Leo's first park swings...

We had some really great sunny, warmish days in February. On this particular day we met our freinds from our homeschool co-op, the Underwoods at a park downtown and had an hour or so of outdoor fun. I love that they have infant swings at this park because Leo LOVED swinging! I took a bazillion pics and after much deliberation I managed to narrow them down to just a zillion. I just love this kid so much, he is really in need of being forever on the go and so he is at his very best when we leave the house. I look forward to more of that as the weather grows warmer and drier in the coming months.

I also have to say that I look at these pics and although I KNOW that he looks like Chris and I LOVE HOW HE LOOKS and don't care that he takes after his papa, I do see my side in this face too. Not in all of the shots but in some of them. So. For the record, he is half of me.

Betsey loved the safe swing as well!

All four of my kiddos...I'm so blessed!

Alice has a social void caused by homeschooling that is called, no care in the world about how she looks. Here, she has done something creative with her infinity scarf for her run across the monkey bars. I love her.

February Cell Phone Summary...

Let the record be clear that for some bizarre reason, Chris takes all the kids to Costco almost every SATURDAY! Who goes to Costco on Saturday?! Crazy people with no children who must work during every other open business hour the store offers...and my husband and four children. On one such trip, the girls got to playing in this house and came home with one of their own! It is meant for the outdoors but they assembled it in our bonus room...yep! It's pretty fun, I have to admit. I got a text from Chris saying how much fun the girls were having and how cute they were with it and how it was only $$$. Hahahaha. How could I refuse!?

Leo in the cart. 

That face!

At piano lessons, Betsey wrote all these names on the board! I was impressed! She's in an independent learning program for Preschool. It's called life, and she is excelling!

So much fun to be had at piano while the older two have their private lesson.

I love these two. They look the most like each other. 

Alice copying Betsey who fell asleep in the back of Chris' truck. 

These gates kept Penny on one side of the house...for minutes...until she realized she fits through the slats! What?

I love this daddy-Alice cuddle!

Betsey likes to do my hair and I like it too. Win-win! She likes to take pictures of her creations.

Not bad!

A hopeless book I picked up at Goodwill that talked about like five hundred things you need to do before you bring your puppy home and a crud ton of things to do in the first seconds, minutes, hours and days. Too bad she was four months old when I got the book. She's pretty much a lost cause.

We had some really stormy wind for a few days and one morning we woke up to this!

Penny really is a great fit personality-wise for our family. We just need to get through the training part.

My Bets Bets with her bunches of patterns and colors and mismatched-ness. I love it.

Alice also does my hair...this is a pretty bun!

More buns.

My adoreable cousin, Sydney left on her mission! I didn't get a bunch of pics but I did get this one of some of my peeps sitting around chatting at the Biddle home. They have the coolest homemade home ever. Ever. EVER.

One weekend, Chris's brother, Mike, flew into town to go to a concert with Chris (Presidents of the United States of America). Mike joined us up at the Biddle's before we had to take him to the airport and say "goodbye". Chris is holding our sweet nephew, Davis.

In January, Alice joined a Lego League team because she is really natural at building things and seeing how they go together. She loves puzzles, Lincoln Logs, blocks and now Legos. It is her favorite activity right now, as they are in a level where they build small machines and some of the machines have remotes and can be controlled using the computer. The curriculum is really scientific and it is cool all the stuff she comes away with after they meet.

We got a new waffle maker in one of the storage units. It's a fancy, Villaware brand and it makes perfect, thin, heart waffles. Mmmmmmm.

So one Sunday, I was running late and needed to get to church so the kids could at least get seated. So I woke Leo, knowing he needed a new diaper and grabbed one to change him at church and by the time I got there, just on the drive over his diaper reached maximum saturation and this is what I found when I pulled him out of the car. Luckily, Chris was available to help me and he held him the rest of church, pants-free.

Betsey gave a talk in Primary. She didn't want me to help her or write it out so we just practiced a bunch of times, I'd feed her a prompt and she'd say her own answer. So once we got up there, I'd say the prompt, like, "What can we do to show Heavenly Father we love him?" and Betsey was nervous and could only repeat after me. It was totally predictable and not a big deal at all, so I wound up feeding her like four sentences and she did a great job. So cute. So excited to sit up front! Look at those socks. Gosh I love her! (Leisha, she had her pack pack from you full of her treasures...see it on the floor?)

Once upon a time, the chickens started laying again...and there were a dozen eggs in the coop when we finally checked!

We got the throw ups. It was actually just Betsey but it was not fun.

Ruby in front of our Christmas card door...I didn't take them down until March! Anyway, I couldn't belive that she was invited to the YW program, New Beginnings because she will be 12 this year and will leave primary and enter the YW program for 12-18 year olds at church. Sigh. She is getting so big!

Haircuts...

 We have hair problems at our house. We aren't the daily groomers when it comes to hair. Nope. We sometimes go a day or two between brushings which is a major problem since my kids have bed head just from a short ride in the car. I always like their hair shorter (Ruby's hair is now long enough to be worn long, though she NEVER does anything with it and never allows me to do anything to it either), but it is a tough sell since every little girl wants long hair. This particular morning while I did the torturous hair brushing while Betsey screamed, I told her how shorter hair would mean less knots and she got on board. It was a drop everything and run to the nearest hair-cutting shop situation so that is what we did.

Before. 

 During...look at that adorable group of fans posing for a pic in the background! I can't get enough of this foursome! 

 The lady did some horrible flipped curls on Betsey's hair, but I didn't stop her, she was so pleased.

 Leo hanging out.

 Betsey AFTER. I love that happy face and that short hair really is easier to brush...we are both happy!

 Alice always wants to grow her hair and I always manage to talk her into choosing to cut her hair. Phew, because she didn't get the Hamm hair genes. She has thin, sparse hair and it doesn't look good long. 

 After...what a beauty! 

Funny guy...

(Anne, I sat down to get more of my committed words in my novel but had to write this instead...does it count?)

I don't remember when or why it came up, but this summer when we were camping with our old schools, Leisha said that I was a lucky one because I married someone with a sense of humor. Turns out I am an auditory learner and sometimes I don't really understand something until I either hear it or say it out loud. Since she said that, I've thought about how much laughing with Chris means to me. I have always known he is funny, of course...and I believe if when I was single I was asked to rank the typical qualities I look for in a match, I would have likely ranked sense of humor as numero uno. So I shouldn't have really learned anything different from that remark, but it refreshed gratitude in me at that moment for that quality/talent Chris possesses. 

One of my favorite things to laugh about is when Chris pretends he is the expert at something. He never backs down, ever. He is very clever in his ability to, for example, speak fluent Spanish. Hypothetical example follows:

"Mi casa es su casa." 
What are you talking about?
I just said, "I want some dinner" in Spanish.
"That isn't how you say that."
"It is how I say it, how do you say it?" 
"Quiero cenar." 
"Well that is one way to say that." or even funnier, "that is what I said!" 

You'd be surprised how long this can go on. He can go all night on three Spanish phrases pretending like he's a native Mexican. The other day he was relying on Tae Kwon Do Japanese counting to convince me he is pretty much Japanese. I am convinced. He can count to ten...and he can say, "Domo arigato," and I'm sure it doesn't have anything to do with the song by Styx.

The same mock cockiness applies to EVERYTHING else in the whole world. Sometimes he isn't even trying to be funny, but it is funny. Like when he decided in five minutes at Lowes he was going to start a garden in mid-JUNE. Now, I don't know much about gardening, but I do know that you don't start a tomato, lettuce, carrot, corn (yes, corn!!), onion, beet, cucumber and radish garden in mid-June in a grow box that you have spent 7 years burdening the contained weeds with Round-up spray. Undaunted, he and the girls marveled over how tall the corn was getting in spite of weeks without water and most of the other plants already giving up the ghost. He banked on that corn coming up clear into October when it was a good three feet tall. I thought it was pretty endearing and hilarious. Whenever I would try and point out that maybe they had started too late, he is quick to remind me that I know nothing and he knows everything. Now it is February and he is already talking about this summer's garden grandeur but I am unconvinced that he has done any actual learning still...as it turns out gardens don't grow from charm alone. 

I think the hardest I laughed in a very long time was really recently when Chris claimed he was pretty much a professional dog trainer. I just laughed alone here in my office for a good three minutes trying to write this. Have you ever met Stone!? Stone! The dog that Chris always claims is perfectly behaved and trained but literally never moved an inch unless it was due to his own conviction to do so? Stone, the dog that eventually Chris decided was hard of hearing because he would lolly gag around the neighborhood with us shouting after him and completely ignore us? Stone, the dog that pulled as if in a tug of war match the entire time he was ever on leash? Stone, yes. The fruit of Chris' dog training labors. Yes. It was funny because he was serious and I couldn't hardly eek out my rebuttal but he knew he was ridiculous and eventually he laughed with me. The next day, I asked, "What was that you claimed to be a pro at yesterday?" He pretended he didn't know to what I referred. Then he quietly said, "That I am an expert dog trainer." And there I went again. So funny. Can't get enough of that idea! Since then I have noticed as we progressively head farther down the path of Penny owning our lives that Chris is now referring to his successful dog training efforts proven by his childhood dog, Scooter. The question is, did Chris actually single handedly train Scooter? If you ask him he did...and also, can an experience training a dog when you are eight possibly equal relevant experience thirty years later?

I remind Chris every so often that he doesn't have to feel stuck in his career choice. I'll say, "We can live in an apartment or with my parents or in a trailer and I can work part time and you can do anything...you want to build chicken coops or install finish carpentry or answer questions about anything in any department at Lowes (he definitely knows WAY more than the people who work in any of the Lowes departments and he hates it if they try and tell him otherwise)." He always appreciates the potential freedom but he's always liked more than hated his jobs and so it goes. So anyway, he is obsessed with a show, "Storage Wars" where people bid on storage units that are past due on rent payments at an auction. They walk with the contents of the lockers and of course score things that are super impressive and worth a ton of money. Anyway, so the other night after he had unloaded his fourth unit into our garage and had picked through it all and was amped about the stuff he was going to sell, I said, "Maybe you can be a thrift store owner one day!" I really am not above that at all, but I was joking. 100%. Not serious. He goes, "I think that's it. That is what I want to do." I laughed and laughed, though I know he wasn't joking. 

The other night, I had seen a commercial for a show on MTV about perfect matches. People underwent some intense interviews and personality and compatibility testing and they find their perfect match. So we were lying in bed and I said, "I wonder what would happen if we took a compatibility test--" I didn't even finish my sentence and Chris said, "Done. Not. Compatible." Bwahahahahaha. AMEN! He kept going with it and I just kept laughing and agreeing. 

We are two truly incompatible people in love...and we even can be pretty convincingly not in love if you ask those who spend much time around us. 

Anyway, if he weren't super hot and hilarious I'd have nothing to go on. Thank goodness for those two things! Happy Valentine's Day!

Candid Daddy Daughter Dance pics...

Here is my crew after they got all ready for the dance. I love Betsey with her cocked head...that means she feels super (thoopah) pretty. Ruby has such beautiful hair, and she let me add some curls. She likes to wear it back pretty much 100% of the time, but it is so pretty down. I love that Alice got her hair cut because I think her hair is best at just this length. These pictures don't do the cut justice, but she's so beautiful! I let Betsey wear her Easter dress because it was a special night. I love the dress, it is by Kate Quinn, I think her Plum Bunny line. Love it so much!!

The dress twirls.

The dance was really well decorated and put together. There were 450 or so people there this year! Crazy! So fun!!