Peek-a-boo

Here is some video of Baby K playing peek-a-boo in her high chair after dinner. Watch her foot in the lower corner of the screen at the beginning of the video:

Triathlete!

My husband participated in his first triathlon on Saturday! He has a buddy at work that he works out with who has been trying to get him to try out a triathlon with him and so they both participated in this one offered by a triathlon club in American Fork. It was a sprint triathlon so it was a 300 meter swim (in a pool), a 12 mile bike ride and then a 5K run. Less than a year ago my husband didn't even know how to swim so this was a great accomplishment for him!
This was also good training for his 100 mile bike ride in May. It was a little chilly, especially for those racing - it was only in the 40s and cloudy that morning. My husband said he couldn't even feel his legs until about halfway through the run because they were numb from the cold! The sun finally came out after he had finished. The kids and I went and had a good time cheering him on and supporting him. M&M even expressed interest in trying out the kid's triathlon next year that takes place right after the adult one (it's about 1/3 the distance of the adult race).

Figuring things out...

Today Baby K figured out how to open the kitchen drawer where we keep the towels... It kept her entertained for a few minutes at least! She has been unusually cranky these last couple of days. Hopefully she is just teething and will be back to her happy self here shortly! She has only wanted me lately and whenever I put her down she gives such a sad cry! :'(

Under there somewhere...

Surprisingly it was cold enough for the snow to stick around for a second day...

More snow, AAAHHH!!

After a beautiful week of spring weather, we woke up to more snow this morning!! It was so nice last week that I planted some flowers in my flower beds out front and the kids and I washed and waxed my husband's new car on Friday. The kids were wearing shorts to school and Baby K was loving being outside! We had perfect soccer weather for M&M's soccer practice last Wednesday and the younger kids enjoyed playing on the playground during her practice. We have been living without the furnace for that last week or so but had to turn it back on this morning because we got below freezing last night. :(

Spring, where have you gone?!?

Outdoor girl

I think Baby K is going to be an outdoors girl. Whenever someone opens one of the doors to the outside, Baby K crawls as fast as she can to try and get to it before it closes - and if she is not let out she starts to whine. Here she is the other day trying to go out back with her siblings:
The last 2 days have been absolutely beautiful in the afternoon so I hung the baby swing back up on our swingset and let Baby K swing. She has loved it!

Snowman

This is an art project that Blondie did at school:

Happy Baby!

Baby K is such a happy baby! It's so fun to have her around. Yesterday I was reading a book to Blondie and Kitty and Baby K had found one of her sister's water bottles. She was drinking out of it and it looked really cute so I went to get the camera to take a picture of her. Well, as soon as I got the camera out and pointed it her direction, she gave a huge grin and quit drinking out of the water bottle so she could get closer to the camera.

Baby K is starting to talk and imitate what we say - it's really cute. She says "hi" now and waves her hand at the same time. I will try and get some video of it to put on my blog. Whenever I pick up the phone she says "hi". Baby K also will say "Uh oh" and "Dada" and "Mama" - although we're not sure if she associates those words with me and her dad yet. Usually she wanders around the house saying, "Mama, mama" when she is tired or upset and looking for me. Baby K loves to cuddle with me and as soon as I pick her up her left thumb goes into her mouth - and she still holds her hand funny when she's sucking her thumb. Sometimes she tries to twirl her hair with her right hand while she is sucking her thumb but she doesn't have quite enough hair yet to do that successfully. She is a super fast crawler now but still hasn't figured out how to go up or down the stairs. She has also started pointing at things which is really cute to see her do with her little tiny pointer finger.

Here are some cute pictures I got of her yesterday, plus I finally got some of her teeth - her second one is finally coming in on the bottom.

I can't believe she's going to turn one in just a couple of weeks!!Love those beautiful blue eyes!!

Cleaning up

Last Friday I was having the kids help clean up the living room and I asked Kitty to take something downstairs for me. She responded with, "It's just a pleasure Mom!"

Crazy weather

On Monday I went to the grocery store in the morning and when I was checking out the cashier asked if I thought it was going to snow that day. He had heard on the weather forecast that morning that we were going to get up to 8 inches of snow in the valleys. I hadn't been paying attention to the forecast lately but I found that forecast a little hard to believe after the warm weather we had been having.

Well, that afternoon it started to snow lightly but it wasn't sticking at all to the road or sidewalk. Then that night after I put Baby K to bed I looked outside and there were several inches on the ground and it was even sticking to the road and sidewalk. My husband and I decided to move our old car and my parents' car from the side of the road to our driveway in case the snowplow came down our road. When my husband went out to move the cars there was a lot more snow than he was expecting - he had to come back in to put a coat on and we had to get out the snow brushes/ice scrapers to clean the cars off before we could move them. It's definitely nice having a garage for our cars so we usually don't have to go through that anymore. :)

We probably got about 3-4 inches of snow by morning and there was enough that I got out the snowblower to clean off the sidewalks and driveway.My poor flowers are under there somewhere...

Dairy Farm

Today we drove down to Elberta to visit my husband's uncle and aunt and to listen to a cousin give a farewell talk in their ward. He is going to serve in the same mission that my husband went to, the Spain Malaga mission. We had a really nice time visiting with my husband's uncle and aunt and several of his cousins and their kids. The uncle works for the church's dairy farm and so he offered to take our family on a tour of their facilities. We saw how the whole milking process works and then he took us out to where the baby cows are kept and we were allowed to pet the calves and let them lick our hands. The calves were pretty cute and the kids really enjoyed themselves - even Baby K was reaching her hand out to touch them. There was one calf that basically sucked your whole hand into its mouth - luckily it doesn't hurt at all... The calves that we were petting were only three weeks old. It's a pretty amazing system that they have going on there and there is a lot of research and computer technology that is used to make the whole process smoother and more efficient.

Unfortunately I forgot my camera at home so we don't have any pictures of the day... :( I'll have to remember it for next time!

Luke's birthday party...

This year was Luke's year to have a friend birthday party and he has been looking forward to it for a long time (we only let the kids have a friend party every other year - on even birthdays). The problem this year was picking a day for the party. I really wanted to have it the weekend of his birthday but with our California trip taking place the week after that we were in the middle of making plans for that and didn't have time to organize a party. Then once we got back in town and recovered from our trip it was getting close to his baptism when family was going to be coming into town and staying with us. So finally yesterday (a month after his birthday) we took the time to throw a birthday party for him. We originally were going to have it on Friday afternoon but since I had to drive my parents to the airport that day we decided to have it on Saturday instead.

Luke invited 9 friends to his party and wanted it to have a Bakugan theme. Unfortunately with our unexpected search for a car this past week we didn't have a lot of time to plan the party. What we ended up doing was making some bingo cards with the different Bakugan characters on them and we wrapped individual Bakugan pieces to hide for the boys to find and unwrap and keep. I also made a half ball cake with Bakugan markings on it and a couple of figurines.

We ended up having 7 boys come and it was a complete mad house. All I can say is that boy parties are much different than girl parties. It's a good thing that the weather was pretty nice outside so that we could send them out to play for a while - until they started hurting each other. I think that if we were to do it again I wouldn't let Luke invite as many friends or we would go to an indoor play facility with bouncy houses and slides. Everything turned out fine but it was hard pleasing all of Luke's friends all of the time and keeping them all entertained. I think that girls are much easier because you can sit them down and do fun craft things with them and not have to worry about them killing each other or trying to outdo one another. Anyways, I'm glad that we were able to have the party finally for Luke and I'm also glad that it's over with!

Keeping the Sabbath

On our way to church this morning we passed a grocery store and Blondie said, "What are all those people doing at the store? It's Sunday today!"

Menlove Toyota

If anyone is looking for a car in the Northern Utah area, I would recommend Menlove Toyota in Bountiful, and do your research beforehand on the internet. Our fear with going to a dealer was having to deal with a salesman that would try and get the most money that he could out of us. Most dealers now have internet salesmen that make their money off of selling high volumes of cars, whereas the regular salesmen make their money off of the individual sales. Both the internet salesmen that we dealt with gave us upfront out-the-door pricing for the cars we were looking at and they both told us that they assume that internet shoppers have already done their research on the cars so they usually start well below the MSRP for internet shoppers. The reason we chose Menlove Toyota over Mark Miller was because their final price was over $1000 less for essentially the same car - and there were no last minute changes or surprises in which they tried to bleed us for more money.
Our overall experience with this car purchase was a very positive one and we still can't believe that we got the deal that we did.

Whirlwind of a week!!

This week has definitely been packed with activity! It started out innocently enough with DH's parents leaving Monday morning. Shortly after they left DH took off for work. Not too long after he left for work I heard the garage door open again and he came walking in the door. My husband's car has been nearing the end of its life for some time and during the last week or two the gears have been getting harder and harder to shift. On Monday my husband got as far as the freeway on his way to work and didn't feel comfortable driving any farther in his car. So we decided to spend the day researching how to go about shopping for a new car. My husband found a great website, carbuyingtips.com, packed with lots of great info on how and where to shop for a car.

The first thing we wanted to do was to go to a car dealer and just test drive a couple of cars to see what was out there. We have talked about buying a car for some time now and had been toying with the idea of buying a brand new car off of the lot. Luckily my parents were available and willing to work with us throughout the week so that we didn't have to lug the kids with us to the car lots. So we called up my parents and they were willing to come and watch the kids while we drove to the lot.

We looked at some cars and test drove a Honda Civic and a Toyota Corolla. My husband has been really wanting to get a car that was going to be dependable and last us for many years to come. After test driving these cars and looking at some of the sticker prices on them we headed for home.

That night and the next day we looked around some at our options and on Tuesday we decided to try out one of the online sites listed at carbuyingtips.com, invoicedealers.com. What you do is select what type of car you want and then the website sends your info to local dealers in the area and then they contact you - so we tried it for the Toyota Corolla. Within just a few minutes we had a Salt Lake Toyota dealer, Mark Miller Toyota, calling us for some info and to give us a price on a car - significantly lower than what we had looked at the day before. Not too long after that we had another dealer in Bountiful, Menlove Toyota, call us with a car and a similar offer. So we called up my parents again and they graciously came and watched the kids while we drove up to Salt Lake to take a look at the first car. We drove the car and had a good experience with the salesman there. He was totally different from what you expect from a car salesman and told us straight up what the take home price would be for that car. We decided to skip the second dealer because the car was almost the exact same model and we didn't feel a need to test drive another one. We told the salesman that we would keep in touch and that we wanted to think about it some more.

Later that afternoon we started the process of applying for a loan through my credit union back in Virginia in case we decided to finance some of our car purchase. We also decided to try the online process with the Honda Civic and see what kind of offers we received. Well, we only heard from one Honda dealer and they sounded like they wouldn't be willing to negotiate from their offer so we decided to go the Toyota route since we were offered cheaper prices by more than $1000.

On Wednesday my husband went to work and I ended up having to drive down to his office to sign some papers for our loan. After that my husband was contacted by the Menlove salesman and asked how he could get us up there. We were kind of leaning towards just going with the Mark Miller dealer because it seemed like a good deal and the two dealers had pretty similar prices but the Mark Miller car had a few extra features. The Menlove salesman said that he would then add on these features at no cost to us and offer a lower price. Then my husband called the Mark Miller salesman and asked if he could match the price. We basically had the 2 dealers going back and forth until the Bountiful salesman said that he had gone as low as he could go without manager approval but he would talk to the manager and then call my husband back in 5 minutes. In the meantime I had called my parents to see if they could watch the kids in case we needed to drive up to the Bountiful dealer. The offer that we got was almost too good to believe. My husband called back the Salt Lake salesman and he couldn't believe the offer either - he told us to be careful that they didn't give us a lesser car and that they didn't add on any hidden fees. So we dropped the kids off at my parents, drove up to Bountiful, test drove the car and got the walk out the door price from them. There were 2 features that the car didn't have but they weren't willing to budge on adding them at no cost because the price was so low - we would have to add them at our cost if we wanted them. We decided to go home and think about it that night and elected to not put down a $500 down payment because it was non-refundable. We were afraid at the price quoted that we would end up signing for something that wasn't what we thought it would be and then be out $500 if we backed out.

On Thursday my husband went in to work and called the Salt Lake salesman to see if he could match the price - my husband liked the color on the car at the Salt Lake dealer better than the Bountiful location. He was told that that was as low as he could go so we called the Bountiful dealer to tell them we would be in in the afternoon to pick up the car! In the meantime we got the pre-approval on our car loan and all of the salesmen were quite shocked by the low interest rate we were getting for our loan - 3.75%.

So Thursday afternoon I drove down to pick my husband up from work early, picked the kids up from school and then we all drove up to sign the papers and drive home with the car! The salesmen at Menlove Toyota were true to their word and didn't try any last minute tricks or switches on us. The price was exactly as we expected and they didn't try getting us to add on anything extra - except for an extra 3 year warranty that we are still considering - it's refundable if we end up not needing it during the length of the warranty. I must say that it still doesn't seem real! We started looking for a car on Monday and drove home with a brand new 2009 Toyota Corolla on Thursday. The car is awesome and we got it for a great price as well - several thousand dollars below the listed MSRP!Now we just need to get rid of our old car somehow - any takers???

Draper Temple

With DH's parents and sister coming to town while the Draper Temple open house was going on, we decided to get tickets to it during their visit so they could go with us. So Friday afternoon, Feb. 27, after the kids came home from school we got dressed up and headed over to Draper. We had tickets for 3:20 and we got to our meeting location a few minutes early, but it was CROWDED! The tickets were pretty much pointless because no one even checked to see that we had them - so we really could have just shown up any time on any day. We went into the meetinghouse and ended up having to wait over 30 minutes to get in to a room where we watched a short video and then got loaded up onto a charter bus to transport us to the temple. I think the kids really enjoyed walking through and seeing the different rooms. Afterwards they handed out free cookies and water and then we got shuttled back to our cars. We ended up not getting home until after 6:00 so we ate a really late dinner that night. The Draper Temple has been kind of a trial run for when the Oquirrh Mountain Temple opens in a few months. We'll have to see if they change anything with how they run the open house for the Oquirrh Mountain Temple - and maybe we'll get to help out with it.

Luke's baptism

Luke was baptized by his dad on Saturday. He was the only one from our ward that day so we had the whole program to ourselves. Thanks to the family that was able to make it and share the special day with us. We enjoyed having DH's parents and sister from out of town as well as our family who live nearby. Luke is a good kid and we're proud of his decision to be baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was a beautiful, sunny day!

We had a hard time getting a family picture with everyone cooperating. This is the best one from our camera. My father-in-law took some as well which I haven't seen yet, so hopefully he got a better one - as well as some big group pictures.
This one would have been the best but Luke has his eyes closed! If I could find some photo editing software on our new computer maybe I could edit the two pictures together, but so far I haven't found anything that I can use... That may have to be a future purchase for us.

Spring... just kidding!

Well, apparently mother nature is not quite ready for us to have spring here in Utah yet. Yesterday, after a huge wind storm that lasted a good portion of the day, the temperatures dropped drastically and we had some snow come through. We always seem to get a few more doses of winter after my crocuses bloom before spring is finally here to stay.

This is how the yard looked this morning:
And these are my crocuses that were blooming yesterday:

First sign of spring...

My crocuses are always the first sign that spring is coming!! I noticed one blooming yesterday and this morning there were several patches in bloom as well as many other bulbs that are peeking through the ground. We've had a relatively mild winter with only a couple of snow storms this year. The last couple of weeks have been alternating between really warm and cold. Yesterday I think the temperature was up in the 60s! Time to get thinking about my garden!