You do good work.

My wife does a lot of stuff and sometimes I know she thinks it is just stuff, but she is wrong. Not only is she a great mother, but she is the primary chorister in our ward and she does a great job.
This last weekend was my birthday and we went down to Mesa for a premiere of Kid History. Since we were in Mesa I thought we would take the kids to the Mesa Temple visitors center Saturday morning.
In the center there is a room that has the life of Jesus in pictures. Mason walked around to each picture and told Kreslie what everyone of them was about. He also preceeded to tell her that he was going to be resserected after he dies. I was amazed. He is actually picking up what he is being taught.
On the way home we singing a primary song in the car and Mason remembered every word. Today in church I was watching Mason in primary and he again knew every word to every song. Good Job Mason and good job Kreslie. You make a huge difference in the lives of our children.

Aubrey turns 2

Happy Birthday to sweet little Aubrey. She is everyones favorite and a precious girl. This has been a great year for her. She is talking in sentences (which I love) running and keeping up with her older sisters and having a blast playing with them. Dwayne's favorite moment was a toss up between her first "I love you Daddy" and learning to say "Star Wars!" My favorite thing is that she has my eyes. She likes to talk on her toy phone to grandma, push her baby doll in her stroller, dancing to music, watching Dora the Exploring, helping me wash dishes and sucking her thumb while twirling her hair. I have to give her a ponytail in her hair so she can twist it. Her nickname is Monkey and she will repond to it. She loves monkeys and I am always looking for shirts or stuffed animals of the same. We all love our lovely girl. She completes our family.

Mason's First Basketball Game

Today was Mason's first ever basketball game. Both Dwayne and I were nervous to let Mason sign up for basketball in the first place. I always have conflicting emotions whenever Mason wants to try something new. I want him to experience new things and to try things he has never done before but with his Autism I never know how others will react to HIM. Will they understand that he claps and hums and he can't help it. Will they realize that he hears and absorbs everything around him so he can't focus on everything you say so you will have to repeat yourself many times. Will they see the quirky sense of humor he has and see just how smart he is and how much he wants to do well. Will they help him learn, not brush him a side. So when he came home with the sign up paper I said "I don't know Mason." He looked my straight in the eye and said "Mom, I can do it." I signed the paper and said a prayer.

He played more than I thought he would. I thought his coach would put him in for the requisite time that every kid has to play and then bench him. But he played a lot. Mason had a hard time with the yelling and echo in the gym. I think it made concentrating on they ball difficult but every time someone yelled "Mason! Look at the ball" he focused. We need to work on passing the ball because his teammates tried passing him the ball but he flinched and dropped it. But he ran well and followed his team back and forth on the court. My favorite part of the game was what his teammates and coach did for him. The coach told the kids on the court to make a wall, the ball was passed to Mason, he took a shot and he MADE IT! My son made one basket and I couldn't be prouder. As I often remind myself with Mason...baby steps. So thank you Dr. Koerprich for understanding.

Queen Bee

Denyce precipitated in her third spelling bee. She won last year and was hoping to do win again this year. Unfortunately she came in fourth. But she still qualified to go to the county spelling bee on Feb 15th in Snowflake which is what she really wanted. She is determined to do better this year than she did last. No matter what she does I am still super proud of her. I am NOT a speller. If fact I will use spell check when I am done with this post and I will be glad I did. Yup, I spelled something wrong (sigh)

Lily's New Goal

The high school cheerleaders put on a fundraiser where they coached a bunch of little kids on cheering. Then they performed at a basket ball game half time. I asked Lily if she wanted to do it thinking that she wouldn't. She surprised me by saying yes. Lily is not very outgoing and a little shy with new people and new opportunities. So I was proud that she would try. She had a fun time and performed well at the game. She even smiled. Now she says she wants to be a cheerleader and a ballerina. Go Roadrunners!!

Christmas Day 2011

This year for Christmas there were some first for our family. First, Christmas was on a Sunday. I don't remember having a Christmas on this day before. Luckily for us we had church at 1:00 so Christmas morning wasn't any different. Although we only had an hour of church, not only were my kids tired but everyone else's were as well. The primary sang 5 songs for the Christmas program and I had 3 kids fall asleep in their chairs on the stand! It was very amusing.
Second, every kid got a present from Santa and P.J's from us the night before but all the other presents were homemade. I really enjoyed making scarves, hand warmers, white boards and with Denyces' help quiet books for the three little girls. Each kid also precipitated in Secret Sibling. We started this in our family last year. You pick a sibling's name and make a homemade gift. We had so much fun last year and it is what inspired the homemade theme this year. Garrison made Denyce a wall hanging with her initials, Kwynn gave Lily a garden snow globe, Mason made a pillow for Garrison, Lily had Kwynn and made her a match game, Aubrey made Mason a big Jenga set and Denyce made a box for Aubrey that was filled with musical instruments. My favorite gift was from Dwayne and the kids. They took my 12 favorite pictures that I've taken and put them together in a calender. It looks great! The boys favorite gift had to be the bottle rocket launchers that Dwayne made them. We all had fun working the pump and watching the 2 liter bottles rocket into the sky.

As you can see from the pictures, it was still dark outside when we got up because it was at 5:30 in the morning! Normally we make the kids wait until 6:00 but for some reason we let it go this year. Maybe we were all excited for Christmas this year. After opening presents we had our traditional cinnamon rolls for breakfast and watched A Christmas Story. Garrison found it real funny this year. Hopefully memories were made and everyone had a great Christmas. My kids are already looking forward to next year!

Snow Day!

The most amazing thing happen this last Friday Dec. 2nd. It snowed..a lot! We have lived here for 8 years and I have never seen this much snow before. School was canceled, nobody in town had electricity and we were so unprepared my kids didn't even have gloves. We had to wait until that afternoon when the power was back on to pick some up. But we had so much fun that day. Our neighbors down the street the (new) Hatch's brought out their horses and towed everyone up and down the street on a sled. The Hall's were there too which prompted a big snow ball fight. My kids stayed out as long as they could and they weren't the only ones. Driving through town you could see kids everywhere building snowmen, making snow angels and at Hunt park some very resilient children made a huge snow duck in the field. Since Dwayne was home he got to help us put up outside Christmas lights. It has been a long time since he has done this because he is usually at wrestling finals. Garrison and Lily were helping him put up the lights on the fence and I need to know what kind of end he had at the end of the string. I asked and he reply ed that he had a male end. "A male end? Dad what does that mean?" Lily asked. Garrison answered "Don't worry Lily, you'll find out when your older. But its not as exciting as you think it is." Oh how that kid makes me laugh! We built our own snowman and colored him with food coloring. The kids loved that part. To top off the the weekend we also put up our Christmas tree. This year we are trying something new. My sister found a Yoda tree topper and was kind enough to send it to us. We bought Star Wars good and bad guys colored ornaments to go with the theme. Everyone agrees that the coolest thing is that Yoda's light saber glows. Nothing say holiday cheer like a scowling Yoda. We love it anyway!