Big things and little things

This whole "catch up on 5 months of blogging in a few weeks" is obviously going awesome.  Not.  But it is kind of fun to be going through a lot of memories at the same time.  And I'm realizing more and more that life is pretty awesome.  The day-in and day-out aren't necessarily super exciting.  But I love documenting all the little things that are mixed in with the big events, because I know it's the little things I'm going to forget the soonest.  

Field day this year had to be rescheduled multiple times.  The rain just wouldn't let up!  However, like a flipped switch, the rain finally stopped and it got super hot outside.  We've actually had very little rain all summer.    The kids finally got to have field day and they were super excited.  Colton was a little bit disappointed that he didn't get to participate.  But at one of the games they let him shoot the kids with a water gun and that made him incredibly happy!

They always rent super-cool bounce houses at field day.  Jaxon and I had fun while I timed him running through this bounce house.  

They weren't allowed to do water games at field day last year because we were in a drought.  Obviously, that wasn't the case this year.  The kids LOVED get soaked!  The older grades do their field day in the afternoon and, I've been told, they get to do cooler games than they younger grades.  

Random little thing: my kids do stuff like this all the time.  I honestly feel sometimes like I'm living my life in an obstacle course.  

I hit my 20 week mark with baby girl.  Here's a comparison of the last 3 kids.  Baby girl, Hudson, Colton.  I was huge with Colton.  I don't have pics from Madi and Jaxon. 

Jason's birthday was during the last week of school.  His teacher planned a fun day every day to kill the time.  His birthday happened to be on art day, which, of course, thrilled him to death!  He brought the big art kit he got from grandma and grandpa to school for the day!

And since not a lot happens the last week of school, except art day, we pulled Jaxon and Madison out of school at lunchtime on Jaxon's birthday so that we could go downtown and meet dad for lunch!  

We had lunch at the food trucks and then played in the splash park at Klyde Warren park!

On the last day of school the kids have parties and awards ceremonies.  Jaxon got the inventor award.  And his class described him as being "loud and chatty" along with a couple of other things.  These are very true statements about Mr. Jaxon.  He's got a lot to say and he wants to make sure everyone hears all his great ideas!  He is also an awesome inventor!

Here's Jaxon at his end of school party!

And a random pic of Hudson that same day throwing a tantrum about not getting fruit snacks.  It didn't work. 

Here's Madison at her awards ceremony.  They do all the awards at different times during the day, which is good for making sure you can see all your kids, but annoying when you have to go back and forth to the school all day long.  Madison got the Snickers award for her awesome sense of humor.  

And here she is with her teacher Mr. Thornburg.  Somehow, over the last 4 years Madison has scared away 3 out of 4 of her teachers.  Only her kindergarten teacher stayed at the same school after Madi had her.  All her other teachers have left after having Madison, which makes me kind of sad because I always enjoyed going back to visit my old teachers.  

Madi stayed at school the rest of the day after her party, but Jaxon came home with me and we went  with Colton to see the Lego exhibit at the mall.  They had a bunch of famous American buildings built out of Legos!  The boys thought it was really cool.

Another little thing: giving rolley polley bugs rides in the back of Hot Wheels cars during swim meets.  

Since we were stuck in Utah on mother's day I finally got my breakfast in bed the second week of June, we just had too much going on most of May!  I love my cute kids!

Madison and I went to visit my friend Courtney and her new baby Kaylee.  Such a pretty baby!  And Madison was in heaven!  She's going to be such a good big sister to her little sister!

Then school was out and it was summer.  I had two goals this summer: spend lots of time reading and teach the kids some new chores.  We were very consistent most of the summer reading 30 minutes every day.  

And the kids did learn some new chores.  This one is my favorite.  For some reason I hate emptying the dishwasher, but now Madison and Jaxon both do it and it's pretty awesome.  

We got to go to a lot of Chris's softball games this summer, which is always fun.  He's been playing in the same softball league for about 3.5 years now!

I had my 20 week ultrasound of baby girl.  She looks nice and healthy!

I took the boys to the park a couple of times while Madison and Jaxon had swim practice.  This is one of our favorite parks.  It's right near swim team.  It's also where Madison practices cheer in the fall.  We love it because it's nice and shady and it has a merry-go-round.  

It's a little bit hard to see in this picture, but Colton has crazy reactions to bug bites on his head.  If you look right in the middle of his forehead, near his hairline, you can see the huge bug bite that's about 2 inches in diameter.  They go down after 24 hours, but any time he gets bitten on his head he has this reaction!

Jaxon spent his first week of summer vacation as an entrepreneur.  He had this great idea that he was going to make comic books and sell them.  He spent days drawing his comic book.  Then I helped him type out the words and glue them in (so it would be legible).  Then we made copies of all the pages so that he had 10 books to sell.  He insisted that we sell them in front of our house.   I texted a few neighbors and friends who live close-by so that they could stop by if they were home.  

Here's his sign. 

Here's his comic.  

He actually made about $10 and he was a very happy guy!  Thankfully, after one book he got distracted by other things.  Not that I want to discourage creativity, but it was kind of a lot of work to get that thing printed!

Memorial Day and the end of May

Last summer (2014) we had big plans to go to Broken Bow Oklahoma with our friends, the Kormylos, for a fun, long weekend.   Well the day before we were supposed to leave Graham was run over by a car, so obviously that trip didn't work out.   We had already paid for the cabin, but thankfully the owner gave us a credit to be used within a year due to our very extenuating circumstances!  We were finally able to take our much anticipated trip over Memorial Day.  We had a blast.  The only downside was the rain (yes, more rain) and the flooding it caused, which meant we couldn't rent a boat and go skiing like we had hoped.  We were still able to have a lot of fun, though!

The first night we got there the kids had fun playing in the hot tub.  

We took a fun train ride through the park.

We took the kids paddle boating.  Paddle boating is not for the faint of heart (or weak of leg), especially when there are kids involved.  Because it pretty much becomes one person paddling around all the kids.  Madison and Brode tried their own.   I think they lasted about 10 minutes.

Hudson, of course, didn't love staying put on the boat so Chris had to get creative.  

Madi really wanted to paddle over to some cliffs and climb up them.  So I paddled her over there.  Then she fell in the water trying to get back in the boat, of course.

Hudson got sick of his lifejacket...don't worry we had Madison hold on to his hood to keep him safe, since we are such great parents (not).  

We played some wiffle ball, Wise family won, just sayin'!

We roasted some s'mores. 

Happy little camper guy!

And we played some games!  Obviously this game of Risk took hours.  

We went out to eat one morning at a local restaurant, which was fun and very authentic.  Broken Bow is a very small town, so the restaurant had that small town feel.  While we were at breakfast they had to close down the restaurant because the water in the dam was too high and they had to open the spillway.  Water from the spillway flooded the water purification plant, which meant the water to the restaurant was shut off.   Too much water to purify water I guess...

We took the kids to the dam to see the open spillway.  This was the lake side.  So serene and beautiful.  

This is the other side of that bridge above.  It was pretty cool to see.  

That's a lot of dam water.

We took the kids to play putt putt.  Playing putt putt with kids should be a 9 hole game.   They all did great for the first half, then things deteriorated very quickly.  

Madison found a new favorite game.  She has fallen in love with Ticket to Ride!  Kormylos left a night before us, so Chris and I stayed up playing with Madison!

A little happy camper with his cookie.  

Madison found a tree that she thought was super cool, so she wanted me to take a picture of it.

This is is the Red River on our way home.  The Red River is normally more of a red stream.  It was amazing to see it so high!

Then we got home and Colton finished speech for the year.  His speech improved significantly during his first year.  He still has quite a few years to go, I'm sure, but I'm glad that it's improving and that people can understand him so much better now!

Colton also likes taking selfies on my phone, which usually are blurry pictures of nothing, but sometimes I find these cute gems and it makes me happy.  

The only downside to our trip to Broken Bow was that the Kormylos had hand foot and mouth disease.  They told use before we went, but Colton had already had it and Madi and Jaxon had been exposed, but never had symptoms, so I was hoping that Hudson was the only one who wasn't immune.  I was right.  Not that I wanted Hudson to get it, but I'm really glad all 4 of them didn't get it.  This picture doesn't do it justice.  He had little blisters all over his feet.  He couldn't wear shoes for almost a week.  Eventually a few of his toe nails partially fell off.  It was sad, but other than being uncomfortable on his feet, he didn't get too terribly sick.  And now I know all 4 kids are immune!

Here are the bottoms of his poor swollen feet.  Poor guy.  All that red area are sores and blisters.  

Not that any of this prevented him from making gigantic messes.  This was during his water spilling phase.  Thankfully that seems to have let up (although it lasted a couple more months).  Any time someone left a cup of water on the table he spilled it out and splashed in it.  

And just to add to the fun, Hudson ended up with a bloody nose and lip one day.  This poor kid.  It's always something. 

The kids had their first swim meet.  All the kids who won their heat got a lei.  Jaxon was very determined to get one and proud of himself when he did!

Chris built a bike rack in the garage.  The amount of bikes, scooters, cozy coupe, roller skates, strollers, plasma car, tricycle etc. that are in our garage is borderline ridiculous.  But the kids use it all, so we can't really get rid of any of it.  We've just had to find a way to organize it better. 

My parents and uncle Garrett came for a quick weekend to exchange trucks (long story).  Garrett decided to do a skittles taste test with the kids.  I think the new orchard skittles won.  

We celebrated Garrett and Jaxon's birthdays.  Garrett spent a while with that crazy beard.  He grew it out until scout camp and then finally trimmed it!  

Hudson started nursery!  Yay!  He cried for a little bit and then he was fine.  The hard part was that I was nursery leader, so I couldn't help in his classroom.  If he saw me he would cry again, otherwise he was happy.  

The same day Hudson started nursery Colton had an incident in his primary class.  He had a penny in his pocket.  For some reason the penny ended up in his mouth.  Somehow he ended up upside down in class with the penny in his mouth and started choking on it.  The poor teacher had to do the heimlich maneuver on him.  By the time they brought him to me he was fine, but very upset because he didn't have his penny.  We searched his poop for three days, no penny.  He was really afraid it would hurt when he pooped it out, so I spent three days sitting next to him while he pooped.    I finally took him to the doctor just to see if it was stuck somewhere.  They did x-rays and there was no penny.   All that fuss and the penny probably came out in the first 24 hours.  So ridiculous!  But we are glad he's ok!