Madison naughty and nice

 While trying to get ready to go to Tristan's birthday party I ran across this. I also found a medicine dropped half filled with some of the contents of this bottle. Guess who did this . . . did you guess Madison? Thankfully it was infants dosage and after having called poison control I found out it wouldn't do anything to her. John asked her how she got the lid off and she said: "twist, twist, twist, twist, twist, open." 

I finished feeding Jocelyn and found Madison doing this. She was trying to get to some movies that she wanted and I obviously wasn't moving quickly enough. She is wearing the tights because she likes to "skate" across the tile floor.

 Madison likes to dress-up, even when she should be in bed. The big thing under her head is a magnifier. After removing it from under her head I let her sleep with all her things.

Can you find Madison in all of this? I went to check on her before bed and she had unloaded a good chunk of her stuffed animals onto her bed so she could sleep with them. I love her sleeping ideas.

Bath time with FOUR kids

 Finally all four kids can take a bath together! Technically this picture is of only one child! The three older kids didn't want to be in the picture so they didn't look at the camera. There was barely any water in the tub and the kids were counting down the minutes until Jocelyn could get out so they could fill that sucker up.

This is the last picture of Jocelyn taking a bath in her baby tub. Clearly she was getting too big for it. I love this picture because of the sparkle in her eye, the tiny baby fat rolls, that can barely be called such and her tiny little body. We love this little girl!

Valentines card making

Last Monday we made our Valentines. The kids had a lot of fun making cards. The project took a lot longer than anticipated but they loved telling people how much they love them! If you didn't get one then Happy Valentines from us - we love you!

John and exercise

 Icon made this display of the Ragnar team that John was on for the office. 

Since Ragnar John has been having problems with his IT band and hasn't been able to run as much. To help his leg heal and to get me more active John brought home: 

Not the kids - the treadmill. It was a tester treadmill and when they were done with it, they sold it to us for an AMAZING price. It connects to Ifit so that we can watch google maps and see where we are running while the treadmill accounts for steepness and such. We can also use the Jillian Michaels workout system. It's been fun to have and the kids love running on it as well, as you can tell!

Trip to Idaho

Two weekends ago we took the kids to southern Idaho to visit Aunt Janice.

It was foggy on the trip up and just a few houses before Janice's house we saw about 85 deer just off to the side of the road. 

Because John and I were using brain cells we only took this one picture of our trip.

Janice had a great house with lots of fun artifacts to look at and a fabulous loft that the kids liked climbing up into. We had a nice visit and will have to go back again as we forgot to see Sandy's grave. The kids reminded us as we were leaving - too bad they didn't remember sooner.

Alexis learning

 Alexis and Drew have started to learn piano! I'm teaching them as it's cheaper and well, it's cheaper. They are both doing really well and they are excited to play songs that they know. Alexis can play Mary Had a Little Lamb and Old McDonald!

 She still takes time to play while learning. On this day she was acting like a rhino I think. Whatever she was, she thought she was hysterical.

Here she is playing the Wii and wearing her dancing outfit. 

Alexis is doing great in school. She's reading chapter books - Junie B. Jones was her first one completed! She still needs help with some of the tricky words, but she's amazing! She's already surpassed her spring goal for reading which means that I don't feel bad when she misses school! 

We're so proud of her for working hard and for being such a good sister.

Madison the Toilet Paper Queen

 I told the kids to get ready to go and Madison showed up in my room looking like this.

If you look at her clothes you'll notice that both her shirt and her pants are on backwards. She was so proud that she'd dressed herself!

I told her to get ready to go on a different day and she came out looking like this. She had on my big heels, her sun glasses upside down, a box of crackers and her big stuffed bear. She was perturbed that I made her leave the shoes, bear and crackers.

You'll notice in the back ground that there are blankets all over the floor. This is one of Madisons "fun" things to do. She likes to lay things on the floor in a "path" and follow it for about half an hour. She then gets bored and she leaves it for me to clean up later. However, I have to have permission to clean it up or she throws a tantrum like you wouldn't believe.

 I heard Madison telling Drew that she needed more blankets, which usually means a big mess. I went to investigate and this is what I found. She had emptied the dress-up chest and made it into a nice bed. She liked it when the lid was closed because she could "go to sleep" then.

 Quietness out of Madison usually means trouble. She was quiet and I think the picture explains the rest.

 Madison has not gotten past the running around naked phase yet. When I told her she had better get some underwear on she came back with 7 pairs on. Yep, she put all the clean underwear she owned on.

 Madison decided to empty the brand new bag of diapers onto the floor and cover Jocelyn in them. They thought that it was so much fun that I let them have fun for a while!

 This is an entire roll of toilet paper, one of four that Madison unrolled in a week. Two rolls were flushed down the toilet. Yes, the toilet over flowed each time. Can we say nasty? The next two rolls were unrolled because she had a nasty nose and needed to wipe it. I guess it was really nasty. I banned her from getting her own toilet paper until she could quit wasting it. When I told her she looked up at me and said: "Awww, suck a  duck." I was laughing so I had to turn and leave, but I'm pretty sure she knew I thought it was funny at that point. To punish me, she has taken up peeing her pants. When I asked her why she was peeing herself, she said it was because she wanted to. I can't wait until she's a teenager!

 Moon sand. I hate it. Madison was quiet again, need I say more?

She decided to be a big helper and clean it up but when it stuck to her hands she quit and I had to finish. The up side of my cleaning it up was that it all hit the garbage!! Hallelujah!

Jocelyn Six Months

 Outfit from Gpa Rod.

 Outfit from Aunt Carrie's family. She loves ground up turkey. She is a big fan of eating anything that we are eating - which is great for us. It makes it much easier to feed her "big kid food."

 Outfit - hand me down. She's so proud that she sits all by herself and can lean to grab things that we think she can't reach. She's getting ready to crawl already.

As a side note, Gma Tobi hates these pants with a passion. She thinks the material is just nasty. I still think they're adorable!

Outfit - hand me down. She was sitting in the bumbo chair we borrowed from Aunt Melanie and when I wasn't looking she grabbed the paper towels and made a huge mess. She was having such fun that I let her have at it so I could have a few minutes of peace and quiet.

She just had her six month check up and she weighed 14.94 lbs, 32%. She was 25 inches, 27%. This means that she is heavier than she should be for her height! I think she's super tiny though so we're working on chubbing her up. Her head size was 16.3 in, 21%. Her head is small for her body, which I think is adorable!

Jocelyn is growing up so quickly. She's going to be a crawling fool in no time, which means that I'm going to have to keep the kids' little toys up more than I'm doing now. She has such a cute smile and laugh that she can make all sorts of trouble and get away with it. She likes to take a 9:00 pm nap and then stay up until nearly 1:00 am. This is slowly killing her poor mom and dad. She has recently taken up crying if we put her down or if we sit down while we're holding her. Not much gets done around here when there is only one adult with her because she doesn't nap either. We're lucky if we get a 20 minute nap, unless we hold her the entire time and then we can get an hour! Even with her naughtiness, we love her and can't imagine not having her with us. She's such a cute little baby, especially when she's happy!

Bed time

 Madison likes to sleep with her babies, books and pillows, to name a few.

I had a picture of her sleeping with her backpack on, which was hilarious but my computer mysteriously shut down during the download and I lost a handful of them.

 Drew looks like a Hakes to me in this picture. He's such a great sleeper. We put him to bed and he goes right to sleep. 

 Alexis complains all the time that it's cold at night. We keep telling her it's because she's not sleeping in her blankets but she doesn't believe us. She has two positions that she really likes. This one pictures here and one where she puts both hands on her chest while lying flat as a board, which looks freaky.

Jocelyn sleeping in her bed, this is a rare thing so I had to get a picture. This month she will be trained to sleep in her bed all night and this will be a more common sight, we hope.

Mom's bad driving

I was driving when I realized that we'd forgotten something back at home. I flipped a U thinking that because it's so cold the ground would be frozen and there wouldn't be a problem going through the snow. Guess what . . . it's not that frozen, it was kind of mushy. Can you guess what happened? Yep, I got stuck. John was not impressed. On my last attempt to get out before I gave it over to John a car actually stopped and was backing up to help get me out. But - I did it - all by myself! I got out of the mud and snow and got us back on the road! I'm no longer allowed to flip U's unless it is on a paved road. 

Tristan's birthday

Tristan - Carrie's - had his 2nd birthday this month! They came up to Logan to celebrate at Denny's parents house and they invited us! Denny and John took all the kids minus the babies to go sledding. From what I understand, they all had a ton of fun! Because we sent the guys we didn't get any pictures of this - is this surprising? Afterwards we had Papa John's pizza, John's favorite, and some ice cream and cake.

Happy Birthday Tristan!!