Mormon Mommy Bloggers

This is a fascinating article written by a feminist atheist who loves Mormon Mommy blogs! I love her perspective and hope that my blog inspires women to feel that marriage and motherhood can make their lives happy.



www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/01/15/feminist_obsessed_with_mormon_blogs

Moving On

With just the slightest shove, I would move back to Texas in a heart beat. It's not that I don't like Phoenix, the weather CAN'T be beat! And we have good friends, good schools, great house. But it's just not home. So to remind us, for better or worse, I made...

The Texas Wall

Thanks for this sign, Christi.

Our Texas friends at the swimming pool, story time, and from the neighborhood.

The Stonely's, the Flynn's, and the Miller's.

The Roanoke water tower and Babe's (when we have fried chicken and mashed potatoes for dinner, we still call it Babe's. It's one of our favorites).

When we moved to Texas in 1997, we were on the five year plan, meaning that we would move back west in five years. I would chuckle when I saw bumper stickers that said "I wasn't born here but I got here as quick as I could" and "I'm from Texas. What country are you from?" But things were so good! We had good jobs, great friends, and the economy was in our favor. Those things were still true when we decided to move a couple years ago. It's just that our little family needed to know our big family. That was the deciding factor. Now that we've been here a while, we may have been a little hasty in our decision:) Just kidding. We are grateful that our kids get to know their cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. But it does present some issues!

Mini Rock Stars

When Caroline said she wanted to have a Rock Star party for her birthday, I couldn't imagine what a bunch of six and seven year olds would do at a party like that. So I tried to change her mind. But once she gets an idea in her mind, she holds tight to it. By way of making it more age appropriate, we made it Mini Rock stars. Gift bags
Mini M&M's, mini Oreo's, and mini Reese's peanut butter cups.

Mini cupcakes

They made mini pizzas and drank mini sodas.

Then we headed over to the park for a rock star pinata.

They did karaoke, played rock band, and had a fashion show.

In the middle of opening presents, Caroline got a bloody nose and so her friends had to play without her.

I think Caroline had fun and her friends seemed to have fun. But Caroline is seven now and that makes me sad. She is really my baby of the first group and when I look at the pictures of her from when she was little, it seems like yesterday. Before you know it, she will be eight! All I can say is I'm sooo glad that all the birthday parties are over for this year. Kassie is going to New York for her birthday so no party for her. And Sophia doesn't care so she can just have cake:)

Seriously? Rabbits? Good Will? Guess How Many? Over run?

Seriously? Guess how many stuffed animals we have? 104!!! And 12 of them are from Christmas! (And shhh don't tell the girls that I gave a whole garbage bag to Goodwill right before Christmas!) It feels like they are multiplying like rabbits and we are now over run. Guess it's time for another Goodwill run or better yet let's have a contest! Here's how it works: take a pictures of all the stuffed animals in your house, post it on your blog and leave a comment on mine with the total number. Whoever wins, I will send them the bag of stuffed animals that I would have given to Goodwill. Want to?

And just for some trivial information we have 9 Build-A-Bears, 12 Care Bears, and 23 Webkinz! Maybe we should buy stock in one of those companies:)

PS - I realize it's a little unfair since I have four girls but keep in mind that I am a thrower awayer and that if I had kept ALL the stuffed animals we've ever owned since Kassie was born, we would probably have over 500! So it's all good.

What a Beautiful Day, We're Not Scared.

Can you believe how close this hot air ballon is? We came outside to enjoy the weather and discovered THIS at the end of our street! Luckily, they figured out there was no place to land:) So as long as we were out... the kids decided to do a bit of showing off for us. Aren't they tricky?

Sophia just likes to climb on things and sing.

The weather is beautiful. Come visit!

She's NINE!!!

For some reason, Sydney seemed to get sick a lot as a baby. I would obsess over all the awful things that could happen and the what ifs. Nine years later, I think she's one tough cookie:) Here she is with her new skateboard that she got for her birthday. She's a natural.

For her birthday, she had a Harry Potter party. Being a Harry fan myself, I couldn't stop myself from going all out. I think I may have set the bar too high for me to keep up with. First an acceptance letter from Hogwarts for the kids to participate in special midterm classes.

The letter was signed...

sealed...

and delivered by Hedwig.

The goodie bags included: Bertie Botts ever flavor bean (which is a hoot to watch the kids try),

A chocolate frog with trading card,

and all the things they made during their classes. These are the bags.

First class was charms with Professor Flitwick and her lovely assistant.

They learned "nox" (un lighting a light),

"Aparecium" - revealing invisible ink,

and "wingardeum leviosa" (levitating a ping pong ball).

Next class was Care of Magical Creatures taught by Hagrid (or his opposite:)

The kids were taught about some magical creatures (using information from this handy textbook entitle "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them") then sent on a scavenger hunt to find them.

Next they were taught fortune telling by Professor Trelawny.

They used signs of divination: an all seeing eye, a crystal ball, astrology, and the Deathly Hallows.

Professor Sprout taught herbology, helping the students plant a magical asphodel using magical essence's to enhance it's potency.

These magical enhancers included: Dragon's Blood, Essence of Pumpkin Juice, Urine of a Quiphade, powdered Shamrock leaf, waves of the Agean Sea, Sea Serpent venom, Pegasus saliva, Fart juice of a Centaur, and Unicorn blood.

Potions class came last with a fantastic concoction for Felix Felicis or Liquid Luck. It tastes nasty so I recommend you only consume if you are in DESPERATE need of luck.

The last class we went to was Divination where each child got to look into the crystal ball and predict what present Sydney was going to receive. It was really fun!

Last we ate snitch cupcakes and drank butter beer (cream soda with butterscotch syrup mixed in). No one really loved the butter beer but the cupcakes were a hit!

After all that, they pretended they were Dumbledore's Army and practiced Defense Against the Dark Arts. Kassie was a dementor they practiced their Expecto Patromum spell on and they took turns being Bogarts hiding in a box and popping up so the spell caster could say "Ridikulus!"

I realize it was a little much but for those of you who are Harry Potter fans, wasn't that awesome?!? Sydney loved it, which is all that matters. She had such a good time and one little girl even gave Sydney a real Firebolt broom as a gift! Love you Syd!

Sophia's Big Girl Room

We have been working on Sophia's big girl room for a while but I finally got it all finished, cleaned, and had my camera out at the same time. So here are the pictures. (And remember, my blog is now for posterity so I am not bragging about this, just detailing for Sophia:)

The little white chine cupboard was made for Sophia's great grandmother Ginny by Ginny's grandfather, so it's old. But just the perfect size for all of Ginny's grand kids who have played with it. It holds three different tea sets, all in various stages of completeness. The little play kitchen is what Sophia got for Christmas, though all the girls are loving it (even Kassie).

My friend Courtney gave me this beautiful woman with flowers to thank me for being her friends. Her is the story of why I keep it in Sophia's room: We had been trying for a while to have another baby and had been unsuccessful, which had not been our experience with our first three. Then Courtney got cancer. I stopped focusing on having another baby and started focusing on the Flynn's. Her beautiful girls came to stay with us for a while and so we had six kids in our house for a few weeks! Imagine how surprised I was to find out in the middle of all that, that we were expecting a baby! So I when I see this statue, I think of how something so beautiful (Sophia) came out of something so ugly (cancer). Thank you Courtney:)

The toddler bed has been interesting. Even though she still loved her crib, we were trying to potty train her and she had to be able to get out of bed if she needed to. For the first month or so, she treated it like a crib. She would sit on her bed and yell, "Mom, I'm awake!" Very funny. But lately, she has no problem getting out of bed for whatever strikes her fancy - a drink of icy, cold water, a stuffed animal, another song. But she is potty trained! (Oh, and I made the quilt on her bed because they don't sell that kind of stuff in toddler bed size. I could not for the life of me make my square match up. So I used ribbon to tie it on every corner and it covers up a lot of the mistakes. It is silky pink material on the back side so it's just like Sophia's blanky.)

Now Sophia has her own book shelf filled with all the toddler classics - her current favorites are The Hungry Caterpillar, Are You My Mother, and One Fish Two Fish.
This little music box also belonged to her great grandmother Ginny. When Ginny died, this was the only thing Kassie wanted. She remember sitting on Grandma Ginny's lap and playing with this. Grandma Ginny died the day after Sophia was born so she only saw pictures of Sophia. But we tell her stories all the time. My grammy made this ceramic bear lamp for me when I was a baby. It was in my room with a blue gingham shade and was kept there through my sister and brother. It has been standing guard over all girls, too, but with different shades and bows tied around it's neck. I am not a keeper of things. But this made the cut and Sophia loves it.

On these shelves are some nick knacks that my mom brought back from her travels in Europe. These little nesting dolls came from Poland and Sophia loves to climb up on the chair and play with them. There are five of them and Sophia says it's me, Kassie, Sydney, Caroline, and Sophia. This is a hand carved goose girl from Germany. All the girls got one for their birthdays last year. Kassie got the Frog Prince, Caroline got Red Riding hood, and Sydney got Hansel and Gretel. And don't worry, Mom, the kids are not playing with them, just looking:)

Sophia was out of sorts over the holidays, partly because of all the excitement but partly because of all this change in her room. It's all finished and she has finally settled down. I think we'll keep it this way for a while!