Rylan's Bedtime Party Ritual

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.

The Mayor's Run

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!!

WE SOLD OUR HOUSE!!!

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!

Multi-cultural Night at the Church

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!

Maleah's First Gymnastics Performance

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

Rylan Playing Ball with Dad

Once again, just thought this was cute!

Crazy Dress-Up Day

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!

Maleah's Sleeping Mask

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!!

Rylan's 1st Birthday

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.

Happy Birthday Rylan!!!

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.

Rylan's First Attempt at Walking

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 just thought this was cute!

Rylan's Thoughtful Gift

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!

Carnival

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!

Exotic Holdrege Nebraska

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.

Here's a little video of Rylan enjoying the music from Shrek. Sorry it's kind of dark.

Daddy/Daughter Date 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.
Here's what Maleah had to say about what they did that night:
"When we got there we played a game where you would get a heart and they would tape it to your back and you couldn't see it and you would try to guess what was on your heart. All the hearts had something about Jesus on them. We also played a different game where the kids took off their shoes and they went behing a curtain and all the dads would have to guess which was their daughter's. My favorite game was 'are you my daughter?' All the girls sat in a semi-circle and the dads would get a pillow and a wooden spoon and they would put it on one of the girls laps and they would say 'are you my daughter?' and the girl would say 'I love you daddy' in whatever voice they wanted to and he had to guess if that was his daughter. We also ate hotdogs, salads and for dessert we had rootbeer floats! After that they read stories about how the parents met and the girls had to guess which parents each story was about. It was fun!"

Jessica said, "I liked when we all sat in a half circle and one of the dads would have a pillow and a spoon and blindfold on their eyes and they would come around and say 'are you my daughter?' and the daughter would say 'I love you daddy' and they would say yes if they knew it was their daughter and no if they knew it wasn't. I liked it when it was my dad's turn and Bro. Talbot got in the circle and said 'I love you daddy' in a high girly voice when my dad came to him. It was really funny!"

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!

Valentine's Day

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!!!