Bribery Works!

We told our kids that if they smiled really nice for family pictures that we would take them out to ice cream after. Matt splurged and got them these HUGE things from cold stone. They picked at them everyday after lunch and dinner, and then put them back in the freezer. After a week we finally just threw them away. But they were so happy! I think each one of them Thanked Heavenly Father for their nice Daddy that night in their prayers. And our pictures turned out Great!Who says you can't Buy Love??

Gooseberry Round 2...

We had so much fun here, we decided to go one more time before officially putting away the camping gear until next year.Matt tried a new recipe in the dutch oven and it was SO TASTY!!Chase swears they taste better this way...We have a picture almost identical to this of Chase... Boys and their toys!Matt took the kids out for some early morning fishingHave you ever read "Froggy learns to swim"? Well it is one of Scott's favorites. There is a part in it where Froggy's Mom tells him to do "Chicken, Airplane, Soldier" with his arms while he is swimming. Well Scott was trying to get the 4-wheeler to move so with all his might he was rocking it back and forth saying "Chicken, Airplane, Soldier..." over and over again. I thought it was funny!Aspen looked like a little Lollipop with her helmet on, a skinny little body with a huge head.Zoe LOVED riding the 4-wheeler!

Warning! This post contains Full Nudity!

Lola has been SO SICK! She has had the runs for over 2 weeks. Her little bum was so sore, the one day I decided to just let her run around naked in the back yard. She was happy as could be!

Ballet

This is Aspens second year of Ballet. She LOVES it! My friend told me about a school here in Lehi that she thought was good called the Barlow Arts Conservatory. So we checked it out, and loved it. Zoe has been dying to start! She has had a couple years of combo classes, but she wanted to be a ballerina like Aspen. She is constantly showing me how good she is at pointing her toes, or doing leaps, or how close she is to her splits. And after she shows me something she always asked "don't you think you should put me in ballet now too?" So finally her time came. She was excited. If you ask her if she likes it though she will tell you "No", but that is just because there are boys in her class. She does not think boys have any business in ballet, and she really doesn't like dancing in front of them. She is getting used to it though.Their best buds, Brooklyn and Kennedy are in their class too. When I pick up the girls there is a 15 minute wait time between when Zoe finishes, and when Aspen finishes. So we always go into this open studio and let Zoe show us all her moves while we wait. Lola loves this place, and just runs around crazy the whole time trying to be like her big sister.

New Shoes

Aspen helped me pick out these shoes to go with my outfit for our family pictures. She really loved them but was concerned because they made me look like such a "HUGE GIGANTIC STATUE". Despite that fact, I bought them anyway. And every time I turned around my girls were wearing them.

Spiderman...

On the first day of school I followed the kids up to the bus stop to take some pictures. There was this HUGE spider in a web in the tree that Chase was really excited to catch.
I was freaking out, because he wanted to catch it with his hands, and the thought of that just made my skin crawl. I HATE SPIDERS! Sure enough he grabs it with his hands and then shakes it up a bit so it won't bite him.
Then he put it in his back pack and took it with him to school. After school we were driving to my Mom's and Chase wanted to check to see if his spider was still alive. He opened up his back pack and the spider is just roaming around in there. Once again I am frantic! I'm yelling at him to shut his back pack before we get in a car accident. He thought it was Hilarious. Can you believe he would hold that in his hand? Disgusting!!

Back to School...

I never think I am ready for school to start. I spend the last few weeks of summer trying to cram in as much fun as possible, before our lives are forced into structure and schedule. But a few weeks into school I realize how nice those things really are. Set bed times, set dinner times, morning routines, scheduled play times, quiet afternoons, etc.

Chase started 4th grade. He got a great teacher, and has some fun kids in his class.Aspen is in second grade, she is just an old pro at this school thing. She got the same teacher Chase had in second grade, and we couldn't be happier. Chase loved her, and he spent the summer letting Aspen know how LUCKY she would be if she got her, so Aspen was THRILLED!
Zoe is Hilarious! She started kindergarten this year, which is usually a nerve racking thing for me, but not with Zoe. She has just always acted like one of the big kids. She is already way to cool for school. Everything they do is so childish. When she got off the bus the first day I was so excited to hear how her day was and she said everything they did was "BORING" She said "I already know how to read, I already know 1000+1000=2000, and I am already a really good colorer." She is a handful! (I'm told there is a lot of Alicia in her, but I just don't see it) We have since come up with the skittle game. Everyday when she gets home from school we sit down and she tells me all about her day. For everything good that she tells me she gets a skittle, but for everything negative that she says I take a skittle away. Her after school reports have become dramatically more positive!!Scott started pre-school. I was dying when I dropped him off his first day. It kills me that he is old enough to go to school. He is SO CUTE! When I ask him about his day he gives me a 10 minute play by play from the second he walks in the door to the second he leaves. His favorite parts are snack time and play time, and he always tells his teacher how "Boring he is when they sing" (I love that he says he is boring rather than he is bored!). He is such a fun little man!

He totally fell out the window!!!

Before you venture forward, I really should warn you... This is a LONG story!! Without any "to make a long story short" phrases in it. So if you want to, just take a peek at the pictures of my nephew, and know that the end is happy!

If your in it for the long haul, here we go... Rick and Debbie (My brother and sister-in-law) were going out of town for the week to Florida. They had arranged for me to take their youngest son, TK (aka Teek) for them while they were gone. Since their oldest 2 kids didn't have school the first two days of their trip they decided to change the plans up a bit and just have me take him the last 3 days they were gone.

They flew out early Monday morning. Monday afternoon I got a call from Jaddin (their 13 year old). She asked if I would mind coming over for a minute to check on Teek, she said she got home from school and he was outside on the back porch screaming his head off and he was bleeding quite a bit. I am running down the stairs and out the door, because my first question was "Did he fall out the window" she said she checked the windows and that they were closed, except for one that was open a tiny bit, but it didn't look like a big enough crack for him to be able to fall through, so that was a relief.

When I got there he was sleeping. I was worried this was a bad thing because my Mom always said not to let your kids sleep after bonking their heads, in case they had a concussion. But since my Mom has a history of over reacting (no offense Mom... Love You!!) I decided to call a nurse and ask just to make sure. She let me know it was okay to let him sleep. She just said to try and wake him up in an hour and make sure he would wake up. She let me know what things I could expect if he truly had a concussion, and what things to be concerned about. So I told the kids everything she told me, and then I left Teek with them so I could take my kids to their Back to School night and just told them to call me if they needed any thing else.

When I got home from the kids school their was a message from the kids. So I went back over to see how Teek was doing. He had just thrown up for the 8th time and was still just sitting in a daze so I packed him up and brought him to my house so I could watch him more closely. Well we had been home less than 5 minutes before I realized he was not acting normal. He would not talk, he would not walk, and he threw up for the 9th time. I brought Matt in to get a second opinion since I have a tendency to over react (no offense self... Love You!), but Matt was feeling the same way. So after getting a hold of Rick and Deb and letting them know what was going on, we decided to take him into the ER to get checked up.

It was about 9:30 when Matt took him in. I fell asleep shortly after and woke up around 5 to find that Matt still wasn't home. So I called him and found out that Teek had a fractured skull, and that they would need to watch him in the hospital for a while.

Poor Kid! He spent 2 days and 2 nights in the hospital, and the whole time he was just out of it. He slept 95% of the time. He would wake up for a couple minutes here and there, but he wouldn't talk or walk, and he kept throwing up. The CT Scan of his head looked pretty good. The fracture was not compressed, and there was no brain damage, or bleeding on the brain, so we were really just waiting for him to be able to hold down his food and kind of wake up a little. After 2 days though the doctor decided to do another CT Scan to check to see if there was a slow bleed. If there was the plan was to transfer him up to Primary Children's Hospital. I felt so bad for Rick and Deb, just being so far away, and not able to be there with their baby in the hospital.
While we were waiting to get the Okay from the insurance to do another CT Scan, one of the nurses came in to see if Teek wanted to go to the toy room. He was not interested at all, and up to this point had not even walked on his own since he got hurt, so I didn't really see the point in taking him down there but she suggested we try it, so we did. The first thing he saw when we got in there were the balls and the basket ball hoop. I stuck him down to see if he would walk over there and he did. He went over and grabbed each ball and shot them each in the basket. Well from then out he just slowly woke up. He wandered around a little bit in there playing with this or that, but about 10 minutes later he found a bike that he wanted to ride on so he hopped on there and asked for a push. We roamed all over the hospital, and he was jabbering a long the way. Then he found a bat and ball and he would throw the ball with one hand and then swing at it with the other and every time he would hit it he would say "Ah Yeah" It was hilarious. We were all in shock. The nurses were making comments like "Wow, this isn't the same kid who has been in here the past few days," or "Where did this come from, who is this guy, where did Teek go?" It was amazing! One minute he was a Zombie, and then all of the sudden he was back.
After seeing the huge change the nurse called the doctor and got the okay to send him home without even doing another CT Scan. We brought him home and he was fine from then on out. You would never in a million years guess he had just spent the last 2 days in the hospital by the way he was acting. It was crazy!

We were all DYING to know what happened. Nobody saw anything, and to have a fractured skull you would think it would have been a pretty bad fall. Rick and Deb have a security camera on their back porch so when they got home they were able to watch it and see what happened.

He totally fell out their second story window, head first onto their deck. It is a miracle that he is still alive! It is a miracle that he doesn't have brain damage, or a broken neck, or any broken bones for that matter. Knowing what actually happened makes the whole thing worse, I think. I feel so bad that I came over and checked on him and then left, and let him sleep. I can't believe it was 6 hours before we even took him to the hospital... I just felt sick to my stomach!! I've thought of nothing else for the past few days.I feel so blessed! Blessed that he is still with us! Blessed that he is back to his crazy self!

While we were watching the video again a few days later, Rick paused it and asked "Did anyone see BJ?? He's got to have been there somewhere, did anyone see him?" We laughed!!

Who knows how things work, or why some people are spared miraculously. I definitely feel like the Lords hand was in it, and I like to think that if he does use Angels to protect his children sometimes, that BJ is ours... Either way, we are just grateful to still have our little Teeky!