Family Update Part 1

We are moving!!!!

Most of you know Paul works for ExxonMobil.  They are in the process of building a new campus just south of The Woodlands in Spring, Texas which is where eventually almost all of Exxon employees will work.  That is currently a 1-1.5hr drive from our home in Katy, Texas.  He started a new assignment at the beginning of August on the construction site of the new campus.

Knowing that these plans were coming our way we began fasting and praying about moving then looking for homes.  This process has been ongoing for well over a year and we knew it could take years more before we found exactly what we were looking for.

However, in May, we found a new subdivision that we felt was right for us.  It has direct access to where the new Grand Parkway will be, is 10 minutes from the new Exxon campus and has a new LDS meetinghouse in the subdivision.  We waited patiently for the exact section we wanted to open. In August we signed the papers to build a new home! 

They finally finished the roads in our section in September.  We had our own private groundbreaking ceremony the first weekend of October and hopefully in about 2 weeks they will get started building our home!  It shouldn’t be ready until the end of March, so we still have plenty of time, but it is official, we are moving!

We have lived in this area of Katy, the Westlake ward of our church, for 11 years, ever since we got married.  The thought of leaving our friends and neighbors, even to live a little more than an hour up the road, is heartbreaking for us.  We love it here and are very sad to move on.  But we KNOW this is the right move for our family and are having fun planning for the new house.

I hope to post LOTS of pictures of the house as it gets built, so bear with me.  We are super excited for this next stage of our life so wish us well.  We are moving!!!!

David’s update

 

It’s hard to write everything that has happened with David this year.  He has grown up so much!  He went from being a baby to quite a big boy right now.

A year ago he got tubes in ears.  He had had so many ear infections in his first year of life that we didn’t have any hesitation  in doing the tubes.  He’s our 4th kid, but was the first one to have to have any surgery or really any medical procedures.  The surgery went fine of course and he woke up REALLY MAD, but recovered great.  In the past year he has only had one ear infection and has felt much better!

He is very mischievous and thinks he can do everything his big brothers can do.  He breaks things way too often as he climbs and touches and moves things.  He drags kitchen chairs all over the house and climbs up on things I thought were safe.  Unfortunately nothing is safe!  Just today he spilled one of my spices all over him and my pantry and broke one of my glass Halloween decorations. He drives me crazy!

Luckily for me, he sleeps wonderfully.  He goes down very easily for a nap every afternoon after lunch.  I lay him down, read him a book, sing him a song, and then walk away.  We even moved him to a big boy bed this month and he still stays wonderfully in bed for his nap.  Bedtime is very similar.  He goes right down and stays right down.  That helps with my sanity!

 

This month we officially switched him from the crib to the big boy bed, the sippy cup to the normal cup, and started potty training.  It’s been a big month!  It’s like he’s growing up right before my eyes.  We are still working on that last one, but in general he’s doing pretty well for a 2yo!

He talks very well, loves to say the prayer on the food at each meal (throws tantrums when it’s not his turn…sigh) and is now really putting sentences together.  Often it’s “Christian hurt me” but it’s a complete sentence!

 

David loves to be outside.  If I don’t keep the front door locked he sneaks into the front yard multiple times a day.  Sometimes just to sit in the grass, sometimes he’ll just start walking down the sidewalk.  He can spend hours in the backyard in the sandbox, on the trampoline or playing in the “forts.” 

He also loves to sing and knows sings many of the primary songs.  He loves to be read to and just to cuddle on the couch or hide under a blanket in a “cave.”  David is a joy to have in our family.  He is learning and growing and is so much fun to be around.  We love you David!

Christian’s Update

  

Christian is 3 years old (will be 4 in a few weeks) and has started another year of preschool at home this year.  Last year we were part of  a once a week for 2 hour preschool co-op with 4 other kids.  We focused on themes like the weather and trees and cars etc.  This year we are upped it to 3 hours a week and there are be 6 other kids.  We are working a lot more on our letters and numbers and teaching them to write.  We are having another great school year and have already had 2 fun field trips!

Earlier this year I pulled out the Dick and Jane beginning reader books and we started learning to read.  Both Aaron and Brian learned to read very young but Christian had not shown any interest.  After a few weeks though he started to get it!  By the time school got out in the spring he had finished the first Dick and Jane book.  We are still in the second book, but have also detoured to read some Bob books.  It does not come nearly as easy for him as it did to Aaron and Brian, but he is learning a lot of sight words and starting to sound out some words too.  It feels like a lot more work than it did with the others, but we are getting it slowly but surely!

Right before school got out Christian did some swimming lessons and is getting to be quite good at swimming.  When he has his puddle jumper on he is completely confident in the water.  Jumping, swimming, playing.  But he often takes it off and just swims to us.  He can almost swim the entire length of my moms swimming pool.  It is much easier to take the kids to the pool now that they are better swimmers! 

He also loves to ride his “bike” and would be outside all the time if I let him.  Now that the weather is turning nicer I’m sure we’ll spend a lot more time outside.  He loves the trampoline and running and being all boy!

One of the things I love about Christian is how much he loves to play make believe.  Aaron never really did that, and Brian didn’t very much either, but Christian is always playing with toys and playing pretend.  Brian plays pretend with him often and David too and he can be happy for hours playing with his brothers.  He loves to dress up, is almost always wearing a super hero cape and takes cars, trucks, teddy bears and books to bed with him. 

He loves to be a helper (when he wants to of course, not necessarily when I ask him to clean up!) and wants to do everything his brothers can do.  He has the greatest little smile and I am loving chatting with him as he just talks and talks and talks these days.  This is such a fun age!

Hopefully I’ll post about his 4th birthday which is next month soon!  We love you Chris!

Brian’s Update

1st day of 2nd grade

Brian is now 7 years old and today started the 2nd grade at Stephens Elementary.  In second grade he will switch between 2 teachers, one for english and history and one for math and science.  Fortunately for us, we know both of his teachers very well.  One was his 1st grade teacher, and the other was Aaron’s 2nd grade teacher.  Both are excellent and we are looking forward to another great year!

Riding his bike while camping over spring break

This past year hasn’t been very momentous for Brian, but he’s done a lot of fun stuff.  We tried to include him in many of the fun things Aaron was doing homeschooling and allowed him to miss school occasionally to do so.  He got to go to the Toyota Factory with us and the Zoo and Children’s Museum and even took a day to try out homeschooling himself. 

Inside the tram to the top of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis

Brian is quite the social butterfly.  He loves to talk and makes friends easily.  He often got reprimanded at school for talking too much, but all the teachers love him and he still hugs them all (all the time!)  He has lots of friends, mostly girls, but is completely friendly to everyone he meets, adults and kids alike. 

Chatting with Tom Sawyer on a Riverboat ride in Hannibal, Missouri

The week or so before Christmas he was hanging out at our neighbors house when he fell out of their hammock and lost his front 2 top teeth which were both very loose.  We teased him a lot about the song “All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth.”  He has lost other teeth since then, but now, 8 months later, those top two teeth are FINALLY coming in!  He has had the cutest little toothless grin for a while now. 

Toothless at Christmas in Utah

Brian enjoys reading, and has read all the reading list books I’ve gotten him for the 2nd and 3rd grades this summer.  He has recently gotten into comic books and super heroes. Similarly, he has become interested in super hero cartoons, and watches Iron Man and Spider Man and many others.  He also still thoroughly enjoys video games and plays on the computer and Wii a lot.  I’ve tried to limit the video game time this summer, and we’ve done “school” this summer and he’s had lots of chores he’s completed, but he’s still played way too many video games!

In a parade in Nauvoo, Illinois

Brian went on his first real amusement park rides this summer when we were at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri.  He was scared of a lot of them, but still went on them anyway!

       

One of the cartoons he started watching on Netflix this summer was BeyBlades, which is a Japanese animation show about these toys which are basically tops you spin by launching them with a ripcord.  He and his brothers watched all the episodes of BeyBlades they could and he decided for his birthday to have a BeyBlade party.  We bought 2 stadiums and enough BeyBlades for all the kids to play and battle against each other.

 

It was a great party and I think everyone had a great time.  My boys are still battling with their Bey’s everyday and I get to host a new BeyBlade House Party next month and will get even more of their new favorite toy!

My cute little boy is growing up so much and I’m so proud of what a great kid he is becoming.  I look forward to watching him continue to learn and grow.  I love you Brian!

Bearing his testimony in the Seventies Hall in Nauvoo, Illinois

Aaron’s update

Evidently I can’t claim that the reason I haven’t blogged is because I was homeschooling like I said in my last entry in June.  Summer time ended up being really busy too!  School started today and I want to get back in the blogging habit!

Let’s start by discussing each kid separately!

1st day of 4th grade

Aaron is 9 years old and is awesome!  He started the 4th grade at Stephens Elementary today and I’m hopeful he has great teachers that can really challenge him and meet all his educational and social needs. 

Christmas in Utah

Last year I homeschooled him and had a great time! In addition to the typical English, spelling, history, writing, math and science stuff I taught, one day a week we focused on other topics, somewhat of his own choice.  We ended up doing a lot of lapbooks to focus our attention.  One of the units we studied was cars.  We read books about the history of cars, watched documentaries about how cars were made and a friend of ours took an hour to show Aaron everything under the hood and explain how cars work.  We even took a field trip to San Antonio to the Toyota Truck Manufacturing plant. 

It was fun getting to learn about other things we were interested in such as “The Little House in the Big Woods”, The 12 days of Christmas, The Zoo, How chocolate is made, and more.  Here are a few pics of Aaron at the zoo.

 

He has a great ear for music and has been taking piano lessons this year from Debbie Siebert.  She has been awesome and Aaron has learned a lot.  He enjoys his lessons and even enjoys practicing (almost) every day.  I look forward to him continuing this talent and seeing how he progresses.

St. Louis Arch

Aaron is a Bear in the Cub Scout program and has a lot of fun working on advancement and awards with his dad.  He won first place at the Pinewood derby in January and then went on to the district derby.  Paul was recently made the Cub Master and is very invested in making our Cub pack excel. The whole family gets involved in the cub scout activities and helping Aaron earn pins, belt loops, arrow points etc.

  

In April and May, Aaron entered two 1 mile races and ran the entire time (The Blue Bell one with free ice cream was his favorite!)  I was surprised at how fast he is.  He loves being outside (when it’s not too hot) and rides his bike and runs often.  I see a future track star in the family!

Aaron got to have a birthday party this year when he turned 9.  He invited 9 friends and they played 9 games.  They were all “minute to win it” style games that each took about one minute to play.  We made tic tac toe shirts and the kids got an X on a square for each challenge they completed.  It was a lot of fun!

He had a great summer playing games, reading books, watching TV, playing video games, playing on the computer and hanging out with his family.  Now on to greater learning in 4th grade!

 

Pictures from Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri

Back to business (I hope)

I’m going to claim that the reason I didn’t blog much in the past year was because I was homeschooling Aaron.  I’m not sure if that is exactly why, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. 

It looks like back in October I finished blogging about the summer and then in November I jumped into some of the things I was thankful for, but other than that I’ve been totally MIA for this past year.  I’m sure most of you don’t really care about everything we did, but these pictures are how I keep caught up with my journaling and saving pictures for our yearly calendar. 

Here are the things I want to blog about in the next few weeks:

• Paul’s Birthday
• field trip to toyota plant
• halloween
• david’s tubes in his ears
• christian’s birthday
• 10 yr anniversary
• zoo
• trip to utah for christmas
• marcia in town
• pauls trips to washington and utah
• camping over spring break
• aaron’s birthday party
• easter
• running 5k
• my birthday
• 7 acre wood
• memorial day
• summary of each kid
• summer vacation

I’m certainly not promising to post about each of these, we’ll see how I do.  And since no one wants to read a blog without any pictures, here’s a recent one of my cute kiddos!

  

Last Day of School

School is out and Summer Break has officially started.

Here are the first day and last day of school pictures for a comparison of how my kids have grown over the past 9 months.

Before 3rd grade and 1st grade

After 3rd grade and 1st grade.  (They don’t look that different to me!)

Brian had a great 1st grade teacher in Mrs. Kelly. 

I’m not sure how much she tamed his craziness versus how much he matured, but he did great in school and by the end of the year wasn’t getting any disciplinary marks at all.  At his awards presentation he was the only student in his class to get the “Gold Academics Award” for getting straight A’s all year long. 

He also got an award for having an “Awesome Attitude” and was obviously the biggest class clown during the awards presentation.  Mrs. Kelly is moving on to 2nd grade so he might get her again this next year too.

Aaron’s teacher was me all year and we had a great year.  We finished the 3rd grade grammar book which had him diagramming sentences and memorizing poems and I think it was a great program.  We went through several spelling book (he knows how to spell amazingly well) and almost 2 full history books.  We started a writing program mid year and will continue to work on it and the history during the summer.  He also memorized scriptures, did typing lessons and learned to write in cursive.  He took swimming lessons and piano lessons and read innumerable books.  Science was also a lot of fun and we did lots of experiments. 

 

Math, of course, was where he excelled.  We have a few more weeks to finish this summer, but then he will have finished 3rd, 4th and 5th grade math books.  We are actively working with the local elementary school to determine what teacher to put him with next year and how we can work on allowing him to continue to excel in math at his own pace in class.  We are sending him back to Stephens Elementary in the Fall but I am so glad I got to homeschool him this year.  I loved it and hope to be able to do it again with my other children. 

Now on to summer!