Christmas Tree Time!

We usually put our Christmas tree up the weekend after Thanksgiving, but since we were out of town for Thanksgiving this year we had to wait a little longer. This year we put the tree up for Family Home Evening the Monday after Thanksgiving. We have an older version of the artificial trees which has a main pole that goes down the center and then the branches are attached on individually. The kids have a lot of fun with this project because they have to sort the branches first by color and then help add them onto the tree one layer at a time. This year we are trying the tree down in the family room since we finally have couches in our living room. DH wanted to move one of the couches to another room to make room for the tree but I like having the couches there. So we're trying it out for this year and will decide later what to do in the future (if we are still in this house). One day I'd like to have a real tree in the living room and keep the artificial one for the kids in the family room.

Ballet Class

Since Blondie loves princesses and anything girl related, I thought that she would love taking a ballet class. M&M took a ballet/tap class at about this same age, my only problem has been finding a class and teacher that I thought would work for our schedule. I finally found a morning class that taught ballet once a week and was at a reasonable price and distance from our house. She started taking them in September every Tuesday morning through our city rec center. I was hoping to find a combined ballet/tap class like M&M had, but they were all offered in the afternoons and I wanted to do it while the older kids were in school to simplify my life a little.

It's been a little hard on Kitty because she loves to dance and get dressed up as well, so each week I get them both dressed in ballet outfits and then I bring toys or coloring books for Kitty to play with while the class is going on (the class is for 3-4 year olds). Luckily it is only a half hour class so Kitty does just fine playing by herself during that time.

The first class was pretty interesting because I wasn't sure how Blondie would respond to being left in the room with a teacher and girls that she didn't know. There ended up only being one other girl there that week so I stayed in the class with Blondie and the teacher let Kitty participate as well. Kitty actually participated more than Blondie did - it was pretty cute to watch. The teacher would come around and help all the girls to put their arms and legs in the correct positions and Kitty would let her do it and stay in the positions. Blondie on the other hand pretty much clung on to me the whole time with her two fingers in her mouth.

The following week Blondie didn't want me to leave the room, but I didn't want to stay there because I seemed to be making things worse. So I left the room with Kitty and we watched through the windows. Blondie didn't participate too much at first and it was a little frustrating because she would be so excited the night before for her ballet class and then she would just sit there in the class. She finally loves the class now and has a good time with the other girls in it. It's been a good experience for her. They are now getting ready for their Christmas recital which will be on December 15th.

Festival of Trees

Last Thursday, M&M's school choir sang at the Festival of Trees in Sandy. This is an annual event where people decorate & donate Christmas trees to be sold to raise money for the Primary Children's Medical Center. Usually the trees are decorated with a particular theme and are usually in memory of someone who has died. I took Blondie & Kitty there with me and we walked around the trees for a little while and then we went to listen to the school choir sing.

Kitty & Blondie really liked this pink My Little Pony tree.

It's a...

baby!
Sorry, you'll have to wait until the baby is born to find out what it is. I went to my appointment with my midwife on Wednesday morning and she was able to call the hospital and schedule my 20 week ultrasound for us for the next day. So we went in on Thursday afternoon and everything appears to be just fine with the baby. We told the tech upfront that we didn't want to know what we were having (we haven't found out with any except the first two). Luke was asking part way through if it was a boy and we told him to watch the monitor to see if he could tell. The tech then told us that she hadn't even tried to look because she was afraid that she would accidentally give it away (i.e. saying, "There's his/her hand").

The measurements were all right on for when my due date is. The baby was being kind of shy with its head down really low and its face towards my lower back. It also had one hand up by its face the whole time so we weren't able to get any good profile or face shots.

We had the kids there with us and I had a hard time trying not to laugh at their comments (try lying flat on your back and not moving your stomach when you laugh). At one point DH was talking to the kids about the "water" that the baby is in inside of me and he asked the kids if any of them knew what it was called. Blondie piped up and said, "Crater Lake?" We then had to explain to the tech what she was talking about and it took a minute or two for me to stop laughing on that one.

The ultrasound tech really liked this picture because it looks like the baby is making the sign for I Love You with its right hand.

According to their best estimates, the baby weighs about 13 oz at this point and the head measures about 2 inches across. It's amazing to me that the baby can be so small still and yet I feel such big kicks and movements every day.

Cute cartoon

Family Circus

Off-track fun!

Yes, I'm still trying to catch up on some events that happened back in October! Here are some pictures from a trip to Tracy Aviary and Hogle Zoo while the kids were off-track.

October 4th
My parents & sister met us at Tracy Aviary. We walked around a little, ate some sack lunches that we had brought and then saw the rest of the aviary.

This toucan loved posing for the cameras.

They have some coin operated machines there where you can put in a quarter and get a handful of food to feed the birds. The kids loved feeding them all and kept looking around on the ground for pieces that had been dropped along the path. In this picture Kitty is trying to throw food to the ducks because she was too short to reach over the railing.

These two pelicans kept dipping their beaks under the water and opening them like they were trying to get some food in the water (even though we couldn't see anything). It was neat to watch this because the skin under their lower beak would expand with the weight from the water (see the one on the right).

After the aviary I took the kids over to Liberty Park to play before we went home. In this picture Kitty is trying to climb the rock-climbing wall. Before we left she was able to do it without help.

October 11th
A week later we went to Hogle Zoo with my parents. It was beautiful weather and we saw a few animals that we haven't seen before there.

This is a rare white alligator that is on loan from the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, LA. It is not an albino, but is an alligator with a rare genetic mutation that causes white skin & blue eyes. There are only 10 known white alligators in the world. Apparently they can't survive in the wild because they can't hide or blend in to their surroundings and they sunburn easily.

This is the first time that I have ever seen penguins at this zoo. Every time we go they are not out so I was beginning to wonder if they really had any or not. When we first got to the penguin exhibit they were all in the water but then they quickly got out and started following one another to the other side of the enclosure. It was really cute watching them try and hop up and down the rocks along the edge.

It is very hard trying to get all 4 kids to look at the camera & smile at the same time (this is the closest I got this day).

This animal is called a bat-eared fox. There were 2 of them and Kitty loved watching them because they kept coming over to the window right where she was.

When we were getting ready to leave the zoo, we walked by the duck ponds and just as we were walking through there was a zoo worker who was feeding 2 loaves of bread to the birds. He handed out pieces to the kids and they had a blast breaking off pieces and feeding it to the ducks & swans.

Great editorial on parenting...

This was an editorial written in the opinion section of the paper about a week and a half ago. I thought that it was a great commentary on parenting today. If you don't want to read the whole thing, skim down to the bottom where I've highlighted my favorite part of the article...

Too many parents pushing for little Einsteins

By Betsy Hart
Scripps Howard News Service

I'm not sure when I lost the competitive-parent race. But make no mistake, I lost.
Or rather, decided early not to compete.
I'm not sure when it all began. But my kids didn't go to preschool because that seemed rather unnecessary to me, and I wanted them home for those years anyway.
Later my then-second-grade daughter, along with her classmates, was tested as a matter of routine for the "gifted" program, which began in third grade at her public school. I was barely aware of the testing, and only glanced at her raw number results before filing them away. So I was surprised when I received an e-mail from the teacher to all of the parents, literally begging them to stop barraging her with inquiries about the "cutoff" for the gifted program before she herself had the information.
Flash forward: When my family moved to the Chicago area from the D.C. suburbs, I couldn't have been happier to discover that here, children were not expected to be fully reading in kindergarten.
So, I was more than a little pleased to read "Rush, Little Baby: How the Push for Infant Academics May Actually be a Waste of Time — or Worse" by Neil Swidey of the Boston Globe. Featured in the recent Sunday Magazine, it was a great profile of parents who push their littlest kids to intellectual extremes. And for what?
He writes about mothers who show their 3-month-old reading and math flashcards every day. Several studies released in recent years show that such efforts have no positive effect on the child's cognitive development. But Swidey says that's just one part of the picture. Flashcards for babies "might actually be no more extreme than the increasing mania among professional parents to armor their youngsters with every educational enrichment program available — Baby Einstein DVDs at 3 months, junior Kumon tutoring at 2 1/2 years, SAT summer camps at 15 — all at the expense of old-fashioned but vitally important unstructured play."
Maybe I'm not on that track because of how my parents raised me. I'm the youngest of five. Yes, there were a few horseback-riding and ballet lessons. But that was about it.
Only, that wasn't "it." Our house was full of books, my mother read to me a lot and pursued an advanced degree and professional success, my father was busy supporting the family, and my parents' friends were interesting and our home was one where ideas were discussed and debated. But here's what I remember most: My parents and their friends didn't talk down to us. We kids had to get our act together and talk "up" to them.
My parents' world didn't revolve around me. Their egos weren't tied up in me. They wanted their children to become whole people of character. What a gift. What freedom, in the best sense, to develop all of me. And what a difference, I think, from many of today's parents who are on the competitive track.
Of course I want my own kids to do well in school. Not because it's a "ticket" to something, but because it's their calling to be the best students they can be. And yes, education is a gift.
So look, maybe I'm just an anti-snob snob or a rebel at heart. Maybe I know at some level that I couldn't successfully push my kids anyway. For me, just successfully chasing all four children into their pajamas at night can be a stretch.
And yes, I know that the "competitive parents" love their kids like crazy, too, and want the best for them.
But I also know I want so much more for my kids than a Baby Einstein DVD could give them, even if it worked. When it comes to my children, my ultimate goal for them is heaven, not Harvard. If they go to the latter on their way to heaven, that's great. But if I reverse that equation, I've failed them.
For this parent, that's the ultimate motivation.


Betsy Hart hosts the "It Takes a Parent" radio show on WYLL-AM 1160 in Chicago. Reach her through betsysblog.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.

Keep checking...

I have been trying to get a few posts up over the last couple of days but I am having numerous problems trying to get my pictures uploaded - so stay tuned in and know that I am working on it...

Halloween 2007

(Note: After trying for 3 days to upload all of these pictures, I have finally been successful! Talk about frustrating...)
This year was one of my easier years for Halloween costumes. Blondie wanted to be a butterfly at first and then changed her mind to a fairy princess but all it required was buying a pair of wings for her and then she wore her ballet leotard with it. Kitty was a ballerina which we already had a ballet leotard & tutu for and Luke was Obi-Wan Kenobi. Luke's costume consisted of a light brown shirt with a belt tie that I made for his birthday party last year and the only thing I had to make was a dark brown overcoat with hood. I found some cheap fabric at Wal-Mart and was able to construct something without any type of pattern. It took me a couple of tries to get the hood looking the way I wanted but I think it ended up looking pretty good - and Luke loved it. I couldn't take a single picture of him without him posing in some type of fighting stance. M&M was my only difficult one because she couldn't decide what she wanted to be. Finally just 2 days before Halloween we were at the grocery store and they had a few costumes there that we looked at and we found one doctor costume that was just the right size and M&M ended up being that for Halloween.

We kept things pretty low key this year and only went to the school parade and then trick-or-treating that night in our neighborhood. Kitty unfortunately ended up being sick so she stayed home most of the evening with me. Kitty threw up at lunchtime and then seemed totally fine for a few hours. Late in the afternoon she ended up falling asleep on the couch (which is very unusual for her). When it was getting close to dinnertime I tried waking her up but she was so tired and not quite herself that I sent DH & the rest of the kids to a neighbors' house for hot dogs (an annual thing that the neighbors do) and told them to check in with us in a little bit to see how Kitty was. Well, when they came back she still didn't appear to be feeling too great so we decided to just leave her at home with me. She loved giving out candy to the trick-or-treaters (except for the bigger "kids") and got mad at me the few times when I didn't let her do it.

After Luke & Blondie got tired DH brought all the kids home & I decided to go out with Kitty to a few houses that they hadn't been to yet with M&M so she could get some candy and experience some trick-or-treating herself this year. I ended up carrying her most of the time and I would put her down when we got to the door of the house. She enjoyed herself & loves candy.

Luckily for us it was a fairly warm evening for Halloween in Utah (our warmest since having kids I think). The kids still wore jackets either over or under their costumes & most of them wore gloves/mittens to keep their hands warm. It also helped that we didn't change the clocks back until after Halloween this year. It was weird having it so light outside at 6:30 or 7 in the evening.

DH's work had a little trick-or-treat activity at their office again this year but it was on the afternoon of Halloween which made it impractical for us to drive all the way down there and then try and get back to our house for dinner & trick-or-treating, so we didn't go this year. (At left is a Halloween haunted house that M&M made at school.)

DH the plumber

This seems to be our year for water problems. On the Monday morning before Halloween I went downstairs to the basement to look in DH's office for something and noticed that the carpet was wet at the bottom of the stairs. The only place that the water could be coming from that I could think of was the storage room right next to the hallway where the water heater and furnace are. I quickly went in the room and noticed that there was water all around the water heater. I quickly called DH downstairs to take a look at it and we found that there was a pin-size hole in the pipe connector between the water intake and the water heater. Water was just shooting out to the side of the pipe. Luckily it was a small hole but we had no idea how long it had been leaking - probably for several days at least to get all of the floor wet and to leak under the wall to the carpet in the hallway. DH tried putting some tape over the hole and we mopped up what we could with towels. Then DH went to work & after I took a shower I turned the water off to the hot water heater so it would quit leaking. DH was able to stop at the store on his way home from work and bought some new connectors and a pipe wrench. I called my dad to see if he had any advice and he said that he would need to take a look at it first. So I invited my parents to come over and carve pumpkins with us and then DH & my dad could look at the water heater. As soon as DH got home from work he started on trying to fix the problem and my dad went down to offer any help he could. Luckily DH was able to replace both connectors without too much difficulty and now we have our hot water back! We are grateful that it ended up being a problem that wasn't too big and that DH was able to fix it himself. It took a couple of days to get the carpet dried out with a fan blowing on it but everything appears to be alright now. (Now he just needs to fix 2 of our toilets that have leaks...)