Sophie's Baptism

Here is cake #4. Sophie was baptised on Saturday, February 7, 2009. She was very pretty in her white dress, and it was a special day for all involved.

We are very proud of Sophie and her decision to be baptised.

My sister, Julie, and her son Evan made the trip to come and share the day with us. It was so much fun having them here with us. We will miss them, but look forward to seeing them this summer. It's so hard to get a good picture of a group of people. This was the best in spite of the look on Evan's face.
A family in our ward, the Silers, put together a video presentation about baptism that we showed between the baptism and the confirmation. It was really well done, and very neat. Here's the link: http://studentweb.engr.utexas.edu/cds847/SilerFamily/videos/BaptismVideo.htm

A week later we celebrated Sophie's 8th birthday. This was a big one. It turned into a week long celebration with eating out, her baptism etc. We had cake and ice cream with our neighbors, the Aherns. This is Jake and Lance with Mr. Nibbles (Brennan's hamster). The little boys loved the hamster, but were a little wary all the same.

This is Collin wondering how he really feels about a rodent crawling on him.

Sophie with her balloons, cake and presents, ready to celebrate. She received her very own set of scriptures, an MP3 player, several books, a little dress, from her family, and a journal, shirt, and sweater from the Aherns.

She had a good birthday, but was disappointed that she didn't get any toys. Oops! She received money from grandparents, so we thought that she could buy her own. Not good enough. We'll remember for next year.

Here's cake 3 within a week.

We celebrated Lance's birthday on January 23rd. He doesn't want anyone to make a big deal out of his birthday, so I respect that, and never plan anything big. We usually end up going to a movie or out to dinner, or just hang out with the kids. He was in for a surprise this year. When he got to work the lights were all off, and he was welcomed by being covered in "Silly String". At lunchtime his co-workers insisted that he go to lunch with them, and that he would ride with them too. As they drove past his car in the parking lot, he discovered that they had decorated his car. They spent the day telling all of his patients that it was his birthday. Not his style, but he was a good sport. Of course they brought a cake!

I had baked a cake at home, so that made two.

We celebrated quietly at home after his fun day at work.

Finally, a chance to post. We've been busy the past few weeks with just life in general. Brennan worked hard on his science project. He chose to study which animal had the grossest mouth; humans, dogs or cats. Cats had the stinkiest petri dishes, but we decided that we're all pretty nasty. Stripy didn't want to be swabbed.

Daisy didn't think that it was too much fun either. Fortunately she was a pretty good sport.

Here is his finished display. Notice the empty spaces. Somehow a couple of important pages fell off during transport from his classroom to the gym. His conclusion was one of the missing pages. His teacher still gave him an "A" on the project, but he wasn't judged as high as he would have been had the pages been there. Someone else set it up for him, so he didn't know that anything was wrong until after the judging had taken place. Bummer!

More Laundry

After the mouse incident on Monday, and the mounds of laundry that I washed I received another fun surprise yesterday. I got a call from Sophie's friend's mother letting me know that her daughter has lice. The school nurse is guessing that she's had them for about 4 weeks! We've had a lot of contact with this child over the passed 4 weeks. Yikes! I had just finished shampooing the carpets when she called and was ready to sit and read my book for an hour or so. Instead I spent the rest of the day doing more laundry, and vacuuming every crack and crevice of the upstairs. Fortuantely, we have yet to find a single louse on anyone's head. I'm sure I'll keep checking for the next week at least. Never a dull moment.

Rare Moment

This doesn't happen very often at our house, so I thought that I better document it. Generally the kids space themselves evenly across the living room. No one shares a piece of furniture ever. So what if they're each playing their own game. At least they aren't fighting.

Mouse in the House

This is what my closet looked like yesterday morning. It was a mandatory cleaning due to an unwanted guest. The kids were playing in my closet and Brennan made a discovery.

Yes, we had a mouse. After cleaning all of the top shelves on Lance's side of the closet, and finding what I thought to be the mouse's nest, I thought my job was done. I was wrong. For some reason, the mouse was enamoured with one of my sweaters. This is the remnants of what it removed from the main body of the sweater.

This is the fabulous new design that that sweet little creature left for me.

I was thrilled. It also chose to chew a few holes in the beautiful quilt that Lance's great grandmother made for him. I feel sick about it.

The best part of the story is that while I was on the phone with my sister-in-law, Jodie, telling her all about the three hours of closet cleaning that I had done, and the mountains of laundry I was in the midst of, I picked up a blanket to put it in the washer, and out ran the mouse. It frightened me a-so that I hung up on Jodie. Fortunately, Daisy is an excellent mouser. She chased it into the bathroom where I was able to trap it under an empty coolwhip bowl. Sophie's friend, Kelli, was there, and thought that the whole ordeal was so exciting and fun that I should release the mouse and chase it some more. I didn't like that idea, so I let it go outside. My guess is that it's missing the warm home that it thought it had. We're wondering what it was eating? Sweater? Blanket? Plastic bags? Hmmm.