Family Blog 2: 3 AM Showers, Car Trouble, Volunteering, Decorating, New Shelves

We have been keeping busy the last 9 days. One of the more interesting happenings this week happened really early Wednesday morning--like around 3am. Aaron and I were woken up by the sound of running water. Seeing as that is never a good thing we got up to see what was happening only to find that Daniel was in the shower. What?! I guess he was having some growing pains in his leg and instead of waking me up to get some medicine he decided to take a shower at 3 am. Unfortunately, the shower is in a central location of our house so it ended up waking everyone else up with the lights and water in the pipe sounds at 3 am, too. Boo!! Let me just say the next day was not fun--everyone was 'Chuckles' and needed to go to bed early the next night because they were so crusty!! Hopefully, next time Daniel has some growing pains he will wake just me up instead of everyone else!! I can't get too upset because Daniel having growing pains is an event that should be celebrated :)! YAY, DANIEL IS GROWING!!

We all have been battling a nasty cold the past week. Last Sunday the only people well enough to go to church were Aaron and Matthew. It was a good thing because Matthew had volunteered to teach the Sunday School lesson for his class that week. We had to help him prepare his lesson all week long. Since he didn't want Aaron to go in to class with him and I was home sick with all the other sick kids he was on his own. His teacher did make sure it was ok with me before she let him teach, though. She also said that if he ended early she would help out. When they got home from church we asked Matthew how it went and he just said it was good. He didn't expound any further than that so I guess it was ok. Yesterday I did ask his Sunday School teacher how he did and she said he did great. I am a bit of a Nervous Nelly so I really hope it did go ok!! You just never know with Matthew!! Anyway, thankfully all of us are feeling much better. It is amazing the difference a week can make!

Speaking of Matthew....he is so excited because they announced that the youth were going to be riding Frontrunner (the commuter train) down to see the lights at Temple Square. Every time they announce that Matthew goes berserk with excitement. To tell you the truth I think the Young Mens president announces it extra just to see Matthew's excited reaction. It doesn't matter if we are at church or not Matthew will just squeal and yell because he is so excited. I think we may need to make a countdown chart for Matthew to help him count down the days before we get to ride Frontrunner instead of a countdown for Christmas--the crazy kid!!

We have been having some problems with our cars which I HATE dealing with!! I was driving home from Salt Lake and the check engine light flashed on in the Suburban--DOH!! Thankfully, Aaron and Bryan, my brother, were able to figure out the problem which was a bad oil sensor and were able to fix it without too much money. Then Aaron's car needed the CV boot fixed. It has been making horrible knocking sounds every time you turned right for a while and they were getting worse. It was better to fix it before the wheel completely locked up. I am hoping that we are done fixing cars for a while because spending money on car repairs is not fun!!

We finally got our Christmas decorations up and I had lots of helpers getting it done. It's fun to have the kids old enough to help out.

Our poor family Christmas tree is slowly dying. It was a pre-lit tree, but none of the lights work anymore. I found some other light strings to put on it. I checked them all before they were put on the tree and they worked, but after they got on the tree two of the strands went out. The poor tree looks like a Charlie Brown tree, but it will still work. It was fun listening to the kids put up their homemade ornaments. They would say, "Oh remember this?" or "This is what I looked like two years ago!".

We do have a fancy tree in the living room that all the lights work on it so this wasn't our only tree. Hopefully the front room tree's lights will continue to work so we don't end up with two Charlie Brown Christmas trees!

Do you like our new fridge door shelves? If we weren't fast enough to get him what he wanted from the fridge he would open the doors and climb up and get it. Unfortunately, he used the shelves to pull himself up too many times and cracked them to the point that it was scary to even put anything on them for fear they broke all the way and drop whatever was stored on them. I was excited to have new shelves that weren't cracked. I have also talked to Noah about rock climbing using the fridge shelves and hopefully he won't do it again. I am keeping my fingers crossed for now, but just in case I have the shelf part numbers written down in case I need to order more....

Noah has been doing the reading program at school. He is so excited to come home and read his new book he got that day. This time it was Aaron's turn to listen to him read:

Thursday was Morning with Mom at the Elementary school. I was excited to go and have breakfast with my kids that morning and play Uno. They had donuts with really thick chocolate frosting so it did take some time to clean off all the frosting off their faces, hands, coats, gloves, etc. before we could play. The kids didn't mind too much because everyone loves chocolate frosting!! I love being able to go to these fun activities and that the kids still get excited to have me come, too!

Noah made a Christmas countdown in his class. He has to cut off a number strip every day to help count down to Christmas. He comes home every day from school and makes sure to remind me that he needs to cut his paper.

Saturday was busy. Saturday morning the Young Men/Young Women got to pass out invitations to the ward party this week. After that Josh got to volunteer at the Community Creche Festival. He got to work in the nursery helping entertain kids while their parents got to look at all the nativity scenes. Josh said it was pretty fun. When it was time to pick him up we all went to check out all the nativity scenes. They were pretty neat to see. This was a non denominational celebration of Christmas where the community let their personal nativity scenes be put on display for everyone to see. There were so many different nativities.

Of course we had to stop by the kid station to check out the fun activities they had for them to do. Here's Daniel, Sarah and Noah playing with the puppets at the puppet station:

Yesterday we drove around to look at the Christmas lights. We drove through the Layton City Park and saw all the Christmas lights. The kids loved the light tunnel you could drive through: