Waiting for the Election

Oh hey, there! I decided to pull myself away from watching the election numbers and do something slightly more useful and immerse myself in cute pictures of our sweet babes. 

Dallas' sister Lezlie made these adorable outfits for the babies and I hadn't put them on them yet because they said 3-6 months, but these babies are growing so fast! I have to hurry and get all their cute clothes on them before they don't fit!

After witnessing Emma's skills with the timer yesterday, I decided to put her skills to some use and get a pic of me with the babes. 

Aww. Here they are again. Holding hands. I didn't pose them. Although I do always hope for this and try to get them close enough that they will. 

And then all the sisters were there because they just can't resist not being with their baby sisters and mommy! Sometimes I get cranky that my kids always want to be next to me...but I know I will miss it. I need to savor these moments. I love love loooooooove our girls and am so glad that we get to be with each other so much. 

Later in the day, after the babies nap. They had woken up and I sent Alice upstairs to check on them and keep them happy until I could come up. Once again, she is a super babysitter. Last time, if you'll recall, I found her singing "Five Little Ducks" to the babies. This time I found her playing her violin for them.

We found some other great toys for the babies! A bunch of necklaces and the girls plastic colors. Hallelujah. I don't know why - but for some reason we have no baby toys. Or at least we've struggled to remember/find things that babies like to play with.

So that's most of the day. I did not run. I spent a lot of time constantly checking my phone and internet to see if there were any updates on the election. Definitely could have used my time better. Oh well. Luckily tomorrow is another day. :) 

Here is a link about the election that I really enjoyed. 

https://www.facebook.com/45502382/videos/10102497749741746/

 

For Your Viewing Pleasure

 I forgot to post last night (aka went to bed mega early...like 8:30). Which is unfortunate because these are such adorable videos. But luckily, I am still here and will still post them for you. :)

I took these while sitting in my chair nursing Olive and Mabel. Alice came over to read me "The Three Billy Goats Gruff." Lucy saw Alice reading to me and decided she wanted to read too. So she got her "Unicorn" book and joined the fun. I like that they are both reading to me at the same time. And when Lucy asks, "What dis say?" and "Dis my unicorn book!" and meanwhile Alice is steadily trying to get through her book. Just watch it. Maybe it's something only a parent would love - but I think these videos are so cute. 

I also love that Alice and Lucy will often participate in Emma's virtual school. Here is music time. The teacher had them listen to a song with fairies and one with giants. When the giants came all the girls hid behind the couch because it was "scary".  I know this virtual thing has not been great for everyone and yes, Emma is excited to someday go to "real" school but I am a big fan of all the time my girls still get to have together. 

And here's the sweet babes. Pluggin' along and learning how to play on their own! They have started to enjoy toys a bit more. In this picture I think they'd started playing with the girls' magnets.

Emma also learned how to use the timer on the phone today and took some impressive selfies. Here's one I really love that she took with Alice.

This must be after Lucy did some more pee-pees. I just loved how cute they are sitting on the couch together picking out their treats.

Haha. And here is Lucy explaining to Dallas why she should get another treat. "I sit on dee potty! My panties dry!"

The other thing that happened yesterday is Emma made a sweet movie theater. I meant to take a picture of it...but still haven't. Maybe tomorrow. Anyway, what happened is Emma had a friend over and they'd been happily playing when out of nowhere, Emma came and asked if they could watch a show. The answer was no. Obviously. Mid-day. Friend over. School day. I could go on, but final answer is no reason to watch a show. I love that Emma doesn't whine or keep asking when I say "no" and this moment was no different. She opened her eyes wide and said, "Then can we watch a pretend show?" "Of course! You can watch a pretend show for as LONG as you want!" Emma and her friend got to work setting it up - Emma created the TV screen (colored a scene on paper and taped it to my nightstand) and theatre (lots of blankets laid out in my bedroom in front of the nightstand) and assigned her friend to go find stuffed animals and set them up. Then the girls came and got some movie snacks (leftover Halloween treats) and that was that. I don't know how long they played but they seemed happy.

Another great thing about yesterday is that Alice had a second wonderful day at preschool. I am so SO happy that she is enjoying it. 

Potty Training Lucy

Holy cow, Lucy is so cute. Let's just start off with that. She makes all of us laugh so much. She also drives us crazy sometimes, which is why she's lucky she's so cute. 

Now, onto the topic of the day. Potty training Lucy. Lucy started pooping in the potty over a year ago (She was almost 15 months). She just decided to start doing it and it was freaking awesome. Dallas and I thought we must be the best parents ever and that this parenting thing must just get easier and easier with each kid. How naive.

I didn't want to make Lucy's decision to poop in the potty a big deal or start legit potty-training. Partly because that required effort but also because I didn't want to smash her inner enthusiasm and end up having to make charts, give treats, etc when she was happy to go number two for nothing right now. 

I was also really pleased that Lucy did all her poops in normal-sized potties. I really dislike little potties because you have to CLEAN them EVERY TIME and it's just more stuff in the bathroom and you have to run to wherever the little potty is located. No fun. However, sometime in February, Dallas decided we should buy a little potty for Lucy and start "encouraging" her a little more. I pushed back - especially with buying the little potty, but Dallas felt strongly about it and promised he would always clean the potty. So we bought it.

Lucy did fine with the little potty for the first few months, but we never really got peeing down. And then the babies came and we had about three months of total back track - back to pooping in diapers and that was really not cool. And then one day, she just decided to poop in the potty again. Wala. But we still didn't have pee-ing down. We have thought so many times we were close (so close that I would cancel diaper purchases) and then we weren't (and I'd make a mad dash for diapers). 

Well, here we are. More than a year after Lucy first started sitting on the potty and I think she's finally potty-trained. The thing that sealed the deal - chocolate chips (now progressed to Halloween treats) and panties. The road to get here included days of Dallas setting a timer and putting her on the potty every 20 minutes, then every 30 minutes, but eventually, it was just letting Lucy do her thing. Oh - and training ourselves. That's always a big part - me remembering to put her on right when she wakes up. anytime before we go anywhere and making sure not took long passes without having her hop on the potty. 

So yes, Lucy might sit on the potty 7 times within 5 minutes and just do a tiny pee-pee each time (because she's figured out she can get more chocolate chips that way), but that's okay. She is learning how to control herself and her panties are dry and we are happy! And we are on about day five of this. I have also noticed that is best to give her the thin panties (not the thick training panties) because she notices right away if she is starting to pee when she's wearing the thin ones. 

Anyway, here is a picture of her and her sisters choosing a treat for going potty. We always include Emma and Alice in Lucy's rewards. That way Emma and Alice are motivated to help and encourage her. It's kind of cute because now whenever Lucy pees she calls out, "Emma! Alice! Emma! Alice!" and then hurries to get treats for all three of them. Back in the "poop days", the reward was watching 5 minutes of your favorite show. Each girl got to pick one so it was a total of 15 minutes. We finally had to stop that when we realized the "weight" Lucy carried to make sure they got to watch a show each day. 

And today we went to Costco and looked for heaters for our basement. If you have any recommendations, I'm open. I've noticed that I can hardly buy anything now without checking reviews.

We came home and here's Lucy once again at the pantry looking for a treat. "I get one more treat, mommy." 

Coming back from the park with friends!

And here are our happy, gurgling babies! I love when they kick their legs and their wide-open mouth smiles. They are SO SWEET! Just watching these videos makes me think, "Oh yea, we could definitely have more kids!"

 

Dancing, Preschool, Voting, Unicorns

The girlies were so cute this morning. I had pulled out these toddler mattresses that we've had under the trampoline. We got new ones a while back and I initially kept these thinking maybe we'd need them someday. And then yesterday when our house was a disaster I went into, "get rid of everything" mode and pulled these mattresses out to give away or throw away. The girls saw them out this morning and immediately started jumping and dancing on them. They found the soundtrack from Coco and started doing some really great Spanish dancing. So...we are now keeping these mattresses. :) 

Alice has been so excited for preschool! She was going to start in September but I pulled her out last minute when I thought we would just homeschool Emma. I figured if Emma was going to be home and getting homeschooled, Alice might as well stay home and do the same. But then Emma ended up enjoying virtual school. And although Alice will sometimes do parts of virtual school with Emma, we started thinking it might be nice for her to have "her" school. 

I have also been hesitant about putting Alice in preschool because I love having all my girls home together. There are definitely times when they get cranky with each other and when I get cranky with them, but overall, they do really well together and I don't want to cut this time short. It also costs money (duh, Amy) and I don't want to waste money if she ends up not liking it and wants to get out. In the end, I decided if Alice is excited about going, we should send her. I have tried to not sway her one way or the other. A few weeks ago we went in and met with the teacher and she felt really excited about going. So, today, we started! 

Here she is - in her cute outfit and boots and two bows. As you all know, Alice loves getting dressed up and loves wearing lots of bows. We love her so much and the drive home seemed SO quiet, even though I still had my four other girls in the car. It was Lucy's naptime so I turned on the sleep music playlist. The first song it played was one of Alice's favorites "Come Thou Fount". Alice actually calls it the "Fine Song". She sings "Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, etc." to the entire tune. It is really cute. Anyway, that song came on and I felt sad and missed Alice. I love seeing our girls grow but it is also so hard letting them go. 

Dallas picked up Alice on his way home from work and then we all met at the High School to vote! Neither Dallas nor I have voted in a loooooong time. I don't know if I should say how long. But let's just acknowledge it's been a great while. Anyway, we didn't think we could bring our kids in with us. So I waited in line while Dallas stayed in the car with the girls and then we swapped. I have since learned that we could have all gone at the same time. Oh well. Next time. Here's a pic of Dallas with his sticker and Lucy trying to feed Mabel a pretzel. As usual, Mabel is ALL ABOUT getting some food and Olive is the chill observer. 

See what I mean about how sweet they are? Here are Alice and Lucy playing together while Emma is practicing violin with Dallas. Alice is pretending to be a unicorn and Lucy is her puppy. 

Here is Emma  - also being a sweet unicorn. I love our girls so much.

And yes. Proof that I also voted.

Sunday

Whenever Dallas is in charge of dressing the babies, you can be sure he will put on a onesie that says something about Daddy. He is so proud of his skills. :)

Church today was pretty simple. We focused on learning the song "Have I Done Any Good in the World Today?". We just sang the first verse a couple of times and made some actions to help remember the words. After that we sang a sacrament hymn and took the sacrament. We've been trying to figure out a way to help sacrament be a little more reverent and help the girls (and ourselves) think more about Jesus. So after the sacrament we went through the song we sang and talked about what the words meant. 

Dallas and I hadn't really gone over a lesson for the girls today so I wasn't going to do much else but  then Emma asked if she could do a "musical number" for primary - so of course, Alice and Lucy wanted to as well! Here are their musical numbers. 

Alice just barely started learning "I am a Child of God" this week. After last week when we talked about trying to remember Jesus more, she asked Dallas to teach her a song about Jesus. So this is the one she is working on.

Lucy starts off playing "I am a Child of God" and then says she want to play the "Mommy Song" which is actually called "Love is Spoken Here". The "Mommy Song" used to be one of her favorite songs to have Dallas sing to her when he got her to bed. We hardly sing to her at bedtime now because she just falls asleep with the girls. 

I took this picture of Emma because I wanted to remember her love for ketchup-mayo sandwiches. We discovered this love of hers a couple months back when we were having hamburgers. Emma and Alice had been requesting hamburgers for a long time so we figured they'd be pretty excited. I asked Emma what she would like on hers. "Umm, I would like a hamburger with ketchup, mayo, cheese, and no meat." Uh, Emma. The meat is what makes it a hamburger. Since then, we have realized that all she really needs to have a "hamburger" is ketchup, mayo, and cheese. I also took this picture to remind myself Emma is growing up! Today she tried to make her sandwich all by herself.

And here's Alice diligently working on coloring the postcards we got from the Epcot at Disney World back in February. I have thought about throwing these away many times, but I always stop because I remember how much my girls love coloring and how much they loved Disney World. Seeing how excited Alice was to find and color these postcards reassured me that keeping these cards was a good choice.

This might be weird..but I took a selfie of my favorite/most efficient/most comfortable way to nurse the babies. I prop myself right next to the arm rest on the firm couch and hold the babies with one baby's head on the other baby's tummy. Don't worry, I hold that head so it's not squishing the other baby's tummy. I usually have Mabel on the bottom because she is bigger than Olive. 

While I was sitting here nursing, I took a video of Alice coloring and Emma writing out all the words to the song we'd learned that morning. She said she wanted to remember it so she was going to write it all out and then she would teach it to her friends this week and sing it with them.

Candy-sorting time! I forgot about this oh-so-important part of Halloween til I saw a video my friend had posted of her kids sorting way back when. So, here we are - sorting into chocolate and non-chocolate. I'm always surprised that my kids like anything non-chocolate (because that is all I like). Which is unfortunate, because I was looking forward to getting rid of a lot of candy but in the end, we kept pretty much all of it.

Alice was really excited to show me how much of the song she knew with actions.

I love her sweet voice.

Pie time! I have never really enjoyed pumpkin pie. But holy cow. I don't know if my taste buds have changed or Dallas is the world's greatest pumpkin pie maker, but this pie was SO GOOD! There is not much left...

Dallas reading with the babes. You'll notice that now BOTH girls have outfits that say something about daddy.

Here's a close-up of just the babes :)

The girlies ended the night by playing with glow sticks with their friend/practically sister. They loved it. My favorite part was peeking out the front door and seeing Lucy zoom by in her light-up scooter, with her dress flying and glow sticks all over her neck and wrists. 

 

Halloween

Our kids love holidays. Especially Emma. And yes, I know, all kids probably love holidays, but ours get really excited for them and especially especially Emma. So I had told them we could do something special for breakfast on Halloween - like make pumpkin pancakes or go get pumpkin donuts. But I didn't really plan it out well. 

I was going to run from 6-8 in the morning and get my haircut at 9 so I figured as soon as I got back from the run, we could go get donuts. But we ended up not going on the run til almost 6:40...and I didn't get home til 8:45. So, no special breakfast. I hadn't told Dallas my plan so he just gave them cold cereal. Sigh. Thankfully, my kids are really understanding and forgiving. Emma said, "It's okay - we can do a special breakfast next Saturday!" Sweet girl. 

We'd also hoped to go to a friend's baseball game at 11 and maybe to the library at 12 for a little drive-thru trick or treat (and to drop off way over-due books). But none of that happened. I don't remember why...there were some naps that needed to happen between the babes and Lucy. Also, Dallas hadn't been able to make his pie while I was running and getting my haircut so that still needed to get done. And after my haircut I realized I don't own any gel and I still wanted to find a long-sleeve black shirt for Emma's costume and maybe look at some clothes for family pictures that were happening today...

So, in case you're wondering - baseball game and library didn't happen. Instead, once we got Lucy down for a nap and the babies fed, Alice and I headed out on errands while Emma stayed to help Dallas with the pies and the babies. Alice was so excited to go shopping. We ended up getting two types of gel and some eye shadow. She has been wanting eye shadow ever since she saw it on Elsa and when she saw my sister Renae putting some on this summer. I know next to nothing about make-up so we'll see how this goes. 

We came home to a happy Dallas and babies and some delicious-looking and scrumptious-smelling pumpkin pies. 

That's when Emma reminded me they hadn't really had lunch yet and we hadn't used the halloween tablecloth we'd gotten at the Dollar Store a few weeks ago. Oops. I felt disappointed I hadn't really done anything Halloween-y and the day was already more than half over. So here's a semi-halloween-y lunch. Just some normal sandwiches haphazardly cut into pumpkins. Ah well. The kids were good sports and happy for pumpkin-shaped sandwiches. And when they were still hungry, they ate the crust as if it were the vines from the pumpkins.

As soon as late-lunch finished, we started the mad dash around the house. We needed to figure out what to wear for pictures at 4 p.m. AND we needed to find the missing kitty-cat ears for Lucy's costume. And our house was a DISASTER today. I feel like we're generally relatively good about not letting things get to disaster stage, but somehow disaster stage snuck up on us. Those kitty ears could be ANYWHERE. But priorities - what the heck were we going to wear for our pictures? Again, something I should have planned earlier. We found some stuff and I think it worked out. We changed Lucy's outfit last minute and looking at the pictures, I wish I had worn something maroon like Lucy but oh well. At least we got pictures! 

The girls and the babies were all such great sports for the pictures. And we got home with plenty of time to get dressed for trick-or-treating and make some cornbread...which was their dinner. As you can see, we never found the black kitty ears, but Lucy ended up really loving these pink ones, so it all worked out. 

We had talked about making the babies into mice...but with all the other hulla-ba-loo that didn't happen. :/

Here's the kiddos with friends from the neighborhood. I know I've said this before..but we are SO LUCKY to have so many great people living next to us. 

So, all-in-all it was a good day. The girls went to bed asking when Halloween would be back again. Ending with dressing up, trick-or-treating, and spending time with friends certainly overshadowed all the little things I'd not done earlier in the day. I also really love that all the girls chose a simple costume and that they were SO excited about it! And I love that they still always want to do whatever their sisters are doing. 

Take home message for me: plan and prepare. I feel like this has been a weakness all my life. My mom would joke with me that I "fly by the seat of my pants" yet somehow things always work out. But I don't want things to just work out - I want them to be AWESOME! So today I told the girls I really want to work on planning. Whenever there's something I need to remember or work on, I tell the girls. They never let me forget. I asked them to remind me to plan before I left their room at night. Sure enough, tonight, after getting the girls ready for bed, Emma said, "Mommy! You have to go plan! You can come back and check on us in 20 minutes after you plan." Sweet Emma. Thanks for helping me out.