Seattle trip

We just arrived home after a fun, quick trip to Seattle. Here are a few pictures of our adventures.

The kids looked cute carrying their backpacks in the airport.

We went to a Thomas and Friends Live show at Key Arena. The kids loved seeing the trains. It was a pretty good show, but the kids would have liked it better if there was more train movement, and a little less people dancing and singing. The stage area was fairly small, and we were kind of far away. But they enjoyed it.

The carousal at the Auburn super mall is a favorite activity when we visit. This was actually our first stop after we arrived on Friday.

Another favorite place is the park by Auntie Christy's house. We had just a few minutes to play before heading to the airport. The kids made sure they went on everything.

Grandma and Grandpa Cooke, who were in Seattle for the Radford's wedding, were on our flight coming home. Boys on one side of the plane, girls on the other.
It was a nice time for Meadow and Logan. They of course loved seeing Auntie Christy and Farley the cat. Next time we travel we will have 4 kids!

Meadow's Art

I just had to show off more of Meadow's drawings. She really is an amazing artist! I wish I had more time to draw with her! (Little mischievous brothers tend to get in the way.)

The first one is of a bird flying over a red ant, a baby red ant, and a black ant. This is a horse eating oranges from a tree, and wearing slippers!

She is so creative!

We are taking Meadow and Logan to Seattle tomorrow to visit auntie Christy, and to see a Thomas the Tank Engine Live show at Key Arena! We wanted to do something special for them and take one last trip before life changes with a new baby. Brennen will be staying with my mom. It should be fun! We'll be back Saturday night and I'll post pictures.

Happy Valentine's Day!

The Great Exciting Outing

Well, we haven't had much to add to our blog lately, and I've hardly even taken any pictures since Christmas! We have all been sick with the bad cold that is going around. Other than grandma's houses, we haven't been out and about much. So, here's a new post and some pictures to show we're still alive.

Desperate to get out of the house, we went on a little outing. Not really that exciting, but it was all I could think of. First we went through the car wash. At first they liked watching it, but the noise scared Logan and Brennen a little.Next we took some boxes to the recycling bin. Meadow is really into recycling lately, (she learned about it from Blue's Clues) so we helped save the planet, and reduced our carbon footprint. We are good people.
Then we went for lunch at the grocery store, (another thing Meadow gets excited about) before heading back home for naps.
It turned out to be simple but fun!

Baby Names

Here are the only names we have thought of for Cookie Doh:
Ashlyn or Ashlen, and Emerald. The middle name will probably be Rain, but we've considered Chloe (which means blooming), and Meadow has chosen Violet. She already calls the baby Violet, and assumes this will be it's name! As you can see, we still have no boy names! This kid better be a girl!
What combination of names do you like best? We are leaning toward Ashlyn Rain at the moment.

Cookie Doh

We changed baby's name from Doh to Cookie Doh! Logan thought of it. It's perfect!

Big Boy Bed

Matthew just finished building a new twin size bed for Logan! It was his main Christmas present. He wanted it to be orange. It's very nice and Logan is very excited and calls it his "bunk bed", which it will be eventually when Brennen is old enough for a big boy bed.

Winter Wonder Land

Our winter wonderland has become a little too wondrous! I haven't measured it yet, but there's about 3 feet of snow at our house, so... We have been camping out for the last two nights at my parents house! Neither of us are able to do much shoveling, since Matthew is still on crutches and can't put pressure on his leg, and I have learned from previous winters not to shovel while pregnant, unless I want some serious sciatic nerve pain!

The kids are having a great time helping Grandpa shovel and sledding with Grandma!

Here's what our house looks like. The deck is almost filled to the railing. It's higher than the windows.

Here's Matthew's jeep. Do you think he can get out? It has 4 wheel drive...
We did have our driveway plowed once, and my dad has been keeping it kind of shoveled between snowfalls, (and shoveling out lots of other people too!) but it's still too much for our van to handle! The jeep has already been shoveled out once, and this is the snowfall since then.

It's beautiful and could be fun, but a lot of work! I must officially be an adult now. Oh dear.

More from Christmas

Well, I seem to have loaded pictures in backward order again. Here are some tired kids in their new jammies at the end of a fun day. This year our usual gathering for dinner has changed since they all moved away, so I wanted to start a new tradition of having Christmas dinner at our house. It ended up with my parents being our only guests, because Matthew's parents are in Mexico, and friends had other plans, but it was nice to have a small group. I wanted to make it a fancy special meal, so we had soup and salad for starters, then chicken cordon bleu with a creamy wine sauce, and raspberry kiwi trifle for dessert. It was my first time making either of these, so I was glad it was just my family, but it all turned out pretty good! I think we have a new tradition!

Earlier in the day the kids and I got to play in the snow! It was so beautiful! We have about 4 inches. It's been sunny and around 20 degrees for about the last 2 weeks, Then it snowed right before Christmas!

I pulled the kids on their sleds for a while, but Brennen didn't last very long. I think his hands froze, and he just cried.

Meadow and I made this snowman yesterday.

We hope everyone had a good Christmas!

Christmas Morning

We had a wonderful, white Christmas! It was fun this year because the kids were really excited, and finally know what it's all about. (The presents and Jesus' birth.) We opened presents to a beautiful wintery purple sunrise outside, then my parents joined us for breakfast. I made blueberry french toast casserole. Here are some pics from the day. Meadow is wearing her fairy wings while she paints a horse which is from a "paint your own horse" set we gave her.
Brennen didn't really open any presents, but he sure enjoyed playing with them. We gave him a drum set which he loved! He knew exactly what to do!
Cute brothers

Matthew had a bit of a different Christmas this year. He is recovering from knee surgery which he had two days ago. It was from an old soccer injury that has become worse and very painful over the past few years with all the work he does on his knees. The Dr. found that he has torn cartilage in his knee, so they cut out the damaged areas. He has had to spend the last two days with his knee higher than his heart to keep swelling down, but he's recovering very well.
He's enjoying learning to play his new ukulele. It's solid acacia wood and sounds very nice.

Singing Christmas Tree

We just attended the first nights performance of the Singing Christmas Tree. It was very nice! They sounded great and the whole thing went very smoothly- no glitches!The kids choir, directed by Jodi

The kids all enjoyed the singing and especially the cookies!

Here's a short video clip. I had a hard time holding the camera still because Brennen was fidgeting on my lap. You can also hear him singing along rather loudly! He loves to sing!

Meadow's 4th Birthday!

Meadow had a fun party this evening! Her two best friends, Jenna and Juliette came. We played a game of pin the tail on the donkey, decorated foam crowns with sparkly foam stickers, had dinner- Meadow chose to have pizza and chicken nuggets, then had cake and she opened presents. She was very excited about each one. She got lots of princess things! (The photos loaded in reverse order as you can see. Oh well..at least it's working right now!)
Her cake was a pumpkin log with rainbow colored filling. She wanted an orange cake with red and blue so this seemed like a yummy way to do that.

The finished crowns

Making the crowns. Logan made a hat instead.

All the kids minus Brennen (who was probably off climbing on something), and big momma standing by. Wow...I can't believe she's 4!!

Bad Bad HP

I must warn anyone who may be looking for a new computer or printer. Stay away from HP!!! Far, far away! They are some of the worst products out there. We've had lots and lots of trouble with our computer and printer over the 3 short years we've owned them. They work fine for the first year, until your warranty runs out, then things gradually stop working. The supposedly wonderful phone support costs $60!! And then they lie to you and tell you the parts you have aren't even HP, and there's nothing they can do other than sell you something else!! We are very disappointed by it and can now barely even use our computer, thus the lack of posts and pictures lately!

Thanksgiving

We had a nice large group for Thanksgiving this year! We gathered at my parents house as usual.Auntie Christy came for the week!Logan enjoyed a big piece of pumpkin pie which he helped make.

Kristi is writing something she's thankful for on a fabric square for our Thanksgiving banner. -A tradition I started 2 years ago, so we can look back on who we gathered with and read what they wrote.

The kids all played together very nicely! Meadow and Juliette wore their ballerina outfits for the occasion.

Meadow the Amazing Artist

Meadow is growing up so much! She's very creative! She loves to dress herself and these are some of the results:

She spends a lot of time drawing. Here she was working hard on a bunch of pictures which she asked me to make into a book! She told me the words to write on each page. It turned out very good! We should get it published!

Here is an excerpt from her book called "The Farm Animals". I discovered this picture won't enlarge for some reason, so this is what it says: "One day there was a little cow, and he was walking all around. And the sky was so blue, and the flowers were growing, and the sun was shining, and it was a kiky." We don't know what a "kiky" is!

Here are a couple of her other drawings, which she did completely on her own! This is an elephant.

This is Daddy.

November Pics

Once again I've been a bad blogger because our rubbish computer freezes up all the time, so here are a few pictures from this month. The kids made place mats with pretty fall leaves from our yard. (There ARE fall colors here....for a short time before they turn brown and get blown away!)


We got to visit our old apartment in between renters. We have new renters now. The kids were very excited to see it! I still miss it. We have lots of good memories from there!
We discovered another fun place to play at the Rec Center! We went with Sarah and the kids one day.

The kids loved these horses. The older ones had fun running around the gym playing with balls and riding some little car scooter things.