Chicken pox again

Bekah, Joseph, and Simeon all have the chickenpox now. I'm happy the rest of them are all getting it at once so we can be done with this! These three are so much more grouchy than Sariah and Lizzie were. Between Joseph and Rebekah we didn't get any sleep last night. Jacob is already planning on a nap after church, which he never does, so that's saying something.

Here is Simeon eating strawberry shake the day they came down with the chicken pox. I love how he has his eyebrows up. He's such a funny little boy.

The chickenpox are starting to show up now! Fun fun!

Joseph and his happy self. If he's distracted he forgets how irritating it is. Don't you just love that smile?!

Poor Rebekah got it the worst of everyone. This was yesterday, and I think there are even more today.

And here is our cute princess Lizzie. She wears that dress everyday. If you look close at her face you can see the last of her chickenpox marks right between her eyes. She's happy once again thankfully.

Vilate's Haircut

To answer Tiffany's question about why we cut Vilate's hair here are two pictures. Vilate is the first of our children to find the scissors and boy did she do a job. There are still weird patches but I didn't want to get it cut any shorter. We actually were planning to get her hair cut, along with Lucy's. I guess we took too long so she took matters into her own hands! We were inspired by cousin Rebekah's cute hair. So here is a picture of Lucy's hair cut too.

Lowell Christmas

I love Christmas! Gary ended up being sick on Christmas eve and Christmas day so we did not get to spend it with family until afterwards. We actually decided we think we prefer it that way. It just made the day less crazy. We also had a special treat when Jacob and Tiff were able to visit along with mom, dad, Ezra and Tim. Santa got the kids the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and each kid got a Dwarf in their stockings. He was pretty good at matching up the kids with dwarfs with similar personalities. Also below is "The amazing Holt men and the flipping grandchildren" movie.

Hail

We had hail yesterday (Jan 22nd) That's the closest we'll get to snow!

Christmas time & my Pregno Belly!

This is a picture of me and Samuel waiting for the Christmas Parade to start. Vista always does their Christmas parade at 1pm, probably to have better weather. It started sunny and ended up being ridiculously freezing. At the end of the parade it even started to sprinkle. This was a little bit of a problem for us because we walked to the parade route, and had to hurry home. This is a picture of Samuel on Christmas morning. He wouldn't put down his golf club or balls for a long time. We had to convince him to open the rest of his presents. We should have just saved the golf clubs for last.

This is Samuel all snug in his pjs. Isn't he sooooo cute!

This is my amazingly large belly!

I like this picture because it really shows how big my belly is and how skinney the rest of me is. I am carrying the baby completely different this time.

Cloth Diapers!

Well, I've finally done it. I've been thinking about it ever since I was pregnant with Tracker, and now it's official. Tracker is wearing his cloth diaper right now. It took some convincing with Travis, but he's agreed to just be quietly supportive. :) It took many conversations & advice from Tiffany and much research on the internet, but we're here.

According to a diaper calculator Tiffany directed me ot on the internet, we will have saved a little under $1000 after a year of use and it will be good for the environment, and probably his skin too. Potty training may also be a bit easier because he can feel when he's wet more efficiently. Those are some of the reasons I've decided to switch.

Here Trayton is taking the picture. He's been showing a lot of desire in taking pictures on my camera. We usually end up with a lot of random pictures of our house & furniture, so I convinced him to just take pictures of people.
Tracker crawling around with his new dipe set-up. Tracker thinks this is what he's supposed to do when I ask him to smile.

Cute bum.

Here it is from the front. He's such a cute muscle man.

Anyway, just thought I'd let you know, Tracker now wears cloth diapers!

Lucy's b-day video

I hope this is really it.

Chicken pox

Our Stake Relief Society is doing the Linus Project (http://projectlinus.org) blankets this year as our major service project. They are asking each person to make several blankets by November, so we did one as a FHE lesson. It was easy, and Bekah and Riah were both able to do the ties on their own, and Lizzie and Joseph could do it with a little help. They were pretty happy to have done it on their own.


We have chicken pox at our house now. Fun stuff. Lizzie is miserable. She had a horrible fever, and she was hallucinating the night she came down with it. That was rather interesting! She was seeing monkeys on the ceiling and walls along with other things and was convinced they were coming to get here. Poor girl. That went on all night long. Evidently, according to our doctor, hallucinating is more common with children that have high fevers than people realize. She doesn't have too many spots, but she feels horrible. At least she looks cute!
Simeon is happy, even if Lizzie isn't. He now will say "cheese" when we get the camera out. Well, a baby version of cheese. It's cute if I do say so myself.
Sariah feels pretty good. She hasn't gotten the fever or rash that Lizzie has, but she has spots everywhere. She even has them in her ears now. Thankfully she doesn't itch too much. She spent the morning searching for new spots and got excited every time she found one. Which was every other second! It looks like the rest of the kids aren't getting it right now, but in a few weeks we'll see if they got it from the girls. I have a neighbor that wants her kids to get the chickenpox, so they are coming over for a play date on Monday. Just in time for cake on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Enjoy your chocolate tomorrow guys!

Mommy brag

Ok, so no pictures from Christmas yet, or after Christmas pictures even, but I do have to brag. Rebekah is most definitely my child. She is my mini me. After getting back from vacation she had another jump in her reading skills. Yesterday she read 100 pages of a chapter book. Yes that is right 100 pages. She got into her book and read for a few hours until she finished the book. How awesome is that!? And to think she had a mini temper tantrum when I made her read the first chapter of the book. This morning she picked out the next several books to read for school. She asks for sewing lessons everyday and reads all the time. Now there is a child after my own heart!

Dad and Simi

We have a bunch of pictures to put up for Christmas, but I wanted to go ahead and put this one up. I love this one. It's one of my favorites from our vacation. I'm going to see if Jacob will put together a slideshow of all the rest since there are so many. Love you guys!

Our wreck

Here are our kids in the Young's van while the guys were emptying out our truck of all our belongings. It was so cold compared to California, and the kids were freezing. No one had their sweaters since they took off with the truck before we could get anything out of it. The kids all took it pretty well. Lizzie is the only other one besides me (Tiff) that had any visible injury. She had her fingers in her mouth when we wrecked and her teeth scraped one of her fingers. She is so determined to suck something that she changed to her thumb for the time being until her finger heals.



Our poor car. It will probably be considered a total loss and we'll be back in the market for a new car. We are so very, very thankful that we all walked away from the accident with only minor hurts. Funny part is that the lady at the tow yard said the truck didn't look that bad. Right...if you only look at it from the front door towards the back. There is a dent just above the wheel well on the left side and that is it besides the engine area.