I think Cody and Steve look like Rocky and Apollo Creed, except they share the love of food and not boxing
Steve, Katie, Cody and I share an intense love of indian food so we chose to have our "last supper" together at The Oven before they moved to Kentucky last week. It's been fun to live close to them for these 5 years and become great friends. We are really going to miss them! 
Cody would be offended if I didn't display THE FOOD!
Maleah did a great job in chorus this year. It has been fun to listen to her sing her songs around the house. She has a very pretty voice.
It has been fun to watch Maleah improve playing the violin this year. She has done a very good job. Here she is in action.
Rylan does this silly mix of crawling and walking. I think it's a genetic flaw because I think it was something that I did when I was his age.
Here's another cute picture of what Rylan does when you pull out a camera. He thinks he's pretty hot stuff and so he should . . . . we think he's pretty hot stuff too!
Rylan is usually pretty good at putting himself to sleep but it's not always without a pretty decent mess. Cody went in to check on him before we went to bed one night and this is what he found. These were baskets full of Rylan's socks and onesies.
I love to run the Mayor's Run with the kids every year. It's a 1-mile run around the capital building. Cody is usually not available to go with us (I'm starting to think that he schedules himself on purpose!!) but we have a great time. Here we are just before we left the house.
These are some of the kids from our school that ran. The lady to the right is Mrs. Brandt the wellness teacher.
Here we are at the starting line for our first time through the race. We were about to run with Maleah's age group. 
This was after our second time through the race. Between Maleah's and Jessica's age-groups I added a couple more kids to my team. Abbie and Eliza joined us because Steve had to work for a couple hours and Katie was out of town. So I did round two with six kids in tow. It went quite well. We were proud of ourselves, especially Abbie because it was her first race!!
After almost a year of having our house on the market we finally sold it!!!!! Here are the kids celebrating that they don't have to keep their rooms clean "in case someone wants to see the house." Little do they know I'll find another excuse to motivate them (I hope!) We are really excited to be moving, though. We are in the process of getting finalized on a new (new to us, not NEW) home. Cody said I can't give any details because it will jinx (sp?) us and everything will fall through. SO, more news to come on that!
The beginning of May we had a multi-cultural night at the church. We represented "team Brazil" along with many other families in our ward. Here we are in our brazilian uniforms. You need to notice Rylan's face in this picture. This is what he does when he's in front of a camera. Quite the CHEESE! The other little guy isn't ours, but we would claim him, he's adorable. Ryan decided he needed to be in the family photo.
Just a cute face!
Rylan and Norah helping take down the tables after the party
Here's a clip of Maleah's performance. It's not very good I was borrowing Diantha's camera and I didn't know how to work it that well. She starts out on the left side of the screen, and I hope you can find her when I zoomed in a bit. She did a really good job!
Here's Maleah getting ready for her first gymnastics performance. It wasn't a competition. They just performed a dance during the state competition for the older girls. It was really fun to watch her and see how much she is learning. I also think she looks sharp in her leotard!
At the competition she helped flash the scores for the uneven bars.
At the Devaney Center
Here she is in position to start the dance
Here's the end of the dance
Here are the kids on Crazy Dress-Up Day at school. Cody did the girls' hair and helped Isaac with his get-up (Notice that Isaac's leg is coming out of the hole in the knee of his pants!) Maleah was embarrassed to walk to school with Isaac because he looked so funny. I thought it was hilarious!
Cody and I just thought this was cute. Maleah got this sleeping mask for Christmas and it has actually turned out to be quite functional for her. She and Jess share a room and Jess likes to have some lights on from the hall or something so it's not totally dark and Maleah wants it to be pitch black, so the mask has turned out to be a decent compromise for them.
Here's Rylan demonstrating his sweeping abilities with his new broom on his birthday. He really gets into it!!
Here Rylan is posing with his gifts and his birthday sign. He was clapping for himself. And, yes, that is a broom with the gifts. That was one of his favorites. He has a broom obsession. Any house that we go to he has to search out their broom to play with. We are raising a future janitor!!!
Enjoying the cake!
Proudly using his broom to help in the kitchen.
We weren't able to celebrate Rylan's birthday on his actual birthday so I took Rylan over to the school to have lunch with each of the older kids and we had some recess time with them too. Here he is with Jess and her friends during recess.
Here's our big one-year-old enjoying his birthday cake. He actually liked it! We put Cool-Whip instead of frosting and the cake was a homemade banana cake so I think it was a little less sweet. It was so cute to watch him.
This was the night before Rylan's first birthday. Jess was filming this and she was so excited it was hard to keep her focused, but she did a good job. I love how Rylan smiled for the camera after he was done. He was so proud of himself! He definitely knows what the camera is for.
I had this gift sitting on my living room floor that I was getting ready for one of my good friends that just had a baby. We caught Rylan after he had so thoughtfully added a few handfuls of dirt to the gift. You can't see, but somehow he got a bunch under the sweater and it was in all the folds of the bag, so it didn't survive. He's such a little munchkin!
This was just a random Saturday night in March that we had Katie and the girls over to have a little carnival. We set up a few games. Here are Isaac and Eliza at the fish pond.
Rylan was clueless, but adorable, as always!
Eliza waiting to catch something!
This game ended up being harder than we expected. Cody made boxes out of tape on the floor and the kids had to roll the ball into them and they got a score according to which box it landed in. It was fun to watch the cheers that went up when each of them finally got the ball in the box.
At the end they had popcorn and played board games. It was cute!
The end of February we took a weekend trip to Holdrege for Cody to do a presentation. We stayed in the hotel and spent the evening before his presentation swimming and watching movies. We had a really good time. I think this picture is adorable! Cody has so much fun with this little boy and this captured a little bit of that.
I got up early Saturday morning to go running and when I got back this is what I saw. This is how they look in the morning when we let them stay up and party all night.
The night of February 18th Cody and the girls had a daddy-daughter date night for activity days at the church. It was a 50's night so here they are before they left. They had a really great time.
I got to stay home with the boys and we made pigs-in-a-blanket for dinner and Isaac thought that was the bomb! Here he is showing which one he was going to eat. The kid LOVES hotdogs. I think he ate 3 before I had to stop him.
Here's Rylan enjoying some pre-dinner mac-n-cheese because he didn't have the patience to wait for dinner to be ready. I just think he's cute!
We ate our dinner downstairs while we watched Shrek. It was a great party!
We have somehow started a tradition of making pink heart pancakes every Valentine's Day. this year we made it a little more fun by putting each child's initial on top. It was pretty fun. Here they are displaying and in Rylan's case mutilating their pancakes
In the afternoon we went over to have a little party with Katie and the girls. Cody took them outside to build a "princess castle" (Of course, Cody's intent was to make a fort, but with that many girls it was bound to turn into a castle.) They had a great time!
After playing in the snow the kids all came in and decorated sugar cookies. Oh, man did we have our kids on a sugar high that day!!! 
As soon as he figured out where we were in the audience he was giving all of his show directly to us. It was really cute. He was so proud of himself.
This was before the program lining up with all the kids in the hall. Here is his I'm-embarrassed-but-I'm-loving-this smile.It has taken me 5 or 6 tries to get this video to download without shutting my internet down. I don't know what the deal is, but here it is. It was so fun to see how much more involved Isaac was in his program this year. He loved this song and sang it all evening after his program. We are so proud of the progress he is making this year in school!
Maleah was banging her head on the door to make Rylan laugh. Consequently our bedroom door now has a big crack in it. I'm not sure if it's a cheap door or if she has a really HARD head . . . . . actually I'm sure it's both!
The other night we had extra kids in the house so Maleah was shifted out of her bed to our room. When Cody and I came in at the end of the night to go to bed we couldn't find Maleah when we came in our room. The bottom picture is what we saw first when we turned on the light. The top picture was after we removed a couple layer. She is definitely Cody's child! He loves to sleep in small places with his head covered. I'm way to clausterphobic!
Every year at our school they celebrate the 100th day of school. Isaac came home that day with this exquisite pair of "100" glasses that HE MADE (emphasis that he added every time he mentioned them!). So consequently this was the Isaac that we saw for about 4 days following the 100th day of school! He's sure proud of himself!
This is our favorite time of year to attend the UNL sporting events because it's Dollar Days!! Yes, we're cheap. . . Anyway, last week we went to a women's basketball game with Curt and Diantha and their kids. We also had Abbie and Eliza with us while Katie went to the temple, so we had a large cheering section made up of lots small people, but we had lots of fun. 
This pictures shares a lot about all the different personalities and temperments that we had with us that night!
Our cheering section
I've decided that even babies have their emergency food storage, they just store it differently than the rest of us. They like to put it in their diaper, in their hair, on their face and in their neck fat. Rylan always has stuff stashed in places the I find later. It's such a treat!
We were doing wheel barrel races for family home evening the other night. We thought it was worth catching on film, but Rylan thought his talent of clicking his tongue was much more exciting than we were.
We went to a Nebraska Gymnastics Meet on Friday, January 30th. My girls are members of the Ten-O club that supports the Gymnastics team, so we went before the meet and had pizza with the rest of the club members. We had so much fun! We got to sit with the rest of the families of the Ten-O club and cheer on the gymnasts together. Cody, Maleah, and Jess got to be part of the welcome at the beginning of the meet and shoot a "small explosive device" as Cody called it (Men and their explosives!!!) that blew streamers over the audience. They thought that was pretty cool. I forgot to take my camera to the event so here they are when we got home. They looked so cute!!
Rylan has discovered that he likes to dance to anything that even resembles music. Here he is rockin' to the radio during breakfast.
Getting ready to open gifts. Notice the lovely sign in the background that everyone pitched in to make. It was really cute! 
We went to Grisanti's, our kids' favorite restaurant, for dinner after Jessica's baptism for dinner.
The people at Grisantis sang to Jess and Maleah for their birthdays and they each got a piece of cheesecake. Cheesecake makes life beautiful!
Blowing out her birthday candles. She missed several times!
I saw these pictures and my heart warmed with gratitude to my Heavenly Father for the blessing of still having my dad here with us. To see these pictures reminded me that I have received an answer to many, many prayers that my dad could be here so my kids could know him. I am so blessed to have a great dad that shows so much support and interest in my life. He frequently calls me to see if I'm "still alive" and I cherish the conversations that we have been able to have. Thank you, Dad, for living what you believe and teaching me so that I can pass those things to my kids. Watching you go through so many trials and staying upbeat and strong in your testimony has been a great example to me and my family. You are such a blessing to us. We love you!
I can never get this right!!! These pictures are in backwards order. Oh, well, you can figure it out. Anyway, this picture was in the dressing room after Jess was baptized and we got her dressed in her white baptismal dress that Grandma Mickey made for our girls' baptisms. She looked beautiful! I can't believe she's old enough to be baptized. She is such a special, sweet girl. She has a tender heart and she is incredibly thoughtful. Cody and I so frequently find our bed made with a note on it from our "secret admirerer" (written, of course, in Jessica's handwriting!!) She is a wonderful daughter and I am so grateful to have her in our home.
Our not so little family before the baptism. Man, we are getting old!
It was so great to have Grandpa Barry and Grandma Judy there for the baptism. Brandt was there too, I'm not sure how he escaped being in the picture. It was so great to have the support of family for this special day. It meant a lot to Jessica.
I absolutely love this picture! Jess and her dad have a really special relationship. It was so sweet to see them in the waters of baptism together.
Here's Maleah at her concert. It's far away, but she amazes me how comfortable she is in front of an audience. I wish I had her confidence!
Maleah with her orchestra teacher.
She's in the zone here!
I just thought this was cute. We went to Curtis and Diantha's house for New Years Eve with Steve and Katie. This was when we put all the kids down on the family room floor to watch a movie and the IDEA was that they would eventually fall asleep while we played games upstairs. Well, being the irresponsible parents that we were that night, we stayed up until almost 2 am and consequently so did the kids. It was quite the party, but we had a lot of fun. We ate all sorts of good food (that in itself is a party to me) and we played games. We're so lucky to have such good friends to have fun with!
I can't believe Maleah is 10!!!! She is growing up too fast. She is such a great kid! She has such a kind heart and an enthusiastic personality. She is incredibly smart and talented. She's good at almost anything she tries to do. I feel the Lord has really blessed me to give me the opportunity to be her mom. It's so fun for me to watch her get older and see how she views the world and it's great to see her wanting to do right and watching her testimony of the gospel grow. She is a wonderful person to have in our family. She brings so much fun and enthusiasm. Happy Birthday, Maleah!!! I love you!
On Maleah's birthday we had Elisa (our friend from Brazil that is here for her Senior year of high school) over for a "sleepover". The girls had a lot of fun with her! We also had Steve, Katie, Abbie, and Eliza over and we went to the church and had a soccer game in the gym. It was really fun. Here we are after dinner getting ready to sing "Happy Birthday" and bring out her cake.
Christmas evening after the kids were all in bed Katie, Steve, Cody, and I went downstairs to test the durability of the kids new toys. This picture was actually taken with the lights off (because the lightsabers light up and make sound, so the effect was so much better in the dark!) so Cody had no idea what a great shot he had. 
The highlight of the Christmas presents was all of the Star Wars stuff: lightsabers, actions figures, Star Wars dishes and books. The kids thought it was great to watch Rylan with the lightsaber. He thought he was pretty cool too! You can tell that Rylan is the center of entertainment in our house.
This was Christmas morning. Each of the kids made us gifts at school and that is always one of my favorite things. Maleah made us a ceramic bowl that was beautiful. Jess made us an adorable snowflake ornament with her picture in the middle of it. And Isaac gave us a Christmas magnet with his picture in the middle of it too. We had a ball opening gifts and the kids got a kick our of Rylan's excitement for the paper and boxes. He was actually scared of his gift! It was a ball popper that sings songs and blows balls in the air. It was a little too much for him to begin with, but he eventually warmed up to it.
This was our Christmas Eve tradition of fondue. We did it at Steve and Katie's this year. We had a great time! The kids made a massive mess once we got to the chocolate part, but that was part of the fun. We did our white elephant gift exchange which is always hilarious. We made the rule that it had to be something you already had and you couldn't purchase anything. So the kids even went through their stuff and they had to wrap it so that no one knew what it was (except usually me because I need to help in the wrapping process for some of them). There were some funny things. Isaac got a "Worst Case Scenario" board game that he was very pleased with! Steve got a microphone and a dancing Santa Claus (well, it used to dance before it broke). Maleah got cloth diapers (that was Rylan's contribution!). Anyway, random stuff, but we had a lot of fun. We are going to miss Steve and Katie next year. They are going to move this spring because Steve joined the military. We have had so much fun living close to them and we've become great friends. We hope they'll be back in a few years for law school!
Well, I think we threw this picture on about 2 months ago thinking we would get right back to telling about it and here it is almost February and I'm just getting back. I guess there are a few other things that take my attention (like the 4 little people in this picture!)
The end result! (Sorry the pictures are in backwards.) Rylan doesn't look as pleased with the turkey as the rest of us were.
Stuffing our bird
This was the first Thanksgiving with just our little family. Well, not just our family, we had a few friends from the ward and the missionaries. But this was our first time preparing our own turkey and we were PROUD! Here is a picture of the kids cutting veggies to go in the stuffing.
The past couple of months we have been choosing a different country to learn about during some of our family home evenings. This month we chose Egypt (Jess's idea). So last week I was running errands with Isaac and Rylan and we came home to an Egyptian restaurant in the basement. We sat on the blanket and ate rice,couscous, veggies, and kabobs. We ate everything with our hands. (Isaac couldn't pull it off, though. He couldn't handle the idea of dirty hands.) The girls served us and Jessica gave us some Egyptian trivia. We had a great time.
Here she is performing with her class
Here she is waiting in line to do the limbo with Abbie, Eliza, and Isaac.
It took Rylan a little while to decide he wanted to start moving around, but once he started to crawl he has started to climb. I feel like we are entering a new realm with a little boy. My girls were never climbers, but I think we're in for it with this little guy. This picture was a few weeks ago. The box that he is on was standing up blocking the bookcase and he tipped it over so he could climb on it and get the rock that he is about to pull off the shelf. I will be cursing this behavior soon enough, but I kind of thought this was cute.
We are rather pathetic. You would think Rylan is our first child because we think everything that he does is hilarious, cute, brilliant, etc. He is the center of entertainment in our home and here is an example. While we think this video is funny it probably is only funny to us. But I thought the commentary in the background was entertaining.
We have family scripture study every morning at 6:45. On this morning I was the last one to come in and this is what I saw. Isn't this what early morning scripture study is supposed to look like? We've got it down!!
I was in the kitchen the other day after school and Jess came in dressed like this. It's Rylan's coat! She had it all zipped up an everything. I thought it was rather funny.
Cody and I visited Little Rock Central High (the first high school to desegregate) when we were there. It was an incredible place! We walked around the grounds and went to the visitor's center next to the high school. It was one of the highlights of our trip. Anyway, when we were walking around the grounds Cody made some sound while we were visiting and Rylan started to do his belly laugh. It was so funny! He went on for about 10 minutes laughing whenever Cody would make that sound. There was a class out in the quad that we were walking in and his giggle was echoing all through the area. It was really cute!
Cody, Rylan, and I went to Little Rock, Arkansas this weekend to one of Cody's conferences for work. We left Maleah, Jessica, and Isaac with Steve and Katie for a 2 days and then they stayed with Paul and Trio for 2 days. Anyway, we had a great time! Here are a few of the pictures of our trip.
The store where Wal-Mart began in Bentonville, Arkansas. We thought it is an important part of our history since a large portion of our paycheck goes to Wal-Mart. We got there after it closed, but it was fun to see. 
Here we are at Liberty Jail. There was a really awesome spirit there. We really enjoyed our tour there.
These last two pictures just showed how beautiful the fall colors were down there. The scenery was amazing.
These two are quite the pair! Cody and Steve enjoy using their baldness for entertainment around Halloween. Here they are as an airport landing strip and a putting green. They are hilarious!!!!
The slimy-looking stuff on his head isn't a bad fungus it's glow-in-the-dark cream that actually worked! The kids thought he would make a good Darth Mal from Star Wars, but we thought it probably wasn't good to come to the ward Trunk-or-treat dressed like someone who resembles the devil.
No, he's not smoking, it's a golf tee in his mouth.
Isaac chowin' down after the Trunk-or-treat at the church on Halloween. It hasn't taken him long to figure out that Halloween is all about candy and now he is a big fan. He's so cute!
Maleah as Princess Leia from Star Wars. She is a big time fan of Star Wars!!! She did have her hair done like Princess Leia but I thought this was such a cute picture of her. I can't believe how as she grows she looks more and more like Sharla. She's getting so pretty.
Here's Jess as Guenevere. The highlight of the costume for her was wearing make-up. She looks beautiful. I love her missing teeth!
This is one of my favorite faces that Rylan makes, but with the addition of the pumpkin costume I thought this picture was adorable!
Maleah decided this is going to be her major when she goes to college. SURPRIZE!!
If this isn't typical Jessica I don't know what is!
Here is my team. From left to right: Kristen, Charmaine, Ashley, Becky, Katie, Me, Sonia, and Jessy. There were some fun things about our team. It was Charmaine, Ashley, Katie, Sonia, and Jessy's first race. Five of the eight of us were breastfeeding so if anyone had been paying attention to our team vehicle they would have seen more bags of breastmilk coming out of it than any other vehicle in the race. It was quite entertaining! We had a really fun group and we had a great time together!
In August Cody went back to Brazil for research and he was able to visit Gabriel, Isaac's best friend for the whole time that he spent in the shelter. Both of them were adopted and left the shelter within 2 weeks of each other. I have no doubt that the Lord had a hand in that. Anyway, Gabriel went to a family in Porto Alegre, where Isaac is from, and they have been very good to keep in touch with us and send pictures and letters. We are so grateful for their being willing to keep in touch with us. Gabriel was an important person to Isaac while he was waiting for us to find him and there continues to be a special bond between the two of them. Here is Cody with Gabriel in his home. He's so cute!
This is very old news, but I wanted to have something written about it. This is Maleah and Jessica with their friend, Maren, and their piano teacher, Stephanie at their first piano recital the first week in August. It was the first recital for all of the girls and it was Stephanie's first recital as teacher. She gave them each a flower at the end and here they are taking a bow. They were adorable! They did such a good job and it was so fun to watch the way they each performed.
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