Ohio open tournament

On Mary's birthday, Ella had her first jump rope tournament.  She was not excited about it at all because it meant that she would not be around to celebrate Mary's birthday.  She competed in 8 or 9 events (I can't remember.) and had a fun day.  

She says her favorite events are speed events and those were the ones she did the best in.  This video is the double under event.  She jumps and the rope goes around twice while she jumps once.  It is a one minute event and she is supposed to do as many as she can before time is up.  You can tell by the end she gets pretty tired, but (unofficially) she did 75 in a minute.

She also competed in a pairs freestyle event where Ella and her partner, Emily, do a synchronized routine together.  She had a good time.

 She was super thrilled to win two ribbons, both sixth place ribbons for single rope speed and the double under event.  Her age group is large so we were surprised and excited that she placed.

 And just because she is so cute, here are a couple more pictures of Mary on her birthday.  Here she is with her breakfast in bed.

 And here she is when she went out for a birthday lunch with dad.  Marc taught her to dip her fries in her Frosty.  Yummy!  Marc said the conversation centered around how to achieve inner peace.  She says you have to stand on sticks.  She has been watching Kung Fu Panda 2 on the iPad.

Mary turns four!

This past Saturday was Mary's fourth birthday.

The time really does fly.  It is hard to believe my baby is four.

Here she is on her actual day of birth.  She was our smallest baby, weighing on 6 lbs 2 oz.

First birthday.  Finally starting to grow some hair!

Second birthday.  It is sad to see that her diet really hasn't progressed much.  I think she chose the same menu for her fourth birthday.  Pasta and fruit!

Third birthday!  She calls that dress her Dora dress because of the colors.

Here she is on her fourth birthday.  Unfortunately she spent most of it at Ella's jumprope tournament.  But she was perfectly content with the iPad.  Marc made her breakfast in bed and took a picture, but I think it is on his phone.  She chose a bowl of Apple Jacks!  I stopped buying sugary cereals a few years ago so that is a treat to her.

She had originally told me that she wanted a ballerina birthday.  During R week at preschool, we talked about rainbows and it must have made quite an impression, because she started asking for a rainbow party.

 Some facts about Mary at age four:

• She is tall and weighs only a pound less than Sarah who is two years older.
• She loves to watch movies especially those that star Barbie.  She will watch them over and over if allowed.
• She loves to play with the iPad but really just wants to watch movies on it.
• She is always asking to play outside, even if it is raining.
• Mary and Sarah play together every afternoon and Mary loves her big sister.
• Mary gets up each morning and stands on the catwalk above our family room and yells, "Hi mom!" 
• Sometimes she will put herself to bed if we haven't gotten around to it and she is tired.
• She is a picky eater and will choose to skip dessert rather than try a new food.
• Her favorite foods are chicken nuggets and french fries but she loves fruit too.
• She likes to get ready with me in the morning and likes to put powder on her ears.
• She has a funny giggle and gets the hiccups if she laughs too much.

We love Mary so much and are so glad that she is part of our family!

Tanner's Birthday

Tanner's birthday started off with giving his cousin Miles a bottle.

He has always wanted an outdoor birthday party like at the pool or something, but when your birthday is at the end of December that isn't a party anyone wants to go to.  So we rented an indoor soccer field and he invited 12 friends and cousins to come play flag football.  His uncle Scott and I were the quarterbacks and the kids just ran around shouting for us to throw them the ball.   At least that was the play I called.

Scott used a little more strategy and his team seemed to get to the end zone more often.

Next came my favorite part: Costco Cake!  

Tanner got a lot of cool gifts from his friends but the one that really stood out was the Sacramento Kings Jimmer t-shirt.

He had a great day, and we were so glad to be able to have so many family members in town to help celebrate.  

Christmas

The whole Christmas season was really fun this year.  All the kids are at fun ages and were really excited about the whole thing.  We have a couple of advent/countdown calendars and they were super excited to change those each day.

One of my favorite traditions of the last couple of years in Christopher Pop-in-kins.  He first visited our house last year and is so much fun.  He is one of Santa's elves but he has a special assignment to help watch children to make sure they are being good.  He arrives shortly after Thanksgiving and stays until just before Christmas.  Each night he moves to a different place in the house so he can watch and make sure the children are staying on the nice list.  All the kids loved coming down each morning to look for where he was sitting that day.  This picture was one of my favorites, sitting in the fruit basket holding jalapeños!

 By the time Christmas Eve arrived, we were lucky to have all the Wilson's home except for Don and Justin.  Justin came Christmas day.  We missed not having Don here.  But we had 16 cousins from 4 months to 14.  It was chaotic, but super fun.

Someone rented a karaoke machine and that was part of the Christmas Eve fun.

 Rylee really liked someone's voice!

After the singing and dinner, we read the Christmas story and exchanged a few gifts.  In my family growing up, we would draw names and we would get to open that gift on Christmas Eve.  That tradition has continued.

 Once we got back to our house, we opened our new jammies and made some reindeer food.  Each of the kids took a turn throwing some reindeer food.  

 Everyone was really excited for Christmas!!  Cute jammies, huh?

 Marc and I were up until nearly 1 am wrapping the last of their presents.  A few of our kids had been sick and Tanner and Ella were on antibiotics for strep throat.  Around 3 am Ella came in saying she wasn't feeling well so I let her sleep on the floor next to our bed.  Then around 4:00, Sarah came in with the same complaint so I told her the same thing I told Ella.  At 5:30, Tanner came and and started jumping on our bed saying, 'It's Christmas!  It's Christmas!"  To which I calmly replied, yes, but your sisters aren't up.  Mary at least was still asleep in her bed.  Within about 10 minutes everyone was up so our Christmas morning started really early....

 Tanner and Ella each had one enormous present from Santa, but it turns our Santa had been a little tricky in his wrapping.  He had wrapped 5 or 6 boxes and nested them inside each other until they got to their real present.  They thought it was pretty fun!

The rest of the day is picture-less.  Marc and I were too tired to think about pictures.  We had pull-aparts and eggs and grandma's house for breakfast and then went to church with my parents and all the siblings families.  We came home and cleaned up a little of the mess and thought about going back to my parents around 2:30, but we made the mistake of sitting down and decided we needed a nap instead.  We finished off the day with dinner with the family.

It was a great Christmas!

excuses...

This year, I resolve to be a better blogger.

Here are a few pics of what has been going on since our last blog post.

Shortly after Thanksgiving, Marc and my brother Kevin took the kids to Chicago to see the BYU Basketball team play in a tournament.  On the way, they stopped at the Triple XXX family diner.

 Ella had a jump rope workshop in early December.  It was three days of hard work.  We actually hosted three of the staff that came in from other places which added to the fun.  Ella is all the way in the back of this picture.

 We put our shoes out for Saint Nicholas...not sure why that picture is upside down!

 We hosted a gingerbread house party with our friends.  It was a huge success and we hope to make it an annual event.

 This house was quite the masterpiece.  It had a skating rink and the beginnings of  a snowman with the grass showing through where the snowball had rolled..

 Of course there had to be some BYU decorations.  The other house has SC for Santa Claus.  We  cut out little gingerbread people so everyone could put their families around their houses!

 Our trusty dryer, that I bought used nine years ago, finally decided to give us some trouble.  It was unusable for ten days!  We washed the clothes here and then shuttled them over to my parent's house to dry.  Sometimes I just left them there and they came back folded!  I debated about fixing it at all!  This is the laundry pile just in the master bath at the end of the ordeal.  The kid's pile was just as big!

 And in the midst of all the Christmas chaos and busyness, we decided to go from this.....

 ...to this.

 I did not think through what it would be like to do a home improvement project during the holidays.  It's the pits.  On top of the shopping, decorating, baking, and party-going, we now had to choose paint and carpet and stain colors and nobs etc, etc, etc.... 

This will be the new office and we are excited with the result, even if the process was a bit painful.

We also had all of my siblings except for my older brother in town for Christmas and celebrated Tanner's 10th birthday, but those two events deserve their own posts...

This week Tanner's fourth grade class went to the Cincinnati Cyclones v. Toledo Walleye hockey game.  They offer a program called Hockey in Education.  At the breaks between the periods, they have educational spots on the jumbotron.  The one I actually listened to taught mean, median and mode using hockey scores.  It was interesting.  

I arrived late, but found Tanner easily.  Thank you to his teachers for asking them all to wear their class shirt.  Unfortunately, he had already planted himself in a seat with no open seats around him.  I asked him to come sit with me and I thought he was following me back up, but when I sat down several rows up, he hadn't moved.  So I spent $10 to park, $13 to get into the game and probably 45 minutes of driving to watch a game that I don't even understand all by myself....

 Our neighborhood is only about eight years old and our house is only three years old.   We are surrounded by farmland, so I don't think there were a lot of trees here to begin with.  Fall is disappointing for the kids because there really are no leaves to rake (yes, thank you, I got enough of that in Toledo!).  The kids were off of school yesterday so we headed over to grandma's to see if we could scrape together a leaf pile to jump in.

It was sunny but pretty chilly outside but some of the kids worked pretty well (they are pictured!).

 Tanner practiced his rake guitar.

 When we were done, there wasn't much of a pile.   Tanner decided to lay in it!

For Brent and Diana....what we've been doing, in pictures.

Participating in the National Day of Service.  We raked leaves for some elderly folks around town.  The kids actually said they had fun!

 Visiting a local farm with our preschool class.

 Trying to carve pumpkins.  The carving tool we had broke halfway through and we never finished them!

 A little begging for candy.  It is a good thing we have a dress-up box because Mary was something different for each of the three costume-wearing occasions that we had.  Here she was a ballerina.  Belle also made an appearance as did a fairy.

 Traveling with the Comet Skippers jumprope team to North Carolina for a workshop.

 Walking to The Mason Veteran's Memorial with Tanner's fourth grade class.

 This quote made me a little misty-eyed.  In case you can't read it, it says, "Rest only in the knowledge that your grief, the grief of a parent or of a sibling, or that of a child, provides us the blanket of freedom and security which all of us sleep under so peaceably at night."

Thank you to all who serve.

 Going to bed too late!  Mary actually fell asleep eating a cookie!

 Casting 215 kids at the Mason Heights Carnival.

I think we got a picture of everyone on this post!