Numbers!

So if any of you has been around Will in the past month you would know that he is absolutely obsessed with numbers! It started right before his birthday because I would hold up two fingers and tell him over and over that he will be two soon. Soon he started saying two in his cute breathy little way and then he learned how to put up two fingers. Then I downloaded him a number learning app and then he learned nine pretty quickly and then it has just spiraled and become his favorite thing to do is recognize numbers. To keep him quiet in church we have to take a piece of paper and draw numbers for him. Instead of playing games on the iPad he goes straight to the calendar and goes through the numbers dozens of times. He has become a little obsessed. I am pretty impressed because he just turned two and he now can recognize 0-10 and say most of them. He knows what fingers to hold up for 1-5 and he can now draw 1 and 9. His nines are the cutest thing ever. I need to take a picture of that. This kid may have chosen to walk at 18 months and doesn't talk much, although he is really starting to take off with that, but he sure knows his numbers! I know he didn't get any math skills from me!

Journal of Funnies

Allison has said some funny things lately and I need to write them down before I forget.

The other day she was watching Spongebob and for some reason the sound cut out and after about a minute she said, "Oh, tartar sauce!"

Today Allison peeked out the back door and said, "Well, its partly cloudy." She has been learning about weather at preschool.

Lots of Changes Around Here

Well, it has been a whirlwind lately. We have been so blessed. November was a big month for us! On November 1st we closed on our first house! We are loving it so much. It is so great to have a home to call our own. It is a 4 bedroom, 2 bath house that was built in 1944. It has so much charm and character but also has lots of modern updates. Updates include bathrooms, kitchen, new hardwood floors, paint, carpet downstairs, electrical, etc. Our bedroom is on the main floor along with our spare room that we use as an office. There is one bathroom up and one bathroom in the basement. The kid's rooms are in the basement. We love the basement because the kids have a nice playroom down there and their own tv to watch shows and play, play, play! I love that I don't have to pick up toys in my living room about a thousand times a day. We have a big fenced back yard which is so great. The people that lived here before lived here for 16 years and made all the updates to the house. The husband had control over the yard and he liked the overgrown, overcrowded, wild look. NOT our style of landscaping at all. I like open, clean, simple, colorful, and functional. He would just let trees sprout up wherever they wanted to and let the grass grow so long in some spots, never cut down plants, or trimmed the trees, and stuck rocks ALL over the place in random places, and vines are growing everywhere. So needless to say we have a lot of work to do to get the yard how we want it. We will be doing most of it next Spring but have already done some clearing out and have probably cut down about 15 baby trees already. There were just way too many, it looked terrible. I have cut down a ton of plants and we raked leaves and bagged up about 7 big bags yesterday and still have some more to finish up before it snows. Anyway, we love our house and are really enjoying home ownership so far. This year for Thanksgiving we were blessed to be able to go out to Oregon to have Thanksgiving with Marcus's family. We had a blast! Marcus had a conference in Portland for the first few days for work so I stayed with his parents and then he joined us after he was done. We went to Autzen Stadium in Eugene to watch Oregon play Stanford. Marcus has been dreaming of watching a game their since he was a kid and he finally got to! It was so much fun! Two of Marcus's brothers, Justin and Neil came too along with my sister in law Daphne. We had a blast, even though Oregon lost! Bummer, we are convinced we are bad luck. We also went laser tagging all together, went to Wreck it Ralph with Justin and Daphne and their kids Levi and Hazel. I also went to Breaking Dawn Part 2 with my sister in law Haylie and my mother in law Tracy. Loved it, definitely my favorite of all the Twilight movies. We had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner and just had so much fun being out there for almost 2 weeks. Marcus got to play some flag football with his brothers on Thanksgiving which he really enjoyed. Allison and Will loved it out there and Allison loved to help Grandma make all the meals and ask a million questions. :) She also loved watching and singing to Disney songs with Aunt Haylie. Allison and Hazel had so much fun playing together, they are so cute. So fun to have cousins their age. We had a great trip and can't wait to go back out there, hopefully this summer. Our other big news is that we got a dog! We feel like a real family now that we have a house and a dog, haha. We adopted a 1-2 year old female Boxer mix from the local animal shelter. As soon as we met her at the shelter we knew she was the one. We just fell in love with her! We brought her home on Monday and she has been such a joy. She is such a great dog and is so well behaved. She loves us and loves the kids, she is so gentle with them. She is very obedient and is learning new things already. She hasn't had one accident in the house! We named her Ginger. Well, we have been doing well and are getting very excited for Christmas, I love this time of year.


From our Oregon Trip!

G

Our house!
                                     This is the front yard before we did anything, most of those trees are gone.

 Ginger:

The Goings On

Hello! Here is a quick little update on the Crook family. Marcus is busy with his job and is loving it! He is getting a lot of compliments from faculty, students, and staff throughout the college about how well he has been doing. Marcus is also enjoying football season and cheering on his 6-0 Oregon Ducks! I have been just busy with the kids and settling into life in Powell and trying to make friends. Marcus and I recently got called to be primary teachers in our ward. I have never been one so I was excited about it and I really enjoy it. I teach the CTR 4 class and Marcus teaches the Valiant 11 class.We have had fun going to the Powell High School football games as well because my cousin Brendon is on the team. They are 8-0 and have their first playoff game this week against Lander. It's fun that my aunt and uncle and cousins live here, we get together on Sundays a lot and have dinner and play games. Allison is absolutely LOVING her preschool! I knew she would and I'm so glad we put her in this year. She is in a class just with 3 other little girls who are all very mature and they get along great. She is learning letters better and their sounds, numbers, how to write her name, art, singing, etc. She just eats it all up. We had her first parent-teacher conferences last week and she is doing great academically and socially which is nice to hear. She has her first show and tell in a couple of weeks and we are going to bring in some sea shells she found in Mexico. She also has her Halloween party at school next Tuesday which will be lots of fun. We have a Halloween party at church on Halloween night. The kids are going to be Hansel and Gretel. A few years ago my parents hosted a German exchange student and we got really close to her and her parents sent over a dirndl which is a traditional German dress for Allison and it finally fits her! Will will be wearing little lederhosen and they are going to be so cute! Will just turned 18 months! Where does the time go? So he is now in nursery which is so great and he loves it! He is not a shy kid at all, in fact quite the opposite. He cracks us up, like at football games teenage girls sitting around us will want to hold him and he just soaks up all the attention with a little grin on his face. He especially loves it when they they have popcorn to share with him. :)  He is walking some of the time now but not all the time. He is still practicing and is getting better. He is such a fast little crawler he doesn't have the patience to move so slow. I hope everyone is having a great fall, we are! Stay tuned next week for a big exciting announcement!

 The kids playing at the park the other day

Allison and I's pumpkins we decorated with glow in the dark puff paint.

Update and {Will-16 months}

Things have been great in the Crook household. We went to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico about a month ago with my mom's family for my Grandparent's 50th Anniversary. We had such a blast and the kids loved playing in the pools all day. Some highlights were deep sea fishing, watching a wild sea turtle dig a nest and lay her eggs right on the beach by our hotel, dancing in the rain in town, and going to the zoo where we got to feed the animals and play with a monkey and tiger cubs!
Marcus really enjoys his job and we feel so blessed! I'm so happy that he loves what he is doing. Allison is completely potty trained (has been for about a month) and can I tell you, is so awesome. She started preschool a few weeks ago and absolutely loves it! She loves everything about it and is doing so well. Her teacher is great and the school is so cute. She loves playing with other kids so much.

                                              Our family at our hotel in Puerto Vallarta

                                     

                                        Allison and my cousin Scout at the zoo in Mexico

                                          Allison on her first day of preschool!

Will is 16 months, almost 17 in a few days. (CAN'T WAIT FOR NURSERY!)
Will is such a good boy, we just love him to death. He is getting really close to walking taking about 6 or 7 steps at a time now. He loves when we clap for him and say, "yay!" He gets the proudest, happiest little smile on his face. He loves food, his favorite snacks right now are bananas, avocado, WATERMELON (obsessed is more like it), tortillas, yogurt, and graham crackers. He will eat about anything and loves to steal food from Allison whenever the opportunity presents itself. It's so funny because he's so small but he eats all day long. :) His words right now are mama, dada, Aya!! is Allison and he loves to yell for her, dog, ball, hi, bye, and he always says a-da which kind of sounds like "right there" and he says it when he points at things. He loves to watch shows with Allison, loves baths, playing with toys especially throwing balls, climbing on everything, going to the store, practicing walking, dogs, eating, and loves when daddy comes home from work. He always yells, "hi!" as soon as he walks through the door and crawls right over to him. We love having this sweet little guy in our family!

More Funnies

Here are a couple things Allison said just today.

We were driving to the park this morning to watch my little cousin's football game and Allison was asking what all of our full names are. She knows hers but was asking Will's, mommy and daddy's, and then she asked what Grandpa's was (my dad) and I told her it was Scott Elvin Phister. She said, "Scott Allison's sister??!" It was hilarious!

Tonight we were playing a game in the living room and she was crawling away from me just goofing around and she kind of tripped and hit her chin on the floor. We were all laughing but I asked her if she was ok and where she hit and laughing she said, "I hit my beard!"

Journal of Funnies

Here are a few funnies as of late.

If you have been around Will lately you know he likes to scream, loudly and often. Well Allison doesn't care for it much and one day he was having a particularly loud day and Allison was just getting tired of it. She is normally pretty tolerant but after a really loud scream she yelled at Will, "Will!! Yell off!!" Haha it reminded me of Dwight saying, "shun on" and "shun off."

This is more something she did rather than said. I bought a little basil plant since I use basil quite a bit in cooking. So I planted it and put it on my desk by a window. Well, when we got home from Yellowstone I noticed it was completely dead and all moldy. Then I noticed some crumbs and chunks of moldy food. I think she was trying to "feed" the plant but ended up killing it. Woops! We will just sneak that one in the garbage when she isn't looking...

Allison has been struggling with consistency with potty training lately but she is so close. We have been motivating her by saying once she doesn't have accidents she will get a bike (she desperately wants one.) Tonight we were outside cleaning out our car and organizing the garage a bit as our activity for family night. I noticed Allison talking to some older neighborhood girls riding their bikes. They asked her what her name was and then Allison said, "I get a bike when I go pee pee and poo poo." The girls who were probably about 9 just looked at me kind of smiling and asked me how old she was. Hehe.