We went to Vegas with Anisa's family to take their family pictures and have a little fun. She wanted them taken at a place called 7 Magic Mountains just outside of Vegas near Jean, Nevada. We stayed at the Goldstrike in Jean and it was super sketch. Bad. Ugh. Just thinking about it makes me shudder. But catching happy hour at Hash House a Go-Go was fun. You can get a bucket of chicken tenders and fries for only $5! And the 7 Magic Mountains were pretty cool.
I learned a couple things this Halloween.
#1: You don't do the face painting at the ward carnival. They got paint on Merit's costume and I ended up staying up the night before Halloween and redoing 1/3 of her candy corn, and of course, it was the hard 1/3.
#2: You absolutely take pictures in the morning instead of right before trick or treating. With little kids, they are all worn out by the time 5:30 rolls around, and you are wasting precious daylight with the pictures.
This year Chap wanted to trick or treat at Daddy's office, so Logan took candy and passed it out before we came and the kids loved it! Anisa also invited us to trick or treat at her school and it was AWESOME! The kids got so much candy and had so much fun. The best thing about this was the kids were dressed up in the morning and I took their pictures. They turned out priceless! So much better than in years past.
We drove up over Chapter's fall break from preschool to go to the pumpkin patch in my hometown. Unfortunately, Daddy didn't come with us, but we had a good time anyway.
All Chapter really wanted for his birthday this year was to go bowling with his cousins and a Pokemon cake. And we made that happen. And it was AWESOME being able to haul 7 kids to Fiesta Fun all by myself in the van:) Chap is blurry in most of the pictures, which is fine, because I want to remember him like he was, so excited he was bouncing all over the place!
I basically have the best husband ever. Even if we did have to shame him in to letting me go a little bit:)
I went to San Antonio, Texas for a girl's weekend with my high school friends/freshman roommates.
It was pretyy much a miracle. We all had the same weekend available, all husbands/fiance were on board, and we had a place to stay and cheap flights.
This idea started brewing in the spring when Logan and I were looking for cheap places to fly for a family vacation. We noticed that flights to Houston were affordable and I have a friend (Julie) who lives there. I talked to her a little bit about it, but then Logan ended up taking the scouts rafting and using his vacation time for that. Then during our high school reunion I said something about a girls night in Texas, totally joking, and Mandy and Julie and Brittney acted interested. Then we found out flights to San Antonio were cheap too. So we booked it about 2 weeks later.
My Friday, Sept 16 started at 3am. I drove Logan's truck across town to catch the shuttle to the Las Vegas Airport. We arrived there about 5am Nevada time. My flight left around 7. I was originally assigned the very back seat with no window, but the flight literally had like 30 people on it, and they let us sit wherever we wanted. I chose a window seat just behind the wing, and I got to experience my first daytime flight with a window seat. It was beautiful! God is amazing! I thoroughly enjoyed that.
We decided to move Chapter downstairs, mostly because having Merit in our room 17 months later was getting a little old. What I wouldn't give to have 3 bedrooms on the same floor in our house, but that just isn't going to happen.
We redid the old office, I'll show the befores, and if we are really lucky, and the kids are being good, I'll try to look back and find the before befores, of the room when we moved in, when it was not so fondly called the "Grandma Room".
It was bound to happen eventually, just not how or to whom I always imagined.
So, do you remember that cute little school bag Chapter and I made? Apparently while making it, my rotary cutter caught his eye. I talked to him while we were using it about how it is a mommy tool and it will hurt you and how I have cut myself with it a bunch of times. I keep it on a high shelf in a room Chap isn't supposed to go in alone. I thought I was safe. But one evening, while Logan was out on a test drive trying to sell our Escape, Chap was playing in his tee-pee. In hindsight I really should have known something was up, the kid never plays in his tee-pee. Anyway, Merit ran into the tee-pee and about 5 seconds later started to cry. It wasn't a scary cry, just a normal cry, like she bumped her head, or wanted a toy Chapter was playing with. So I called to her and told her to come to mommy. So she ran all the way across the downstairs family room to me and I picked her up and and started asking her if she bumped somewhere. About 5 seconds later I noticed blood on her foot so I took her into the bathroom. I washed one foot, no cut. It was then that I discovered blood gushing from her other foot. I ran it under the water and immediately realized this was more than a band-aid injury. I grabbed a bath towel (the hand towels were no where to be found) and wrapped her up and went upstairs to call Logan. I told him we were headed to the instacare. I was remarkably calm, and looking back, I am impressed with myself, haha. I loaded kids in the car and when we got to the corner we saw Logan and he jumped in and came with us.
The receptionist at instacare told us it would be 30 minutes. I was about to go all momma bear on her, but we had just had a stake conference and the stake president talked about being patient and nice to people who were working at stores, etc. Luckily, it was probably only 5 minutes. When the nice old lady nurse started checking to see if her toes worked or if there had been severed tendons I started to panic a little. That had never even crossed my mind. Luckily, it was fine. They took us back into the procedure room and a nice curly haired doctor came in. Not once did I feel like they were judging me or thinking I was a bad mom (I was doing enough of that myself, thank you very much). This was honestly the best instacare experience I have ever had. Usually I feel like I pay the outrageous copay only to be treated like scum, told that I'm stupid and sent home to take some Advil. It was a little traumatizing, but 7 stitches later we went home, with instructions too keep her off of it for 2 days (that was fun) and to come back in 2 weeks for suture removal.
