Explanation

I thought perhaps I should explain the new background. There are two reasons.

1. I'm trying to think warm thoughts in hopes that spring will come quickly and the weather will stop teasing me with its bipolarity. I'm sick of snow that never sticks and bright sunny days that get your hopes up only to have them dashed when you step outside to find that it's freezing and windy. We have had occasional warm-ish days, but then I wake up the next morning to find it snowing. Again. Guess how much snow is on the ground right now. None. Guess when it snowed last. 10:00 this morning. Story of my life right now and I'm so sick of it! I want sunshine and t-shirt weather!!!!!!! Even Ryker, who's always happy and excited about everything, has been begging to plant things and I have to keep explaining to him that the plants would die because it's too cold.

2. My computer with the new operating system is set so that I have to zoom out to see the whole frame, so I'll probably forget what background I have for several months. With this one, I won't have to worry about it until fall.

Ryker

Ryker says the funniest things.

After church:

Brice: Do you guys want to go for a drive?

Kids: Nooooooooooo!!!
Brice: Why not?
Ryker: Because we should go straight home and eat sugar.

Towards the end of a long day of Ryker snatching treats with the last straw being that he was snatching (again) Raelin's Valentine's hearts while her back was turned:

Me: Ryker! NO MORE CANDY!! You may not have any more candy for the rest of the day!

Ryker: Waaaaaaa! I just love sugar!!!

Followed by a complete meltdown and consequently an early bedtime. Sugar overload I guess.

Showing the kids some more dollars I printed out for our family money system (they were smaller than the last batch):

Kids: Aaaawwww! They're so cute!
Ryker: They're like a baby horse. Cuuuute!

What?! Where did that come from?

In the car:

Ryker: And when we have the new baby, it can sit in that seat, and then our next baby can sit in this seat, and then our next baby can sit in that seat and then when we have our next baby, we won't have any more seats and we'll have to get a new car.
Me: How many more babies do you think we're having?
Ryker: 8!

He's continued to tell me that we are having 8 more kids in our family for a grand total of 11 kids. Yeah, right.

Alaina

She is just so cute! I want to squeeze her all the time and pinch those little cheeks!

Wearing mommy's shoes

She thought it was so funny to give herself kisses in the mirror. And she can give real kisses; not the open-mouth slobber kisses babies usually give. She smacks her lips and everything! So cute! I also noticed that she has a cute little dimple high on her cheek when she smiles really big.

She loves this chair and she'll grab a book and sit down to "read." Unfortunately, as soon as she sees the camera, she starts to get up to come see me, so I keep missing cute candids.

Dancing

This is a baby carrier I made for my cousin. I love the fabric and it turned out really nice! The pictures don't do it justice. Maybe she can get some nicer pictures of it after she has her baby. But I have to say that I love making things. It's so cool to be able to look at something useful (and typically expensive--you know what a tightwad I am) and say, "I didn't have to buy that; I MADE it!" I love my baby carriers and it makes me so happy to have made something I use all the time. And to have saved $70 by not having to buy it from someone else!

Woohoo!

Sorry for the relative blogging silence over the last few months. It's been pretty depressing to try to blog without any pictures to go with my stories. I LOVE taking pictures and I have missed my camera immensely. I decided that I just couldn't stand not capturing my little ones as they grow. Ryker is getting so tall and Raelin hasn't stopped growing in about a year. And Alaina has this smile lately that just kills me! With her little mouth full of teeth and her pinchy little cheeks! I just couldn't stand letting all these moments pass me by undocumented! So I started looking on KSL (I love KSL!) and researching things on the internet. I talked to Brice and told him what kind of options were out there and asked him if he thought this was something worth investing in right now. He said he loves all the things I do with our pictures (like blogging) and that we should definitely remedy our camera-less situation. After several hours of research, I decided to get this one:from someone on KSL for $30 (but then I talked her down to $20)! It certainly isn't my dream camera or anything but I won't be getting that anytime soon. So for now, I'm just happy to be able to do this:I think the kids were almost as excited as I was to have a camera again! Ha! It doesn't always take the greatest pictures and some of the pictures are blurry in low light situations, but at least I have pictures again! Now I just have to fiddle with my computer so it will let me upload the pictures without so much hassle.

The kids both have a set of these blocks (called Trio blocks) and they love them, and so do I. I highly recommend them as a before-they're-ready-for-Legos set.

Alaina just makes the best faces! Just look at this funny face with all those big teeth! (We all know how much I love taking pictures of her, but there's also a bazillion more pictures of her than the other kids because she was home with me all day today and the other kids weren't. Just so you don't think I'm TOO biased!)

Have some drool! And some really big eyelashes to go with it...
She loves watching the dogs in the backyard.
This is her mad face:
So now I'm back to feeling motivated to blog and I'm wishing I had more to talk about right now! Hopefully, I'll get around to taking some belly pictures with this baby like I did with Alaina and get those posted soon. I fear I'm going to be HUGE! I mean, I was huge with Alaina and all my muscles and things are no where near back to normal, so I'm kinda scared of just how cow-ish I'm going to become. Anybody want to start a women's soccer league with me? Basketball? Rugby's probably not such a good idea... I was playing basketball with my ward on Saturdays for a while, but that's over now. I was surprised by how hard I was willing to work when I wasn't just "working out." Going running by myself, or biking, or yoga or anything else that I do by myself is not nearly as much fun or as productive. But I think I'm going to need something intense to keep from being so huge that I turn into a beached whale.

Oh, here's a good group of pictures. Alaina loves this little song and here's Brice helping her with the motions (he's such a great daddy!):

I had a little turtle,
His name was Tiny Tim,
I put him in the bathtub,
To see if he could swim

He drank up all the water (gulp, gulp, gulp)

He ate up all the soap (chomp, chomp, chomp)
And now he's sick in bed with

Bubbles in his throat
(use your finger across your lips to make a bubububub noise as you say this line)

Bubble, bubble, bubble,
Bubble, bubble, bubble,
Bubble, bubble, bubble,
Bubble, bubble, POP!!

Because of this song, "bubble" is one of the few words in Alaina's repertoire. She makes the bubble motion with her hands and says, "bub, bub, bub" after we finish the song. Every now and then she'll say, "bubboh, bubboh," but usually it's just "bub."

Well, that's all for now! Hopefully I will be a better blogger now!

Due Date!

Well, we got in for an ultrasound today to find out when the heck to expect this baby of ours. Baby is due July 5, 2010, just two days before Ryker's birthday! Of course, it's a rough estimate (+/- 10 days--please be minus!). So this means that I am 18 weeks and 1 day along. Almost halfway! That's one of the things I like about waiting to announce a new addition; the time just flies by when it's not such a frequent topic of conversation. Not that I don't like talking about it; I do! But I really don't like being pregnant, so the shorter it feels the better. I have some pictures and I'll see if my computer-geek physicist brother-in-law can get them scanned to the computer for me this evening. I don't know how to do it with Linux. Wait, I think I just figured it out... Yup there we go! I'm a genius!

The first on is the hardest to see (if you click on the image, it will open in a new screen much bigger and easier to see), but it's the baby's profile and it's facing up with a hand in front of it's forehead. The second one is the face with a big vacant space where it's brain should be. Hopefully it's in there somewhere...

This one is the hand (kinda looks like the baby is flippin' the bird, but it's actually the baby's other hand) and the next one is a foot.

No gender shot because it's going to be a surprise! I asked the tech not to tell me. She told Ryker she'd tell him if he payed her a lot of money and I'm sure that offer is on the table for any of you that are dying to know! ;0)

So now for the name game... This takes a long time. It's really the only reason we'd be interested in finding out gender; so I'd have half as many names to weed through.

The other thing we learned from this ultrasound is that the placenta is a bit close to the cervix for comfort and we should check on it again later to be sure it's moved far enough away for a safe birth. It usually does, but the tech said we should check later just in case.