This week was actually very busy. And I have a lot of pictures to show you.
Older:
This is a picture from my birthday party. It is a little olds. Please excuse the lack of clothing.
Friday:
Friday was the Fairytale ball at the Public Library. Alice got all dressed up to go and Buddy decided that he wanted to get dressed up too. You cannot see very easily, but Buddy is wearing two pairs of pants. One of them is correct and the other is kind of twisted. He put them both on by himself. and waddled around like that until it was time to go.
He decided that he also wanted a "Hat" like his silly big sister (2 pictures up).
There was a puppet show.
And dancing, although this action shots in bad lighting is kind of fuzzy.
Saturday:
On Saturday we worked outside in the yard. It was wonderful weather. We finished putting together the raised beds. We put in a border around it to hold the giant pile of mulch that is blocking our driveway. And we planted 6 fruit trees, 2 peach, 2 apple, and 2 pare. Our soil here is very high in clay, so we bought 480 lbs of composted cow manure and top soil to help give the trees a good start. The yard is starting to look good.
This week was fairly normal. The one thing out of the ordinary was that we went to the Cheese Festival in Arthur IL. It was fun. Alice was on three separate cheese curling teams, and one of those teams (not ours) came in third place over all. They were tied for first until the sudden death tie breaker round. After that we went to the park and had a picnic. It was a lot of fun, except for the heat. It was 95+ degrees. Sorry no pictures in this post, Susan is downloading the pictures from our camera to the computer, so hopefully the will show up in a post soon.
This week felt kind of short. At least to me it did, Susan said it felt long to her. Susan spent the first two days of this week in Chicago at a friends house canning. I was here by myself working and twiddling my thumbs. The middle of the week was mostly uneventful. Then yesterday my parents showed up. They are in the midst of traveling out to see my newest nephew and decided to stop here on the way.
It has been a long time since I posted anything. That is because we have been on vacation, like Susan said. I was not a 3 week vacation, although it kind of felt that way. The last Sunday before we left I did not write for two reasons. First is that I was the only member of the Bishopric in town that day so I had to run a fair amount of church myself. That is not a big deal but it was time consuming. Second we left on our trip shortly after getting back from church. We had booked a cheap flight out of Indianapolis early Monday morning, but we forgot about the time change, and did not really factor everything in. There was just no way that we were going to wake up at 3 am to get to Indi on time so we stayed that night in a hotel. It was not ideal but it worked out.
We did a tone of things while we were out west. I cannot really tell you about all of them. But I will post the pictures and things that I can. I don't have a lot because I don't know where the camera is. We came home and there were a few people who wanted to look at the house, so we hurried and cleaned up. And I don't know where the camera got placed in all the cleaning. These pictures/videos are from my phone.
This is Alice sitting in a fake Chickens nest at a childrens part of the Idaho falls zoo.
This is Alice riding a horse for the first time ever. We have one of Robert too, but that is on the camera. She did this a Pioneer Village at This is the place monument in Salt Lake City.
Here is Alice and Robert Panning for "Gold." It really is fools gold so the banter that you hear in the video about how much per ounce is nothing. This is in the Pioneer Village at this is the place monument in Salt Lake City.
This out of this world looking video is actually Robert staring at a Monkey sunning itself (Again at the zoo in Idaho). This boy loves animals, this particular animal just looks like it is from another planet.
As for what happened this week. Well not a lot. It was a fairly normal week trying to recover from vacation. I read a lot of e-mail at work and everyone tried to catch up on their sleep.
Well this week was some what normal, but also very long. Robert has been getting better at talking. Today I wanted to see if he would say the name of his friend Isizey (Susan's comment: Isaac shortened to I-zy). Instead he ran to the door and started yelling bo bo bo. Which we learned this week means go. Susan made me break the bad news to him that Isizey is in California, and we couldn't go play. He was mad. Alice got him to say her name though.
As for Alice she has been at Nature Day camp much of this week. I dropped her of once day at the Planetarium, which is on the campus of he local Community College. But it took me half an hour to find it, because the address has it sitting on a street next to the college. It appears that there are no real streets on the campus. Every building has an address on this same street, but no direct access to it.
Yesterday we went to the Library. When we got there they were having a Sister City thing. Apparently Urbana has a sister city in Mulaui, and we got to try some food from Mulaui and play some games from there it was fun, and Susan really liked the corn meal mush and cooked spinach.
But that wasn't the only unusual thing that we ate yesterday. We were invited over to dinner at a friends house and they served us a goat shoulder. It was good. There was not much of a goat flavor at all. Apparently most of the strong flavor is in the fat and this was a fairly lean cut I guess.
Well there was really only one thing that stands out this week. On Tuesday we went to Nauvoo. Our nephew was in town from Utah and went though the temple there for the first time. It was a very nice experience to be able to do that with him and his family. The big thing about that day was that it was upper 90's with 100% humidity right next to the Mississippi river. With the heat index it was 117 that day. We went and saw some of the things. We made rope and saw how the people in Nauvoo made bread, but by the time we got to the bricks Robert was about done. All he wanted to do was to run around and play. So Robert and I spent 20 min out in the heat while he ran around and I doused him in water. Susan and Alice were in an air conditioned room listening to a lecture on how they made bricks.
After that we spent most of the afternoon in the visitors center watching some of the films they have and talking with family. It was a fun day, but very tiring. We got back at just after midnight. Sorry we don't have any pictures or videos.
This week was mostly normal. Alice had nature day camp again this past week and Susan gave a genealogical society presentation. One of the big things is that Robert has turned into a bit of a chatter bug. He has been babbling a lot and that babbling is starting to really sound like words. He learned hi this week. He said something that sounded a lot like buddy, but I think he was just copying. We think he has said Alice, but Mama is definitely part of his vocabulary and I think I heard dada.
Well, this week was very busy, with the 4th of July and all. The 4th was a very busy day.
We had a ward Lunch/BBQ. There were lots of games.
Some of them were water games.
After that we went home, and invited another family in our ward over. They have three boys Alice's age.
Finally we went to see the fireworks. Alice was very excited to see the fireworks, but they freaked her out. We had good seats, and she felt like they were going to fall on us. Poor girl. So we came home early.
The next day we went to the zoo in Decatur. It is a little zoo, but it was fun. Robert loves animals and I was hoping he would get really excited about it. He liked looking at the animals and petting some goats at the petting zoo, but he didn't get as excited as I had hoped.
They also have a playground to play on next to the zoo, which he did like a lot, probably because he loves to climb.
This week I was out of town in CA. Sorry Jon (My brother not brother-in-law) I didn't call the week was crazy and I didn't have much time at all to do anything besides work.
I left Monday morning at about 5 am. My flight took off at 6 am. Unfortunately there was a thunderstorm which made our flight a little late and we had to rearrange the other flight a little bit but we still got there. I was there with 5 other people from our office for the conference. We had meetings all day Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday was the conference and it lasted all day long. Thursday was more meetings and we had another meeting on Friday morning before our flight home.
Sadly our flight home had some mechanical issues and was canceled. We got the call early in the morning telling us that it was canceled and that we were al scheduled to fly out the next day. I spent half an hour on the phone getting things worked out. It turns out that it was worth it though. I ended up in first class for the flight home. I liked the warmed mixed nuts, free lunch, and all the soda I could drink, but I think the leg room is the really hard thing to give up.
Well, this week has been some what normal. About the only thing that was out of the ordinary is that we went to the temple on Saturday. Driving for 3 hours with the kids is never a lot of fun, but Alice and Robert seemed to have a good time. We stayed in a hotel friday night, something that Alice always loves. Because she and Robert share a room when we stay in a hotel, and Alice does not want the light off and Robert cannot have it on we let Alice stay up a little and watch TV while Robert falls asleep. She mentioned the following to us on Saturday "I watched TV yesterday and I watched TV today. We could buy a TV and then have one at our house." Its not like the girl doesn't watch a lot of stuff. It is just all on the computer.
This week has been slowly returning to normal. Susan is back from her trip to North Carolina and we are starting to get back into our routine. Yesterday I had a first. A friend of ours had a piano with a cracked soundboard. So the piano would never be in tune and it was more expensive to fix it then the piano was worth. So we loaded it up into their minivan and took it to the dump. It was a bit of an adventure because the first dump we tried, the one in town that they called up yesterday to confirm that they would be open, was closed. So we adjusted last minute and went to a landfill half an hour away, and got there just a few mins before they closed. Alice was happy that she could spend all morning playing with her friends instead of just an hour. Susan was a the Family History Center the entire time so it really didn't impact her.
When you drop a piano into a large dumpster and it shatters it makes the sound I expected it to make.
Well, I don't have a lot to say, or perhaps more appropriately I don't have a lot of time to say anything. This week, since Wednesday, I have been flying solo. Susan is off on a family history pilgrimage that I am sure she will tell you all about when she is back. But for the time being it is just me. All I really have to say is wow, Susan is wonderful. I have gotten some help from family and friends or I don't think I would have been able to do this. But it is almost over, Susan comes home Tuesday night, and we are all still alive.
Sorry I did not write yesterday. It was a very busy day. I had home teaching and we had some friends from out of town come over for dinner. It was a lot of fun. We had Julia over, one of Susan's friends from college and also some friends that used to live just through the block from us about 3 years ago. They have kids just a bit older then both Robert and Alice. So Alice had lots of fun playing with "new" old friends again, and Robert got to play with someone new. He actually played with them, which is a bit of a first. Susan also got to play with her friends too.
This past week was kind of busy anyways. Alice had a preschool commencement ceremony, but I did not get to go, because Robert was feeling sick that day. He has actually been sick quite a bit recently. He had a fever at the end of last week and the beginning of this week. Then yesterday he work up with a rash all over. I think it was something he ate, but we don't know for sure. The rash was mostly gone this morning, so we will probably never know for sure what happened, but he will not be eating any more fresh pineapple for a while.
Well, This week has seemed kind of calm, which is good. Robert and Alice went to the doctor on Monday. It turned out OK, especially wen ALice learned that she would not need any shots. Robert, however, did need shots. He seamed to react fairly well, but on Saturday he developed a fever. We kind of think it may have been a reaction to the shots, but just to be sure we did not let him go out much. I stayed home with Robert while Susan and Alice went to a ward activity on Saturday night. Today Susan stayed home with Robert during church, and I stayed with the kids while Susan went to a later Sacrament meeting. This is the first time that we have had a sick child since I was called into the Bishopric. We had to think things through to know how I could still be on the stand and also let Alice go to church. We are very lucky with how obedient Alice is.
But this week was not all about Robert. Alice got to go on a field trip to the Nature center. She got to see snakes and turtles. She also found several mosquitoes, or perhaps more appropriately they found her.
Well, Surprise Surprise, not too much happened this week. We went to the temple this week. On the way back we saw 4 accidents one right after another on 270 leaving St. Louis. It took us 1 hour to get past them all. he worst of them they actually routed us off of the freeway for a while. I was raining, but not that bad. I really had to wonder how so many people independently all got in accidents on the same small stretch of road. Luckily Alice and Robert were relatively good through most of it, except for that part about her needing to use the bathroom the entire hour we are trying to get to a gas station to stop. And then just as we pull off the freeway to go the the gas station she falls asleep. The funniest part of it is that she warned Susan that she was going to take a small rest first. Susan thought she was kidding, but it took us several minutes to wake her from the deep sleep once we stopped. Everyone was really tired.
Well, This week has been kind of uneventful. Life has continued mostly as normal. Alice and Robert are slowly growing up. Robert is now 28 lbs. Alice is also picking up on reading a little bit. Not a lot, but a bit more then before. I don't really have a lot to say about it. Work is going well, and I am also starting to get more into my calling. I actually extended a calling to someone this week, and released someone else, and I have been conducting Sacrament meeting the last two weeks. So I guess I am slowly starting to come up to speed on it. I guess that is about it.
Well, it has been two weeks since I last wrote. This is because last week we spent in Utah at my brother's wedding. Sadly we didn't take a lot of pictures. We didn't steal too many from others just yet, so once we get them we may post some more. One of the highlights of the wedding was the reception. Susan and Robert were not feeling too well so they stayed at her parents while I took Alice. The following are of her dancing with her cousins. The first one after the audio cuts out is Alice trying to kiss her cousin, and me telling her kissing him on the lips is not the best idea. She was not too happy about that.
At the party she ate 2 huge pieces of wedding cake. Had lemonade (the best thing in the world in her opinion) and had a large plate of fruit, and chocolate covered treats. She had a wonderful time. When it was time for us to go home, she cried for half a hour she was so sad to leave.
We also got to spend easter with Susan's family. Alice loved it too. She got to go on an eater egg hunt with her cousins, and got a huge bag of candy. Robert didn't quite get it al, but he still picked up three eggs.
We did get to spend some time with my parents too, who are on a mission in Salt Lake City.
The top one is Alice pushing Robert on top of the Church administration building in down town Salt Lake City.
This week has felt very crazy, but also very productive. We are getting our house ready, as everyone knows. Well Saturday was the day that we took pictures of the house.
We spent a lot of the week cleaning out all of our clutter, and then Susan did a huge push Saturday morning to clean everything while I worked in the family history library. The house looked great, still does. But it felt very empty afterwards. We were very used to having stuff in the house, and now it is all in the garage, or in the trash.
This week has been a long week. My birthday was this week, but because we have had so much going on each day, we have celebrated it some what piecemeal. We went out to dinner on the day itself, because Susan had so much going on that day she didn't have time to make the requested birthday dinner. Later I made my birthday pie.
And finally we made my birthday dinner. We had everything for it, just not a lot of time for dinner.
Yesterday was a very busy day. We are getting our house ready to put it on the market, and would like to put it out in about a week. So we spent Saturday getting some things ready. We panted Robert's room. It hasn't been painted since we moved in, and it wasn't in the best shape when we did move in. I also installed two new light fixtures in the halls. Wow it makes a big difference with the light level in there. And then just a bunch of general things around the house. The whole house is starting to look ready. We still have a lot of clutter to remove, and a few more minor things to finish up, but it is very close.
This week has been very crazy. Well the last few days have been crazy. Alice had her birthday party yesterday. She was so excited all week and especially in the morning. It was very hard for her to wait until 3:00 for the party to start. The party consisted of cake and ice cream.
WHAT?! There was a whole lot more goin' on than cake and ice cream! Weeks ago, Alice and I started putting the plans together. She decided on a pinata, a cake she would serve her friends all by herself, and an activity ("not a craft, Mom, an activity"). I decided on goody bags and made a crazy goal to put on a 4-year-old birthday party that would produce "zero landfill waste." Alice consented to the goody bags, selected the fabric, and helped with the design (back pack!), but they were stuffed with secret surprises that only I knew about. Mwah ha ha haaaa. Those were SO much fun to put together. I loved it.
Alice decorated the cake herself.
The original "plan" was a fuzzy pink spider cake, but the girlie gets into something and changes her mind all the time. We were at the store picking out candy (in the bulk section) and she still hadn't completely decided on her cake. The night before the party, she settled on a self-portrait cake. I didn't complain. A plain old circle is way easier than a cephalothorax, abdomen, and eight fuzzy legs cake.
It had lots and lots of candy on it, which was exactly what all of her friends (and Alice) wanted. They would ask for pieces of cake by the candy on top of it.
She did end up divvying out most of the pieces herself. She got impatient, though, after serving the 5th piece of cake and seeing the other kids eating theirs.It was a whole wheat super-carrot cake. I had to somehow counteract all the frosting and candy going on, right? ;)
Sorry about the video quality.
Alice requested it be "dark, dark, dark" in the kitchen, so we had the lights off and the curtains drawn. It still wasn't very dark at 3 in the afternoon, but I humored the girl.
It started out as a self portrait (see her design below), but then became a "Zombi".
"Zombie" was Alice's own description of her work. To her credit, Alice actually did a great job copying her original design onto the cake in candy. Unfortunately, we had a lot more candy than the self-portrait required and she just couldn't stop. I did snap a photo of the cake before it went "Zombie." I should also explain that she doesn't normally have 6 limbs. There are her two arms and two legs, then the long ones at her hips are "bad guy arms stretching out to get me." The blob on top is a "crazy hat!"
After that they did a dancing/movement activity. They jumped and spun and had lots of fun, which also is perfectly Alice.
I was very, very happy with how this turned out. I asked my friend Marianne to do the activity for us (delegation rocks!) and she put on a 20-minute creative dance class. Very cool! The games were spot-on for the age group. Every single child participated gleefully, regardless of dance experience. It cracked me up! I laughed out loud seeing the kids have so much fun.
Confession here. When I first met Marianne and heard that she was into creative dance, I just kinda nodded and smiled with a non-committal "Oh, I see." Dance seemed so, well, frivolous and unconnected to anything I ever wanted for me or my children. Then we happened to be over at their house one day when she was giving her kids their weekly dance class. Alice didn't get it, but she wanted to. It wasn't anything like I thought it would be. It was a series of fun and active games, using the kids imagination, where each kid gets to choose his/her own movements and yet they're all still part of the same game. It blew me away. I instantly gained respect for children's creative dance and an instructor who can turn enthusiasm and personality into a group fun session.
After that we did a piñata. The kids were not the strongest, and it was fairly well made, so everyone got lots of turns to try and break it open.
The original idea for the pinata was a fuzzy pink spider, too. We made the papier-mache ball ourselves, then started cutting out legs for the spider. Alice was eager to start painting. I told her we couldn't paint until we were all done putting on the legs. She decided two legs were plenty. Maybe I should have made her wait for 6 more legs. Oh well. Next time. Here she is painting it every color we have (and some we mixed up on the spot). She put on a purple spot and I told her Grandma Poulson loves that shade of purple. Alice was sad Grandma wouldn't be at her party. A few days later, we learned of Bobby's new calling and suddenly Grandma and Grandpa Poulson were coming out to Illinois...just in time for her party. I can't picture a calling to the bishopric as a "tender mercy", but the Lord knows how to make hard news more palatable ;)
After that the weather was good enough that they all played out side until it was time to go home. Everyone had a great time.
I liked this part a lot. The idea was to have unstructured free play built into the party. I'm so glad the weather allowed them to play outside. Kids were lugging around fallen tree branches, digging in the garden, playing pirates, chasing balls, tromping through the brush, and just plain enjoying each other. Robert wanted in on the action, too.
Oh and by the way I am now the second counselor in the Bishopric.
P.S. I loved having my parents in town for the weekend. As an added surprise, my friend Julia was able to visit for the weekend, too! There was ample adult help and lots of adult conversation and plenty of people to play with the kids. I actually got a break! A real break!
P.P.S I have three extra backpack/bags leftover from Alice's birthday surprise. How about a giveaway? Details to come soon. I have to figure out what to fill them with...most of the original party favors are gone. Hmmmmm.
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