Cirque du Chandler

Do you see a resemblance?

This morning at breakfast there was a live fly on the window near Nora. She reached over with her pointer finger and smashed him, just like that. She's got skills!

I love to see the temple

Usually we go to Seattle each month so we can of course visit Dan and Grace but also to go to the temple without worrying about finding a responsible, fun, available, and most of all cheap babysitter. For the month of June we missed our chance to go before they left town the last half of the month. So did we give up? NO. Not totally anyway. One day after Klave was done with work we drove down to the Columbia River temple which is about an hour and a half away. There is a stake center there with a field and sand volleyball pit and drinking fountain, so Klave watched the kids while I went into the temple. It was so great to go inside and I enjoyed every minute of it. It's so peaceful there. I come out feeling totally refreshed for life and find Klave just about unwound. Nora I think just had pants on and was filthy, Nadine and Naomi were digging in the sand pit, equally dirty and Lucy was laying on a blanket crying. Klave is a great dad but I think he just needed some more resources, like snacks, swings, toys, etc. Anyway I come out ready to watch the kids and he's like, "That's ok, I can't leave you with these kids. They're crazy!" That was really nice of him to be so concerned for me but inside I was thinking, "What do you think I do every day of my life?" I tried to get him to not worry about it and go ahead inside but he persisted so we ending up just heading back home. The girls love going to the temple. They spend most of their days pretending like they are going to get married, so they really wanted to take their white dress-up to the temple and get their pictures taken. They loved it and we got some pretty cute pictures. Here you go...

Psycho in real life!!

So, a few days a week I go to the church and workout with some other ladies while our kids all play in the gym and on the stage. It's great, we have fun and our kids do too. There are about 10 little girls that come with their mom's and they are all 2-5 years old. This last week once I got to the church which is about .5 miles from our house I realized I forgot Lucy's pacifier which is crucial to being able to workout the whole time. So I called Klave to see if he could drop it off on his way out. He said yeah but he was about to get in the shower so it wouldn't be right away. After about 30 seconds I realized I couldn't wait so I just decided to run home and grab it before we started. I got inside our house and heard the shower running and my dark side took over. I could not resist the temptation to pretend attack my unsuspecting hubby. I stealthily tiptoed to the bathroom, (he didn't even close the door!!) postitioned myself just right and snatched open the shower curtain.
Poor, poor Klave had soap all over his face and was swinging blindly at his assailant. I was laughing hysterically and almost crying. Partly because I felt so badly for scaring the living daylights out of him. That really made my day, all throughout the day I would think about what happened and start cracking up all over again. At the end of the day is when the terror set in. Klave came home from work and said, "I've been thinking all day about how I'm going to get you back." Not fair, I get scared way more easily than he does!

My girls

Just a few things about my girls. I've noticed that everything is considered "fair", no matter the outcome as long as it's determined by eenie meenie miney mo. Their favorite car is "the one that Daddy gave you, Mommy" it's a '91 Subaru Loyale. It's a real beaut. But they would rather ride in there than in Klave's work car, a 2007 Honda Pilot. I think it's because it is really loud, we have to roll down the windows because the a/c isn't that great and because one of them has to ride in the front seat so we all fit. (Don't worry there are no air bags.) Whenever we arrive somewhere they yell, "Don't open the door, I'm going out the window!" Nadine loves to dig for worms it's just that she usually stretches them so far that they break, then she has to find a new one. The other day she was just playing with one and I was watching her as she stretched it out and not really thinking almost put it in her mouth!! AAAAAAHHHHHHH luckily I stopped her before it made contact! She must get that from Klave. Naomi loves to stash stuff under her desk, like her clothes, even though she has to walk past the dresser to get to the desk. I always find a pile of things I've asked her to put away right there under the desk. Nora wasn't really talking yet or saying any words which kind of worried me, because she's almost 22 months old, but she has the greatest expressions. I would try to work with her to say some words and she'd try for a while and then shake her head and try to cover my mouth. Actually the last few weeks I've been making it a real focus and praying alot for her to be able to learn and she had been trying so much more. You still can't understand most of what she says, but she's saying things and tries to copy us. She's such a sweetie.
Lucy is starting to smile alot more and laugh a little too. I can't wait till she can defend herself from all of her overadmiring sisters.

Another story about Nadine, a while ago she came and sat on the couch across from me and says, "Remember when Naomi got sick at church...." and on and on for probably 5 minutes relating every detail about what she was wearing and everything that happened that day. At the end of the story she's like, "Do remember that mom?" "Yeah I do" I said. Then she says, "Oh, I don't."

It seems like I write down alot of the crazy things they do, but they really surprise me often at the profound things they say. This morning we were reading in our scriptures about the Nephites preparing for the Gadianton robbers to come down to fight them and how they made armor to protect themselves. I was explaining to them what armor was and then Naomi asks, "So, how can we protect our bodies?" I was impressed at how thoughtful that was and they had a lot of good answers to it too. I sure love these kids.

The Winnecook Ranch

Over the last weekend we took a trip to the church ranch where Klave did his internship in Harlowton, Montana. You probably have never heard of it because only a few people live there Well not really but it's far enough out there that our phone didn't get any kind of coverage until we'd left and been driving for an hour. Some of the highlights of the trip were throwing stuff off the bridge, trying to catch the bunnies that were everywhere, seeing horses, cows, antelope, jack rabbits galore, deer, elk, and our favorite an otter. The otter was the best, we saw him swimming through the river so what do you do? Throw rocks, right? It was cool because wherever we would throw a rock in the water he would swim to that place, so we ran him around for a long time and got him to come really close to us.
This is where we would get our water if we decide to homestead there.

We also went exploring for fossils and went to the buffalo run that is there on the ranch. A buffalo run is where the indians would herd the buffalo up and over a hill but on the back side of a hill is a cliff where they would break their legs and then the indians could eat them. That sounds pretty morbid but it was interesting to see it. There also was a wall of rocks shaped in a "v" and the buffalo would run through the point of it and the indians would hide behind the rocks to scare them through it. (Erin I hope you are not totally disgusted by this post, sorry!)
That's the buffalo run behind the girls.

The drive took about 8 and 1/5 hours but it was really beautiful and it was so fun for Klave to go back and see old friends and reminisce.
.The Jacobson's, our friends we stayed with.

(Travis, Bekah, Emmett, and Seth)

On the way home I was really excited because we could stop in Spokane and go to a store that's not Walmart. Wahoo, I planned to stop at least at Old Navy and get some clothes for this in between stage of pregnant and not pregnant body. I was searching the racks and talking with but not watching my girls when the alarms start blaring! Nadine had opened the emergency exit door. "ok girls, that's alright, just touch the clothes and nothing else ok?" A few minutes later the maniquin next to me starts losing limbs, and an arm comes crashing to the ground. Nadine and Naomi just stood there wide-eyed. That's as far as the shopping trip went. I just can't shop under pressure. We tried a fabric store also for just a few minutes and then headed for Wingers. At first I was kind of bugged that I didn't get to buy anything that it seemed I'd been waiting forever to buy, but quickly enough I realized it really didn't matter. We had such an awesome trip not because we went to an extremely cool place but because we had so much fun together as a family. The whole time I just felt like I was on cloud 9. Everyone was happy for the whole trip (with 5 girls that is not always the case) and I totally could never ask for a better time. I love my family sooooooo much!

Nadine's excited to hold Lucy and get her picture taken.

Springfest!

This weekend was Springfest here. There were so many fun things to do which is good except then all the babysitters in town are out having fun too. So we did what we could with the girls and that was fun. We watched all the dance and the gymnastic groups in town perform and we went to the carnival. Nadine and Naomi were so anxious to go on the rides. First they saw the YoYo, you know the one with the swings that goes around and around. They really wanted to go on that one, "Do you think you could go on that one?" I asked. Oh, yeah, it's for little kids they assured me. I told them that I didn't know if I would even go on it. Naomi looks at me like I'm crazy and says, "Mom you can't go on that, you'd break it!" So apparently I'm a little larger than I realized.

"Cheese!" This is the expression Nora gets when she's ready to have her picture taken.

We really had a great time but Klave and I both never realized how many weird people there are in Moses Lake, I guess a carnival just brings them all out of the woodwork. Seeing all those Jr high kids also makes me really nervous about my girls growing up. Kids that age get so confused about what's cool. Recently someone told me that psycologically 3 is the same as 15 as far as attitudes go. That was a little scary for me to hear but way motivating to work extra hard now so that when 15 rolls around things can go more smoothly.