepare it myself. Plus it tastes and smells better. That's got to mean something. :) He has done very well with squash, sweet potatoes, carrots, green beans, pears, applesauce, bananas and peaches. He eats two or three solid meals daily now and is doing a great job. He can eat a whole zwieback toast while he sits in his high chair (Emma never did that!). It's just been fun. The funniest thing is watching him chase this ball around the living room. He catches up with it, tries to grab it and ends up pushing it further, only to have to chase it down again. It's really cute. He's very determined.

Mike is officially on break from school. He did well on his finals, and is relieved to have passed both classes (physics really gave him a scare) and he is now not thinking about school for another week before gearing up for the next semester. This is the semester we need to buy good snow tires and make sure the gas tank never gets below half. I really hope he'll be safe commuting the canyon! It can be scary in the winter.

We are planning a camping trip for this next weekend during Swiss Days (good riddance) so that we don't have to sit through all the noise up at the square. Picture listening to yodeling all day long for two days. It's enough to make you develop a permanent twitch. So we're getting the heck out of here for those couple of days. I don't know how it's going to be camping with two kids, but I'm excited. We haven't gone anywhere for awhile so it will be fun. We're going with Mike's brother Dave, his wife Sara and their son Hyrum. Somewhere out by Duchesne. Hopefully it won't be too crowded. :)

I am continuing on my workout routine. I have been able to run again (I developed some stress fractures a couple of weeks ago and had been walking while I was healing up) so my workouts have been a lot more satisfying. I've also been doing some pilates now and again. I have so far lost an inch on my tummy (yay!!!) and hope to see more progress. I still am not doing as well as I'd like with the junk food. I swear your body needs chocolate to make up for lost hormones during pregnacy or labor or something. I have never wanted sugar so much as after I had kids!!! I'm working on it though. I have also been reading a whole ton, finished the Twilight series (which was great until the 4th...? Could really have been better) and have been reading some LDS fiction which has been awesome. I love a good adventure/romance/suspense/history.... yeah.

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming....

Life is moving on, like always. We have almost finished our adjusting to living with the family, it's still rough some days, but I think we have all figured out what to expect and the best way to handle each other. It's been interesting. We all take turns cooking and doing dishes and we all have a laundry day... it's all orderly and arranged. I like it though, I don't do nearly as much work as I did when we lived on our own. It will probably make for another rough adjustment when we finally move out. It is nice not to have to cook and do dishes every night though.

Saturday we spent down in Salt Lake at Mike's parents house. His grandparents have always lived in his parent's basement apartment, and now that they are getting older and less able to take care of themselves, they all talked and agreed it was best for them to move upstairs with Jim and Sue. So they have been transitioning as well. We went down and helped move things around and visited for awhile. It was good to see them, hopefully they will adjust to this move quickly. We came home on Saturday, made dinner and did the dishes (it was my night) and spent the rest of the night working on projects. My dad has been trying to put a shower head in the downstairs bathroom, which until recently was just a bathtub. The shower upstairs is a stall and needs replacing, and with so many people living here now, they thought it might be best to have two showers. So with a lot of work and things going wrong (it's an old house, plaster walls.... nothing is square...) we worked on getting the showerhead in Saturday night. We got the head in, and then while we were drilling holes for the curtain rod, we ran straight into brick. Oh goody. So now we have to pick up a masonry bit and some stronger insert than the one it came with. Something that will work with brick. That's all we have to do though and then it will be done! I haven't showered since we moved here.... lol. I've bathed instead. I forgot how frustrating that was living here.

Sunday was Hyrum Steve Woods's baby blessing, Mike's brother David and his wife Sara's first baby. It was a good day, a beautiful blessing, and the Spirit was very strong in the meeting. I enjoyed it. It makes me miss going to church with people our age! All in all it was a very relaxing and happy weekend. A good break from the chaos of the weekdays. This week is Mike's last week of the summer semester, and then we found out that he will have not one, but three weeks off before fall semester. HOORAY!!! We are soooo thrilled. We're hoping to take a trip to Burley, Idaho. My friend Diana and her husband and daughter live up there, and they've invited us to come stay sometime this summer. It would be a good vacation, and actually going somewhere besides just camping nearby. We're hoping to scrape enough together for gas (insane!!) and food, that should be the most expensive stuff. We'll see what happens. So, one more grueling week of homework and studying and then we'll have a break! ;)

Emma is continuing her discovery of new words and things to do. She can't seem to stay out of the sprinklers at all anymore. If she goes outside while we sit on the deck, she takes off and is through the sprinkler before we can do anything. So... we've stopped worrying about it. It's hot enough that she's usually dry again pretty quickly anyway. She is a little smart aleck. The more you tell her not to do something, the faster she does it. And she laughs at you! The hard part is trying to keep a straight face and be consistent about time out's. I did try potty training her last w0eek, we read books, she tried underwear, sat on the potty regulary, got stickers, the whole bit. But after about 3 times of wetting her pants she had had it. She threw horrible tantrums every time she saw the potty and was very upset. I figured I'd just back off. She seemed more traumatized than irritated so we'll just wait for awhile longer.

Matthew has been moving like a hyper kangaroo... it's crazy how fast he is developing. Two weeks ago he was rolling front to back, back to front, all over. Last week he started doing push-ups on hands and feet, this week he pulled himself up in crawling position and is rocking back and forth and is all over the place. He is very close to sitting up on his own as well. It is amazing to me how quickly this is going, it seemed like it took forever with Emma. Maybe I just have less time to analyze him. Hmmm. It is very cute, and he is such a sweet little boy. He almost never stops smiling, and laughs at the littlest comment you make to him. He loves his big sister and seems to be the smiliest when she is around. I love being a mom!

Mike is continuing his studying as always, and to pass the time while he studies, I have gotten back into running. My friend Susie and I have been jogging together every night after the kids are in bed. It feels so good to exercise! I have a hard time getting my foot out the door, but now that I have someone I can't let down I'm actually doing the work, and it's starting to pay off. My muscles are getting stronger and I am able to go faster, I just feel so much better than I have since high school! It's incredible. No wonder exercise is so addicting. I hope this is something we can keep up even during the winter. It's great to have a good friend up here!

Teeth, Jobs, and other answered prayers

I HAVE A JOB! I am no longer the lazy lay about that I have been for the past month. I laugh at all those who said that it couldn't be done. HA ha ha ha. I guess that no one said it, but HA anyway! I work part time as a software tester at Netdocuments. It has been a good experience. My boss is awesome and the people that I work with.....well, I have only worked there 2 days so far, so I don't know much about them. It is everything that we have been praying for. Needless to say that there was much rejoicing. yay.

Matthew has two new teeth! They just started popping out. He has 2 on his bottom that have broken through and more lumps on the top. So more soon. We have him eating squash and sweet potatoes. He seems to like it. It sure gives his diapers and interesting smell. He is now rolling over and over and over. This just started this week too. We are going to wrap him in Ace bandages and enter him into worm races shortly. We hope that he will beat Adam's kid Georgia. Adam's family beats us out every time. We are going to feed Matthew jalapenos before the match. We will see who wins this year. I am also planning on coating their bandages in Teflon. We engineers know a little something about friction. HA.

Emma is talking up a storm. She now has her basic colors down and can count to 10. All without you asking her. She has a stubborn streak a mile wide. If you ask her to do something, she will do the opposite. If you ask her not to do something, she will do it faster. Needless to say that the time out chair is well worn in. She is really cute though. She noticed that my glass was empty at dinner tonight. She went to the fridge and pulled out the milk and gave it to me to pour. Then she put it away for me. She is really thoughtful when she wants to be.

Well, bathtime and I have to figure out the velocity of a 340 Kg satellite in orbit. So goodnight and thanks for reading. I hope that it has been as enjoyable for you to read as it has been for me to write.

Oh the joys of living at home.... AGAIN

How time flies! It is incredible to think that I am living at home with my parents again, and to have my own kids, and to try to find my place here all over again. Weirder still are the feelings that I need to get up to go to school (heaven forbid) or that I need to do my chores or something. Funny how that whole focus changes when you move out, and suddenly chores are just something you do on your own without being nagged all the time. Now I do a lot of the work around here, and I actually enjoy keeping things nice. Who'da thunk?

The one thing I can't get over is that I feel like an adult failure... moving in with your parents when you're married and have kids?? Wow that kid has problems... ;) I know there is a good reason and there was no doubt that this was what we needed to do, but guilt always hangs out in the back of the room somewhere.

Mike is enjoying his classes. I have never seen him so positive about his schoolwork before. He comes home happy and actually enjoys his homework (mostly). It raises the hope that he will enjoy his career, when that time finally comes. He also has more time for the kids, and for just hanging out. It's a big relief to just have time to spend together as a family. I really like it.

Emma is driving us crazy. She has started getting up out of bed because there are so many people to "play" with downstairs. She comes down all happy and excited and you feel like a big jerk hauling her back upstairs to her nightly doom. We've started shutting the door, and tonight is the first night she made a few squawks and settled down to sleep. I hope it will become a pattern!! She is a definate sweetheart, and has been very cute lately. She has been saying a lot more, and expressing herself more through words. She asks questions, and tells me what she wants or needs. She even tells me when she's gone "potty" (in her diaper of course). That's another beast to tackle in the near future. The fun never ends! ;)

Matthew has also been a little cutie. He is smiley and happy and such a delight. He loves to be played with, looked at, paid attention to. He will actively participate in games, peek-a-boo is a thrill a minute. He laughs and laughs. It is a joy to know my children are happy. I don't think I've ever felt a more content feeling than seeing them cared for and honestly happy in their lives.
Of course there are the off times, like this last week when Matthew has been teething! :) He is getting his two bottom teeth in at once and they are causing him some pain. Tylenol and teething tablets have been our source of sanity these past couple of days. Pretty soon they will push through and he will be his happy little self again.

I have finally gotten used to living here I think. I'm finding a balance between being the child and the mother. It is nice to have people here during the day, it breaks up the monotony a lot. I enjoy being with my family. (Never thought I'd admit that... ;)

Fun Times Abounding!

Stress=very yes!
Since I am in engineering, I would like to put our life into an equation for you. New shed construction + School + Family relations + Matthew teething + 2.5 needing dicipline + no sleep + no job = fun times.

Since moving to our new home, which is Erin's old home, we have started construction on a new shed to hold our crap. I was assigned the task of picking up various loads of lumber and roofing supplies after my classes. Every one thought that this is was a great idea since I had nothing to do anyway! Well, it was a good idea. It is comming along nicely though. We just need to finish the out side portions. We have the guts, we need the sidding and the roof done.

School is a lot of fun. It would be more fun if I would understand everything that was going on. The physics class has had a lot of fun demonstrations. The weird thing is that all the labs and demonstrations work. At the Community College, nothing worked! My Book of Mormon class has been very insightful. We had a good lesson about teaching your children sins through principles and teaching them by explaining how to do the sin.

Matthew just started teething. Our sweet inocent son is now a ball of frustration. He doesn't want to sleep, or sit quietly anymore. We have started the teething tablets and he is feeling better.

We have finally acclimated to our new home. We don't keep feeling like it's time to leave grandma and grandpa's. Emma loves having so many people around. It has had its share of frustration and fun.

Well, I have to go back to the shed. BYE!