Adding some pink to our house of blue!

That's right! We are having a baby girl! Quite a shock after 5 little boys to actually be getting a girl. I was really stressed out wondering what baby was going to be so I talked Hubby into letting me schedule and elective gender ultrasound this week so I didn't have to wait another 3 weeks for my anatomy scan. We took all of the kids with us. Jason wanted a girl because he said he had too many little brothers, and Jakey wanted another boy. The younger 3 don't care either way lol.

The ultrasound tech started the scan and showed the boys the babies head and tummy and then she started looking for the gender. She passed over it a few times and from those glimpses I was pretty sure it was a girl but was waiting for her to stop and confirm it. She said, "So, did you guys do something different this time?!" and I just turned and grinned at Hubby and he asked, "It's a girl?" She showed us the gender shot and it was clearly NOT a boy! Hubby kept asking if she was really sure and her and I both assured him that it was definitely a girl. She congratulated us and gave us a few pictures and off we went happy and excited.

It feels so surreal! I'm actually having a baby girl! I want to go shopping and start making things. I pulled out my old baby clothes that I've been saving all these years, which are in surprisingly good condition for being almost 30 years old. I'm getting them washed up now, and it'll be so fun to see my little girl wearing clothes I wore as a baby. I'm hoping she looks like I did as a baby, with tons of dark thick hair.

A Wonderful Christmas Gift!

This was the present we surprised our parents with this Christmas. Yep, that last spot says 'Baby'! I found out the day before my birthday a few weeks ago that we are expecting baby #6. It was really fun to surprise the grandparents with these cute ornaments (got at Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, love them!) and see how quickly they caught the change. So far I'm feeling pretty good. I've started to get a little bit of nausea this week, though it didn't interfere with Christmas. The boys are really excited about the baby. I told Jakey when we were at the inlaws and he went out of the room to Grandma Cindy and said, "Guess what Grandma? In August my mom is going to have a baby! Or maybe two!" I burst out laughing at that. We don't know yet how many there are, guess we'll see lol. And Jason told me today that he really wants it to be a girl because four brothers is enough. I'm so excited for this baby and can't wait to start feeling it move and see it on ultrasound.

Could be worse

It's almost winter here. Not officially, but weather-wise. The weather has been getting colder, we had some freezing temps and a dusting of snow last week that killed off the rest of my garden (I have 2 boxes of green tomatoes inside that I hope will ripen). Amazingly we had temps in the 70s on Halloween which was awesome for trick-or-treating, but I know that won't last. I'm really dreading the cold and snow. Though I'm not going to complain too much about our weather after what the East coast is going through with the destruction of Hurricane Sandy. It affected millions along the East coast. Awful seeing the pictures from areas like New Jersey and areas of New York. It may have even affected business contracts attorney raleigh nc. No matter how much I dislike the cold and snow, I'm very glad to live in an area with very few natural disasters. Although we live by a big fault line we only have rare minor earthquakes. Because we are surrounded by mountains we rarely get tornadoes or other big storms. We are landlocked so no threat of tsunamis or hurricanes. I may have my complaints about Utah, but the lack of major natural disasters is a plus lol (*knock on wood*).

Sugar overload

We had a really fun Halloween. The boys got way too much candy and had a long busy day. Started out with a costume parade at the boys' school. Then I checked them out a little early to go to Nate's work for trick-or-treating. They got tons of candy there, over half of their whole stash. Then we headed to my mom's and did a little more trick-or-treating, and while I went to class Nate took them home. When I got home we took them out to our neighborhood, which didn't last long. The babies were really slow and had a hard time getting around in their boxes lol. So after just a few houses I brought the twins back, and about 10 minutes later Nate returned with the other 3 because they were done. So we let them pig out on candy and watch a show while we passed out candy.

I weighed the candy the next day, and we had 13 lbs of candy! Not including what we'd pigged out on the day before. Yikes! So I've been eating way too much, but I've also started exercising, so that will hopefully counteract the junk lol.

Winterizing

It's that time of year. Cold. We're getting the house and yard all prepared for winter. Hubby already got the swamp cooler covered and the sprinklers drained and all the outdoor toys like scooters and dump trucks and custom frisbees stored in the shed. The heater has been coming on. I'm hoping the weather will give me one more week of non-freezing temps (we had a few freezing nights this week I covered them with a tarp) so the tomatoes in my garden can ripen a bit more. I've also been pulling out the long sleeved shirts and need to finish switching out the kids' clothes.

Halloween MineCraft Costumes

For Halloween this year my oldest son wanted to be Steve from the game MineCraft. A few weeks ago I barely even knew what MineCraft was, but we got the trial game on our Xbox and the kids have been loving it. So about 2 days ago I decided to go ahead and make his costume, and to make it even more insane I decided to make all the boys things from MineCraft. It took waaaaaaay longer than I expected to make their costumes. I literally did hardly anything the last few days but work on their costumes, staying up until 2am the last two nights even. And they had to be done by today because my niece's costume birthday party and the twins club trunk-or-treat. Using lots of scissors, construction paper, paint, boxes, and tape, this was the final- totally awesome- product:

And the pictures of the characters/objects they were based on:

The costumes were a huge hit with anyone who recognized MineCraft. The babies weren't too fond of being stuck in a box but we were able to distract them with candy. They loved the trunk-or-treat and were so excited to be given candy.

Birthday Party

We also had a birthday party for Jason after his baptism. He had a small friend's party the Saturday after his birthday, but we decided to have the bigger family party after the baptism. We had lots of food (though some days I would love to have los angeles catering instead of making everything myself lol) and lots of people showed up for him. Was really nice to have so many family and friends show up to celebrate him and show support.

Jason's Baptism

My oldest son Jason turned 8 last month, which means that he was old enough to be baptized! (We are LDS [Mormon] and children can be baptized once they are 8). It was an amazing day and made me cry. Grandma Laurie gave him his own set of scriptures, which he has been reading out of every day. Here is a picture of my family before the baptism.

Selective hearing

Some days I think my children must be deaf. For one, they like turning up the TV or games way louder than necessary, and secondly they just plain don't listen. I'll be standing right in front of them and talking and they will just look up and say, "What?" I think I need a loudspeaker in my house, like a bose l1 compact musicians friend system, to be able to get there attention anywhere in the house. Maybe they would hear me better if I was talking through a microphone lol.

Nom nom nom

My garden this year actually hasn't done too bad. Getting lots of tomatoes (mostly little cherry and juliets) and some zucchini and squash. The other day I picked a zucchini that had gotten pretty big and decided to have one of the babies hold it to see how big it was compared to them. So I handed it over to Isaac and he thought it was a snack for him.

Then he ran off with it and I had to chase him around the table to get it back. Little stinker. :)

Just like riding a bike

I just realized it has been probably over 12 years since I've ridden a bike. The last time I remember riding bikes was when I was maybe 16. I may have ridden a couple times since then (because it's hard to believe anyone can go that long without riding a bike once?!) but I don't remember. I don't even own a bike, and neither does Hubby. Jason and Jakey have bikes but that's it. One of these days we need to get us all bikes so we can go on rides. We'd probably need to look on cracksandracks.com for car bike racks for the van too. I'm pretty sure I'd still be able to ride a bike after all these years, right?!

More cuteness

Here's another little video of my cute kiddos. Now that Caleb is on his feet more, Isaac likes to go over and give him hugs, but because Caleb is still a little wobbly usually one or both of them end up falling over lol. Now that Caleb is understanding the word "hug" he is starting to do it too.

Getting into it

When I was watching football a few days ago I noticed that they don't really treat the preseason games like they do regular season. The players didn't seem as into the game and neither did the announcers. It sounded more like college press box talk instead of pros, with more random chatter and sometimes they ignored the game altogether. It's more exciting when the players and announcers are more into the games. I've gotten used to the Sunday Night guys and their knowledge of the game and great commentary.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!

A few days ago Jakey decided to teach the babies how to play Ring-Around-The-Rosies and it was just so dang cute! They loved it and were laughing their heads off. They were pretty worn out though by the time I pulled the camera out, but got a few rounds recorded. :)

Safety first

This year when we have gone to busy public outings, like the park on the 4th of July and Lagoon themepark, we have made sure to put contact info on them. A few years ago on the 4th we lost Jakey and it was the most terrifying 15 minutes of my life. So I got some labels, kind of like ul labels, that go inside the children's shoes with our contact info, as well as put some bracelet type things on their wrist or leg with our phone number. Luckily nobody got lost but it was a relief to know that if somebody found them (and we talked about them looking for a police officer or nice mommy with kids to ask for help if they got lost) that they would be able to quickly reach us.