11 Months!

Our Kent boy is 11 months old. Time sure flies! This month is going to be quite an eventful one for our family. Next week the movers are coming and also next week Jacob graduates and has his final out and we should be out of Tucson by next Friday. We have less than two weeks left in this house, but I digress, I'm supposed to be talking about Kent at 11 months.

 My Kent boy is happy and wild and exciting and wiggly and independent and snugly and reckless and sweet. Sometimes we call him Cyclone Kent because he goes from one thing to the next making mess after mess after mess. I turn around to clean up one mess and when I turn back around from finishing that he has made 3 more messes. 

He is super curious about everything and wants to experience it all. 
He likes to climb. He climbs in my dishwasher and pulls the dishes out. He climbs in my dryer. He climbs on our chairs and couch. In fact he just figured out how to climb up on our reading chairs to turn the lights on and off in our library room. He also just figured out how to climb onto my kitchen chairs. Yeah, we are in trouble.

 He loves doing anything that gets a reaction. 
He loves playing the piano. 
He loves getting the toothbrushes out of the bathroom drawer and carrying them around the house. 
He knows how to open the wet wipe containers and loves to empty them out and rip them apart.

 He loves books! He gets them off the shelf and brings them to me, but if I'm busy he will sit and look at them himself. The other day I set him in the cave (the cupboard under the stairs where we keep our toys) and he was sitting in a pile of toys but the thing he reached out to play with was the one book that was in with all the toys. 
He's starting to make some animal noises and its so cute! He roars like a lion, hisses like a snake, baas like a sheep, tries to make elephant and frog and monkey noises, and howls like a dog. It's the cutest thing!

 He's slowing down on his growing now that he is running and walking all over the house and actually didn't gain anything this month which is crazy, so he still weighs 25 pounds.

 Kent loves to be outside. He goes to the door and bangs on it to ask to go outside and he never wants to go back inside. He likes to play in the dirt and to taste all of the rocks. At least he doesn't try to swallow the rocks anymore. :s
 He is a mama's boy. The other night I was quite tired and asked Jacob to get up with Kent when we heard him wake up, and Kent didn't like that idea at all. Jacob said he just laid there and said over and over, "Mom. Mom. Mom."

 He calls me "mom" and Jacob "dad," and the other day he called Rachel "Kate." I can understand why he works be confused though because Rachel insists we call her Cowgirl Kate and doesn't respond to anything else. 

He is an extremely messy eater and uses every meal as hair gel. The hair on the back of his head always has food in it after a meal.
  

 

 

 I love this busy boy!

Reading and Writing

My Rachel girl is learning so fast! I've been working on reading a lot with her because I feel like she is ready. In just the last few weeks that we have been working on it, Rachel has learned how to read more than 30 different words and has read a few books all by herself, and I'm not talking books that she just happened to have memorized already, I'm talking sounding out words she's never read before in simple books she has never seen before. For a while she has been telling me, "Mom, I want to write." I didn't want to push her into doing fine motor things that she wasn't ready for so I didn't really do much about it, but on the 4th of July she was drawing on the magnadoodle and she wrote the letter A. I was shocked! I started working with her that evening and after about a half hour she wrote her first work: hat.

 

 

 

I can't believe how fast this little girl picks things up. She blows me away!  I love being her mom and I love being her home school teacher. It is so fun to see her master new things. I love my little smartie pants!

Grapes

My little Kent boy is such and independent little squirt! He wants to do every thing on his own (except sleep on his own.) The other day Rachel got in the fridge and got some grapes. Kent followed right behind her and before she could shut the door to the fridge, he had grabbed some too.



He was so proud of himself for getting grapes all by himself.

He took his grapes and went and sat down on the carpet and ate them.

 

 

It was so fun to see how happy it made him to go get a bunch of grapes all by himself just like his sister. This kid cracks me up!

Desert Museum

About 3 weeks ago I got my act together and made a curriculum to try out with homeschooling  with Rachel and so far it has been working out great! I need to do a little better at having things planned a little more in advance, but Rachel has been doing an awesome job! A few weeks ago we learned about animals that live in the desert and so we decided to take a trip to the desert museum afterwards. It was just me and the kids, and it was HOT, but we had a lot of fun. Rachel's favorite place was the hummingbird enclosure.


The hummingbird enclosure was cool! There were tons of hummingbirds just flying around. One few so close to me that I felt the wind from its wings as it few past. 

 

 

Kent kept trying to get out of the stroller. He wanted to run around so bad, but I didn't trust him not to go try to grab handfuls of cactus prickles.

 

We also saw a few hummingbird nests while we were there, and one of them even had a couple of eggs in it.

Can you see my kids hot red faces?

 

Our other favorite place to go while we were their was their mini aquarium exhibit. Rachel loved seeing the fish.

 

I thought these eels were funny. They plant their bottoms in the sand and pretend they are plants and eat any unsuspecting creatures that happen by. You can't see it in this picture, but off to the right (the direction they are all facing) is a fish that they all want to eat, but instead of going after it, they pretended they were plants and just looked at it. I don't think the fish was fooled, it wasn't going anywhere near the eels. :)

 

 

 

 

They had a few other fun exhibits that we got to see, and a few that I wish we had had time for but didn't. It was very informative and very fun.
If anyone is in Tucson, I recommend taking a day and checking out the desert museum...in the winter. We stayed as long as we could but it was just too miserable and hot to stay as long as I would have liked.

Our rainy day adventure

All week long we've planned to go to the Children's  Museum and today we finally went, kinda. We at least drove around it. It had been raining lightly all morning. I found a place to park a few blocks away from the Museum and as we were getting out of the car, the thunder started. I still thought we would be okay to walk to the museum, after all the rain had almost stopped just a few minutes before. As we left the parking garage it was into a pretty steady rain. As we crossed the first street it came down a little harder. As we crossed the second street it was a downpour and we were pretty much soaked. The kids were being good and neither one were complaining about getting drenched, but we were so soaked, I wasn't even sure they would let is into the museum. I decided to turn back and go back home and come again another day. We were all soaked down to our underwear. By the time the kids were loaded into the car and we were pulling out of the parking garage, the rain was only a sprinkle again, and by the time we made it to the freeway, it was sunny. We still went home because we were all completely soaked. We didn't make it to where we meant to today, but we still had a fun adventure. Rachel kept saying, "We are prancing in the rain!" She also kept a good hold on her pretend horses "Cocoa and Jumper" the entire time. On the way home we looked for rainbows. We didn't see any but Rachel sang, "I love to look at two rainbows whenever there is rain!" It cracked me up because the words are "I like to look for rainbows..."  She also said "We were pretending to be fish, cause we got all wet, huh mom!" My sweet little kent boy never once complained about being wet and cold. In fact other than insisting I take his sopping shoes and socks off when we got to the car, he didn't seem to mind at all. He fell asleep on the way home, wet clothes and all.  Hopeful our next trip to the Children's Museum will be a little different, but we still made a fun little memory. 

Book Review

I just read The Quarryman's Bride by Tracie Peterson. I thought this was a fun book. It was about a girl named Emmalyne who just weeks before her wedding, her two younger sisters die so her father refuses to let her marry because of an old family tradition: the youngest daughter cannot marry but must stay home and take care of their aging parents for the rest of their days. Emmalyne's fiance would have her blow off her parents and elope with him, and although she loves him she feels like she need to honor her parents and stay with them instead. Her family moves away and after 10 years they decide to move back. When Emmalyne and her former fiance see each other again they know that they love the felt for each other is still there, but the same obstacle as before is till there as well: her father. I enjoyed reading this book. It was a good book about a daughters loyalty to her parents and it gave an good example of different ways to deal with trials. While Emmalyne tried through it all to move closer to God, her father and fiance blamed him instead, and she was much better off for it.  The book was set in the late 1800's and is a christian novel. It was a clean easy quick read (one of my favorite kinds).

I received this book for free from Bethany House Publishing in return for an honest review. If you would like to review books follow this link: www.bethanyhouse.com/bookreviewers.

A Pet

Rachel has been dying for a pet lately. The other day she told me, "Mom, I really wish we had a pet!" I told her she had to talk to her Dad about it. Later that day I overheard this conversation.

Rachel: Dad, I really wish I had a pet!
Dad: Where would you get the pet?
Rachel: The zoo!
Dad: The zoo doesn't give away their animals.
Rachel: They would let me have one.
Dad: What kind of a pet do you want?
Rachel: A baby elephant!
Dad: An elephant would be too big!
Rachel: But I would like it!

My funny Rachel girl wants a pet so bad. Jacob's rule with pets is that our kids have to save up and earn the money for it themselves and then they have to continue to pay for whatever it needs (food and such). We have started talking to Rachel about money and how you trade work for money and then when you have money, you can trade the money for other things. Yesterday Rachel brought me her stuffed animal and told me she wanted to trade it to me for money. :) We decided that if she works and earns money for it, than maybe when we get to Monterey we will let her buy a fish or something. This little girl makes me laugh! I love that she knows what she wants.

#4- 10 things you would tell your 16-year old self

10 things you would tell your 16 year old self if you could

1. Don't steady date unless its a return missionary and you are at least 18 years old. I had two boyfriends in high school. I regret it. We had fun, but I missed out on a lot of opportunities. I hung out with my boyfriends instead of my other friends. I missed out on other dating opportunities, and when my Mr. Right came around I was still dating someone else who wasn't my Mr. Right, but who I had dated so long that it was just really hard to break it off with him. I don't have a lot of regrets in my life but this is probably my #1 regret.

2. You are important and you are unique. You are a child of God! I always struggled with self esteem. I think so many times we see exactly what we aren't instead of exactly what we are. I am good enough. I am a child of God.

3. Don't be so worried about what others will think.What others think doesn't matter. What your Heavenly Father thinks is all that matters. I was always afraid to be myself. I was afraid to share my insights or to just let go an have fun. I was afraid of what others would think of me so instead of opening up to them and when I could have been helping others, I hid myself away and didn't do anyone any good.

4. Take chemistry instead of physics in high school. Physics is a waste of time. Better yet, take medical anatomy and physiology instead of either of them. 

5. Don't lower your standards for anyone or anything. 

6. Join inspirations at the institute. :)

7. Share your talents. You are more talented than you know. Don't let fear hold you back.You were given the talents you have for a reason.

8. Memorize every single scripture mastery. I only memorized about half of them, but the ones I did memorize, I at least remember part of them. I wish I had done a better job with that. It is a lot harder for me to memorize things now then it was back then.

9. I would tell myself the birthdays of all my future kids. 

10. Have fun and be happy.

Singing

Here's a little video of my cute Kent-boy singing. He loves to sing and he loves it when Jacob or I sing to him. He also sings during the hymns in Sacrament meeting and I love it.

I love my cute singing boy!

If this is sideways, I'm sorry. 

Book Review

I just read Adoring Addie by Leslie Gould and it was so good. This book was a very fun light-hearted easy read. The book was set in an Amish community and was based on the story of Romeo and Juliet. 19 year-old Addie was the only daughter in a family with 6 brothers. She always did what she told, never questioning or disrespecting her parents until they want her to marry the bishops son. Everyone tells her that she would never get a better catch but doesn't love him. Then one day she meets Jonathon Mosier, a handsome carpenter from a family that she has always been forbidden to have any contact with, but Addie can't stay away. I loved the forbidden love, and the new twist on an old favorite that is contained in this story. It was a fun book that kept me up too late 2 nights in a row because I just had to see how it was going to get resolved, and then there was the heart stopping moment towards the end that you wonder if its going to end the same way as the Shakespearean tradegy. I recommend it! 

I received this book for free from Bethany House Publishing in return for an honest review. If you would like to review books follow this link: www.bethanyhouse.com/bookreviewers.