Dino Museum Field Trip

Gabe had off from school on Monday and Caleb's preschool had a fieldtrip planned to the Dinosaur exibit in Idaho Falls, so I decided to go along and take the two boys together. We met there at about 10:00 and there was about a billion little preschoolers there waiting in the lobby! I think the old ladies that work at the museum were about to have a heart attack. But the good news was, it was way cheaper than usual because of the group rate for the kids, so I just had to pay for myself to get in - which was $8.00. Any other day it would've also been $6.00 per child so I was pretty happy.

We spent about two hours there, exploring all the dinosuar fossils and even talking to a guy who was working on piecing together some bones that were found recently in Wyoming. I didn't realize that they usually find like - hundreds of pieces that need to go together just to have ONE bone. It's not like, "Here is a femur!" It's like, "Here are 300 pieces that we need to put together to make the femur!" Crazy.

The boys were too young to appreciate a lot of the info at each exhibit but they still had fun seeing it all I think. Caleb had one little melt-down (I'll post a picture...) but otherwise it went smoothly. We just saw everything a LOT faster than adults probably would! :) Anyways, it was a fun little trip and it was a good warm-up for Gabe's Dinosaur party coming up on March 17th for his 6th birthday! We are celebrating a week early because one of his best friends is going to be gone the weekend of the 23rd. I am going to try to do the whole party myself at home - even making the cake.... it should be interesting!

The Fam is Growing!

Lots of news!

A) I realized that I never officially announced that baby #3 is on the way. Oops. I guess once it's baby number three it's kind of like, "just another kid..." :) Right now I am about 17 weeks and I wish I knew if it was a boy or a girl by now but I don't. My ultrasound tech seems to be the only one in Idaho that insists on waiting until 20 weeks to even try to see what it is! I know two girls that found out at 16 weeks what they were having! (Both also having girls... no fair.) Of course I am hoping for a girl again, just like I was the first and second time. So I guess I shouldn't get my hopes up too much! The mom thing to say is, "I will be happy no matter what it is!" But whatever, I want a girl. I have done my time! If this one is still a boy I might just be throwing in the towel.

B) BUT, in other news... we did recently add a girl to the family... in dog form. Josh has always been an animal-lover and has wanted to get a dog since the day we got married. Luckily, we were living in apartments for a while and couldn't have one. Then we moved to Wisconsin and had a house and tried out a little tiny dog. We had it for about 3 months but it was just too much. The kids were still really young and it seemed like it just chased them around and bit them all day. So, now we have our house here in Idaho and Josh has been asking about getting a dog again since last August. I kept putting it off for various reasons, but then this kid we know said that his cousin was moving and needed to find a home for her newly adopted golden retriever puppy and she was willing to just give it away to a good home. We had talked about how a golden retriever was the kind of dog we wanted to eventually get and if you have to buy them they are usually about $400 out here to buy as puppies, so Josh appealed to my sense of bargain hunting by saying, "Tiffany, this is a FREE dog! Why wait until next year and pay $400 when this one is FREE and it's exactly what we want!" Oh boy. He was laying it on thick. I actually think he was surprised when I agreed to even go look at it. But when we did, he was ready to take it home with us that second. I made him wait four days until he had his 3-day weekend and so we could get the house dog-proof. But then we officially went and got her last Monday.

So it's been a week now and she has become a member of the family. She has her moments of puppyness where I am like, "Arg! Stop biting everything!" but overall it has been easier than I thought it would be. She seems to be worlds smarter than the other little dog we had. She goes to the door to go potty and Josh already taught her to sit and stay. I think that's pretty good for an 8 week old puppy. Oh and we named her Zoe. She's pretty cute and the boys seem to like her. Gabe got up early this morning and got himself dressed just to go with Josh to walk her in the cold. My hope is that she can just be mostly trained by the time baby #3 is here!

That's the news for now!

Dentist Trip

Caleb had his first trip to the dentist! He didn't have any cavities and thought it was a pretty fun time. Gabe, on the other hand.... this was his second trip. He has 4 cavities. :( The dentist said they are all in between his teeth so we need to be sure to floss every night because his teeth are so close together in the back. I have a hard enough time getting him to brush every night! Now I need to worry about the flossing already too!?! Sheesh.

Here are a couple pictures!

"One Nation, Under God...."

This is a funny story. I always have funny stories that I want to post about but then I forget them by the end of the day. So I actually wrote this one down right after it happened so I would remember it.

So, to give you a little backstory... Caleb has asked me a few times about if Jesus is invisible. I am never sure how to answer because I'm like, "Well, yes He is always able to see you but you can't see Him... but I wouldn't say He is invisible.... He lived on Earth and had a body and then died and was resurrected and the disciples felt His hands...." but Caleb's eyes have usually glazed over by that point in the story and he has tuned me out.

But anyways, we had this Cub Scout banquet night at church last night because Josh is the Cub Master and the boys came along and one thing that everyone did was the pledge. Then today me and the boys were talking about the pledge and Gabe was saying, "I know the pledge! I do it at school!" So I asked him to say it with me and Caleb was trying to say it along too. At the end, we got to the part were it says, "One nation, under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all." Then Caleb puts his hand down and looks up at me with satisfaction and says, "See... I told you Jesus was invisible."

My Wisconsin trip and Christmas

I am trying to play a little catch-up here so I have to write about some of the things I missed since Halloween!

In November, our family stayed pretty close to home. We celebrated Thanksgiving at Josh's parents' house in Ashton and most of his siblings were there for lunch as well. It was a very large group. I was going to try and count it out in my head but decided I was too lazy. So I'l just say probably around 30+ people I bet.

Then in December I decided I was going to take a little trip to Wisconsin. I had actually booked my flight back in October because I had some free sky Miles that I wanted to use up. So I was only there for about 4 days but it was nice to take a little trip by myself! Josh had off that weekend and I had a neighbor and Diane help with the kids while I was gone. I actually would've loved to stay there longer but it was enough of a delicate web of babysitting for the 4 days! While I was there I did some Christmas shopping with my mom and got to see my grandma Dahlke's new condo that she moved into about three days after I left!

When I got back to Idaho around mid-December, I had a lot of little Christmas things to get ready - as does everyone in those last two weeks - and was busy helping with Gabe's school Christmas party and other things. Josh helped me make this "Pin the Nose on the Rudolph" game and we also did a little Christmas Bingo game. The kids had a lot of fun. Someday Gabe will probably be embarassed by his mom hanging around but right now he loves it. As the matter of fact the other day when I dropped him off at school I got talking to another mom and he started to have to go in the school with his class and he stopped at the door and yelled, "Mom! You forgot to give me a hug!!!" And I had to run over and give him his hug so he could walk in with the rest of his line. It was cute. I know THAT won't last for long! :)

So, for Christmas Gabe and Caleb were all about the remote control vehicles this year. Josh wanted - I mean, um - GABE wanted a remote control helipoter. It was one that had tiny parts and said ages 8 and up, but Josh insisted Gabe was advanced enough for it. It broke within about.... 2 hours of opening it on Christmas. A few too many crashes within the two hours. The also both got a couple remote control cars. Caleb is pretty into Super Heroes still. He got some Captain America and Batman toys. Gabe loves animals and was pretty excited about this A-Z animal zoo with a letter on each animal. I think it's probably meant more for toddlers but he just loves taking the animals around in little pouches and backpacks and making up little stories with them. Caleb's more rough and crazy. He discovered Power Rangers on Netflix unfortunately.... and he loves it.

Sometimes the boys get wrestling and Gabe is like - competitive and wants to be the best at everything because he's older, but Caleb is like a little tazmanian devil when he gets mad so it's usually a pretty good fight. Then sometimes Josh jumps in there and stirs the pot even more (why? I don't know...) but I always end up just comforting whoever keeps getting hurt. Then after their 5 seconds of sympathy from me they run back to the pile and continue again. It's craziness.

So, in December we seriously had like 3 snowfalls maybe and they each had just a dusting of snow then melted right away. Now that it's January, we finally got our first real snow like, 3 days ago. It was actually to the point where there was about 4 inches on the ground and everything looked really white. The boys were soooo excited. They had only put on their full snow clothes probably one other time this whole Winter. So last week we woke up and got them all bundled up and they played witht their trucks in the snow and went sledding down this little hill in our neighborhood. Then they both had school for a couple hours from about noon to 3:00 and came home and went back outside again.

I am going to post some pictures now of December, Christmas, and snow fun and then I'll write my next big post for this past week!

This was Gabe with his Baby Snowman in one of are tiny snowfalls in December.
















This is just Caleb being Caleb. He does this pose a lot when he says, "Cheese!"
















Gabe at his school Christmas program.














Here's Caleb being impatient during Gabe's Christmas program.

Halloween!

I am just getting worse and worse about the blogging.... I heard a friend say recently, "I am just so bad at blogging, on a good month I will blog about once every week...." I was thinking, "I am struggling to do once a MONTH!" I just want to keep it up though because last year I printed a blog book and it was so cool! Like an instant scrapbook/journal.

So, with that as my motivation... I must go on!

For Halloween, Gabe told me about a month before Halloween that he wanted to be a robot this year. I said, "Well... we'll see.... hopefully we can find a robot costume somewhere..." and he looks at me like, "Uh no!" and says, "You have to make it!" I was like, "WHAT?!" I am not really one of the ambitious crafty mom types. I would much prefer to just go to Wal-mart and buy one. But, since he insisted, I could not turn him down. So, I went to work on it about a week after he first told me about it. Luckily, Caleb was easy to please. All I had to do was take him to Wal-mart and show him all the size 5 Super Hero costume choices and he was in heaven. He looked at Transformers, Iron Man, and the Green Lantern but finally decided on Captain America. It even had the built-in muscles. I loved it and so did he, so he was set. For Gabe, I used some boxes and some spray paint, some dryer tubing stuff for arms, and some empty two-liter bottles for rockets on the back. It actually turned out pretty cute. This one guy handing out candy on Halloween told Gabe that was the best costume he'd ever seen! (Possibly an exaggeration... but still...)

Our Halloween festivities this year included Gabe's school carnival, a trip out to Harriman State Park for this haunted hay ride and little cabin trick-or-treating (it was pretty impressive, but I am waaaay glad we got there before the insane rush of people.... some people waited in line for 2 hours to get it!) and then we did our pumpkin carving and stuff a couple days before Halloween. Or I should say, JOSH did his pumpkin carving.... for all of us. I am really bad at it. I did bake pumpkin seeds though, which were really good.

On Halloween we first trick-or-treated in our tiny neighborhood. Then once those five minutes were over... we went to Bryan (Josh's bro) and Jada's house and trick-or-treated their big neighborhood. Caleb got to the point where he was saying, *Sigh* "Is THIS their house???" he was ready to be done and back at Bryan's house playing with his cousins. :) They both got more than enough candy. Gabe's little rocket packs were full to the "Ready for Blast-off" line!

I can't believe it is already halfway through November. It has snowed once or twice here already, but right now there's green grass outside because it usually melts pretty quick. I am already wishing it was June again! If I were 60 it would be time for me and Josh to fly south for the Winter. Some day...

Gabe and Caleb are both loving school. Caleb's is all fun and games. Every day he comes home with a cute craft or some great story about how they did "Planet painting" (marbles in a tub of paint) or some fun song they learned. Meanwhile, I feel like Gabe is growing up so fast! He has to learn how to read and everything!!! I swear, I did not learn how to read in Kindergarten. I thought it was about second grade... All I remember about Kindergarten is different play stations - my favorite one I would dress up and play house - and struggling to learn the difference between left and right (I have conquered that finally.)

So, that is pretty much the highlights right now. Oh yeah, and I am in serving in Young Women's at church again! ("You can run, but you can't hide..." comes to mind!) Just kidding. I actually would prefer to be there than anywhere else. Except in the back row, as the hymn book hander-outer. That would be nice too.

Josh is keeping busy with work and in his spare time, bulding a play house. Not many husbands wake up one morning and say, "I think I will build a playhouse in the backyard!" But Josh does. It is both strange and impressive.

That's all for now! Here's some pictures!!

Trick-or-Treat!

Harriman Haunted Hay Ride

Mom - someone was looking for you....

Little Pun'kins!

New house

I am actually cheating and adding these pictures at a way later date (Feb. 4, 2012 to be exact) but I took these pictures a long time ago and meant to post them and forgot! So here they are! Our New House! We officially closed on it August 26th, 2011 and moved in a couple of days later. We love it!

First Day of School Pictures!

I am pretty behind on posting pictures but tonight I finally sat down and cleared out my whole camera. Here are the boys on their first day of school. Gabe started kindergarten this year and we are so excited that the school he goes to is right across the street from our new house! He goes every day from 11:40 - 2:25. Then Caleb started at a preschool (the same one Gabe went to ) and he goes to the three-year-old class Tuesday and Thursday from 12:00 to 2:00. So far they are loving school! Caleb's class even took a trip to the campus planetarium last week after studying about planets this month. Gabe is busy learning his letters and numbers some more. The last picture is of Josh by his police car. I just thought that was funny. Sorry I don't have one of me in front of Northgate!