Lunch Time

It was time to try Sara out on rice cereal again. We tried at 2 months and she didn't like it very much. Honestly I can't believe babies ever like it. It's colorless, pastey and it stinks. Maybe Chase hates mashed potatoes because it reminds him of baby food. Anyway, sweet little Sara seemed way more interested this time. Ir was killing me though to see her making such a horrible mess all over her handmade bib from my friend Jamie. Why can't she have better mess making manners like my friend Blaire's little boy Preston. Here's to the beginning of long relationship with big messes!

A Mother Daughter Book Club

My sister in law and her daughter have started a mother /daughter book club. I have thought about doing a children's book club for several years and never gotten around to it. I like the sound of a mother / daughter book club even more. I need some good bonding time with Emily.

Maddie and her friends take turns hosting the event. The host picks the book, leads the discussion about it and plans an activity to go along with it.

The girls bring along a piece of fruit with them every time to chop together to create a yummy fruit salad for the snack. How easy is that.

I'm linking you to their blog so that you can see how they do it.
http://svreaders.blogspot.com/

Does anyone want to do this with me. I'm looking for Mom's with daughters in the 7-12 age group. Leave a comment to let me know if you want to be on board!

Animal Concentration

On our last night in town with Willie and Andrea's family we taught their kids how to play a Wilcox staple. I'm still surprised they hadn't ever played it with their family. It seems when I first joined the family we played it at every large gathering!

The game goes like this. We all sit around in a circle. The tail of the circle is always a skunk (the sign is made by pinching your nose). The head of the circle is always an elephant (the sign is made by pinching your nose with one hand while the other hand with pointing finger activated goes through the space between your body and the arm pinching your nose). See Zach for further clarification!


All of the other people in the circle get to chose their own animal and sign to go along with it. Simple is best. We have a few standards of course but some new ones generally make it into the playing field. This time Maddie added a galloping horse, Zach contributed a flapping eagle (which had nothing to do with having just watched Nacho Libre I'm sure) and Emily chose to be a kitty cat (grooming itself instead of the traditional show of whiskers).

After the signs are all chosen we begin the game. The goal is to become the elephant. The skunk starts out by making it's sign and then making the sign of another person in the circle. They must be paying attention! When you see your sign made you repeat it and then make the sign of someone else. It goes on and on like that until someone messes up one of the signs, misses their turn because they weren't paying attention or breaks the rhythm. When someone messes up they become the new skunk. They leave their seat in the circle and take over the skunk seat. Then everyone including the old skunk move up a seat until the vacated seat is filled. The tricky part is that the animal signs don't travel with the people that chose them they stay with the chair. So now everyone that just moved has a new sign.

The brilliance of this game is that it is silent:-)

We want to include even our little ones. So they don't get out and have lots of help! Once they make it to elephant we give them three turns on the throne before demoting them to skunkdom!

The highlights of the night were the typical pokes in the eye from messing up the elephant sign and then Katie's totally candid decision to run and get the peanuts to snack on during her reign as elephant. Our nephew Zach shouted out, "the elephant's eating peanuts!" Very astute of him! We all got a really good laugh and Katie loved being the center of attention of course!


Everyone try it out at your next family home evening or game night with friends and let me know how it went!

My Favorite Picture

This is my favorite picture from our trip. Here, here to a telephoto lens! She didn't even know I was taking her picture! Hopefully I will be taking many more really great pictures soon. Not just 1 in 300. I bought some really great photography books on vacation. Hopefully after reading them, going through the tutorial CDROM that Dave bought me for my camera and learning how to make the most out of all my new camera gadgets that I got for my birthday I will have a better percentage of great shots to snap shots!

Cousin Time in Sierra Vista

On the last few days of our Spring Break vacation we added Dave to our party and headed south to Sierra Vista. Willie (Dave's oldest brother) and his family are still holding up the fort there, the last Arizona branch of the family. Our kids have really missed their Arizona Wilcox Cousins! They were very excited to finally get to see them again. Andrea and I were trying to figure it out and we think it has been three years since we saw these guys last. That is awful! The bloggoshpere has made it easier to keep in touch but it doesn't replace that need for a real live visit.



The kids were busy doing one fun thing after another. They roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, made birthday cake decorations out of fondant, built and rebuilt electrical cars and raced them through obstacle courses, played with space mud (see my creative blog), made creations out of clay, played air hockey, basketball, dress-up, tea party etc......

The highlight once again was a very cool outdoor adventure. We went up to Coronado national monument. We went on a small hike to the top of a hill to overlook the Coronado National forest (various sage brushes, struggling riparian trees and cactus) and the Arizona / Mexico border (it is the skinny dirt road in the back ground).






I know my kids really enjoyed trying on authentic conquistador chain mail and weaponry. They could barely support the weight. Poor Katie wanted to try some on and literally crumpled from the weight.

We had so much fun. Definitely more frequent visits are in order! When you have cousins this cool you shouldn't see each other once every three years!!!!!!!

Spring Fling With Grandma

On our last day visiting With my parents my Mom mentioned that Spring Fling was in town. Spring Fling is the annual University of Arizona's fundraiser for all of it's sororities and fraternities. It's a carnival run by university students. I have such found memories of it. So when my Mom told me it opening on our last day I felt totally lucky. We left at about 5:00 and didn't get home until 11:00. We had so much fun with Grandma! She was a great sport about riding all the spiny rides with her Grand kids. We even talked her into riding on the "Maliboomer-ish" ride that shoots you straight up into the sky! It wasn't busy at all so we waled onto every ride and played for hours. Even Sara was a great sport.

But who falls asleep on an amusement park ride? I know it was the Ferris Wheel the tamest of them all but come on....we must have really wore her out!

Aspiring to be a Ace!

(Shooting this Spring 2008)
The highlight of any trip we take to Arizona for Chase is always getting to shoot with Grandpa. My Dad has the most amazing JROTC group. He has raised them up from a small unpopular organization to a National ranked, very popular huge program. He buses in kids from other high schools who all want to be part of the Flowing Wells Program. The have an obstacle course, climbing wall, repel tower and a state of the art riffle range. My Dad's team is awesome. almost always they take home a top placement at their meets. It won't be long until they're number one in the Nation.

So when we visit we generally get to have fun with Grandpa's cadets. Sometimes we repel and sometime the kids climb on the rock wall...but always Chase wants to shoot. Maybe next year the gun will be closer to the right size. Chase is really an excellent mark. I wish I had saved his score to post it but he always hits the target.

Grandchildren!

Well here are Grandma and Grandpa DeWitt with their six grandchildren. Poor Chase is surrounded by a sea of girls but he's holding up OK. From left to right:

Jessie, Chase, Katie, Grandpa DeWitt, Becca, Sara, Grandma DeWitt and Emily. A very good looking bunch I should say.

Sabino Canyon Hike

This visit I really wanted to take the kids out on an adventure. They haven't really ever experienced Arizona. We always visit in the Summer when mere survival dictates staying indoors. Spring offers perfect weather. My Dad picked Sabino Canyon as our destination. It was an easy three miles round trip. If you hike up farther you can visit pools and waterfalls at the right time of the year. But in this case with little children our goal was to get to the river (more like a creak). The trail was blocked off anyway to go any farther due to some serious monsoon demolition! Arizona granted us just what I was hoping for. Crazy critters, treacherous landscape and warm weather to enjoy the water. Chase found and caught a horny toad. Much to the delight of his siblings and cousin who is learning to deal with "boy" issues. (like boys picking up weird scary looking creatures and of course picking on girls, especially their little sisters which happen to be her idol) Once we made it to water the kids got totally soaked and it wasn't long before they had caught frogs to entertain themselves with. My kids came out of the water drenched and my sweet little niece managed to get mostly wet. I am so proud of her! We also explored a tiny cave and spotted a gofer snake!

Even with all the sun screen I managed to get burned...but the kids came out unscathed, and they're the ones that really matter.

Thanks Mom and Dad for an awesome adventure!

Happy Easter

We'll we had a very nice Easter in Arizona. Instead of eggs with running colors we had melted chocolate eggs. I still can't get over the 40% swing in temperature between Arizona and Washington. The kids were spoiled magnificently. I counted over 200 plastic eggs filled with candy that our clever little bunny hid throughout the yard. And that's not counting chocolate rabbits or other larger yummy treats. Just eggs. The kids were filling up their baskets and them coming to Grandpa to empty them all out to start again. It was total candy indulgence.

This year Chase was absolutely committed to recover the golden egg. Dave and I hide a golden egg ever year in a super tricky spot. The lucky finder gets a $5.00 bonus! Emily and Chase looked and looked. Then they took a break. After a quick cool down they were back out there. It was so funny to watch them. Emily has found it every year for the last 5 years. So Chase's new strategy this year was to follow Emily around always an arms length away. I guess he was counting on his arms being an extra 2 inches longer.

(can you see Katie in the background investigating what just fell?)
I hid the egg in the lens of my Mom's telescope. Then kids were right there looking. I was sure they were going to see it any minute. (Really the golden egg is just an exercise to improve their finding abilities. Maybe someday they will have enough skills to find their tie in their draw full of socks or their shoes in their cubbies:-) In the commotion of their searching the big kids kept knocking the telescope which went from tilted up to very quickly tilting down. It spilled it's goods right onto the porch in the hands of one very quick, underdog named Katie. She was so excited. She hasn't stopped talking about what she is going to buy with her golden egg.
Better luck next year big kids.

"Are we in Hawaii?" -Katie as we left the Tucson airport in response to seeing palm trees

April Fools

An April Fools dinner has become a fledgling tradition in our family. It all started two years ago when I made the kids chicken nuggets, peas and carrots all made out of candy and then cupcakes made out of meatloaf and mashed potatoes for dessert. The kids loved it. They thought it was the coolest dinner ever. It made me feel so good to get them all laughing over dinner. A real feat in my house. the kids are all so finicky with food and I generally don't stand for it which leads to lots of tears! I think the biggest hit that year though was the jello drink!

Last year I was too sick and depressed to do anything fun. They were all lucky if they even got dinner. I can't remember....

But this year I was back in the saddle with culinary tricks up my sleeve (thanks again to Family Fun Magazine, one of my favorites). We had chocolate pie! The kids were totally on to me of course. But the meatloaf pie did actually have chocolate in it. So I was able to honestly say it was a chocolate pie!!!!

Unfortunately Chase has this crazy, unfounded disgust of mashed potatoes. Both he and Katie went to bed because they wouldn't eat. So not such a happy celebration after all. Next year I need to find something without mashed potatoes. Or I could follow Dave's advice and make on;y mashed potatoes everyday for dinner. Eventually Chase will have to eat them or starve.

April is such a good month. It as nothing to do with other amazing holidays like per say my birthday or the arrival of Spring (I know March claims that date but come on pretentious little March!!!!! we all know Spring isn't really around until April!)

Miracle

There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle. - Albert Einstein

My friend Kathryn Emailed me this picture and story. It was so touching I wanted to share it with all of my friends and family. With a new baby in the house we literally see the evidence of miracles every day. The blessing of our new little Sara makes me want to thank my Heavenly Father daily for the sweet blessing she is to our family. What a wonder and miracle babies are.

Here's the story:

The picture is that of a 21-week-old unborn baby named Samuel Alexander Armas, who is being operated on by a surgeon named Joseph Bruner. The baby was diagnosed with spinal bifida and would not survive if removed from his mother's womb.

Little Samuel's mother, Julie Armas, is an obstetrics nurse in Atlanta . She knew of Dr. Bruner's remarkable surgical procedure. He is practicing at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, he performs these special operations while the baby is still in the womb. During the procedure, the doctor removes the uterus via C-section and makes a small incision to operate on the baby.

As Dr. Bruner completed the surgery on Samuel, the little guy reached his tiny, but fully developed hand through the incision and firmly grasped the surgeon's finger. Dr. Bruner was reported as saying that when his finger was grasped, it was the most emotional moment of his life, and that for an instant during the procedure he was just frozen, totally immobile. The photograph captures this amazing event with perfect clarity. The editors titled the picture, 'Hand of Hope.'

The text explaining the picture begins, 'The tiny hand of 21-week-old fetus Samuel Alexander Armas emerges from the mother's uterus to grasp the finger of Dr. Joseph Bruner as if thanking the doctor for the gift of life.'

Little Samuel's mother said they 'wept for days' when they saw the picture.. She said, 'The photo reminds us that this pregnancy isn't about disability or an illness, it's about a little person.'
Samuel was born in perfect health, the operation was 100 percent successful. This is the actual picture, it is awesome...incredible....!

Dress-up Kareoke

So I am really late getting pictures of our last date-night up. Sorry if you've been waiting on pins and needles. Can you guess who we are? I was Gwen Stefani and Dave was Flea (the guitarist for Red Hot Chilli Peppers). It was way too fun to dress up and sing like nut jobs! Our friends went all out too. I think my favorite was Cyndi Lauper...can you believe the crowd we hang out with?!?!?!? Lessons learned:

A: I can't stand red lipstick. I had lipstick smears on my shirt, hair and of course you could always tell which soda can was mine. Plus I was terrified to kiss Dave and it was a date night after all.

B: Don't let Dave anywhere near a tattoo parlor!

C: Singing in public can be fun, IF you and your friends are all intoxicated with soda and silliness!

"Mom I think my heart is having a birthday party! I can hear it!" - Katie