It's a Girl (Again)!

It has been a long road, but I think we are almost all caught up in reporting on all this big events we missed over the last couple of week.  The last thing left is our big gender reveal.  While everyone was here for the baptism, we decided it was as good of a time as any to announce the gender of baby number 3.

We decided to go with balloon reveal.  We had 60 pink and blue balloons with papers inside that all said "Not Me!" with the exception of one that said "It's a ___________!".  The family had to pop all the balloons to reveal if it was a boy or a girl.  Unfortunately when all the balloons were popped, all we had was a sea of papers that all said "Not Me!"

At that point Jeremy and I each produced a balloon from our pocket, one blue and one pink.  We blew them up, tied them, and popped them.  My blue balloon said "Not Me!" and Jeremy's pink balloon said "It's a Girl!".  At that point all the older boy cousins fell to the ground in utter disappointment.  All the rest of us are really excited to have this little girly join our family.  We can't wait!

Eight is Great!

A bit late, but it is about time we talked about a super important event that happened in our family early this month, Merrick's birthday.  This wasn't just any birthday, this was the year Merrick turned 8 and decided to get baptized.  I guess because it was such a big birthday we decided to really spread out the celebrating.  We celebrated as a family on his actual birthday, celebrated with our extended family and friends as he was baptized, and celebrated with his friends at a car engineering and racing birthday party.

Merrick was supposed to have soccer practice on the big day but we have had such poor air quality due to forest fires around us that they decided to cancel.  That meant we had a little extra time to celebrate.  We had homemade mac and cheese (the birthday boy's choice), cake and of course presents.

As special as Merrick's birthday was, it was nothing compared to what was coming that weekend.  On September 9th, Merrick was baptized by Jeremy and confirmed as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  Grandpa, Lollie, Uncle Jensen, Aunt Emily, Tala, and Kai all came into town and the special day was made even more special by sharing the day with his bestie cousin, Kai, who was also baptized.  My heart swelled and I had a difficult time controlling my emotions as these two boys made this great decision.  I could not be more proud and I hope Merrick knows that.

As icing on the cake, we rounded out the celebrations with a joint birthday party for Merrick and his friend Jacoby.  It must have been because of sheer exhaustion after all the events of the previous weeks, but I neglected to take pictures of most of the party.  You will just have to rely on my description of what was a super fun party.  The idea was for the boys to engineer and create cars out of skewers, toothpicks, straws, tape, and wheels.  Once they created their car they could race it down a ramp track we created and then fine tune and tweak their car to make it better.  The kids got really creative with extra wheels, spoilers, fewer wheels, and sometimes just racing wheels down the track.  I think everyone had a great time and Merrick and Jacoby were definitely spoiled by their friends.

It has been a whirlwind!  We love Merrick and couldn't imaging our family without him and were so excited to get to celebrate him...for a nice long time.  Now I need a nap.

First Days of School

The last two weeks have been a complete whirlwind.  Both kids started school, I started work, Merrick had a birthday, we took a quick vacation to San Francisco for my cousin's wedding, family came into town, and Merrick got baptized.  WHEW!  I am tired just writing about it.

Today I will try to start covering these many events with a post about our back to school days.  Merrick's first day was August 29th.  We were all lamenting the early August start to school this year, but things went from bad to worse when Merrick got his teacher assignment and didn't get the teacher he was hoping for.

The first day of school came and it was a disaster.  Merrick was beside himself that school was awful, his teacher was the worst, and he wasn't going back.  He came home, fell face first onto the couch and cried.  I told him we were going to get slushees and to get in the car.  On the way there we talked about his experiences and how I really wanted him to have a good year.  We talked about looking for the positive things in his teacher and his day.  I told him that I would pay him $.10/day for any day that he could tell me three positive things about his day (2 things about his teacher and 1 about his day in general).  This has seemed to turn things around for him.  Now that we are looking for the positives our outlook seems to be better overall.

As for Carrigan, her first day was September 5th.  She had a great first day and as of now seems to be doing a much better job this year of following the rules and routine.  It is exciting to see how much she has grown over her years of preschool.

One last note, over the last few weeks my preschool team (Lora, my mom, and I) have worked really hard giving our preschool room a complete make over prior to the start of the school year.  I am really happy with how it turned out.