Remembering 2016...

Todays it.....the last day of another year.

Merry Christmas 2016...

Merry Christmas to my little family! What a day it has been to sit back and watch all the excitement on your little faces!

Happy halloween 2016!

This Halloween we tried to go with a family theame...at least daddy and I with the two littest boys...I was a kitty, karbon a skunk, khailo a puppy and daddy was the animal control!!

summer camping...

My MOST FAVORITE thing to do of all times with my boys is go up the mountain and forget the world for the weekend...spend time outdoors all day with them, watch them run and
play...watch them laugh and get filthy dirty!
We went up to my favorite camping place...Duck Creek..up cedar mountain. It was peaceful, relaxing, and amazing to just be with my 5 guys, plus the two dogs!
Kaylin loved finding bugs, trying to shoot the blue bird that was teasing him, riding grandpas BIG four wheeler and taking mommy on the four wheeler and lounging with dad!
Kiptin LOVED squirrel hunting with daddy, driving around like a banchee on his motorcycle, and shooting his BB gun!
Khailo loves his police car, taking it to the mountain was his highlight i think..getting super dirty, taking off his shirt, going for a four wheeler ride with daddy, and sleeping in the trailer!
Karbon this was his 2nd time ever camping..saying he loves to be outside is a huge UNDERSTATEMENT!!!! he loved everything..as long as he is outside you dont hear any complaining from him!
All THREE BIG BOYS LOVED THE FIRE!
It's a lot of work to pack up and go but its worth every second!!

The boys first day of 1st & 5th Grade...

Today summer ended and the boy headed back to school....
1st grade for mr kippy....and 5th grade for mr kaylin
They woke up so excited and hyper and ready to head back to school. Mom was happy to have a little bit of a break and calm things down around here, but sad that
summer is almost over and soon we will be back to cold weather and suck indoors.
Im so proud of my two boys, they are so amazing and i hope they have such an amazing school year! im a lucky mama to have these sweet boys in my life!
here is so another fun school year...2016-2017

Happy 13th Anniversary to us...

Happy 32nd Birthday Daddy...

Happy 10th Birthday Kaylin Boy...

TEN!!!
I cant believe we have a 10 year old...this is craziness!
what lucky parents are we to have been blessed with the sweetest boy in the world...he has a heart of GOLD and is the kindest boy...ALWAYS thinking of others!
Ten years ago TODAY..my first little boy was born and how my life changed forever...my pregnancy and labor was scary with him but God protected him and me, im so grateful for that!
Kaylin you are my world, my first boy to make me a mommy and the first little boy to call me MOMMY...you and I were buddies, glued at the hip 24/7, you were my whole world, nothing
else mattered to me...over the years you have been our guinea pig, the down fall of being the first born..its hard at times and I know its not always fair BUT you are a trooper and
have hung in there with us and keep teaching us whats most important...YOU!
Your heart is amazing and there is something BIG in store for you in life, stay close to your Father in Heaven and door will be open to you!
I know that I can be a hard mom at times, being a mom is very hard BUT its the most rewarding job in the world and I wouldnt change it for anything, You have made my life magical
you have taught me, guided me, tested me, and most of all LOVED ME!! I cant believe you are TEN already..time is flying by and I would give anything to slow it down..you are growing so fast...please let me keep you little forever!
Kaylin, we love you more then you could ever know, one day when you have your own little ones you will understand the unconditional love Daddy and I have for you!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY KAYLIN BOY...you will always have our hearts!

ONE DECADE OLD TODAY 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10!!!!

Khailo's kitty kats...

So my little khai is the funniest kid and I adore everything he says!
This morning he comes in my room with a bag of kit kats he found in the freezer and says "mom, I love kitty kats" holding the bag up he also says "mom can I have some kitty kats cause I just love them and they are little one's"
Melted my dang heart!!!!

Aaaaaand HE'S WALKING....

Karbon finally started to get brave enough to take some steps...on fathers day he decided he was brave enough to take about 5 to 7 steps at a time. he walked back and forth
from mommy to daddy and was so proud of him self! Im a little bit sad about this big step, once he's a walker he will always be a walker...i have really just let him go at his
own pace and not pushed him in anyway to walk sooner...i wanted (want) to keep him as little as possible for as long as possible!!
So I left for girls camp the following wends the 22nd of june...and when i got home on the 25th of june he was walking like a pro...i was so sad but it was so awesome to see him
so proud of himself..he walks about 10 or more steps now, he walks across the room and its thee CUTEST thing in the world to watch, his face has the biggest smile and he giggles while he is walking...I LOVE IT!
14 months old and he took off walking like a boss!!!

Karbon is 14 months!...

Today marks 14 months of having my sweetest littlest baby boy...karbon is so much fun. He is cuddly, happy, loves his mommy and daddy...he thinks he is just as big and his brothers and try's to do everything they do. He sleeps like a champ 12-14 hours a night, doesn't cry when it's bed time! He loves food, not a big fan of fruit but loves most all veggies. He crawls like a Taz mania devil...so fast! He walks along everything and will take 2 or 3 steps but then chickens out and goes back to crawling!
He is the happiest, easiest baby and only crys when he is board, tired, or hungry!
He loves his bath time!
He loves to just be with his mommy & daddy....he is super shy around other people but that's ok cause he gives mommy extra snuggles when strangers come around and I LOVE it!
I'm so sad he is growing so fast now...I truly want him to stay little and always be my tiny baby.
I can't imagine life without this kid he completes me and I know he was ment to come to me and be mine!!
I love you forever and ever my sweet boy!!

I want our kids to ALWAYS come home!...

I found this artical about what familys need to do NOW to ensure that their kids alaways want to return home when they are older!
I LOVED it so much, many things in it Dad and I have already been trying to do but I wanted to have it written down so one day our boys could read it as well!
Having a home where my beautiful boys want to come back too when they are grown is EVERYTHING to me...I want my kids and us to be CLOSE, I want to be involved in their
life, not just visiting their life...I want them to know that NO MATTER what my home is always open to them...I want sunday dinners together with them and their kids, I want them to always feel the love that we have for them! ALWAYS & FOREVER.

I’ve always admired families who stay close after their children are grown. A boy who wants to bring his girlfriend home, girls who go shopping with their mom even after mom’s style is. . . mom-ish. Happy camaraderie and a freedom to be unique while coming back to the fold to be loved unconditionally are metaphoric blocks we are trying to build into our family structure.

Happy, healthy, close (but not clingy) grown families are so rare anymore. When I see one, I want to stop and pull up a chair and watch, like a happy movie, pressing pause at my favorite scenes and hyper-analyzing each minute detail.

I watch my neighbors in awe, Sundays set aside for their grown children to drop by. I watch the massive quantities of groceries rushed in the door in preparation, Lay’s potato chips peeking out of the grocery sacks, the smell of the grill starting, as one by one the vehicles arrive, as their kids bring their kids home. I feel like a stalker but it’s hard to tear myself away from the sweetness of a family who loves well.

But looking at the epically cool families while your little ones aren’t even sleeping through the night can be depressing: happy philosophy discussions over bowls of ice cream seem light years away.

I don’t know this for sure, but here’s what I think: take heart because happy starts now.



1. Listening >Lecturing

If I want my sixteen-year-old to talk to me about life, then I must listen to my fifth grader. It is hard sometimes. I find it hard to focus. Several weeks ago JD came home from a party and sat at the counter and proceeded to download every single detail. I honestly didn’t want to hear every little bit but a warning deep in my soul stopped me from sending him to the shower. Instead, I put away dishes and listened to his happy chatter. I looked across the counter at his face, still round with boyhood, and knew in my spirit that listening mattered. Daniel told me the other day that he took JD disc golfing; he relayed, a bit shocked, that JD had kept up a running conversation with him for the entire 18 holes.

Does the talking stop for teens because parents stop listening? I don’t know yet. I only know at this stage I’m very, very tempted to stop listening: the stakes aren’t super high, the stories aren’t super interesting, I hear a lot about different kinds of pizza, jokes, and play by play description of each sporting event. But every time I start to tune out, I think of what I want in the future and tune back in.

2. Structure & Spontaneity

Children love surprises. Adults love surprises too, though we’ve conditioned ourselves well to the daily grind of life. But surprises aren’t much fun if they happen constantly. One aspect of my job as a mom right now is creating structure so that we can be spontaneous. This means bedtimes and baths and schoolwork, the rhythm of a weekend, chores and hard work. And then it means throwing it all to the wind and packing everyone up to skip school and ride the subway into Chicago to a rooftop pool Hotwire deal and see fireworks over Navy Pier and eat breakfast on Lake Michigan.

Structure + spontaneity is eating oatmeal for breakfast all week so we can eat donuts every Monday morning. It means going to bed early so they can stay up late when we have company. It means working hard so they appreciate throwing the job list in the trash and going on a hike (with snacks). Schedule makes the surprise so much sweeter; but too much schedule is just sad. Why wait for your kids to be adults to travel with them? Or eat out? No one will think going to the carwash in pajamas is cool when they’re twenty, but they’ll remember it happened and smile all over again. (I know. I was the five-year-old in pajamas watching the carwash magic. I never forgot.) Do the fun stuff. Do it now.

3. Shopping

While shopping is hardly a cross for a woman to bear, it takes time and energy and I realized with a flash one day that my daughter Cambria had been begging me to go shopping with her and I was just too busy. I love thrifting and she was looking for the glow of the mall forty minutes away. We made up a plan to shop on free Saturdays when Daniel could have Eli with him and set a date. I was stunned and humbled by how much my daughter loved doing this with me. I wanted to cry multiple times as I realized how much I’d already missed out on and what I could have missed if I didn’t listen to her. We shopped and shopped and shopped. My feet ached. She bought accessories like a diva on vacation but stuck to her budget religiously (her daddy was proud) while I succumbed to Target (her daddy was not as proud of me).

Much like listening, if I want her to know I love her and care about her need to be beautiful when she’s sixteen, I need to be involved in all those feelings now. Right now it’s the perfect color of laces for soccer cleats. I’m told a girl’s beauty needs get more complicated. I’m in it for the long haul even if it has to involve the mall.

4. Music

Our family loves music. It’s easy to make music styles a hot button conflict as kids get older. But we are trying hard to avoid that by creating “us” music, not “me” music. In other words, we listen to all sorts of music at the kitchen counter, looking up lyrics and critiquing music styles together. This requires patience for Daniel and me (I’ve given up a lot of music that I really love because it’s not best for everyone) but it also requires patience from our kids (they often have to be flexible too).

When we listen and even play and create music together we can appreciate the art and not lapse into a me-oriented world of zoning out with headphones. One of our favorite things to do is create playlists for events and people. We have a massive library of online playlists, carefully curated and edited to fit moods and events: we have a Saturday Morning Pancakes playlist and a Beanbags playlist, not to mention Happy Birthday, Dad, School Background, JD’s Christmas Party, Mowing, Rainy/Soul, and Kick My Wednesday in Gear. My hope for the next few years is for music to draw us closer, not farther apart and give a window into the individuality of each child’s soul.

5. Open Door to Friends

When does the proverbial door open to friends? I’m not sure and I don’t want to miss the window, so our door has been open from the start of our kids being able to have relationships. It only gets more enjoyable and fun as their friends get older (and funnier and more interesting).

It is never easy to allow your home to be open. It’s not easy to teach a child how to be and have a good friend; having friends and being friendly is something taught most often by example. It’s exhausting to have toddlers over that bite each other and spill juice all over. It’s not easy to deal with hurt feelings when little girls leave each other out and it’s embarrassing if it’s your kid who is the offender. It feels weary to explain why your son can’t shoot his airsoft gun at friends without eye protection.

Sometimes it seems easier to close the door to friends, but I’m not sure anything other than temporary comfort is accomplished by that choice. Interacting with my children and their friends gives me opportunity again and again to train them, to demonstrate and teach wisdom and grace as well as speaking life and love into the extra kids in our home. I don’t want to wake up one day and realize that I don’t even know my children’s friends. So that means waking up now, and interacting now and swinging the door open. . . wide.

6. Patience with Trends and Styles

Children are going to become adults. It’s important as parents to guide their steps and set parameters, but there should still be a lot of room for individuality. Think carefully before you choose to die on the hill of which shoes your child wants to wear to the family reunion. This is really hard for me because I feel like our kids reflect us. We don’t want them to be rebellious but I’d rather use my influence on issues that are black and white rather than making my daughter a mini me. Our kids are just hitting the age of caring about all of this. Homeschooling doesn’t shield a child’s desperate need to fit in and feel cool! I don’t place high priority on the cool factor–in fact a very low one (“I shop at Goodwill. You can too!”)–but we don’t want to exasperate them either.

I may live to regret this, but we have found that saying something like this works: “Hey, this isn’t our favorite thing, and please don’t wear it to special events but why don’t you wear it when you are going [fill in appropriate place for trendy item].” Time and time again I see the thrill of said trendy item wear off and the child acquiesce to our family’s more classic (read: boring) style of clothing and appearance. But in the meantime we have averted multiple world wars and wounded spirits and misunderstandings.

7. Pizza Night

On Friday nights at 7 pm at our house, you will see people draw their activities to a close and show up for pizza and family movie night. We are on our second year of regularly doing this together and I have been surprised at how much everyone enjoys it. Sometimes Daniel even takes time off of work for it.

We eat in the living room and shut all the windows. JD usually picks the movie; he screens and searches relentlessly to find excellent entertainment each week. We have not forced this time slot to be free but as Daniel and I have chosen not to work or engage in other obligations, we have noticed that the kids do too. It’s crazy the things they’ll opt out of on their own: “Oh, sorry, I’d love to go but we have movie night. Maybe Saturday.” (I secretly grin to myself.)

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8. Journaling

Journaling is actually a new way I’m communicating with the kids but it’s been so successful that I’m sharing it here. I grabbed two blank journals (here’s a great one to start with, but there are many parent-child journal options available), Googled a list of questions to ask kids, and wrote one at the top of each journal. I explained that each child’s response was 100% optional and I promised no hurt feelings if they never wrote back.

I did not expect their intense fascination with journal sharing. They pour their hearts out on paper and then leave it on my pillow in a little bound book. I have laughed and laughed and almost cried reading what they think about life, and love too. You should try it. But believe me when I say the hardest thing about journaling with your kids is refusing to screenshot their responses to your friends.

9. Debriefing after Events

This is huge for our family. We have a lot of event traffic and travel and guests and it’s very easy for us to lose track of family life. When I was a kid I capitalized on those busy times to do exactly as I pleased and I was pretty sure Mom and Dad would never notice.

Debriefing gives us a chance to see how each child is doing, if there is anything to address from the event that just happened (it’s not polite to throw and gleefully launch frogs in front of little children, even if it is fun) or soothe hurts (we are sorry you got left out of the game) or even just simply saying: “Hey. You guys were awesome hosts. Good job.”

10. Sending Children to Grandparents

Everyone needs a break from each other. Training children is not a lasting assignment, but marriage is, and it’s important to cultivate your marriage. I admit feeling guilty every single time I send the kids to their grandparents (even though its only twice a year) but to fall in love again is a better gift to our children than marriage burnout while we cling to parenting 24/7/365.

11. Going Outdoors

Something about being outside seems to make humanity realize that the universe does not revolve around themselves. Being exposed to the elements is sometimes gentle and sometimes harsh but it’s all directly from the hand of God, unlike being inside our carefully controlled environments. The normal everyday frustrations of family life seem to pale a little when you leave the bills on the desk and the crumbs on the floor to go hiking in a cave or fishing in a pond.

Laying in the back yard on fresh cut grass eating cookies, catching lightning bugs, building a fire, watching stars come out, listening for birds. . . appreciating the world God created, together, brings an awareness that God is in control and we are not. And that’s a good thing for a family to know.
Our kids are still so young. Everyone is home at night, safely tucked in before nine o’clock. Their issues are all quite manageable. I know the years ahead will bring challenges and I’m not blind: I know there will be hard days and hard years. But I’m excited, too, because I like these people my kids are becoming and it’s so exciting to watch them grow.

I don’t want to create a close family so that I cling tightly, unable to say goodbye: that was never God’s intention or design for the family. He created families as safe places (communities!) to demonstrate the Gospel and grow children into people who will turn around and do the same. I am looking forward to launching our kids into the great wide world and I can’t wait for them to come home and tell us all about it.

Mothers day 2016

I love that there is a day for mothers...no matter how you look at the day it's just nice that someone cared enough to say thank you mom!

My sweet kiptin sure made it extra special, so many cards and drawing from him all day! He is so sweet to his mama...he picks me "flowers" most days when he is walking home off the bus, I got hugs and kisses from him the most and he always wants me to lay by him and snuggle at night!
All the boys were sweet and caring though! Kaylin helped the little boys make me cards too...Nick bought me some new clothes and shoes and we just hung out...talked to uncle parker from his mission and visited g & g haslem up in parowan as well as grandma Orton, we gave them each a rose and showed them the casting we made of g & g ortons hands!

I LOVE MY BOYS, I'm truly happy. My heart literally feels like it could swell so big and explode with the amount of love I have for this little family of ours...Nick and I make a good team with these boys...we fall short sometimes BUT man do we have some really good kids!
I have read a few things the past week that other moms have written to inspire mom's and one thing really stood out to me...well maybe a few....1) not to hold our kids to such a high standard, we as adults make so many mistakes, we have bad days, and so do our kids...they are KIDS...they are learning and it's hard. Just love them and love them as much as possible and then more beyond that!!
2) be the mom you want your kids to remember, a fun mom...a mom that puts them first and actually gets down and dirty with them...this summer I plan to have a blast with my kids, I will try my hardest to JUST BE WITH THEM!
3) they grow incredibly fast. Soak it up, take pictures of everything, video their sweet little voices...rose will be gone before you know it and you won't be ready for it so soak in every detail you can!

There was so much more I will write about in another post...for now I just want to make sure to thank my amazing husband for sharing this incredible life with me and for being the greatest dad in the world to then and showing them how to be men...yet keeping then little at the same time by being just a kid with them!  Thank you to my boys, I love you four more then I could literally ever tell you, one day you too will know this kind of love...yet a little different, as a mom I think there is just a deeper connection then just being a dad but love is love and it's deep! Thank you for all the mothers day drawings and all the love! You guys are my world!

Happy FIRST Birthday to our little bun bunz...

Your FIRST Birthday is here already!!
Its such a bitter sweet day for me...I have LOVED every second of you being so little and now we have hit numbers and those littlest times are just memories.
I would keep you little forever if I could! You have been SUCH an amazing blessing to me this year, in so many ways you will never understand.
You have helped me do and through so much. The love I have for you has no words...words could never describe the amount of love there is for you!
This last 12 months have shown me how to love more and appreciate all the small things and to take time to just BE in the moment and cherish those little moments, for they
truly dont last long enough. We blinked and here we are at your first birthday already.
I wasnt ready for you to come a whole month early but i wouldnt trade it for the world!
This morning you join the "pancake birthday club", Dad make a number pancake for each boy on their birthday and you got a #1 today with a candle and we sang to you!

I have not pushed you to learn new things too fast, I have wanted to keep you little as long as I could and you will learn all in due time so why push it!
You are learning things so fast now....
this month you started walking along furniture, you can walk super fast when you are holding onto things
you clap
you wave at us now
you love to say dada over and over
you say mama, i love to hear that so much
you jump up and down when you get excited
you get so excited when you see your brothers
you love peas and green beans
you are a pretty dang healthy eater...by far our best one
you dont like fruit tasting things very much
you dont like jello
you love to be outside
you want to be held all day
you snuggle up on me and I love that
you still love mickey mouse, its the ONLY thing on tv you will watch...thats why I did you birthday theme "mickey mouse"
you are about 18 pounds now...still our little baby and I will take you being little forever!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KARBON....i love you forever!

we took you birthday smash cake pictures last night and you were the CUTEST mickey I have ever seen!