Reid and Stefani Adopt

We're off to Panama City Beach!  Car is packed with a couple of presents, a smoker for the Christmas turkey, and a Christmas tree.  It is a bit crowded in here. We went to a state park beach. Isaac and his cousin David were inseperable. Esther enjoying the pontoon boat ride out of Shell Island. Dad lets Esther drive for a moment. Christmas day.  All the grandkids try on Grandma Archibald's pajama pants. They tended to be a little big. The kids loved them anyway. We had to wait until 5 days after Christmas to open the rest of the presents that we couldn't fit in the car.  Kids were ecstatic this morning opening them!  Christmas day 2.0. Esther opening a present from Isaac.  It was a little plush cat.  She LOVED it!  Thanks, Big brother Isaac!

I went to eat lunch with Esther on her birthday at school, and I brought her a surprise--Chick-fil-a lunch!  I thought she would be sooo excited!  But then she saw I also brought her beloved "soft bear," and she was so excited to have him at school lunch with her she forgot to be excited about having Chick-fil-a for lunch.  She just got done telling me last night that soft bear was her most favorite toy.  I think he's been lost and found about a dozen times now--and sometimes he's been lost for over a month at a time.  There must be something magical about the way she feels about that bear that keeps bringing him home to her. We also went to Frozen 2 in the theaters for Esther's birthday.  It came out just 4 days before her birthday.  Then we came home to open presents and eat her fabulous cake.  She loved it all, even though she got sick that night and had to stay home from church the next day.  Poor girl! This picture was taken ou...

It's hard to resist posting when the kids are all dressed up.  They look the part, now just to get them to act the part...

Our church congregation always has a little Christmas party.  It's not a very big event, but it usually includes the kids putting together a nativity and singing a song.   This year, Isaac was a shepherd and Esther was an angel.  Isaac grabbed his own shepherd costume, which included a belt and a wet towel from my bathroom.  Can you tell that Mom had to be to the church early and left the costumes up to Dad?   Esther grabbed her Elsa costume to be an angel.  She complained about the costume being too itchy, and was appropriately grumpy for every picture thereafter.  It was still worth seeing.

Another Halloween has come and gone.  This year I didn't manage to get pictures of costumes somehow, but Isaac was Darth Vader again and Esther was Elsa again.  We did our mummy dogs and bug juice again, which Reid is finally starting to look forward to after all these years of doing a special Halloween dinner.  After trick or treating, I realized the kids had way too much candy and that I had bought way too much candy for trick or treaters.  So this mysterious person named Inafets came in the night and stole all the candy and undecorated the house like a halloween grinch.  Then he decided that candy could be left on the kids' beds if they had done nice things for each other during the day.  There is A LOT of talk about who this mysterious Inafets could be.  I personally congratulate him on his genius. Our crew at Halloween dinner. Our loot.  Disgusting amount, right? Mummy Dogs.  Esther ate four and bailed out on trick or treating...

Esther was rewarded in school for being responsible. Now if we can capitalize on that at home... Isaac loves to dance and has recently discovered NTV--Noodle television.  I get a kick out of it when he dances to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Oh, and Isaac can't stop scratching his bug bites.  He's gets them all the time and has marks on this legs from them, the little nasties! I also can't help but to throw this little treasure in...Isaac asked his dad to write some math problems for him to do.  Then he could take a picture when it was all done and send it to Reid to correct.  He was doing this in the morning before school while he was waiting for his sister to finish getting ready to go.  When I saw the paper laying on the table, my heart melted.  I don't know how math became such a bonding experience between Reid and Isaac, but I love it!

Yesterday we babysat the Gibson kids.  We also invited over our neighbors and had a movie party watching Toy Story IV. Then I took them all to the park to play until the Gibsons came to pick up their kids.  I walked to the park with 7 kids ages 7 and under. (4 seven year olds, 2 five year olds, and 1 three year old.) It was quite a party.   If that wasn't enough of a fun day, Reid set up the tent with Isaac's help, and the kids and Reid slept camped outside in the yard.  Don't worry, though--we're not all fun and games.  They also helped clean the bathrooms, do the dishes, and vacuum the floor.  I like weekends when we both work and play together.  It brings us closer as a family.

This past Friday, Esther got sick. She woke up with a temperature of 101 degrees.  She stayed home from school and slept with Cooper to keep her company.  She was better by about 3 or 4 pm, and didn't miss out on playing with her friend Angela while Isaac was at soccer practice.   On Saturday, Isaac concocted this idea that he wanted to make our home movie night more like the movie theater.  With his dad's help, he went to the store and bought pop and then came home and made movie theater concessions for us to buy.  He made movie tickets and served us while we watched "How to Train Your Dragon III."  

Esther and Isaac like to pretend to be actual hurricanes.  My house often looks like a hurricane came through, but this is different.  Esther was pretending the blanket was the Bahamas, and she was hurricane Dori-Anne, as she says it (no matter how many times I explain how to pronounce Dorian).  Then she roped Isaac into the game.  I'm not sure whether I should laugh out loud or be a little horrified.

We got out of school for 3 extra days after Labor Day because of the threat of Hurricane Dorian.  Whereas he did much damage and awfulness elsewhere, he didn't even really hit most of Florida.  Waiting for that storm was very drawn out and awful, and then he never really reared his ugly head at us.  Isaac was so upset that the hurricane never really came that he cried about it.  Really what he was disappointed about was not getting to kayak in the streets like our neighbor had promised.  I however, am grateful that no damage was done in my little neck of the swamp that is Florida. So we went to Sea Life Orlando and Madame Tussauds wax museum in Orlando on Tuesday, and  LegoLand on Wednesday.  I think this was preferable to kayaking in the streets. The Axolotl.  The "walking Mexican fish."  It is a salamander that can live its entire life underwater if it never decides to leave.  Once it leaves, it will finish development into an ad...

Isaac's first day picture. He started school 3 days before Esther. Isaac walks Esther to her class like a good big brother during the first week of Kindergarten. Esther's first day of school.  She totally froze when she got to her class and we had to leave her there crying.  She was fine when we picked her up, though. Seems to love school now. Isaac and Esther pose during Kindergarten round up.  Our school's mascot is the Mustang.

This summer we went on a 2 week vacation to one of my favorite places on earth... Blanding, Utah!  This is my home town.  We flew into Denver, CO, and took Isaac to the Denver Mint.  Later that day, we went to the Denver museum of Nature and Science. Isaac outside the Denver Mint. Esther in the play area at the Museum. After spending some time in Denver, we drove to Blanding.  We spent some time with cousins hiking, and we even got to spend some time at Lake Powell. We hiked to a little known waterfall on Blue Mountain near Blanding, Utah. All the cousins in the back of the pick up truck Reid and I rented, coming down from the mountain hike. This was a floating restroom at Lake Powell.  Somehow we totally neglected to take pictures of the kids swimming, tubing, and of Reid and I cliff jumping.  I guess the restroom was a bigger novelty than any of those other exciting things we did... We visited the Bluff, Utah fort, where t...