More pictures of the kids not holding still

This time it was okay for the kids to move around in the pictures. That was the point. And the person taking them (Mindy) apparently knows how to deal with that in clean up. And used a real camera. So I guess there's a lesson in that.

As you can see, fall has flung. Is that how the saying goes? At any rate, it's cold and leaves are falling off trees. Anyway, we have already had several visitors to our new house (someday I will post pictures of that). Brady's mom came for a quick visit, and then my parents came and my sister Mindy came all in the same weekend. The kids were delighted and we loved being able to have visitors and people to distract the kids while we tried to get some things set up around the house.

Here are some pictures that Mindy took of the kids playing at the park between sessions of conference. Lots of leaf throwing. It's hard to walk anywhere with Charlie these days because he has to stop and throw leaves in the air. For a long time. (I've been meaning to thank Mindy for teaching him that . . .)

Hope you are all having a lovely Autumn.

Family pictures (but not really)

While we were all dressed up for the wedding, I thought it might be nice to get an updated family picture. So we found a nice spot out of the way before the reception and asked some siblings to help us out. I figured if they just kept shooting, we'd get one that works, right? I think I have well over 100 to choose from. Scrolling through them is like looking through those flip books we used to make in elementary school with stick figures in different position, and when you go fast it looks like they are running or dancing. Only this is the flip book of my children's wiggling and inability to look straight ahead. Eventually someone thought of getting bubbles out to get their attention. That was really helpful. So here's a small sampling. Which one goes on the wall?

Wedding-palooza

Well, we were supposed to move into our house last Friday. But the inspectors from the city who were supposed to come and sign off on everything had apparently already hit their 40 hours for the week and were sent home (new budget thing, I guess). So assuming they come and give the O.K. tomorrow, we will move in tomorrow. So I'm not blogging about house yet. Stay tuned.

I thought I'd take a brief moment of my last few hours before all the craziness begins (again) and try to catch up on the blog. So many posts behind. So here's a bunch of great pictures from Andrew and Margo's wedding in Colorado at the end of July. It was quite a lovely affair with the whole family together. It turned into something of a mini family reunion. We haven't all been together on that side for quite a long time.

The happy couple outside the Denver, Colorado temple. That wedding dress was amazing. Vintage? Retro? I think we'll go with vintage. Either way, you have to hand it to Margo. The girl has style.

Another happy couple outside the temple, with Andrew and Anita. We left the kids at home to be tended. No pulling kids away from fountains, flower beds, etc. Also, note the sunglasses here. Partly, Brady and I are just really cool, so we have to wear sunglasses all the time. But also, it was a very sunny day. Was. Relevant information later. (Also notice how not frizzy my hair is. Yet.)

At the reception, or actually just before. All the siblings together. Like I said, it's not often the whole family gets "in range of one hand grenade," as my grandpa used to put it so poetically. Lots of good times finally watching our kids play together and then staying up way to late talking after they all went to bed.

Waiting for things to get going. The reception was held in Margo's family's back yard. It was beautiful. They put in a wood-fired pizza oven for the event and had it catered by the head chef from Settabellos Pizzaria, our very favorite restaurant to go to when we visit Salt Lake City. (Seriously, so good. I don't think I am over-hyping it when I say this is the pizza we will eat in heaven.)

Before the reception started, Andrew and Margo had a ring ceremony for family who couldn't go to the temple. Margo had a lot of family who came in from different parts of the world, and they wanted to include everyone. I didn't get a picture of her entrance on horseback. Like I said, the girl has style.

 And here are some random pictures of our kids from the reception. Ellie was a bit upset about wearing blue because "red is my favorite color." I told her that she could wear red a different day, but that Margo wanted her to wear blue that day. For a good two weeks or so after that, Ellie kept pointing out when I wasn't wearing blue or when I had pink toenail polish on, "Mommy! Margo wants your toes blue!" It took a while to get out from under blue fashion demands.

 She looked like she came out of a Shirley Temple movie or something.

 She was excited to have a matching dress with her cousin Katelyn. Finding navy blue summer dresses for little girls is hard. I was going to try to make one, but then Jamie found a great deal on these. So, twin cousins!

 Not my kids, but look how cute these two are in this picture. Phoebe and Collin. This would be a great painting (Kari).

Charlie was absolutely enamored with this little dog. I think it was Margo's grandpa's (he's the one performing the ring ceremony in the picture above--hilarious man from South Africa). I think this is the day Charlie learned the word "doggie" and shouted it every chance he got.

 All the guys in the family wore bow ties. Very dapper. I couldn't get over how cute Charlie looked.

 Ellie having a moment with Brady's mom. It was so good for her to get to know all these cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents a bit more.

 Charlie logged some good time on the trampoline. He would live on a trampoline if we let him. That night he cried every time we had to get him off. He gets on and yells "jump! Jump! Ju-u-u-u-mp!" The whole time. Pretty hard to say no to.

Big enough for everyone to enjoy.

That is a marshmallow. Huge. Instead of cake (which they did cut later toward the end of the evening), they had a table set up with all kinds of candy and treats that were all white. White gummy bears even (vanilla flavored). Ellie was in heaven.

 This is a picture someone else got of her later. Didn't know she went back. She seriously had the best time there.

So I mentioned the sunshine earlier, remember? Notice the kind of hazy lighting in all these reception pictures? Yeah, that is not some weird filter on my camera. That was that huge storm moving in. Made it nice and cool before the reception for all the pictures and stuff. Then it started sprinkling lightly at the start. About an hour in, it was pouring. No backup plan. Dream wedding is getting rained on. So they put a tarp over the pizza guys, and then moved everyone into the house. Which was big enough, so it worked out okay.

This is what Ellie's hair did from all the humidity that night. I didn't know Boulder, CO got humid, but her hair was extra curly the whole week we were there. Makes me wonder what it would have been like if we'd stayed in Knoxville. So then she really did look like Shirley Temple.

And one last picture of wet Charlie for good measure. He cried at the window when we had to go inside, and we decided that we had graced that party with our presence long enough. So we took the kids home and put them to bed. 

Apparently it never really rains there, so it was safe planning everything for outside. Never rains, except for that night, and then earlier this month when they were evacuated for flash floods. But other than that . . . Still, just more style and flair, right? And lots of good memories.

Blog? What Blog?

Two truths I have learned this summer. (Well, I hope more than that, but two I will write here.) One, there is a direct correlation between the amount of stain pre-treatment solution I use and how happy my children are. And two, the more a person has to blog about, the less time a person has to blog. I guess that can lead readers to the conclusion that we have had a busy, messy summer. Pretty good way to sum things up.

We are currently in the middle of a move, building a house, and completing various projects for said house. The house isn't quite done yet, but we had to be out of our rental August 15th, so we are kind of in limbo, living in my cousin Brad's basement, but then we decided to take a quick (6-day) visit to my family before summer is really over. Recently I had to get a prescription filled and the technician wanted to verify my address and I technically could have given four, but really none of them were accurate. Needless to say, we (especially the kids) are feeling a bit displaced these days, but lots of support from friends and family has made it all a pretty good adventure.

This has definitely been a summer of cousins. Last June we got a visit from Chelsea and Tyler's family and got to show them around our little town.

Ellie insists on taking anyone who visits during the summer to ride on the merry-go-round and then play at the nearby splash pad. She earns "Abraham Lincolns" (pennies) to go on the carousel, which is a great motivator for her anytime a visit from family is pending.

We also had to show the boys the park closer to home. I absolutely love this shot. Ellie throwing her head back, Ben and Tommy caught in a moment of (ahem) brotherly love, and Jon so diligently looking at the camera.

The whole summer has been one countdown after another; first Tommy will come visit, then Grandma, then we'll go on a trip to see more cousins, then we'll come home, Grandma will come again, then we'll move, then we'll go live at Catie and Carley's house, then we'll move to our new house . . . On the one hand a lot to take in, but also a lot of adventures for a three-year-old to look forward to.

Just as we were getting ready to take off on the big trip of the summer--Colorado for Andrew and Margo's wedding (that's another post), Ellie got sick. Siiiick. Like fever radiating out her feet sick, asking if she can just stay in bed all day sick (!).

Luckily it was just a virus (which Charlie caught a couple days into our trip,  but not as bad) and we only had to postpone one day. In other news, Charlie is learning to be a ham for the camera. Sometimes.

At last we went to Colorado. Ellie had been dreaming of this magical place for months, ever since Brady went there for a conference last April. So we drove, and drove, and drove, and finally reunited with so many cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. Most of us stayed in the same house together.

So many three-year-olds in one house. And babies. Ellie and Charlie were in heaven.

The evening we got there we had a cousin talent show. I mentioned to Ellie a few times beforehand that this would be happening and asked her if she wanted to sing a song or learn a poem or something. She changed her mind every day or so on what she wanted to do, so in the end I never really practiced anything with her in all our preparations for the trip. I think we'd been out of the car for less than an hour when showtime arrived and Ellie enthusiastically volunteered to perform this little number (she takes a bit to get going and mumbles a bit, but really hits her stride by about G or so):


ChickaBoomBoom from Vimeo.

And I had been worried about her being shy around family we hadn't seen in a while. I think we might have a showboat on our hands.

We had some other fun outings with the cousins, only one of which I took pictures:

 Charlie is turning out to be our water baby. He was usually somewhat ambivalent about the splash pad at home, so after a while in the sun I put his shirt back on him. Then, of course, he got soaked, running through the fountains chanting, "water-water-WA-TER---WATERRRR!!!!" Now he will stay in water until he is blue and shaking all over, crying for it as I pull him away to get warm. He was kind of the same way warming up to ice cream when he was smaller.

So we enjoyed all the wedding festivities, but never enough play time with all the family together. Alas, we had to head home to get ready for our move two weeks later. And, boy, were we tired. (Wish I could say they did this the whole way home, but we did get a couple hours of simultaneous napping.)

So then we packed and cleaned and packed and cleaned and packed and cleaned (thanks to Grandma and my niece Gracie for coming to visit a few days and entertain the kids to give us a huge head start). And now we have been waiting and waiting for our house to be ready for us (some our fault--we added the finished basement after building was underway--some not our fault--the city marked some of the utilities wrong and we had a geyser in the front yard when they tried to hook up the water, etc.).

During some of that waiting, before the school year picked up again for Brady, and to give these over-generous cousins a bit of a break from us, we sneaked in another trip to visit more cousins. Not quite as much driving this time, but two-year molars coming in, so kind of a toss up for road trips.

Ellie wanted to go to the zoo again. It's becoming something of a Labor Day weekend tradition, I guess. Charlie was pretty unimpressed with the whole thing, except he really liked the giraffes.

He liked being out and with lots of kids, though.

Ellie's continued plight as "one of the boys." I noticed on this trip how people didn't even bother to distinguish, "the boys and Ellie," anymore. It was just, "go tell the boys to come in for dinner," or "tell the boys to start cleaning up the toys," etc. It was funny. One of these days Ellie is going to catch on and tell the boys that it means she doesn't have to help because Grandma just said "boys."

We did some good swimming.

And some good grooming. Both kids got their first haircuts this summer. Don't worry, we cut less than half an inch off Ellie's, just smoothing out the ends. She still has her curls. I had to have someone else do it, though, just to keep the idea of cutting her own hair far off the radar. I gotta try to keep a step or two ahead of her in at least a few areas ("Who can cut our hair? That's right. Only Emili. Not even Mommy . . .)

Also, Brady caught the fish. Super exciting. He hadn't been fishing since before Ellie was born, just with how busy things were with his internship, moving, dissertation, job hunt and interviews, etc. So, yay for fishing!