Goodbye

Cilla left our house today. The boys were sad to see her go, our house is a lot calmer without them always having her to play with. Although, Ben is looking forward to sleeping in a little longer in the morning because she won't be at the foot of his bed waiting for him to play with her. It was good to have her and good experience to have a "trial run".

Opposite day

Josh declared yesterday as opposite day, so after church he spent the evening wearing his shirt on his bottom and his pants on his head. He is such a nut.
Somehow the pants came off and ended up on my head. Not sure how that happened, but I taught the boys how to walk like an egyptian. :-)

I was sustained as the new young women's president in our ward yesterday. I'm really excited about this new adventure! Send me any ideas that you have, I could really use the help!

Great afternoon

Along with everything else breaking in our house, our vacum also broke this week. We have one of those vacums that are suppose to last you for the rest of your life so when a little part comes off like on ours it's worth just having it fixed.

One of the repair places was in Woburn, so we decided to make a day of it and go visit our good friends the LaPierres while the vacum was being fixed. It was such a great afternoon! It's just like going home to visit the grandparents when we go to there house. We enjoyed a great lunch (very yummy!) and spent the afternoon playing games out on the sun porch. We laughed a ton and just really enjoyed spending the time together, it was really nice.

Thanks Lap's for such a nice afternoon. Can't wait till we see you in March!

More house fun

We just can't seem to have enough fun with things breaking in our house this week (Bob we miss you, Mike needs your help!) The newest adventure happened Thursday. I was in my shower while Luke was in the boys shower. All of a sudden I could hear them screaming so I get out of the shower and go to check on them. The boys are so stressed out they can barely muster out the words that water is coming from the ceiling. I go downstairs to see water pouring out of 4 lights in our kitchen and eating area. "Oh great" I thought. I ordered the boys to get some buckets while I ran upstairs to get dressed, come back downstairs to start getting towels on the floor to try to collect some of the water when I still hear water running. Luke had tried to shut the water off in the shower but couldn't so I shut it off and after awhile the water stopped streaming throught the lights. Mike came home and he figured out that the pipe going to the shower head broke which is why water was going everywhere. Mike fixed the part and now our ceiling has nice lovely yellow spots all over it. Looks like I have a painting job in my future. Thankfully, the damage was minimal and all will be fine. It just caused A LOT of drama for one morning.

Bathing

Mike and the boys gave the dog a bath this week. The boys loved it, I'm sure the dog did too, she only tried to escape once. :-) I'm just glad she smells better!

Funny for the day

The last couple of nights at dinner Ben has been asking us some "table talk" questions from the Highlights magazine that we get each month. One of the questions that was ask was name something rough and name something soft.

Luke out of the blue says, "that pavement that I hit today was pretty rough"

We all had a good laugh

Valentines Day

Our Valentine's has been so eventful! Here's the scoop; While I was taking Amelia to the airport when she was visiting this past Decemer, I managed to get a speeding ticket. Technically I was speeding but not intentionally. As you drive into the tunnels in Boston the speed limit goes down and I was more focused on the exits getting her to the airport then the speed limit. Mike and Amelia talked me into contesting the ticket, so I appealed and my court date ended up being yesterday. Mike took the day off and the two of us ventured into Boston. I made my court appearance and believe it or not the judge dropped my ticket completely!!!!! That was amazing, I was just hoping they would maybe reduce the $220 ticket price but never thought they would drop it. I am still in shock.

Anyway, Mike and I decided to make a day of it and celebrate Valentines a day early. We first went to Haymarket. Haymarket is like a big farmers market, merchants sell the surplus fruits and veggies from the ships that bring in the food. You can get a lot for a little. The market is only open on Friday and Saturday so it worked out perfect that we were going to be there on a Friday, I've been wanting to got to Haymarket for a long time.

We stocked up! It has tasted SO GOOD to have such a variety of fruits and veggies in the middle of winter. YUMMMM! I can't wait to go again. After our shopping, Mike and I had a delicious lunch in the North End (Boston's Little Italy). You can't go wrong in the North End for fabulous Italian food and of course topped it off with a pastry at Mike's Pastry. It was so nice to just enjoy the day together, (especially starting the day off as good as we did!) We haven't been on a date forever. It's fun to be able to walk down the street and hold his hand, to be able to say what we want to say and to just focus on us. Thanks Mike for such a nice day, I still love spending my time with you!

I'm so glad we celebrated Valentine's yesterday, because this has been quite the day. Cilla (the dog) woke us up at 6:00am this morning (what's up with that?). Mike decided to treat us with his special coffee cake for breakfast, he got it made but the oven would not preheat. PROBLEM. So he spent the morning finding out what was the matter - I thought for sure that my Valentine gift was going to be a a new stove, but my amazing husband can fix just about anything which now includes stoves. After a couple of new parts, it's working just as good as new. YEA! After that we managed to catch a mouse in the basement, GROSS! After a quick dog walk with the boys, the garbage disposal managed to show it's crack through it's steady leak under the sink. Just when I was getting over not getting a stove for Vday, lucky me I got a dispoal instead! So in between our VERY GOOD Valentines day dinner, Mike managed to go and buy a new disposal and is still installing it as I write. Now if that's not romance I don't know what is! :-)

Our Valentines dinner was really good. We ate by candle light and had shrimp linguini, with heart shape breadsticks, roasted asparagus and a delicious salad full of fresh veggies (along with the asparagus) from haymarket. We finshed the evening off with molten lava cake topped with whip cream. Rich but yumm!!!
We also shared things that we like about each other. I love doing that. It's good for the boys to know why they are so important in our family.

I hope you all had a wonderful day!

Look who's come to visit

Some friends of ours are out of town so we are dog sitting their dog. Her name is Priscilla but she is called cilla for short. We have her for the next 10 days, I figure this is a good trial run to see if we really even want a dog, of course the boys do, but do all of us? So far it's going really well. This dog is near perfect, very little shedding, no barking, and very friendly. My only problem with her is if you let her outside without her leash she will take off running. That's no fun. But she is really a good dog, that says a lot coming from someone who really isn't a dog/pet fan. The boys are having a ball, it's been fun to watch them play with her.

A nice day off

Yes, I'm behind again, I don't have that much to update but I did want to put some pictures on here from last weekend. It was one of those nice weekends where not a lot happened. It seemed that the boys spent a lot of time making and designing. Josh made this cute robot from the gift he got from Grandpa Wayne for Christmas. The nose lights up and it moves by remote control. It is so cute I love it.

Luke is taking an art class (thanks Garbers and Grandpa Wayne for the great Christmas gift), last week he made sculptures out of clay. He was so proud of his solider and castle and his coins that he made out of money. He has really enjoyed making all sorts of different things.


They also had fun making tents all over our house. We have two in the basement and as you can see, they made some in their room. They had so much fun playing in them most of the day and sleeping in them that night. It was a great day!

Ben's at it again

At least this time it's with his Dad.

I'm not exactly sure why the wooden spoons seem to be the spark that starts the wooden spoon and nerf gun wars. But it is, I guess I should thank Amelia for providing us with 4 wooden spoons (thankfully not 5 that way I have no obligation) enough for all of them to have their fair share of fun. Really, I think the sun needs to shine and it needs to warm up to more then 25 degrees so they can RUN outside and get their energy out. Since that seems to be impossible these days, I guess we'll stick with our wooden spoons and nerf guns with some air hockey on the side.

You know you have a family of boys when . .

. . . . within the first hour of coming home from church


- an old walkman had been dissected - all of the wires and cool little parts are of great interest to them these days
-Ben threatens to puke, if I EVER keep him that late (20 minutes) after church on fast sunday ever again.
- Josh wants to know what a melted Kit Kat tastes like, so while I was upstairs changing my clothes, which means nobody was around to ask for help, he puts the kit kat in a bowl then in the microwave for more then 2:00 minutes. The glass bowl explodes in the microwave and we now have blackened Kit Kat.
- After the trama of the microwave they then find an old cell phone to take apart. It took 15 minutes to get all of the little gadget parts off the table just so we could eat.

I love my house of boys!

Snowboarding with my Dad

Yesterday, my dad and I, my friend and his dad went snowboarding. We went off jumps and fell out of the ski lift (not really). One of the jumps was big and some kids went high off of the jump I just went over the jump. Dad went off of the big jump.

Dad is teaching me how to balance on my heels. Once you learn to balance on your toes and your heels, you learn to curve back and forth, that helps you have better control of your speed.

Dad brought the thermos and filled it with hot chocolate. It was GOOD!

I had a fun day.

- Ben