Lots of holiday fun and a whole lot of yuckies...

We just finished up a long weekend full of WAY too much food and lots of wonderful family time. And do you think I have any pictures to show for it? Not really. 

All of my attention was spent worrying about these little ones...

Let's just say, we think we've had our share of sickies around our house lately. We just can't quite seem to kick it.

Brooklyn and Aubrey both had high fevers last weekend that were shortly there followed by nasty coughs and runny noses. Maddie started complaining that her ear was hurting and kept begging us to take her to the doctor. It's a good thing that we listened because she had a pretty intense ear infection. 

We've been playing the two steps forward, one step back game with Aubrey lately. Actually this week it almost felt like 2 steps forward, 5 steps back- at least in terms of eating...

Eating has always been one of our biggest struggles with little Aubrey. She just doesn't have much of an appetite. We are always pushing her to eat more than she wants to, just to keep her healthy. She is only in the 5th percentile for weight as well as for height, which means there is a lot of room for growth with our little sweet heart. Since she has been sick she has almost completely lost the little appetite that she did have. We were lucky if by the end of the day she had eaten 7 ounces. Normally she eats 24 to 30 ounces in a day so I'm sure you can see what a problem this really was. 

After about a week of not eating, we are finally starting to work our way back up to normal.

Since Aubrey wasn't wanting to drink her milk, we finally decided to try giving her some "real" food. I think she rather enjoyed herself... even if more of it got on her then in her.

 If you are wondering why we waited so long to start giving her baby food, the reason for this is because we do not want to encourage tongue thrusting. Since children with Down Syndrome tend to have a larger tongue, they have a tendency to stick it out quite frequently. Since most babies already have the tendency to stick out their tongue when they are learning to eat, I'm sure you can imagine why we chose to hold off a little longer than normal.

She especially liked the baby mum mums. She loved to chomp those things to pieces.

Anyway, I think (cross your fingers) we are on the mend. Between the flu bug and yucky cold we've had for the last month, we are ready to be feeling better.

Here's hoping!

The Delivery!

10 boxes

300 pounds

227 cookbooks.

Finally,

They are here!!

If you have already paid me for the books, I will be doing my best to get them out to you as soon as possible.

If you happen to find yourself in the neighborhood... give me a call.

Sweet affection...

 One of my favorite things that Aubrey has been doing as of late is that she loves to sit up close to our face, smile and then tap us. I love, love, love when she does this. It's kind of her way of playing with us. Tonight I realized just why she does what she does, and it just made me love it that much more.

I was holding Aubrey and she was getting a little fussy. I could tell she was tired but she wasn't falling asleep. So I did what I always do. I snuggled her in close and started patting her bottom. Almost instantly she looked up at my face and reached her hand out and started patting my chest. Not only was she patting, she was patting perfectly in rhythm with my patting.

I just find it interesting what things this sweet little baby picks up on. 

Now I know that my other girls have done similar things... but definitely not at 5 months old.

What have we done?

I just found these pictures on my phone...

What have we done?

We drive all the way up to visit our cousin's and what do the girls do the whole time we are there?

 ...Yeah...

At least they were playing "with" each other right?

Darn smart phones... we love you but...

...Really?

You are so convenient in so many ways.

You help us find our way when we are lost.

You make it so easy to get information at the touch of a finger.

You do a great job at keeping the kiddies entertained while waiting at the Doctor's office or while eating out.

You can be great for long car rides too.

You also make for some good "motivation" to get the girls to do what they need to

BUT

I really don't love that my kids seem to think you need to be played with all the time.

Note to my daughters... don't think you are going to get away with this all the time either.

Love

Your mom. :)

What's for dinner at your house?

 We've been trying lots of new recipes from Pinterest as of late. It has been so much fun to expand our food horizon. We have tried some delicious recipes that we will definitely be adding to our collection of favorites... but we have also tried some that were... ok but we probably won't be trying them again.

Tonight we made some things that hit both of these categories.

Our dinner was kind of random.

Chicken Cordon Bleu (the store bought kind... not homemade)

Pumpkin Pasta (recipe found on pinterest)

Recipe for Pumpkin Pasta

Rice Pudding (recipe found on pinterest)

Recipe for Rice Pudding

Corn (from a can)

The pumpkin pasta was definitely not our favorite. The flavor was ok but a little bit too bland for our liking.

The rice pudding on the other hand... Was absolutely delicious! I did add a little cinnamon, just for fun but the recipe was easy and not too time consuming.

It was a fun dinner, even if it was a little bit different.

Christmas Stockings...

I've been doing a little sewing lately...

Getting ready for Christmas.

I know, Thanksgiving comes before Christmas but I wanted to have everything ready BEFORE it was time to decorate. :)

Here's a little sneak peak of today's project.

I found a great tutorial on how to make your own Stockings here.

They were super easy to make, and I love how they turned out.

 Can you guess which stocking is for each member of our family?

...

 Maddie had to get a piture of me too...

 Can you believe that this is mine and Karl's 6th Christmas together and this will be the first year we have our own stockings at home?

We've never been home on Christmas morning so we've never had the need...

 ...Since Karl wasn't here to model his, you get another picture of this lovely.

A little bit of icky-ness...

This last week our family was put out of commission when the flu bug hit our home. I was preparing myself for a long, hard week but fortunately things went a lot better than expected. Madison woke up in the middle of the night Friday very sick but was pretty much done by Saturday morning. It took a while to regain her strength but you could tell she was feeling a lot better. Sunday morning little Aubrey started acting sick. Somehow though, she only had one incident. 

How? I have no idea but I am counting all my blessing right now.  We kept ourselves confined for a few days just to be safe and are all doing much better now.

And so is our computer...

On Saturday we somehow downloaded a nasty virus that took complete control of our computer in a matter of seconds. We thought we had taken care of the problem but on Sunday when Karl was getting on the Utah Real-estate website to check out some houses (the website our Realtor sent us to) the virus popped up again. 

This is when we realized that it was in fact this website that was giving us the virus! We talked to our Realtor and she was able to confirm with the website themselves that someone had hijacked their site and was infecting computers all around. Pretty scary. So if you are on the internet and a message pops up that says a virus has been detected on your computer, click here to get rid of this virus MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT CLICK THE BUTTON.

 Stop and open up your own security program and run a scan on your computer. And if you do happen to click the button, turn your computer off immediately and ask for help before doing anything else on your computer. It took our landlord all day to get rid of the darn thing for us... 

But thank you Jared for helping us out!

This is just hilarious...

Remember this weird ear bruise miss Brooklyn got the other day?

 Well, the other day I was babysitting my friend's little kids.

Meet Mr. Matthew. The sweetest little guy I've ever met.

 Check out his ear... You have to look really closely but do you see how his right ear is all purple? Apparently, his ear is further along in the healing process, but it is the exact weird ear bruise miss Brooklyn has... and it's even in the exact same spot and on the same ear. How do you do something like that? Can I just say weird?

 Anyway, the weirdness doesn't end there. So the kids were eating lunch when all of a sudden Brooklyn fell off of her chair and landed on her head. (I knew the accidents weren't over yet.) I could not figure out how she had done this. She was just sitting. 

Two minutes later, not even kidding, Matthew did the exact same thing!

I guess these two really were meant to be friends. :)

Let Halloween be over...

I'm ready to be done posting about Halloween, so this post is all about finishing up our Halloween celebrations.

Last Friday Madison's preschool had a Halloween party/program for the parents. It was fun to go and see what Maddie is learning at school. 

 This is Maddie with her two friends, Paige and Brooklyn, from our ward. 

 Yesterday we went to my Mom's/Brother's/Sister's elementary school to celebrate with them.

This is our version of a clown car...

 Last night we went Trick or Treating with some friends from the ward. I think I have to say this was our most successful year of Trick or Treating ever. We had so much fun. The weather was perfect and the kids were really in to it. We came home with quite the stash.

 On Sunday our bishop taught all the primary kids about paying tithing and asked each of them to pay a candy tithe to him this next Sunday. He plans to put all of the candy he receives in the candy jar in his office. What a wonderful idea. I think this will become a yearly tradition for our family. 

After counting all of our loot, the children got to choose 26 pieces of candy to give to the bishop. That means they got 260 pieces of candy!

 This sweet little girl has had quite the week.

First, she ran into the door frame while turning back to look at me...

 We are lucky we didn't end up in the ER with this one.

 Then yesterday she hit the back of her head when she tripped while walking backwards...

Then this morning she fell off the rocking foot stool she was using as a step stool and got this weird blood blister on her ear... It's kind of hard to see in the picture but it looks super painful. Poor girl. 

Here's to hoping for no more accidents.

Halloween is officially over. We loved having you here but we're excited to celebrate the next holiday.