Hogle Zoo!

Babysitting Ella and Rachel turned out to be such a fun day!  Nana and Papa were visiting as well, which made it even better.  We took the wagon to the zoo and pulled all 4 girls around to see the animals.  It was a wee bit cold outside so they all cuddled up under a blanket.  The girls had such a blast!  Since we live right across the street from the zoo, I decided to just go ahead and buy a season pass.  So looks like we will be stopping by the zoo a lot more often now!

4 happy girls!

No way I could catch a shot of all of them looking at the camera at once... a girl can dream though ;)

So sweet

I was blown away by the size of the gorilla.  What long arms they have!

Rachel and Avril see how they measure up...

We even took a ride on the merry-go-round :)

Whee!

Love to see this girl smile

Love this girl's smile as well :)

Loved our day at the zoo!  Can't wait to go again :)

100th Day Celebration

Avril's kindergarten celebrated their 100th school day by having parents come to volunteer for fun activities with the kids.  I took a half day of work off to help out, and decided that it was a HUNDRED times harder doing the school volunteer job, than my desk job at the University.  But I was happy to do it!  I loved getting to see Avril at her school.  She's such a delight in the classroom.  I definitely could not say the same for all the kids there.

Heather (the only adult pictured above) gives Avril a ride back from kindergarten every day.  Her daughter, Ella, is sitting to her left, and is Avril's best friend.  It's wonderful to see Avril developing friendships.

I got to be in charge of a coloring activity.  It was interesting to see the different personalities of all the kids...

Also that day...

McKel added to her wound collection by crashing in to the bottom of the slide at daycare.  She now has a good-sized bruise, a black eye, and her stitches scar above her eyebrow.  This child is going to give me a heart attack.

My Aunt Trish

My amazing Aunt Trish was just diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer.  She is also the mother of 3 year old triplets... 2 of which are disabled.  Here is her story:
http://www.gofundme.com/lq8lw0

Sending lots of love and prayers her way....

Fun Visitors!

Grandma Joyce, Trish and the boys, Olivia, and Nana and Papa all came to visit us in our new apartment.  Avril was overjoyed to have Live do her hair and nails for her.  And McKel loved playing outside with the triplet boys.  What a fun day!

Liv is amazing at doing hair!!

Also beautiful blue and pink nails!

George is not at all embarrassed to be taking a ride on this little pink tricycle

McKel never wanted to get off of her bicycle!

Edison always loves a good swing!

Grandma Joyce loves spending time with all her family :)

Thank you for a fun day!!!

Dance Class

I am so excited to report that I finally get to take the girls to a dance class.  I should also probably explain that Mike and mommy have separated... the girls and mommy moved in to an apartment right on campus where mommy works.  Hopefully Mike can work on the things he needs to and maybe someday be with our family again...
The good news is that it now takes me 5 minutes to get to work, and the girls will get to go to a wonderful school, and make lots of new friends.  We also live across the street from the Zoo!  So we are pretty much neighbors with the elephants :)
In the apartment community center where we live, a girl teaches dance class.  This week was the first week of class, and the girls did an amazing job.  They loved it!  Watching them learn and have fun is heart-warming to mommy...

Girls' Day Out!

I promised the girls a train ride.  I take the Trax to work most days, since the traffic to my new job is horrendous.  The girls were BEYOND excited to get to ride the train.  I was BEYOND excited to not have to drive :)  I must say, we had an absolute blast, and the girls were so cute and well behaved, a train passenger even commented on how good the girls were for the entire train ride!
It was pretty freezing out so we wore our hats and gloves.  For our destination, we were going all the way to Red Butte Gardens, by mommy's work, to attend an educational snowflake craft class.  We got our exercise in walking up the hill all the way from the train station to the location of the class...

Two very excited sisters, awaiting the train arrival at the Jordan Valley station

Cuddling helps keep each other warm!

Mommy loves her girls!

I just love this girl's smile!

Luckily I got to see lots of smiles on our adventure trip!

This girl has a pretty cute smile too!

The girls loved the snowflake crafts!

McKel proudly displays her glittery snowflake that she made!

They especially loved the pretzel/marshmallow snowflakes... and got to taste quite a few of these flavorful snowflakes.

Such a sweetie cutie

Makes my heart happy

These are some delicious snowflakes!

:)

What happened next was another adventure all in itself!  We headed over to the Gateway Mall to meet up with Aunt Trish and the triplet boys... While waiting in the car for them to arrive, Avril used her Houdini skills and somehow managed to entangle herself in the seatbelt and lock it in to position.  Mommy tried and tried, but could not get the seatbelt to budge at all... a mall employee passed by and witnessed my despair, so offered to help.  He did not have any better luck, so he called a friend for more support.  She was very kind and helpful, but not able to help to get poor Avril unstuck from her seat in the car.
Next we had the mall police come, who were quite useless without any tools.  They went to try to find tools... in the meantime, a lady who walked by saw our predicament and grabbed her husband, knowing that he had a tool set in his truck...
He ended up being the one who finally saved us!  He was able to unbolt the seatbelt to get Avril out, which was nice because we were worried that we would have to resort to cutting through the seatbelt.  This way, we didn't have to buy an expensive new seatbelt.  This made quite the story.  Avril was a trooper through the whole thing.  I think she liked the attention, but was a little embarrassed that she'd gotten herself stuck....

Avril sits patiently waiting for someone to be able to rescue her...

you can see how tight the seatbelt is wrapped around her waist, poor girl!

Our team of helpers trying to get Avril out of the car...

Someday she will have quite the story to tell!

Unbolting the seatbelt...

And she made it out!  Time to go get some ice cream treats at the mall :)

Bringing in the New Year!

I thought the perfect way to start out the New Year would be at the Fun Center :)  Rollerskating, scooters, jump zone, they have it all!  The girls had an absolute blast!

I only snapped one photo, but it was completely adorable.

They even had an electronic bull for us to ride... we took some amazing footage of all of us taking on the ferocious bull:


And later that day...
What a way to bring in the New Year, with a trip to the Emergency Room!  No surprise, McKel was the recipient of 5 new stitches!  The poor girl is so accident prone!  But she's also one tough gal!  She didn't even cry when the doctor was stitching her up.
The gash was due to a run-in with the granite countertop in the kitchen.  It completely gashed open the skin above her left eyebrow...
Poor mom was having a panic attack at the sight of the blood and open wound, I could barely even look... we took the whole family down to the South Jordan U of U ER, and met a lot of nice nurses and doctors, who helped us out over the course of 3 hours...
Avril was having fun pretending that she was a doctor, and even sat in the Doctor's chair.  When he came in, she proudly told him that she was the doctor.  When asked how many years of school she thought doctors went to, Avril thought about it and then said, "um... twelve?"  Not a bad answer for a 5 year old!
Anyway, here are the gruesome pictures that I took of McKel:

split that eyebrow wide open...

I only include this second pic to show you Avril in the background :)

They put numbing medicine on this pirate eye patch, before starting the stitching up process...

Poor McKel

This was after they tried to wash out the wound... 

McKel had her eyes wide open the whole time...

The doc did a great job... hopefully it will heal up nice and quickly!

Happy New Year!!