Our Regular Life!

Here are some things that are regular in our life!  

 This handsome guy gets to serve every Friday in the Calgary Temple.  He looks so great in his whites and are excited about his service.  It is great to be able to participate in anything at the temple and we are grateful to have our own here!

 Elliette doing a service for Caeleb and Dawsyn.  She is getting to be a great reader!  Here she is reading some of her favorite books- Fly Guy.  Caeleb has spent some time with us these few moths as his mom has worked really hard to grow a healthy baby girl.  We have sure been grateful to get to know this sweet boy and see  how he fit right into our family so easily.

 All that snow!

 Again with the face paint!  There may be more pictures with painted faces as after I put the face paint where no one could find it Dawsyn started using dry erase crayons and coloring all over herself constantly.

 Marshall even having to participate with getting painted.

 Daddy gets to be part of this fun game of blind tag or something like that.  Paul's favorite saying and one that the kids have also adopted is true so often "This can only end in tears!"

Marshall is often pulled around for a ride in some sort of set-up like this.  He now loves to climb into any box that is around.

Elliette really loves pickles.  I looked up a new recipe for pancakes
and there was a picture of one with pickles like this on it.
So I asked Elliette if she wanted to try it out and she was so excited!
She ate it and enjoyed it, pickles on pancakes with maple syrup!

Grandpa just adores this boy, and Marshall him as well.  One of their bonding times is just like this.  Marshall has been taught to make a mouth smacking noise to mean cookie.  He asks for it frequently.  When he gets his cookie he heads straight over to grandpa's chair to sit.  He cannot eat a cookie and leave the room, he takes his time sitting in the chair and preferable watching soccer or something else with a ball.  He also asks for water next and enjoys some bonding time.  He then proceeds to ask for more cookies and has learned well how to get them.

 He is not smiling, he is doing his "cookie" noise.  He is so funny!  And learning so fast!!

 The girls love to play with grandpa as well.  This kind of ruthless attack is not too common.

Some cuddle time with my girls. This is one of my favorite things to do!  I love to just cuddle and hang out with my girls!!

Some of the fun that we had!

We had a fun fall.  This year it got cold and snowed early and it hasn't really let up too much.  But nonetheless we had a great time playing together and enjoying our Halloween.  Here is some of it!

Kyndal gave an award to her favorite book and here is Grandpa trying out some soccer on the Wii Fit.

Here is our Halloween.  We were themed of the Little House on the Prairie. The girls fought over who was Laura.  Then they worked it out and they even introduced themselves as Laura and Mary Ingalls at peoples doors.

Chris and Caeleb Watters joined us for a little bit.  From Chris's fogginess it really speaks to how cold it was that night.  It was definitely too much to have this 2 year old enjoy, just too cold!  We didn't spend too long out either.  The girls were happy to get some candy and then ready to come home.  When we got home we first sorted the candy into groups, then we counted it and graphed the results.  Then while we watched some fun Halloween shows the girls got to pick out a certain number of their candies to keep and the rest was going away.  They got their fair share and there was no overload, just fun. It was a great Halloween.

The next day we participated in our first Candy Buy-Back.  It was at a dentist office where we get to dress up, take in our candy and they will pay us $1 per pound of candy.  It was fun to go and great to move on from Halloween without having to deal with hoards of candy.  It was a total win-win.  The girls had 8lbs of candy (including all junk candy I could clean out of our cupboards).  It was so great!  Here is the dress up for that event!

After Halloween there were so many times that Dawsyn was into the face paint.  It is something that they like to do anyways but it had reached a new level of frequency.  Here is one such day.  I even had the face paint hidden on top of the fridge.  That wasn't far enough!  So now it is farther away to avoid cleaning this up every other day.  This girl is so funny!

My Little Miss is Six!!

I cannot believe that Elliette is 6! She is still such a tiny girl. She at times has introduced herself and says "I'm 6 but most people think I'm 4." She is such a funny girl and is always going! I think that she just falls down immediately to sleep when she stops going for just a second!  She is totally goofy, that is obvious by these pictures.  She just loves to be silly!  She always comes up with the most interesting thoughts and I just love to be able to see the world from her perspective. 

She can be the most social kid but at times my most shy one as well.  Today at church it was very funny as Elliette was sitting next to a lady that she didn't know.  The girls are often sad that we have the rule that they have to sit with their family, as they want to sit next to a few of the ladies that have become adopted grandmas to them.  Well today Elliette was disappointed again by this rule as we made her come back and sit with us.  But right next to us was the Relief Society president.  Elliette instantly started chatting to this lady, cuddling up next to her and holding her hand.  She kept announcing to me what her name was, she invited her to her 7th birthday, etc.  She was very well behaved during church and it was so cute to see her make a new friend.  So sometimes she is very social. 

I just can't say enough how funny this little miss is!  Here is a glimpse!

Elliette having funky monkey pancakes on her birthday!

She asked for a snowman cake.  She helped me to make the chocolate snowmen and the big one on the top!

I absolutely love these pictures!  They show enough of the goofiness of the kids and a bit of the craziness that it is to have 8 kids here 9 and under.  Entertaining, definitely!  Loud, you bet!  Lots of laughing and tears, always!  This is the life of our family!