Excuses, Excuses

I know. I always have an excuse for slacking on my blog, but this time I have a really good one:

Yup. We're having another one! This one was a bit of a surprise (a happy one...besides the pregnancy part. Baby--yay! Pregnant--boo) so I don't know when I'm due. I'm guessing sometime around June or July, which will make Alaina and Baby #4 about 18 months apart. Raelin and Ryker are 20 months apart and it was really hard when they were little but so much fun now. They are such good buddies (but also mortal enemies on occasion). I haven't been quite as sick this time as I was with the other kids, but I've been TIRED! For a while there I was going to bed at 8:30 or 9:00. So between sleeping, feeling sick (but not puking, for the most part), and getting Christmas gifts made, the blog has fallen by the wayside. Also, still no camera to speak of (camera phones don't count when you're trying to get pictures of wiggly kids--they're not fast enough to make it worth it), which makes blogging a bit boring to me. I do have a few pictures though....The kids in their new clothes

And Alaina is officially a biped, walking more than crawling and it's adorable because she is just so tiny!

...but she has a hard time walking in her new shoes. I haven't had shoes for her for a long time so she's not used to the hard soles. She stands there apprehensively until she just falls over like her feet are laden with blocks of lead. She started getting the hang of it yesterday and she laughed and laughed!

Oh, I should tell how we announced our news to family because it was fun. Brice's family did a white elephant gift exchange for Christmas this year instead of traditional gifts and it had to be in a quart jar. So I put the pregnancy test in a jar with a tag on it that said, "Announcing a new member of the family. Guess who!" and I wrapped it in shiny gold foil. It was so bright and pretty that it was the first gift picked. It took a minute for the family to figure it out because everyone in the family had a reason to be an unlikely candidate; us, because our baby wasn't even a year old yet (her birthday is on Sunday! How the time flies!). So that was a fun guessing game. Then for Gina and Toby's gift I made them a little wooden box (more about that in a future post) and labeled it "the oven." Then I put two small dolls inside, one labeled "Gina's bun" and the other labeled "Morgan's bun." Boy, was she surprised!

And another interesting side note; my grandma will be having 6!!!! great-grandbabies in 2010! My aunt Tori is having 4 grandbabies and my mom is having 2! Any more upcoming arrivals I should know about? C'mon, cousins, there are 5 more of you that are married and not expecting. You guys should jump on the bandwagon! Oh, and I just had a new baby cousin born right after Christmas (Congrats, Jon and Ange!). Babies, babies everywhere!

Anyway, I hope you all had a great Christmas; ours was miraculous and wonderful! We made it to California after Christmas to visit Brice's family and had a great time (and were blessed that our car didn't break down even though we had a seized up pulley! Brice fixed it when we got home, but our trip was amazingly unaffected). We are truly blessed to have wonderful friends and family who made this holiday season particularly special for us. Thank you!