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I made his cake the day before and he was very pleased with it.  He kept trying to taste it.  He did succeed in sampling some of the frosting in one spot on the front before I pushed the cake all the way back.  He was so upset when he couldn’t reach it, that I had to hide it in the guest room until he forgot about it.

Since he hates getting dressed so much, as a birthday treat I let him wear the clothes he fell asleep in the night before.  He started his day with one of his favorite activities, playing with cars on the floor.

I made Cinnamon Crumb cake for his birthday breakfast.  He loved it.

Everyone loves to make the birthday kid happy.  Here is Charlotte making him laugh:

Isaac made Thomas a birthday train track to play with before going to bed the night before:

His birthday happened to fall on a day we watch Ian.  Ian is also 2 and gets along really well with Thomas.  We took Ian with us to Walmart to buy birthday balloons and diapers.  As a special birthday treat, I bought the kids a cup of popcorn chicken and popcorn shrimp to eat as we shopped.  Thomas loved the shrimp the most.  I didn’t bring my camera with us to the store.

Thomas played with cars most of the day and was as happy as can be.

Zach gave Thomas a plane that he had purchased in Seattle on a work trip the day before:

Thomas loved it:

He even pretended to feed the plane Smarties:

Here’s the full view of Thomas’s outfit for the day.  He seems to like to have either just one sock or just one shoe on:

We played one of his favorite games, where I pretend to be a slide.  I only got one picture before his foot pushed my camera into my face and I decided that not all memories can be captured:

He played with trains some more:

Nicole made Thomas a special train out of medium sized Legos (Duplos):

After school, Isaac redesigned the train tracks for Thomas:

We went to a McDonalds with a Play Place for his birthday dinner.  Then we had presents:

Last was birthday cake:

He fell to sleep pretty soon after cake.

Since before he was born, we decided that Thomas might be our last.  I’ve had that thought in my mind often over the last two years.  Now I know why the baby sometimes gets spoiled.  Instead of putting him back down to do chores, I’d often cuddle with him a little longer and tell myself to just enjoy my baby because this might be the last time.  Lucky for me Thomas loves to hug his mommy so I get all the baby cuddles I want.  Sometimes more than I want.  I think if Thomas had his way, he’d spend all of the first and last hour of the day in my arms.  Unfortunately with 5 kids, my mornings are way to busy to just hold a baby for an hour so he regularly spends the morning crying to be held each time I put him down.

He loves to jump or run into my arms.  He’ll get back and run straight into my arms without slowing at all so that his little body crashes into me.  He also loves to stand on a table (like a coffee table) and fall forward into my arms.

Thomas LOVES cars.  Even that statement seems like an understatement.  He spends most of everyday playing with cars.  Driving them along the window sill, across the couch or along the floor.  He lays on the floor and watches the wheels or lays his head on the window sill to watch the wheels go by.  On our last wagon ride he spent the entire time leaning out of the wagon to see the wheels.  Although he can say the word car, he often calls cars “bye bye.”

His favorite movie is Cars.  He even gets excited to see pictures of Lightning McQueen or Mater or read books about them.

Often when he sees my camera he says “cheese” and gives me a big smile.  If he sees me taking a picture of one of his siblings, he’ll often run over and photo bomb my picture.

If he hears a group of people laughing, he’ll join in with his own really fake sounding laugh.  When we visited his cousins in Texas, he heard them laugh at a series of commercials and would join in.  Even after we came home, he’d laugh his fake laugh when he heard the theme music for those commercials.

He loves his siblings, especially Ila and Isaac.  The other night as I was putting him to bed he kept saying “I want Ila.”

His most repeated phrase is “I don’t want to.”

He loves to read books.

He loves to run around and to push around anything with wheels.

He likes going on walks and will go out of his way to step on the snow instead of the clean sidewalk.

He is very good at pouting.  He puts his head down and buries his face in his hands.

He loves to say goodbye to people and cars and he has a great wave.

He loves to blow bubbles in his milk.

He loves to stand up in his seat and hates to be buckled.

Lately he hates clothes and fights me every time I get him dressed.  He doesn’t want to wear a shirt or pants and has slept in just a diaper the last two nights.  He doesn’t even like covers and pushes them off every time I try to put them on.  He refuses to wear a coat or socks.  The only shoes I can get him to wear are his Crocs, but sometimes he even refuses them.  Often after I’ve forced him to get dressed, he maneuvers one of his arms out of the sleeve and puts it through the neck of his shirt. I’ll fix it and he’ll put his arm back out in his own form of rebellion against clothes.

He can sing “Once upon a dream” from Sleeping Beauty and “I am a Child of God.”  He will either grab my hand or Ila’s hand and say “I know you” which means he wants us to sing and dance with him.

Charlotte was baptized on January 20th.  Heidi made her a beautiful dress:

Grandma Bunny and Grandpa Bird came from Ohio.  Bethani and Dan came from California.

She was so excited on her special day that she got up at 4:45!  I made her pancakes for breakfast and Grandpa Bird bought whipped cream and strawberries to go with them:

We borrowed a jumpsuit from the stake for her to be baptized in:

The meeting and the ordinance were beautiful and we had a big group of family and friends there for her special day:

After her baptism, we invited everyone back to our house for soup, rolls and dessert.  Dan took some great pictures of everyone for me.  Here are some of them:

After everyone left, we took a break and watched a movie (Frozen).  In the evening, we gathered the family so that Charlotte could open some gifts.  She received a tithing bank and some candy from our neighbor (Sister Prestwich) and scriptures from her grandparents.

She also received a white towel with a CTR symbol on it and the year 2014 and a wooden #8 from the primary.

Charlotte’s birthday started off with the Ward Breakfast.  I didn’t bring my camera, but they had a set-up where you could dress up as the Nativity and have your picture taken, so I have a few pictures from that:

Charlotte invited friends over for a baking party.  As her friends were arriving we gave them paper hats and aprons and had them pick a mini cake to start decorating:

I had imagined them taking their time to make patterns with the candies and sprinkles, but they went overboard with sprinkles before I had a chance to encourage them to be neat and creative:

Once everyone was here, we started cooking.  First we made “chicken bobs” only instead of chicken we used pork, so I guess they were pork bobs.  The kids had fun crushing some chips for the outside and then rolling them into balls and covering them with crushed chips:

We made big soft pretzels and a gingerbread man who disappeared and was found at the end of a scavenger hunt.  We also chopped berries for ice cream which didn’t set up quite right till after the party:

At some point we took a break for presents :

After her friends went home we got dinner at Panda Express and then had presents and cake with family:

She was very pleased with her day and reported that it was her best birthday yet!

 

 

Charlotte is so different than me in personality that I sometimes wonder how I became her mom.  She has a sense of self-confidence that astounds me.  She loves everything about herself.  She’ll admire herself in the mirror and tell me that she likes how she looks.

She is proud of her handwriting and likes to tell people about her nice handwriting.  On one of her homework assignments she had to answer a question about what she thought she’d be famous for and her answer was:  “My handwriting.”

She has decided that her favorite color is now turquoise.  She still likes pink, but turquoise is her favorite.  She has also decided that she’d rather wear skirts than jeans and she keeps borrowing skirts from her little sister.  Unfortunately they don’t fit her right so I’m hoping to take her out shopping this week to find some skirts and causal dresses.

She loves making art, but usually makes a huge mess whenever she creates something.  She was lucky enough to get an art lesson from her Aunt Bethani last month.

She makes friends easily, but is also perfectly content to swing by herself all through recess.  She has several friends at school and they love to laugh and be silly together.

She is learning to play piano and doing quite well.

She likes My Little Pony and Spiderman.

She loves to eat apples and grapefruit and chocolate.

She likes to match her sisters.  Often she’ll pull matching pairs of underwear out of her drawer and then go find Nicole and talk her into changing her underwear to match.  She often encourages Nicole to dress like her.

She recently told me her two favorite things are “side galloping” and climbing up mountains of snow.

Charlotte likes to play with Nicole.  Charlotte sets up the scenario and tells Nicole what her role should be.  As long as Charlotte is directing things, she happy.  She does allow Nicole to insert some of her own ideas, but mostly Nicole is happy to follow and Charlotte is happy to lead.  Occasionally they’ll get into a fight if Nicole doesn’t want to cooperate with Charlotte’s ideas.

She loves school and regularly argues with Isaac about who has the best teacher.

She taught herself how to ride a bike this year and it has become one of her favorite activities.  She often insists on riding her bike even when we’re only going across the street.

She played soccer this year and really enjoyed it.  She’d run back and forth across the field and when all the other girls would ask to be subbed out for a break, she’d ask to stay in.  Every time she scored, she’d stick her nose up in the air and wink and cheer.

I like to do a little personality sketch of each of my kids around their birthdays, only I got stuck trying to write about Ila as a 4 year old and it’s put me terribly far behind on my blogging.  Here is what I wrote about her last year. I don’t know why, but I have had trouble defining who she is right now.  I’ve decided that the only thing to do about it is to just start writing and hopefully by the end I’ll be happy with what I’ve written.

She’s small. It’s the first thing people notice about her. She was diagnosed over the past year with a growth hormone deficiency. They took an X-ray of her hand and determined that her bone age was about a year behind.  They took 7 vials of blood and found that the amount of growth hormone in her blood was abnormally low. She spent a day in the hospital having some tests done to see if they could stimulate production of growth hormone and she had an MRI.  The MRI showed an abnormally small pituitary gland. The doctor said that she has “pituitary dwarfism” which is just a scary way of saying she just isn’t making enough growth hormone. Her doctor recommended growth hormone injections. She started the injections in December. She was very nervous about them at first and cried and cried when she had her first shot. Now, she has gotten used to them and almost likes having them done. After the first prescription, we  didn’t reorder in time and she had about a week with no injections.  The day her new shot pen arrived she made up a song about how she loves being brave, she picked out her band-aide hours ahead of time and spent most of the day talking about getting a shot.  She had even taken up sleeping with the empty shot pen (without a sharp on it of course).  I think in some strange way it makes her feel special or big to get shots.

Ila is very attached to her mother and would almost always choose a boring time with mom over the offer of going somewhere fun with someone else. She’d cry every time I took her over to her Grandma Cochran’s house to be babysat. About a week and a half before her birthday she announced that she’d love Grandma when she was 4. She even claimed that when she was 4 she wouldn’t cry anymore when I dropped her off. We reminded her of her promise periodically by saying things like “in one more week you’ll be 4 and you’ll love Grandma.” When her birthday came, she was true to her word.  On her birthday she announced that she now loves Grandma. Instead of crying when I drop her off, she regularly wants to go over to Grandma’s house early. Over Christmas break she’d sometimes ask if she could go to Grandma’s house and then spend most of the day there and still be sad that she had to come home. She loves to look out the window and see whose home and will excitedly jump up and down if she sees all 4 cars home. I love seeing her become attached to her grandparents.

She has started commenting on a regular basis that she has “no polish on” which is her way of asking if she can put on my make-up.  She only puts on blush which she calls “polish” and foundation powder which she calls “skin.”  Then she admires her face in the mirror.  She likes to make silly faces at herself in the mirror.

She has a sweet infections laugh.  I love it.  When she’s happy she has a hop in her step and she says “boing” as she hops.

She loves to “crunch” in the snow.  She goes out of her way as we walk to step in the crunchy snow.

She loves the book “Dinosaurs Love Underpants.”  She asks for it every night because “it’s such a good book” and “it’s soo funny!”  She often picks one book and has me read it to her every night until she has it memorized.  She memorized a book about making a street and could recite it without even opening the book.

Ila is a super picky eater.  She’s the pickiest eater I’ve ever met.  She has an extremely small menu of foods that she’ll eat.  She’s never had a bite of pizza.  Her only experience with cheese is that she once licked a cheeto.  She didn’t even eat the cheeto or lick all the cheese off, she licked it once on one side.  She eats one kind of chips (Lays regular potato chips) she won’t even try any other kind.  Awhile ago they changed the bag.  It was such a subtle change that I hadn’t even noticed it, but Ila refused to eat them.  It took me a week to convince her that they were the same chips.  Here is a picture of the old bag and new bag next to each other:

She likes to draw pictures and deliver them to her friends in the neighborhood.  Sometimes I would bribe her to clean up a mess by promising her that we could deliver a picture after she cleaned it up.  One time a friend gave her a wadded up store ad in exchange.  Ila carried that crumpled up paper around for a full day, periodically straightening it out and asking me about the words and pictures on it.

She loves orange and princesses and Elephants.  Her favorite clothes are “easy pants” and her “American clothes” (a red, white, and blue skirt and shirt combination).

So I thought maybe my brother wouldn’t appreciate a whole bunch of pictures on facebook announcing how awesomely generous he was to our family for Christmas this year, so I decided to be slightly more subtle and share the pictures here on my blog because some how I’ve decided that the best way to show someone how much everyone enjoyed their gifts is with pictures:  

It’s a little hard to see, but Thomas has a pleased little smile on his face:

Thomas immediately insisted on reading his Cars book.

Zach read the book three or four times, but that wasn’t enough for Thomas.  In this picture you can see Thomas using his whole body trying to force Zach to keep holding him on his lap:

Thanks Uncle Lee!!

My wife recently told me about an exchange she had with her sister. The story goes that once when my mother-in-law visited my family, I greeted her with the unpleasant rejoinder to not “crap up my fridge”. Now, there’s some missing background. I like a fridge to be arranged pretty openly, so it’s easy to get access to what I need quickly. My in-laws like to make efficient use of the fridge, and they’ll fill it up. When they visit, they like to buy groceries to help out with meals, basically trying to be good guests. But that means a fridge collision! My fridge sometimes becomes more crowded than I like when company visits.

Now, in honor of that moment, my wife’s sister ensures that there’s a space ready in their fridge to “crap up” if needed. It’s a bit of a jab at me, and a bit of a way to make my mother-in-law feel more welcome there.

But I don’t remember that original exchange. I’m not saying it didn’t happen; when I’m feeling stressed and cranky, I might say something unkind. I think I have a reputation as an ogre among my wife’s family, and it’s not for no reason. But I was hurt to hear that this had become something of a legend and a tradition to members of my wife’s family. I don’t remember the original remark, if I meant it as a joke, or if I didn’t mean for my mother-in-law to hear, or even if I said it at all. I don’t remember my mood or what my work day had been like or if the children were acting up. And it was all these self-justifications that got me thinking about how we love our neighbors.

First, I thought that I’d better be more careful about what I say. I think that a lot, unfortunately. Then I thought about what it means to love someone the way you love yourself. C.S. Lewis had this to say:

When I look into my own mind, I find that I do not love myself by thinking myself a dear old chap or having affectionate feelings. I do not think that I love myself because I am particularly good, but just because I am myself and quite apart from my character. I might detest something which I have done. Nevertheless, I do not cease to love myself.

So all the justification and irritation I felt on my own behalf, that I’d been misunderstood, or taken out of context, or that my mother-in-law had misremembered, ought to be applied to others when I feel they’ve offended me or hurt me somehow.

Lewis also said:

For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life–namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

So I can draw several lessons from this. First, don’t be a jerk. Be thoughtful of others. Second, when someone offends you, give them the benefit the same excuses you’d give to yourself. Third, I think we’ll take on the same tradition here. Why not facilitate guests’ good intentions, and why not do it with good humor?

 

Ila’s actual birthday was on a Sunday.  I let her open up a present before church.  It was princess dolls with easily changeable dresses:

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We started celebrating Ila’s birthday on Saturday with a “Princess Aurora” birthday party.  [Side note:  I purposefully avoided everything Disney princess for Charlotte and Nicole, but Ila became obsessed with the movie “Sleeping Beauty” in June and here we are celebrating her birthday with a Disney Princess theme.]

Ila only wanted to invite three girls, actually she only wanted to invite two girls because her “tummy only wants to have 2 friends.”  I talked her into the third friend, but the fourth one was totally out of the question, she’s such an odd little girl sometimes.

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It’s about time I finished my Texas travel log.  Here’s our boys hanging out together before church:

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I think most if not all of the people who read my blog are also my facebook friends, but just in case there are a few out there who are blog subscribers only, I thought I’d share our family pictures here as well.

Our usual place has closed it’s Utah location so we had to try someplace new this time.  FotoFly came highly recommended and are reasonably priced, so we gave them a shot.  The basic package gives you a CD with rights to all the images.  I’m including all the images we got for those avid fans of ours who want to see all the pictures.

Ila was not happy when they told her to put her hand on Dad:

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I wanted a real Texas experience, so we planned a Saturday outing to Lu Lu’s and the Alamo.  First was Lu Lu’s

The water glasses were enormous:The food was enormous (this was the small chicken fried steak covered in Queso):

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Ila in her elephant costume, ready for a trip to the zoo:

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I have to admit to being worried about  more than 4 hours on a plane with my 1 and 3 year olds, but the flight went really well.  I was so pleasantly surprised at how well it went that I took lots of pictures.

As you can see, it was still dark when we got on the plane:

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Charlotte taught herself to ride a bicycle and she absolutely loves riding.  She spends about half the time she’s home everyday riding her bike.

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On Thursday the kids didn’t have school and Zach had some time off (because he was planning to take them to the Grand Canyon which was closed) so we headed down to some of the State parks.  Utah has an amazingly varied landscape.

The first place we went was Fisher’s Tower.  It was very rainy, which is odd since we were in the dessert.

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1.  That the bus stop is so close (across the street) and that there are so many kids in the neighborhood.

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This year we signed Isaac and Charlotte up for soccer through Orem Youth Soccer.  We signed them up shortly after we moved, but we were late sign-ups so they ended up playing on teams with kids from other elementary schools.

Isaac’s soccer team choose the name “The Mean Green Machines.”Charlotte’s team changed their name from “Maroon Girls” to “Maroon Stars”:(I had to stay home with some of the younger kids on Charlotte’s picture day and her envelope didn’t get turned in, so we had to take an unofficial picture of her team)

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