Ruby turned 8!

Ruby was soooooooo spoiled with family fun on her birthday! Having cousins that are your best friends live far away is really hard, so it was something super special for Ruby when she heard that Jeff and his family and Heather and her kids were going to be in town for Ruby's birthday and baptism (they were in town for Thanksgiving and made sacrifices to stick around the whole weekend and week following). Of course she has cousins who are equally important to her on Chris' side of the family that weren't here...but the fact that so many out of towners were here was still huge.

Here's Betsey and Molly crawling around together...they are only six weeks apart, and they have another girl cousin, Adeline, just over three months younger than Bee.

On Ruby's birthday it was also sharing day at piano...so we rolled over there with three extra adults and eight extra kiddos. It was comical, but fun for Ruby and Alice to play the piano for family.

I love the happy faces in this picture! Hailey, Alice, Ruby, Sarah and Nathan...if Emma was in the picture we'd have all the "round one" and "round two" cousins in the picture.

Mary, Carson, Oma (holding Van), Jane, Mason and Jeff.

This is Molly...she's super cute!

Ruby is such a gracious gift receiver. She was genuinely thrilled at each gift!

I usually make cakes for the kids, but I was watching my diet and didn't want to torture myself any more...DQ it is! She was happy with it though!

We went...yes, all of us...over to the mall in Puyallup to get Ruby's ears pierced. I was allowed to pierce my ears when I was 8 and it seemed like a good age for Ruby too. She has been obsessed with this idea for about a year now, and though it didn't really matter to me when she had hers done, I did think it was wonderful for her to experience wanting something really bad and having to wait. I just don't feel that is a very common experience for kids today and I need to create that more for mine, because it made the event sooooo exciting!

Hailey, Sarah and Ruby. BCF. They love each other so much and are so lucky to have cousins so close to their ages!

Ruby was very brave, but you can see that she was apprehensive in the moment.

Immediately following the first ear, she exclaimed..."that didn't hurt! I did it!" She said that over and over again and then prepared for the next ear.

Anyone been to Claire's with 20 people before? I have! It's quite a crowd in a little, cluttered store like that! It was so fun and special for Ruby to have her people there!

Van's Blessing...

Van was blessed on November 27th in Seattle by his papa. It was awesome timing, because Jeff and his family were all in town as well as Robb and his whole family...so there were a lot of people there to support the little man. They had a nice lunch at my folks' house afterward, but we had been up north long enough so we headed back south to settle in for a big week for our family!

Braden supported some horrible thing called, "Movember", which inspires men to grow a mustache to promote some kind of man cancer (colin/prostate?). I guess it is a good cause, but maybe not worth a mustache? You be the judge.

Thanksgiving...

These are the only pics I took of Thanksgiving. We were at my mom's house and enjoyed dinner with them, my brother Jordan and Braden and Amanda's family. It was a nice, relaxing, tasty day!

These are turkey sculptures my mom has collected. The two in the middle were made by two of my brothers a long time ago. The one on the left was made by Ruby and the one on the right by Alice. I'm not sure about the one in the front. Alice says she made it, but I don't remember if she made two. I also just grabbed my cheap camera, so this isn't even in focus. I don't know how to use my cheap camera very well!

I feel like my girls look pretty different from each other by now. The funny thing is that you'd think maybe someone would give me some credit for being 50% of their gene pool...but NOPE! Everyone always says how they look just like Chris.

Witto Bee...

That's what we call our baby most, we just can't help but roll out a little baby talk for our Witto Bee. She is just up to soooooo much! I haven't really documented the more recent things she's doing, and it's all so exciting! I don't really have time to blog because I'm so busy keeping little things out of her mouth, steering her away from the stairs and persuading her not to suck on any part of the kitty. EVERYTHING goes in the mouth, and if you had a room full of toys and things over the choking hazard size, she would waste no time going for the one minuscule little thing that should not go in her mouth and put it in her mouth. She is just a little vacuum, and sometimes I just let her eat the tissue or paper pieces if I figure she can get them down easily enough.

 She started crawling the third weekend in October! She was pulling herself around for a few weeks and then she'd get up on her knees and rock back and forth...and eventually she just took off crawling. I guess she was seven months old.

 My Bets is a MESS MAKER. She loves to use her poky little fingers to move mushy things around, and don't think you can leave a bowl of carrot puree close by because she has a radar for things you don't want her to touch..."bleep, bleep, bleep, your mommy left the carrot bowl within reach...go, go, go!" says the radar. I love having a Vita-Mix this time around for quickly making all her food without having to steam, peel or dice. She mostly eats organic peas and carrots, and I like to make them tastier by adding grapeseed oil and sea salt. I also added a cucumber to both to make them less dense in texture. She loves little finger pinching snacks like puffed grains and those freeze dried fruits.

 Betsey gets herself into all kinds of weird corners and she doesn't know what to do to get out of some of them. She was pretty hard to get to in this picture...and this was taken around 8 months when she started pulling up to a 1/2 stand on shorter items. I had to rescue her from this one.

 Ahhhh the standing up in bed trick. I lay her down and she literally just melds to the sheet and sucks her binkie and lets her eyes roll back in her head...but it's all a huge act! She'll be quiet for like ten minutes and then she starts to cry because she's gotten herself in a standing position but she doesn't know how to get back down...and did I mention she is tired because she's a baby and really needs her sleep!? I go in there and lay her back down sometimes more than six or seven times per nap, but she just gets right back up and invites people over.

We were all crowded around watching her take to the stairs for the first time. She did this the beginning of November and boy was she thrilled! She went up a stair and then stopped and slapped the stairs and giggled with joy. She now gets all the way to the top!!!

Betsey is pulling up on everything in sight. She just really doesn't know how to get back down...and I don't think she wants to know. Doesn't she look like a bruised mess in this picture? She took a little beating over Thanksgiving with lots of little cousin feet on the same floor she is crawling

Ahhhhh, isn't she beautiful? I have to say that babies dismayed me completely until this little one came along. She's not staying little, and it's hard to swallow! Here are some silly little games she is playing lately that I can't get enough of. I know all babies do them, but I still have to write it down. She loves to press her head into my lips when I hold her and attach my lips to her cheek. She'll pull away and then move her head and press a new spot onto my lips for a kiss. MORE PLEASE! I LOVE it when she does this, I could kiss her all day with this game. Sometimes she initiates this by just pushing her head against mine when I'm holding her. I don't think she's really going for a kiss, just doing the head touching game, but what if she is wanting kisses? She is also doing the mimic game in several ways. She will just make eye contact and then shake her head like she's saying "no" and if you do it back, she'll do it again and you just take turns imitating each other. She also does this with some sounds, like scrunching up the nose and breathing short, hard breaths out...back and forth. Last week at church, she was standing up on the bench flirting with the people behind us the whole time, and there was a woman who played the mimic game with Betsey for quite a while. It was so cute!

Even though Ruby and Alice just adore her, they are much older and when Betsey is in the tub, I think about how she needs someone to play in the tub with, she can't do that alone! She needs a sibling that doesn't just want to give in to her every whim, someone who will be her best friend and grow up interested in the same things as her. Even when she is old enough for her "five years old Disney trip", her sisters will be 10 and 13!!! They won't really get amped about a signature from Mickey Mouse, so she'll need someone to wait in line with. Never fear Betsey, there's one more in me in a couple of years...if I have my way!

Homeschooling Woes...

I am a really social person, and so are my kids. I don't find socialization a reason for public schooling, as my kids do participate in a lot of classes all week that provide them great social experiences in team work, heart break, rejection, compromise, rule keeping/making, etc. However, there is something lacking that is recently more difficult to ignore. My kids don't have kids that live close by that are available to be their friends. I mean they have friends in all their classes and teams, but being friends for six weeks here and there is not the same as being long time, long term friends.

I am glad that they are close to each other, Alice and Ruby are very dear friends, and I am super grateful for that fact, but sometimes you need a non-family friend to invite on a special outing or something. I'm starting to realize that Ruby's friends from church really like her and enjoy getting together with her, but they are socializing with the same kids on a daily basis and may only have time to socialize with her once a month. So these few friends are Ruby's everything, and she's kind of their nothing. Does that make sense? She can't really compete with daily contact on the playground.

This is the first year that this has gotten to me, because our awesome homeschool co-op disbanded and left us with just each other and semi-regular classes with others. I'm really happy not to have such an emphasis on non-family friends all the time, and I know moms who struggle with their young children who desire constant play dates and don't play well with siblings, so I think what we need are more friends like us...homeschoolers who need to get together once a month or maybe twice and be friends. On the same playing field.

I don't really know how to accomplish this, because I don't want to go back to the co-op options that live all over tarnation. I want homeschooling friends that live within a reasonable distance from our house. I want girls. For some reason, we have lots of boys. Ruby has literally no one (she has a friend, Paige that lives a solid thirty minute drive into the boonies and another, Olivia, who lives a good 20 minutes away and isn't available Tuesdays or Wednesdays because those are her daddy's days off). Alice has a kindergarten co-op that I started with some friends this year and there are seven kids, and they are all her friends, but only one is  a girl...she loves her boys, and I love my girls to have playmates that are boys because the play is so different and fun, but a few little girls would be nice when she requests an "Ariel party" (which I turned into the balloon party).

I am not minimizing their awesome friends that aren't home schooled, our eggs are all in that basket, and we don't know what we would do with out them...but I feel like my kids are kind of the backup friends, the second stage, the B-team...and I want them to have some friends who call them FIRST! I need another co-op. It is true. Do I have to start my own? I really liked just joining and letting someone else do the work. Sheesh.

Tonight I asked Alice who her best friend was and she said "you are, mommy!" Thanks, baby girl. I'm your best friend, and you want to marry your dad. That's all fine and dandy for now, but someday you will probably want more.

Know any homeschoolers in the Puyallup area with girls that are between the ages of 4 and 10? Send them my way!

Mid-November Snow?

It snowed and snowed and snowed...in the middle of November. When it snows in WA, it usually starts as a rain and then gets colder, and the rain is forced to turn into flakes...then sometimes it snows. Then the rain and wet snow freeze overnight, the world shuts down and as soon as the daytime temps raise to 31 degrees or so, it all melts and leaves. Not this year. It snowed and stalled, snowed and stalled...it even stayed around for like four days because it was in the mid-20s. We even got a taste of the sun being out and NOT melting the snow...just making it that much more amazing outside.

Kitty was curious...watching the girls out in the snow... 

 The pics are out of order, these are pics of the entire amount that ever fell...

 This is a LOT of snow for Western WA!

These last few were taken right when it started to snow...they were so excited! I love these little sisters/friends...they are so sweet together!

Ruby's Birthday horse camp...

This year wasn't Ruby's year for a birthday party, so we told her she could invite one friend to horse camp with her. It's just a three hour little camp on Saturday morning and she invited her friend, Emily Ceresa. Emily could not be a sweeter girl and the two had a great time together. I wasn't there, so I left a camera with them and these are the pictures they took...

This is definitely not a horse...

 This is Ruby's favorite horse, Blackie.

 Ruby and Emily taking a self portrait...

 Home for hot chocolate through oreo straws...