Our Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!!!
Above is Macey the Christmas Angel. Too bad she really wasn't much of an angel for Christmas this year! I think there was just too much going on and she was a little bit ornery for most of it.

We did have a nice Christmas time. We spent a lot of it entertaining others. The kids played their instruments at Maceys for fun.

Micah and Caleb have finally teamed up as a duo. They performed a little number for the ward Relief Society Christmas dinner. Here is a little video of their number:



Please ignore the many facial grimaces and gigantic yawn by Caleb. Sorry, this was really our best take if you can believe it!

We visited with Great Grandma Lentz and played a few songs for her.

Jewelia played her violin too.

On Christmas Eve we have the traditional Christmas Eve dinner at Troy's family's house. The cousins love it. Poor Micah and Caleb are a bit older than everyone else, but the girls have made some cousin friends.

Jewelia loves to play with Hayley.

And Macey is making a new friend with baby Kaitlyn.

We eat and do a little bit of a present exchange for those we drew names for. I got a new hat :)

Then FINALLY we get to go home and open our traditional Christmas Eve pajamas!

Macey is thinking about drinking Santa Claus's chocolate milk.

It took a bit to get the kids all to bed. Well, mostly Macey was being a pain, but they finally went to bed and in the morning it was Christmas!!!

The kids loved their presents and were very happy.

Caleb enjoyed building his first lego house all by himself.

Micah had a good time with new lego games.

Jewelia and Macey were thrilled with a new dollhouse to share. Of course it has caused much fighting because one or the other has a different idea of what should be happening and where the furniture should go. But mostly they enjoy playing together.

We didn't exchange many presents between the two of us. I got Troy some underwear and he gave me some fingernail polish. Really exciting, I know.

We got some nice presents from the the in-laws and it was a nice day. (Look, I got another new hat. Good thing to hide my slobby hair during Christmas break!)

Troy has the whole week off of work this next week, so hopefully it will give me a nice time to relax, sleep in, and let Troy take care of everything for once.

Well, here's to hoping anyway.

Spinning, Dancing, Singing, and Nutcracker

This past week we have been even more busy with kids choir performances, dance class performances, and Nutcracker performances. It has been a crazy week! No wonder we all got deathly ill by the end of it! We are all hopefully better now, and so here are some pictures and videos of last week's events.

Caleb and Micah were such cute party boys in the local Nutcracker ballet!

They did a "Parent Watch Week" at dance class so we got to see Jewelia and Micah in their classes.

Here is Jewelia's Christmas number:
(She's the short one in the pink.)



And here is a little dance Micah is working on in tap:



Macey thought it was great to watch the kids. She was copying their dances and having her own little dance in the corner of the room while they performed.

On Friday, the boys were in a school choir performance. Poor Micah though--for some reason they decided to arrange the school choir in rows per grade, and so they placed Micah in the very center of the back row with the other 6th graders, but you can't even see him because he's as short as the girls in front of him, and the one girl has a particularly large bow on her braid blocking his face most of the time. Oh, well, I got a few peaks at him.

Caleb is the one jiving out on the front row.

I did manage to see a bit more of Micah's head in the next song:



But then all the rest he wasn't to be seen. Come on now! It did make me a little upset whoever had decided to arrange the kids this way! But oh, well, I guess we were there rather to listen than to see.

I took a picture at the end when they were all sitting down to prove that Micah did exist!

Christmas Busy

We have been crazy busy this past month with all kinds of activities! I guess I'm lucky that Santa loves me! I need all the help I can get.

Here I am with my good pal Santa and one of his elves. Too bad I'm the same size of his elves!

Our family has been pretty booked with music, dance and school activities, that we haven't had too much free time. Plus we've had a lot of Christmas parties.

We barely fit in time to take our Christmas card pictures. I think we maybe managed a few good ones. These are not the ones we sent out though.

Here's just the kids:

I guess we could have waited a week longer to have Macey out of her cast, but oh well. She finally got her cast off this last week and is doing well. It took a day before she would walk on it, but now she is running around and dancing just as crazy as ever.

The kids are keeping me very busy. The boys are both in a local Nutcracker and have began performances. Jewelia was in a school Christmas program, and Caleb has began all his Christmas piano performances. He played in another ward this morning and at the Stake Choir performance tonight. Next week he plays in our ward. He is loving every minute of it. Micah has teamed up with Caleb with his guitar and they are playing on and off at Maceys.

There are so many Christmas parties to go to! Saturday I took the day off so we could go to 3 parties all in one day! It is all in good fun though. Too bad I'm going to gain 10 pounds by the time Christmas is over!

Happy Birthday Macey! You're Still My Baby

Hooray!!

Macey turned 3 years old on Friday, and we finally celebrated her birthday Saturday night.

She has had a rough birthday week. A week ago she broke her leg and so between trying to figure out what was wrong and getting her hard cast on, she has not been too happy. She has had a lot of nice visitors who have come over and brought her little "get well" gifts, so it has seemed like her birthday all week.

Poor little girl. She had a splint on for several days, but finally she got her hard cast on Wednesday, and what color did she pick? Why, bright YELLOW---her favorite color! And a very bright yellow it was!

Although it looked cute with her little yellow outfit, Macey doesn't have all yellow clothes, so it really stands out with her other outfits.

She got some nice yellow balloons for her birthday as well!

She also got a nice yellow cake too. Her mommy didn't have very much time to put it all together, so it wasn't very fancy, but Macey liked her yellow butterfly cake just the same.

She had a quiet little party with some friends and family and got some fun presents.
She finally got her starter drum set so she can start practicing to be in the band!

Although the doctors gave permission for Macey to walk with her cast, she still isn't walking or wanting to either. Poor little girl. We hope she will be back to her old self soon. 4 more weeks of wearing a cast!

So, although she has turned 3 and that seems like the end to being a baby and now she should be a big girl, I'm not going to let it happen just yet. She can't walk and she's stuck there needing me to carry her and care for her. I guess she'll just have to be my little baby for a few more weeks.
She can be a big 3 year old next month.

A Big Day for Caleb, A Broken Leg for Macey

Saturday was a big day for Caleb.

It was his baptism!

Caleb was baptized by his wonderful daddy.

It was really a tough day actually. It was already going to be a very very busy day.

The boys are both dancing in the ballet Nutcracker this year and so they were to have a Nutcracker Full Scene 1 practice from 10-noon, then Caleb's baptism was going to be at 1, and then at 4 we needed to be in Ogden up at Weber State University because Caleb was asked to perform in the Utah Music Teacher's Association annual conference.

So, it would be busy, but we were going to make it work, and everything would be great.

Of course, things don't always work out as planned.

Friday night while I was at work, Macey decided she wanted to jump on the trampoline with her daddy. Now, I have been really careful and we got the trampoline with the big safety enclosure, and I have set very strict rules about only one person being able to jump at a time unless they are small and then maybe 2 small kids can be in there at the same time, but I guess my rules were not good enough.

Macey went in the trampoline to jump next to her dad and she jumped up and then landed funny and would not get up again. Troy called me later at work saying Macey had hurt her leg really bad and refused to walk, so off he went to InstaCare.

(Now, here is a little side note: Never never never go to InstaCare with your small child who may have broken something. They aren't going to do anything, they aren't really going to help you, and then you will just have to go somewhere else later but still have to pay their $300 bill for making you go somewhere else where they can really help you.)

Anyway, yes he went to InstaCare and they x-rayed Macey and yet could not see any fracture, and so just wrapped her up in an ace bandage and told Troy to call the childrens hospital on Monday to have their radiologists look at it.

So I got home from work after shopping too about midnight. She was asleep and so I figured things were alright.

Oh, my I was soooo wrong. From 1 am to 7 am Macey was screaming and crying at least every 20 minutes. We could get her leg in the position she wanted and she would sleep just long enough for us to finally think we were going to get some sleep, and then yet she would wake up screaming again. It was the worst night ever! I felt so bad for her, but at the same time, we couldn't even think or function because we had gotten maybe 30 minutes of sleep.

In the morning I started calling doctors and asking what to do. The pediatrician office said we could bring her in there to look again or call back InstaCare, or take her to Primary Childrens, but I didn't really know what was best, and I didn't want to take her to the Pediatrician if they were going to say to take her to the hospital. We had already gone to InstaCare and I guess I'm an awful mom, but we have a $1000 deductible and I didn't want to have an InstaCare bill, then a doctor bill, and then an emergency room bill. I wanted to take care of it in one place. So, I called the InstaCare place back to see if they could do something better.

This time I had a radiologist who said that her leg was fractured, and they had never seen anything like it and it might need an orthopedic surgeon and we should take her up to the hospital ASAP.

OK, so now it was 10 am, the boys had to go to practice and I had to get Macey up to the hospital and hope things were OK, yet Caleb had a baptism at 1 and how was this going to work when she might have to have surgery? Oh, this is where things began falling apart.

I thought I could have my mom and Jim sit at the hospital with her and I go back to the baptism, but that wasn't nice. It wasn't fair to my mom and it wasn't right for me to leave Macey either.
I took a wrong turn and so it was almost 11 am by now and I hadn't even gotten to the hospital. So, what else to do? I had to cancel the baptism. I began calling people telling them it wasn't going to work, and I was feeling awful to know people had flown in for this and it wasn't going to happen.

But then, surprisingly we got to the hospital and they took her right in and they told us InstaCare was wrong and it wasn't bad to need surgery and they splinted her all up, gave her some pain medicine and said to set up an appointment to get a hard cast. I was so surprised it was being taken care of so quickly and Macey was doing so much better now that she had good drugs and her leg was immobilized. Now it was about 11:50 and all of the sudden I thought we could still do this. Let's not cancel! So crazy it all was, I began calling everyone back to uncancel it and then hoped to drive home quickly enough.

Of course, this was also some huge University of Utah game thing and all the roads were blocked, and I couldn't get a hold of everyone and I was freaking out, and I hadn't had any time to make cookies for the baptism, and on and on.....but I drove and hurried, and ran by the store and faked some store bought cookies as my own on a Christmas platter, and got to the baptism with seconds to spare.

Things were not perfect though. For in all the chaos, some very important people were missing. I felt bad that they were not there because of all this mess. They had heard the 1st cancel, but not the uncancel. What a mess!! We hadn't had time to finalize Micah's talk and he was all freaked out as well, but in the end, I think it worked out. Micah was OK, another sister filled in on the spot, and it was actually a very very nice baptism. I feel bad I didn't get any pictures of all the wonderful people who were there to support us.

After the baptism we had to say quick goodbyes and then we had another big event---off to Weber State University for Caleb's piano performance. Our super nice neighbors took care of Macey for us and we began speeding to Ogden.

We made it barely in time, but Caleb did very well and got another cherished certificate.

If you'd like to see his performance, you can check out his piano blog here.

And then it was finally over. The crazy day and crazy mess, but it all turned out OK in the end. Well, except for poor little Macey, but we hoped she would be feeling better soon. For sure once we get a hard cast on her.


One thing we learned---the doctors told us that kids should only jump by themselves alone on a trampoline when they are young under the age of 6 because of their bone structure. They said another person can't even be sitting on the side of the trampoline while they jump because it tightens the bounce of the trampoline and so when a little kid jumps and lands back on the trampoline, the coil isn't stretchy enough and they can hurt themselves. So--for all of you out there who might not have known this---be careful and keep your young kids off the trampoline or make sure they are only one at a time allowed on!

Anyway,
thanks sooo much to all our family and friends who helped us and made everything work out. It was a very important day and we're so glad Caleb could be baptized and all of you could be a part of it.

Hooray for New Bathroom Stuff!

So we finally got our bathroom all fixed up! Well, no we didn't do a complete remodel. We just needed to fix the floor, and we got a new bathtub and surround, but it is finally done!

It is funny, I'm almost afraid to use it because I want it stay nice. When I'm in the shower I'm all concerned that I might mess something up if I stand here or let the water touch this side too much or something. I guess I just like new and nice so much and hope that it will last.

Macey likes her new bathtub!

Halloween 2010

Happy Halloween!!! We had so much fun this year dressing up! But don't we always? Well, most of us do.

This year we dressed up like many different things:

Troy was Batman with his trusty sidekick Robin:

Becca was a witch:

Micah went as Mr. Spock:

Caleb was Robin:

Then there comes the girls, and of course they can't just wear ONE costume.

Jewelia dressed up as Sleeping Beauty:

But of course, she did have to dress as Cinderella another day when she had a Halloween party:

Macey was Snow White:

But it was cold sometimes and so she went as Piglet to the kids' Halloween parade:

And then it was raining on Halloween, so she dressed as "Winter Tigger":

We had pumpkin carving night:

Some of us carved and some of us painted.
Jewelia made a rainbow pumpkin:

Caleb made a crazy face pumpkin:

Micah made a skeleton face:

And Macey made a mess.

Troy's pumpkin:

Becca's smiley pumpkin:

Halloween started out in the pouring rain, so Macey didn't last long. She said she had enough candy and wanted to go home, so Macey and Mommy got to stay home in the nice warm house and give out treats.

The kids finally came home and we dumped all the candy to examine what they had brought us.

Then they could go to bed and leave us with all the goodies!
HA HA HAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!

Hopefully I won't eat it all.