It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas!

We are ending 2015 in style. We've had a great month of December. My Dad came over last weekend and got us a tree as he does every. It's kind of become a tradition. The kids love to go with Grandpa "Harry" (as they call him, but that's a story for another day) to pick out their tree. I think he likes it too. The kids went crazy with the decorating. They are so darn cute and they make Christmas fun again. They are so excited for Christmas they can hardly stand it. Macie even got into it this year. She doesn't quite realize that you have to put the hook on the tree, but she put the decoration in the tree though.

A couple days after setting up for Christmas we had a snow storm. Ben and Natalie mad it out to shovel the walks for. After all that hard work was done it looked like he needed to go out and shovel again because the snow wouldn't stop coming. It was good for him and Natty though. They got a little daddy-daughter time together.

We have also been doing our best to keep up with the house so that it is clean for Santa Claus. We've run into a few distractions though, namely Macie Jo. Ben was trying to vacuum the stairs and that little stinker kept going in front of him and laying across the stairs so that he couldn't vacuum it. She thought she was so funny.

With all this snow my sister, Chelsie, had this genius idea to take the cousins out to the hills at the university and go sledding. Macie was a little skeptical, but didn't mind watching. Everyone had a great time. We ended the evening by eating homemade chili and sipping on hot cocoa.

November 2014

This year for Thanksgiving we celebrated it at my mom's house and celebrated it with her, Doug, and Ashley and her children. It was a nice Thanksgiving. After dinner Doug and Ben hooked up this sled to the four-wheeler and Ben drug the kids around the field. I think Natalie and Ethan outlasted everyone. We had a great time. I wish that I had more pictures, but I forgot my camera. Thanksgiving snuck up on me this year. I didn't even realize it was Thanksgiving week until the Friday before. It came quickly and it went quickly. We have so much to be thankful for though. We have been truly blessed in our lives and in our family We count our blessings every day. We look forward now to Christmas and spending more time with our families and celebrating the birth of the Savior.

 

Halloween Town

  The last two weeks at the Cook house have been filled with lots of fun. Travis has been nagging me to get the Halloween decorations out so they can decorate. Little does he know that we don't really have any. While Ben was sleeping last Saturday morning I packed the kids up and we went to the family dollar and bought $15 worth of Halloween decorations. When we got home the kids went haywire decorating. The kids put all the window stickers on the windows of their choosing. Some windows are quite bare while others are packed nearly sticker on sticker. They chose where they wanted the wall decorations and spider webs and I put them up. They had so much fun. After all was decorated they went and woke up Daddy to show them the surprise of the "spooky" decorations. Boy was he surprised to go to bed with a normal house and wake up to such spookiness.
  Natalie had her first field trip. They were supposed to go to the pumpkin patch yesterday morning, but due to poor weather it had to be rescheduled to this morning. I had planned on going until it got rescheduled. I had to work the night shift last night and am in no condition to be driving the girls around today. I am a little sad that I missed her first field trip, especially since I am pretty much the only parent who didn't go. She did have so much fun though. I am glad that she went today too because the weather has been a tid bid nicer and less cold. She seemed to have fun with Miss Kara (her teacher) too. She came home and has been jabbering all about it. She brought home a small pumpkin and told me she needed to wash it to "get all the buggies off". She has been carrying her pumpkin around for the last twenty minutes since she got home. She has been a little cutie.
 On another note, about a month ago Ben and I got invited to a "free" dinner to Johnny Corino's in Idaho Falls with some friends. There is nothing free in life, just keep that in mind. It actually turned out to be a free spaghetti dinner over about an hour to an hour and a half presentation on fire safety. While that sounds boring and was kind of boring, Ben and I actually learned a lot about fire safety. For instance you are supposed to check your fire alarm weekly, you should replace the batteries in your fire alarm every six months, you should replace the whole fire alarm unit every ten years, you need to tip your fire extinguisher upside down and give it a good shake every six months or less, we also learned the difference between an ionizing detecting fire alarm and a photoelectric fire alarm, and a carbon monoxide alarm should be present on every floor of the house. We learned a lot more and did some personal research after the meeting was over for ourselves. After all the meeting was not just about fire safety, the presenter was their to sell fire alarms and heat detectors. While we ended up not being interested in his product we did learn a lot. Not more than a couple weeks later when I was volunteering at Trav's school, the fire department came into the classroom and talked fire safety with the kids. And about a week ago there have been fire safety things on the news. I've felt like this is a premonition or something and if I don't listen to all these warnings we will be the ones caught in a fire. It's quite expensive to be fire ready. We have had a couple fire extinguishers that have been tipped upside down and shook recently as you could guess. The batteries in the alarms were checked and actually two alarms were not working. Last year when we replaced the water filter in our refrigerator we found that the old water filter had not been changed in over ten years so if that hasn't been replaced I think it's safe to assume that the fire alarms in our house are the same fire alarms that were placed when the house was built. Slowly, but surely we are going to get every single one of those alarms replaced and get a fire ladder. We also need to have a fire safety plan for our children with a meeting place. That family home evening lesson is to come. We have a whole lot of work ahead of us, but I feel like we need to do it with all these fire safety warnings we've been having.

Family Picture Day

Today was Chelsie's birthday. We all gathered at her house for a family get together. I decided it would be a great opportunity to retake our family pictures. We took them earlier at the Cook family reunion and I really didn't like the way they turned out. My hair was awful and uncooperative and my shirt made me look 7 months pregnant. Today my hair went exactly the way I like it for family pictures, can't say much for the 7 month looking belly, but that's a work in progress. I managed to get the kids and Ben in the outfits I picked out and no one spilled on them before we went out. The only thing that didn't cooperate was the wind and the sun. It was a bit irritating. Between those two downfalls it was making the kids a little more squirrelly than normal and they couldn't see a dang thing and of course squinted into the sun. Can I just say, I FREAKING HATE family picture day! Nothing ever seems to go right. Last year was the best year we had for family pictures. Our pictures turned out lovely. I just have to remind myself that when I look at how great they turned out, the fight it costs to get good pictures like that. I mean if you look close at last years pictures you will notice a wet spot down Natty's pants. No it wasn't water either. She peed her pants right before pictures. I remember being so irritated. Today I went through and looked at the pictures after it was over. While one or maybe two turned out ok I will have to say the family reunion ones were a little bit better. This by no means was the photographers fault. Chelsie took them for us and she took them just how I like them taken. No ones heads were chopped off, no ones bodies were chopped off. Everything was just right. It just didn't work out like I had hoped. It is very frustrating thing. Family picture day is really false advertisement of the picture perfect family anyway. All these pretty smiles and really just before the click of the camera there is chaos. Everyone screaming and fighting (mostly me) and others running around like wild animals (mostly the kids) and the rest are just pouting (mostly Ben). Well I think you get the picture. He are the fruits of our labors today.

 

 

 

Here are some cute one's that I was able to get of the kids. Poor Nat's lips have had it. I can't get her to stop licking them. Still a cute little stinker though!

 

 

 

 

Here are some pictures I captured of everyone else with us:

 

 

 

Family Fun in September

Well today all the kids have runny noses so I decided it would be a good day to play hooky from church. The kids are running around the house like crazy right now so I probably should have taken them to church, but Natty keeps running up to me to wipe her "nosey".  So I guess I will update the blog. 

I can't remember if I posted pictures of our Battle Ball Soccer last month. It was quite the workout. Who needs P90X after an hour of that. I was so stinking sore the next day I could hardly life my shirt over my arms when I was getting dressed for the day. It was hard to breathe in there and I personally had to take several breaks because of how much energy it consumes. I don't think any of us lasted past 45 minutes before we gave in to our age and our lack of energy. It was a tie game. At the beginning our team was getting demolished before we realized it was basically all the boys and Tristan against the rest of us. We switched more evenly. There were only two goals scored during the game. The first was Tristan and the last was yours truly. I don't want to brag or anything, but it's hard to be humble sometimes.

 

 

 

 

I know I talked about school starting, but I didn't post first day of school pictures. Trav and Natty's pictures turned out marvelous. Macie Jo and Ben's was pretty classic too I must say. This year Travis is in 1st grade and Natty is in Preschool. Both are loving it.

 

 

Early in the month Travis already missed his first day of school. He had a cavity filled and I was a little worried how he would do so we opted for conscious sedation. He came home a little on the loopy side. He sat down on the couch and started staring at it and said, "I didn't know the couch could change colors. How does it do that?" Then Later he would not sit down and there was a missing ketchup crisis and he "knew" where it was and jumped up from his chair and took off running to go get it and smacked straight on into the chair in front of him and fell to the ground. It was like a scene right out of a movie. It was so funny, but I couldn't laugh because he was so upset over it. When dad woke up from his nap he took Travis downstairs to play his new Lego Movie video game. He was pretty excited about that.

Travis has grown so much so fast. He is such a good boy with a gentle heart. He is such a good brother and watches out for his sisters all the time and helps out around the house really well too. His biggest hero that he looks up to is his daddy. Travis tries to be just like him. Whenever Ben is wearing a hat Travis is too. He likes to follow Ben around and go to town with Ben when he's getting things for the house. We bought him some work gloves and some ear muffs and they get used frequently at our house.

 

 

 

This little monster is growing up fast too. She is such a pretty girl. Her and I have our battle some days, but she is a sweet little thing. She just had a doctors appointment this week and she grew a couple inches and gained 6 pounds since last year. That was nice to hear because she's so skinny and small. Her body is starting to catch up with her attitude. She is our little mother hen. She is always making sure everything is equal and fair and if it's not she knows how to take care of it. She is an outdoors girl for sure. She could spend all day outside if you let her. We spent an hour and a half on the swing just yesterday. I could not convince her to get off. Just as soon as I talked her off the swing she turned around and got on another swing. I finally talked her inside for a drink.



 

 

 

 

This little gremlin graduated earlier in the month from her crib to her toddler bed. She got her leg caught in the rail of her crib and I had to use lotion to get it unstuck. We had similar problems with Natty when she was her age so we decided not to mess with it and just switch her over. She does pretty good in her bed. With both Travis and Natty we had problems with them getting up and falling asleep in front of the door. Macie Jo may get up and play, but when she starts getting tired she always gets back into her bed. She covers herself up with blankets and everything. She is starting to become quite the climber too. Those diaper boxes you see had to be taken out of her room because she unstacked them and pushed them up against the twin bed in her room and climbed up on the twin bed and then climbed up on the headboard and was standing up there and didn't know how to get down so she was just standing and crying. It's a good thing I checked on her too because if I hadn't she would have taken quite the tumble. She is a mischief maker! 

 

 

 

 

Rulan had a birthday last weekend. Kathy threw him a surprise party. She was quite delighted when he was so surprised about his party. We all met at Stockman's for the big surprise. James flew down for it and had Cali on face time for the big surprise. After the restaurant  we went back to their house for presents where I gave Rulan my fun box of gifts. It was quite fun to put together. It had some homemade Viagra, Milk of Mag, hemorrhoid cream, an adult diaper, and some other fun stuff. After all the presents were over he read his book all about him to the family. The next day after an intense wrestling match between Aubrey and I we went fishing. Travis stuck with grandpa the whole time. He had a lot of fun. There was a picture of Macie eating Grandpa's Hershey's bar, but I couldn't find it. It must have been taken on another camera. Apparently it was a replica of when Ben was her age. He had stolen a Hershey's bar from Rulan on another birthday.

 

 

 

That's all I got for this month. In other news we are really looking forward to the General Conference weekend. Ben has the entire weekend off and it has probably been the first time he has since we first got married. He is usually working all or part of it.