What Do Babies Do When They Get Bored?

And mom isn't watching....

One of His Other Favorite Guys

C loves loves loves his daddy, his Grandpas and his uncles. But he also loves Grandpa Garth. Now Garth is not really his Grandpa. We rented the little pink house from him and Veda for years and they have been an active part in our lives. We all just love them so much. My aunt Charlene is actually married to their son Dan. Anyhoo, the girls have always called them Grandpa Garth and Grandma Veda. Veda passed away before C was born. I think that she told him in heaven to be a good baby for us because she knew how much the girls had given us a run for our money. They have both been into farming and collecting tractors forever. If you go to their house, you'll see the Tractor Patch. We go up and visit quite often and especially now that Garth is alone we go up to see him a lot more. He likes to visit. J likes to take the kids up there to entertain Garth. He loves it and they love visiting, playing on the grass, picking apples and pears and just playing up there. C and J go up on the Ranger or the 4-Wheeler a lot and they enjoying sitting up there visiting. C just loves Garth so much. He gets really excited when he sees him. He loves the tractors too. I decided I need to take a picture with the two of them in it:

We are very thankful that Garth and Veda let us be a part of their lives!

Kittens

So back in August, we caved. The girls had been asking for kitties for awhile and there were some free kitties at Kent's. I asked Joe and he said okay. So the girls got themselves some kittens. O is a kitten striped kitten. She at first named it Hearts but has since changed the name to Jessica. M kitten was a little gray male with white feet. She kept changing the name from Boots, to Mittens, to Socks. They love love love their kittens. O's kitten is really playful and fisty. M's was a little more subdue but still liked playing too. M gets up every morning to give hers a love before school and the first thing she does when she gets home is run out to give it more loves. The first week of school she asked me to bring the kittens in for show and tell. They were so well behaved. M packed her kitten around like a baby and the funny thing was that it let her. She put her little heart and sole into that kitten. O loves and babies hers too but M has a special attachment to all animals. As my niece would say, she is an animal lover.

Well, here comes the bad part of having kitties. The girls can't seem to grasp the concept of not opening the garage door every time they go outside. A week ago we need to run to town and the cats had gotten into the garage. So being the concincous mother and not wanting to run them over (cause we have done that before), I asked the girls to get their cats and take them out back. O's was giving her a hard time catching it so I went to help O. Just as I was picking up O's cat I heard a large crash on the other side of the garage. J had three extremely large metal tractor disk's that he had made into dutch oven stands leaning up against the wall with his bike. M had accidently knocked them over. Luckily they did not fall on M, but unluckily they hit her little kitten. It broke its back and neck. I don't necessarily love cats by any means, but seeing her little kitty suffer and seeing M crying was really hard. I actually cried. J had to come home to bury the poor little thing. Poor M cried and cried. I found her after she got ready for school the next morning outside on the steps holding O's kitten with tears streaming down her little face. That was hard. The kids had just watched Marly and Me (again) the weekend before so they colored pictures and said nice things about the kitty.
We were able to locate her another kitten. He is a short little chubby thing. He is really cute and M has taken really good care of it. O's kitten has decided that it is fun to walk with whoever is outside and be underneath your feet. And we are all actually enjoying the kittens, except for Fritz who gets nervous going outside by them. They are on the attack every time he goes around.

Important Part of Summer... I forgot to post about

If you ask the girls one of there highlights this summer was taking.... Swimming lessons. Yay!!! I kind of drug my feet at getting them into lessons (just because I knew I would have to go into town every single day), so we ended up taking lessons at the end of July/first of August from the natatorium. The girls really enjoyed it and learned alot. M has been a waterbaby since day one. She just loves loves loves swimming and boating and gettting wet. O has been really into swimming and boating and playing in the water too...but when a new thing was brought on at swimming she wasn't 100% sure she was into it. It is called the tuck float. I took swimming lessons for several years and I didn't remember what the tuck float was. Anyways she got brave and did it. One of our favorite things to do in the summer is go to the Big Slide Pool (Brigham Pool) to swim. We kind of measure how tall the girls have gotten over the past year by where the water hits them. Man have they grown and by the end of the year the girls were going down the slide by themselves and J had C going down with them and he loved it. Looks like we might have another waterbaby on our hands.

Here are some pictures of the girls at swimming lessons (I had to have April Litchford take the pictures because I kept forgetting to bring my camera):

The Poor Dog

I feel bad for our poor little picked on dog. C has been chasing him NON-STOP. The dog is probably enjoying it though. C chased him with a plastic sword from the fair last week squealing the whole time. Fritz looked scared that day though. Last night C had one of the girls' Barbies and was wacking him with it. Today C is chasing him with a graham cracker...he ought to turn around and eat it.

Tooting My Own Horn

I learned at work a couple years ago from a friend that sometimes you just got to toot your own horn when you do sometime good or accomplish a goal you set cause who else will toot it for you... Well I didn't do as good as O did on her spelling test but....I got 92% on my 1st Family and Human Development Test today!!!! YAY!!!! I had no clue how it was going to go. I studied and studied and hoped for the best. I only missed three questions, and well, two of them I should have got right because I just didn't read the question thoroughly but still I am pretty darn excited!!! YAY for me!

What We've Been Up to...

We have been enjoying the start of school. Both girls are absolutely loving it. The first week M had homework every night (coloring) and she thought she was pretty cool. O was a little mad cause the Kindergartener had homework and she didn't. Oh boy, she (we) were in for it last week though. O has spelling words to work on every night and reading along with a little math. I can't believe my 1st grade had a spelling test on Friday. Yikes! I don't remember really reading or having spelling tests until 2nd grade. I asked her when she got home how she did and she said she spelled them all correctly. That's right 100% for my little girl.

M was a little upset because last week was kindgarten testing and she didn't have school. She was okay the first day staying home with me but after that she was frustrated she didn't get to go to school with O. On Friday she went to hang out with Grandma Maxfield having some one-on-one time. They rode their bikes around, made cookies, painted and had a great time. O is now wondering when her Grandma one-on-one is. She'll get it soon I bet.

J's brother drew a moose tag up in the Cache so we decided to go a camping. We thought we'd take the trailer up Thursday to save us a spot. We usually like going up Temple Fork. Thursday before J left the Ranch up in Huntsville he blew a tire so when he got back to Tremonton he had to go get it fixed. So he didn't get home until 7 pm. The trailer was ready and we headed out. Unfortunately they have made a mess out of Temple Fork with construction on the dirt roads. Any spots that weren't already take had Bulldozers in them. They have really screwed it up up there. So we thought we'd go to Right Hand Fork. So spots. After pulling our trailer around the mountain for two hours we came home. We didn't get home until about 11 pm. I was ticked off. Not at J but for the stupid construction and just what a crappy night we had. On top of it I was worried O was not getting enough sleep to do well on her test. But she ended up getting enough. Thank goodness.

Friday when J and O got home from work and school we headed up to the Sinks. A spot we had only been to snowmobile around at before. We had no idea they had all of those camping spots up there and they were big spots too! We had so much for with everyone that came up. It was fun to tease his brother and sister about their, um... friends. It was nice not being the one to get harrassed for a change. We drove all over the mountain. No moose though. Sunday we saw some guys that had a Bull Elk Tag and they thought they had seen some about 45 mins earlier but so we sent Mike and his "friend" a hiking over the mountain and went around the mountain to meet them. We weren't far enough down though but we waited and drove around. Vicki and her "friend" and Maury were on 4-wheelers and we were on the Ranger. We split up to see if we could locate them. J saw a trail and decided that we'd turn around to go on it, but he backed up an embankment and flipped the Ranger on its side. Everone went flying out lucky. And we were really blessed no one got hurt badly. My side is a little sore, but we are all okay. The kids were all crying (from getting thrown out). It scared us pretty good. We said a prayer to thank Heavenly Father for protecting us and that no one got hurt and that J would be able to flip the Ranger back up right and by the time we opened our eyes J had already turned it back over. We finally found Mike and his "friend" on the road to Old Ephraims Grave and headed home. We met up with everyone and headed back to camp. All in all it was a great time and the kids were flithy dirty by the time we got home (you'd think we'd give them a shower in the trailer, huh). We got home about 5 pm. It was good to be home.

I got a phone call Sunday night that they had released us from the YW Presidency on Sunday. I have mixed emotions. I have loved working with the Presidency and getting to know them better. I have really enjoyed the girls and what wonderful YW they are. I hope our daughters grow up to be like them. They are really good girls. C is getting to be quite the little rascal in church and it is getting hard to sit through any type of lesson with him. He was pretty disruptive to the class. But he was just so darn cute that the girls would rather pay attention to him than the lesson. I just pray they don't stick me in as the Music Director cause heaven knows I can't lead music. I am just going to stay on the down low.