Updates

It's been a whole month since I've blogged! So sad! I have plenty of pictures, adventures, and stories to tell! I just uploaded a slew of pictures so give a few days to formulate some posts, but for now I'll just give you a little bit.

Updates:
Floor update-The ripples on my floor due to E's tub catastrophe have gone down quite a bit, but the floor will have to be totally replaced. You can only tell if you walk all the way into our house, bend down and look at it in the light but if we were to ever sell our house it would never pass inspection. As long as we don't encounter any more issues with it, I think we'll just leave it alone until we move. We're going to be living here for awhile and have 2 crazy boys and who knows what could happen to it. I would hate to replace the floor and then have another unfortunate issue with it again and lose my mind! Not to mention the complete and utter mess it would make to replace the entire thing right now. I can't imagine the mess!

E Update- E is still loving school and has started into the art of "story telling." That's putting it nicely. Nothing that comes out of his mouth these days is true! He is constantly telling "stories", made up facts, and other things. The other day I picked him up from school and he told me he got a stamp and a smelly that day. Now that's how his teacher tells you how their day went. If they come home with a stamp then that means they've had a happy face all day and things were good. If they get a smelly (dab of smelly chapstick on their hand) then that means they've gone above and beyond. On 'smelly' days we go get a Happy Meal from McDonalds to celebrate. Well, I drove up in the carpool lane and he got in really excited and told me he got a stamp and a smelly. So I told him how proud I was and all that and that we could go to McDonalds.. We went through the drive through and came home so he could eat. He got half way through his Happy Meal and I asked to see his special stamp and smelly and he hid his hand. He didn't even get a stamp that day! He totally got rewarded for not even getting a stamp! I couldn't even believe it. Not only does he fake stamps and smellys, but he totally tells people things that don't even happen. I can't even imagine all the stories his Primary teacher and preschool teacher hear all the time and I hope they don't believe any of it!

Max- Luckily Max isn't making up stories these days, but he sure is trying to talk! He even tried to say his own prayer the other day during dinner. He says Amen by saying "ma!" It's really cute! He also loves to rock out to the Christmas music that we play in the evenings. He is hilarious to watch! If you ever come over to our house you'll usually find Max walking around with his blanket on his head. We call him "Ghosty McGee" since he looks like a little blue ghost walking around like that. I don't know why he loves it so much, but whatever.

Us-As for Ry and I we are busy busy busy. Ry just finished a Chuy's in Waco and in Cool Springs, TN so he's been here, there and everywhere. I've been holding down the fort and trying to get the rest of the Christmas shopping done. I swear I feel like my head is swimming in the crazy amount of deals that are going on right now! I'll have to be sure to tell you all about my experience on Black Friday. I'm still couponing these days and recently just taught my first couponing class for Enrichment last month. We had quite the turn out and I love hearing all the savings going on when I get to Relief Society on Sundays. It makes my day!

Well, hopefully I'll have some fun posts up from November and get caught up soon.

Let's Move To Something Positive

I've been wanting to post this video for awhile, but I just haven't gotten around to it. It was taken all the way back in the summer on a trip to Target. My mom and I were taking the kids around the toy section and E grabbed those dogs that connect to your Ipod and light up and play your music (I can't remember what they're called). Anyway, he kept linging them up, turning them all on and then dancing around. We were just cracking up and of course Max had to get in on the dance moves too. I especially love E's spin move. Check it out!

Watch it here

Somebody Is On The Naughty List!

I took this picture today because I needed a laugh, goodness knows I needed a laugh. I can't believe this happened and I know I have to write about it because someday (a very very very very long time from now) I will laugh about this.

Tuesday night I went to a Relief Society get together. It was fun, got to hang out with friends, yada yada yada. I got home, spent time with Ry and then went to bed. Well, Ry went into the kid's bathroom for something and called for me to get up and check something out. The minute I stepped in there my feet and pajama pants were wet. I had no idea what had happened! The ENTIRE bathroom floor was COVERED in water! Nothing was wrong with the plumbing and then we realized that E had to be the culprit. We woke him up for a couple of reasons. First we wanted to know what happened, second we wanted to him to help clean it up, and third we wanted to drive the point home that he never wants to do this again. Well, 7 soaking towels and 1 bathroom rug later everything was cleaned up. I was actually kind of happy to have my bathroom floors hand done by everyone. Anyway...we couldn't get a clear story from E about what happened, but our guess is that he just started dumping water from the tub onto the floor during bath time. After that event we went to bed and thought nothing of it. The next morning we got up, got ready, and I took E to school and ran errands. Once we got home I took a look at my hardwood floors that are outside the bathroom and realized that there was a major problem! Somehow the water seeped out of the bathroom and into my hardwoods and the seams have popped! I am just sick to my stomach! We had someone come out and look at it and from what we can tell it looks like we might have to have the entire floor replaced. Now before I jump the gun, we're going to see if we can pull up the ruined pieces and replace them but if that doesn't work then we'll just have to pull it all up and start over. I am so bummed about this. I know it's just flooring, but it was my favorite part of my house and the one thing that I absolutely wouldn't change about it. I would love to repaint or get new carpet but money on a new hardwood floor is not my idea of fun! I can't take pictures of it right now because it just makes me sick. Just remind me that I will laugh about this one day!

Some Things Never Change

Don't you remember those mornings you had with your bowl of cereal and fun things to look at on the cereal box? I guess some things never change!

Birthday Palooza- E's 4th Birthday

E's actual birthday is November 1st, but we celebrated with family on Halloween night so you've seen a lot of the pictures already from all the Halloween events, but here are a few that you haven't seen. So I have to explain the cake. I don't know why E has chosen purple to be his favorite color, but it is. Every single thing that he ever has a choice on color it's always purple. Keep that in mind as I tell you the story. Anyway...I thought I would make E a gumball machine birthday cake this year so I baked it up and asked E what color he wanted his gumball machine. Of course he said purple, but I tried to persuade him to make it red. We finally agreed on red and I went to work on the frosting. Do you know how hard it is to make red frosting? I went through an entire bottle of red food coloring and all I had was hot pink! I gave up on it, threw in some blue and made E happy with his purple gumball machine cake. So that is the explanation on why my son has a purple birthday cake.
I have to share "the many faces of E" with photo documentation.
Here we have "Here Comes Trouble"

And this is "The Boardroom"

And Lastly we have the "I'm Innocent" look

I see this look everytime he blames something on Max. Oh, the faces that he makes! They never end! Happy 4th Birthday E-man!

Birthday Palooza-Max's First Birthday!

It feels like never ending birthday celebrations around here! We started of with Max's 1st birthday at the end of September. It's always a tradition that the birthday boy gets to lick the beater when I bake his cake so this is Max trying out his first beater, he loved it!

Then we got him all dressed in his "Birthday Boy" outfit. Our family friend, Becky, bought this for Max when she came to visit us and it's the cutest thing! He had a birthday shirt, crown and bib for his special little party.
We had our family get together and celebrate Max's big day and we just had so much fun. Max loves walking around with the phone or remote in his hands so a little toy cell phone was perfect for him!
I ended up making a cupcake cake in the shape of a #1 so here's a picture of the final product. Not too creative, but it served its purpose.
Oh, and I had to snag a picture of E performing his "duties" as the drink maker. Liz, does this cooler look familiar? E had way too much fun serving up lemonade to all our party guests. He was cracking me up! And here we have Max polishing off his first cupcake. After all that we had to get down to business and build his Little Tikes car that he got. It seriously took way longer to build that thing then I ever though it would. Thanks Dad! As you can tell, Max didn't want to wait for the wheels to even be on that thing! We had way too much fun!

More Catch Up...School Days

E is now in Preschool and has been since September. I just haven't blogged about it. So here we go...

Meet The Teacher
A few days before school started we got to go into school and meet E's teacher. That morning E woke up and told me we had to bring his teacher an apple. I thought that was so funny, where did he learn that? So I had him pick out his favorite one out of the fruit drawer. He ended up picking one for himself and one for his teacher. When he got to school he handed over his apple and said, "here you go, teacher, I brought you an apple!" She told him that he was very thoughtful. Little did she know what she was in for this year! Who can resist that face?

First Day of School



We had to get a few token "first day of school" pictures by the door. When we got to preschool most of the moms parked and took their kids in, but E just wanted me to use the car pool lane and drop him off. I was seriously the only one that used the car pool lane that day. My child is already 12 and wants me to drop him off 3 blocks from school!!!

Updates from School

We just got our first progress report back and this is what E's teacher had to say about his progress. I love the comment she made about E needs to remember that he's not the teacher. Classic!


I helped put on the Fall Party this past Friday and his teacher let me in on a little secret, E has a little girlfriend. I guess he and another boy have girls that they like in the class and they always choose them as their little dance partners when they have music time. Seriously, what am I in for?

Catching Up From August...

I have to get all this on the blog so I'm going to try to do little updates here and there until I can get caught up. Anyway...this post was all the way back from August. It was from a day that I thought would turn out terrible, but it ended up being wonderful. Ry is usually not out of town on weekends, but the Saturday I signed up to clean the church and feed the missionaries was the day that Ry was gone. Perfect. I gathered up the kids in the morning and headed over to the church. Max had to chill in the stroller and E was the "duster" while we were there. I only had to clean a few rooms since our ward divides it up so not a big deal. I promised E if he was really good then I would take him to the library to pick out some books and movies. He was super good and super helpful so we packed up and went to the library. As we were driving, I noticed all these people lined up on the side of the road with lawn chairs. I was really confused and had no idea what was going on. We got in the library and I asked the librarian if there was some kind of event going on today and he had no idea.
We got all our stuff and got back in the car and all these people were still out in their lawn chairs so I rolled down my window to ask what was going on. I guess it was the North Texas Fair/Rodeo parade and it was going to start in 5 minutes! I couldn't have timed it better! I whipped out the stroller and we found a spot on the sidewalk and settled in for a great time. And they even throw candy and toys!
E loved waving to everyone and Max just enjoyed looking at everything. Here is a shot of all the goods that E scored at the parade.

And that rocket was a huge hit for E, he was launching that thing all day long. I DID have to give the missionaries pizza money that evening which I felt horrible for but maybe they like going out occasionally. Anyway...turned out to be a pretty great day!

Happy Halloween

E's birthday is tomorrow so we always have lots going on this Halloween weekend. I originally planned for E to be a pirate (which he was at his class party). He really liked to get into character and say all sorts of pirate sayings. I think he called me "matey" all day.


And I planned for Max to wear E's old pumpkin costume and he wore that when Daddy took them to the local car dealership for some trunk or treating. Isn't he just so cute?
Well, Friday morning after I dropped E off at school I decided to go over to Old Navy and see what I could snag with their $2 costume deal. I waited in line with the other crazy moms and ended up getting 5 costumes and they only cost me $1.60 a piece since I had an additional 20% printable coupon! I got 2 tigers, a monkey, a chicken, and a dog. When I brought them home, E was totally loving the tiger costumes so that's what we put the boys in for trick or treating tonight and we were the tiger tamers.

This is what it's really like to tame tigers and this is Ry trying to do his best. Just look at E's face! hahahahaha!



The boys had a great time trick or treating tonight and E had an even better time passing out the candy to all the kids. Every time the doorbell rang he's jump up, get really excited, and say "alright!" Tomorrow he's turning 4, but I feel like he's going on 14! Hope everyone had a great Halloween!

Fun Weekend with Papa

My dad got some awesome VIP passes for the Air Show this past weekend through Oracle (a company that provides tech stuff for the company my dad works for). So we headed off to the airshow for a great time. We started out looking at some of the planes and helicopters that were on display.

We were able to walk through a helicopter that they use over in Iraq and E sat in the seat and was begging for them to "blast off." He was a little disappointed when he had to get out without going for a ride. After walking through that thing it made me feel so grateful for all those that are over in Iraq! I can't imagine riding in that thing in the heat and the smell of exhaust and being so scared. I get motion sickness pretty bad so I can't imagine what it would be like. Thank you to those that do that for our country!

So after checking out the planes and helicopter we headed over to the Oracle tent.
They had a whole array of great things for us when we got there. Everything was catered so we had some yummy food and E got unlimited hot dogs and ice cream which was heaven in his eyes. They had coloring books, stickers, treats, and all sorts of stuff for the kids. We even got to meet and get autographs from the award winning pilot that flew the Oracle plane!

E loved wearing the head phones and I was glad he kept them on since the planes were so loud. Here's E showing off his tattoo. And here's Max watching the stunt planes with Papa.
Oracle had a portion of the air show that my dad and Ryan got to participate in. I couldn't get a close enough picture because I had both kids and they were all the way out on the runway, but I tried my best. If you look at the Blue angels plane you can see them walking right behind them with the red flag looking thing. They got to hold the poles that had a ribbon (like a race) on it and then the stunt pilot did all these tricks in the air and then came down and went under the ribbon at one point and then cut the ribbon at the end. Kind of scary to have a plane that is going 210 mph zoom past your dad and husband and they're only a few feet away. But they had fun doing it and said that it was an incredible experience. Here they are with the pilot and some of the other guys that were a part of the show. It was a great day with great weather and we all got a little sunburned. Before we left they gave E a little foam airplane that he can pretend to do tricks with and that's all he's been doing around here lately. So the airshow was amazing, loved all the stunts and crazy things that pilots can do. I think we'll be going again next year!

Happy Birthday!

I had my birthday on Thursday and then went out with some friends last night. I turned a whopping 27 years! Is it weird that I remember when my mom was 27 (I was 5 at the time)? I thought that was old back then. Oh how things change!

A Little Coupon Update

The couponing is still going strong in this house! It's kind of funny when your kids ask you in the store, "do we have a coupon for this?" or "your coupons say you should buy this!" I've gotten our grocery bill down to about $60/week (including diapers and drug store items). Some weeks are a little more and some are a little less it just depends on if it's a "stock up" week or not. Here is my latest "photo worthy" grocery run at Tom Thumb. My subtotal was $51.63 and then after coupons and my 10% coupon from my flu shot I paid $4.64!!!

My friends joke around that they want to steal my coupon binder and see what I do. I think I would probably have a panic attack and have to breath into a paper sack to be quite honest. I think that would be equivalent to losing your purse with all your Christmas gift cards in it. Coupons = cash, people!

Randall & Crystal's Wedding

Way back on August 15th my brother got married! We're so excited for them both! We had family and friends come to Dallas for the event so we had lots of fun before, during and after the wedding. I'm only going off what I have on my camera, so I'll have to add some more once I get them from my mom.

A little BBQ a day or two before the wedding

Max swimming with the boys and then spending time with Grandma Call


Waiting for Pictures

Randall & Crystal

My Parents with Randall


Before the reception my Aunt Nancy took us out to take some fun pictures. We found a really bright backdrop and even captured the color of the wedding (blue and pink)

Summer in Review

I feel like I have to go back and blog all the stuff that I'm behind on and that I can't move forward until I do. That just makes me more behind so I'm just going to have to do a couple quick "picture posts" and leave it at that. Up first on the list of posts is Elmer Family reunion 2009. I think we had 88 total up there for reunion and boy did we have a good time. Max was sick for most of it so Ry and I had to divide and conquer and make sure that E still had a great experience. Here are some fun pics from reunion.

The Entire Family (thanks

Tones for the picture)


Ry's immediate family-The "John Elmers"


Our Little Family


E Riding Horses


Toni's photo shoot


Climbing the Rock Wall