Clara Turns 3

Today is a big day! Clara is 3 today and I just can't believe it. She is such a blessing in our lives and I am so grateful for her. I remember the day my Dr. told me that it was probably not likely I would have children of my own. What do you do when you hear something like? Well obviously you cry and you cry some more, but eventually you come to terms with it and decide what your next step will be. After multiple unexplained miscarriages and 2 years of struggling to bear children I finally hit that point where I realized it was time to do something else. So, we looked into adoption. It was only a few weeks later that I found out that I was pregnant again. There was something different about it this time. I could never in a million years explain the reasoning of that to anyone, but in my heart, I knew this was for real. Don't get me wrong, I had many nightmares of bad things happening, but that is all they were.

Along came Clara. What a beautiful little blessing and it is so humbling to me to reflect on this as we celebrate her birthday. She truly is a miracle.

Clara loves princesses, the Doodlebops and Dora. She loves her teddy bears that she got for her first birthday and she has to sleep with them every night, along with all the other toys she can think of as she is getting into bed. No joking, sometimes she sleeps with 10 different toys or books. It drives me crazy, but she loves it. She loves doing crafts and she LOVES bubbles!! Her favorite food has got to be french fries, although she is a pretty good eater and will try pretty much anything on her plate. As long as you don't try to feed her breakfast food for dinner, or snack food for breakfast because she is pretty particular about which foods can be eaten at what time of day and for what meal they are appropriate. I think what she loves most in this world is her little brother. She is such a mother to him. She likes bossing him around, but she loves playing with him. She loves showing him new things. She loves kissing him and hugging him. She loves reading him stories. It is the sweetest thing to watch the two of them together. I hope they will be good friends through out their lives.

She is such a happy girl and she is so full of life. I love my little girl so much, there is no greater blessing than being her mother.

Happy birthday sweet angel, we love you to pieces!!

This is a slideshow I put together in honor of her birthday. I created this shorter one for anyone who doesn't want to spend 5 minutes watching a slide show of Clara. Ha!!

This is the REALLY long version, so feel free to skip it. It's mostly for us to have, not to make everyone else watch. With 3 years full of pictures it is hard to cut any out!

Trick or Treat

So this year was the first year that Clara got trick or treating. I was so excited to go trick or treating with the kids. Now that it's over, I am so glad it is a whole year before I have to do it again! Guess it's not as exciting as I thought it would be. Clara loved it though, she was just really tired. Donovan as well. Tired, cold kids combined with candy does not make for a great night.

Clara was a monkey for Halloween and Donovan was a giraffe. I called them our zoo animals as often it feels that way on a normal day!! They had lots of fun and Clara loved saying trick or treat. This morning she woke up and the first thing she said was, "Where's my trick or treat?" Usually the first thing she says to me is "Where's my daddy?". I guess candy prevailed this time around.

Here are some pictures of our Halloween, blogger won't let me upload them all, which is probably a good thing for the people reading this!! Hopefully everyone else had a good time trick or treating as well!!

Thanksgiving in Cardston

It's a little late, but I thought I would just post some pictures of our thanksgiving weekend. We had a turkey dinner at my moms house on Saturday night, then we headed to Cardston for more turkey on Sunday. The kids had a great time, they get to play with their cousins and they love that. Cardston really is beautiful and it is so fun for the kids to visit there. It's nice that I can send them outside to play and not worry about them being run over by a car, or that they will go missing. They just love going there to visit Great Grandpa, although Clara is always excited to see him, until she actually sees him, and then she is too shy to say anything to him. Donovan is fascinated by him as you can tell in the one picture below. He really does like watching him, it's really quite cute.

We spend a little time on Monday playing on the quads in the field. The kids really liked it. Although Donovan really preferred riding with his dad instead of his uncle. He is such a daddy's boy.
We had a great weekend and we look forward to the next time we head out to Cardston for a visit.

A Few New Things

I just had to put some pictures of Clara with her grandma up. Clara calls her grandma Kearl her "black" grandma. We are not sure why and we will probably never know why, but she sure loves her!

So it is finally official, we are building a new house in Lake Chapparal. No, as far as I am aware there is not a Lake Chapparal in Australia.
I knew the only way we weren't going to Australia was if Jeff changed jobs within a 2 month window between the time we made the decision and the time busy season would have started at KPMG. Well...he did just that. An excellent opportunity came around and he jumped on it. He is now employed by Axia, it is an internet network sevices company. So, we are going to build a house in the south. I figure that is the best way to get a change without actually leaving the city. They are estimating 13 months to build it, hopefully that is accurate because I am dying to get out of this house. Lately so many things have gone wrong with it. This month we put a few hundred dollars into some plumbing and electrical work. Not fun that's for sure. We have gotten a lot done around the house to finish it off. After only one year living in this place we finally have baseboards. It only took 8 months longer than I had originally planned, but it is done now. We still have some small things to fix up in this house, but it is a relief to have most of it done.
I have decided to go back to work one day a week. I work Mondays for the orthodontist I worked for when I was pregnant with Clara. It's a good place to work and 1 day a week is perfect for me. It gets me out of the house and allows me to use the skills I was trained to use. I also added a day to my dayhome. So now I have kids Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I am quite happy with this it keeps me from shopping more than once a week at least! Having only Fridays off doesn't give me much time to waste at the malls, so it really is a good thing for me. Knowing that it is only for a year makes it manageable and it is probably the only reason I am doing it.

Well this is a picture of our sweet lot. It isn't as small as it looks, but it isn't necessarily large either. The selling point to this lot is that it sides onto a green space with a park. We are so excited about this. It's a great park and every time I have driven by it has been full of kids.
We are building with Cardel and the floorplan is called the Lexington. There is a big sale on this house, and it is a really good deal. We weren't originally going to build this particular house. We had actually signed an offer conditional to financing on a different floorplan. Shortly after signing we found out about the deal on the Lexington. Jeff got up the courage and asked our sales guy if we could switch houses, only 1 week before conditions were supposed to be lifted. We had already had the lot for this house on hold for 1.5 months, so we were really prolonging things. In the end, we are SO happy that he asked. We are getting a bigger house, with a fully developed basement for less money than our original house would have cost with a partially developed basement. Our master bedroom is going to be HUGE and our ensuite will have a 3-way fireplace into the bedroom. I am so excited for that!!

It was finally time to cut Donovan's hair. It has been a long time coming but it is hard to cut such cute curls off. Curls are not quite as cute when they are in mullet form, so I said enough and buzzed his hair right off. Now he looks like such a boy and you would never know that my kid doesn't grow hair like most kids! I couldn't do this with Clara but I was tempted a few times! I am so happy with the outcome and Donovan seemed to enjoy having it done.

Well...thanks for reading our short novel. It has been a long time and I definitely have a lot more stories to tell, but I will leave it at this!!

Thank you

This is a post just for the people who made this trip possible for us! First of all George and Myrna for allowing us to invade their space and stay in their timeshare with them. Also for putting up with our shopping, touring and my picture taking on the trip!!
I am really grateful for my parents and for my brother and sister in law for taking the kids while we were gone. The kids weren't on their best behaviour as I understand, so it makes me even more grateful that they put up with them for us!
We had a great time but couldn't have done it without you guys!!

VIVA LAS VEGAS!!

So we had a great time in Las Vegas! It was super hot but you didn't even notice the heat because most of the time we were indoors in the a/c. I would say I spent more time shivering from the cold a/c then sweating from the heat. Go figure. That probably explains the nasty cold I have right now. That's what I get for leaving the kids for 5 days I guess.
I took so many pictures I won't post them all, but I selected a few to put in the online album for anyone who wants to check them out.
We started our trip by driving to Great Falls with Jeff's parents to fly with them to Vegas. It was a long drive, but I wasn't the one driving, so it was ok with me. The flight was short and sweet. We arrived at our hotel around 9 or 10pm, I don't remember really. I just know we hopped on a shuttle bus and headed to the strip. Jeff wasn't into going, but I pushed for it anyways. We went to New York, New York first. It was so cool to see all the lights, but it was a reality check the first step we took into the hotel. I realized it is not the life for me in Las Vegas. All the smoking, drinking and gambling. It was crazy. There were parents walking around with their kids that had to be around Clara's age at 11pm, carrying a beer in one hand and holding the kids hand with the other. It was crazy to me that some one could be so selfish. Those poor kids being drug around a casino 3 hours past their bedtime. It was very sad.
The next day I spent shopping with Myrna at the outlet mall. Why Jeff wanted to stay at the hotel is beyond me, but I was happy to have a shopping buddy. It worked out quite well. Though we spent a little too much time shopping, the boys were pretty hungry when we got back because they were waiting for us to go for supper. Oops. They will never understand why it was so important to us to spend an hour in a shoe store, but we were happy that we found so many pairs of shoes.
Jeff got to visit one of his mission companions. Heath Smith and his wife had us over for dinner on Sunday night. It was an amazing dinner and it was so nice to visit with them. It gave Jeff the itch to go back and visit his mission. That trip will have to be put on the back burner for now, but one day we will make it there.
Basically we spent the days sighseeing or shopping, and the evenings wandering around the strip. We spent a day at Hoover Dam, which was amazing. It was HUGE! It is pretty neat to see in person.
We went to a show called ICE. It was a cirque de soleil type show, but on ice. It was pretty neat. We probably should have splurged for the cirque de soleil tickets, but I was happy with the show. They did some really neat things.
We visited as many hotels as we could, but there were a lot we weren't able to see in 5 days. My favorite hotel by far was the Bellagio. It was just stunning. They make the fountains dance to the music, and they do a different show every 15 minutes.
One night we went on the roller coaster at New York, New York. That was fun. It was shorter than I would have liked, but it was still fun. Even George joined us on that adventure. There was no convincing Myrna though. She was happy to stay on the ground and wait for us to be done. That same night we spent some time playing in the ESPN game zone at New York New York. That was a good time. They had all types of sport arcade type games. We visited the real ESPN game zone when we were in New York, but we had Donovan with us, so we weren't able to play any of the games. This time we were kid free, so we took advantage of that and had a great time.
Our last day there we went to If anyone went to the Calgary Stampede Grandstand show, they say this guy. He is a ventriloquist and he is really good at it. It was so fun to see his show.
So that is our trip summed up as short as I can make it. I decided not to bore anyone with my great shopping finds, but I will say it was a successful shopping trip among other things. It was bound to be when you are close to Target and 3 different outlet malls. We feel very satisfied with our Las Vegas trip, so much so that we will probably never go back. It's nice to feel that way, we feel like we spent just the right amount of time there. Now we can plan our Disney Cruise with the kids!!
So to take a look at our photos just click on the one below. Please note that often we had to have random people on the street take our picture. I am not sure of some of their condition to be taking a picture when they had to put their drink down so they could hold the camera, but at least they captured our moment for us. That's what photoshop is for I guess!!

Las Vegas

August Long Weekend

We spent August long weekend this year at my Aunt's cabin in Shuswap. The drive was just a little too long for us, but other than that it was a great trip. The weather was perfect, it wasn't too hot. We enjoyed the company, it is always nice to visit with family. The kids loved the freedom. Their yard is huge and the kids had so much fun just running around the yard. Clara spent all day swinging on the swings. She would hurry and eat her breakfast every morning so she could go play outside on the swings. Then she would buckle herself into the swing and cry for someone to come help her get out. It was really cute. Donovan was happy just running around. When it came time to play in the lake, Clara was too chicken. She got about knee deep in the water before screaming to get out. Donovan was all over it, he probably would have walked right off the dock into the water and it wouldn't have phased him. It was nice to spend some time away from home with the kids. The next post will be about the time we spent away from home without the kids in VEGAS!! I am so excited, so stay tuned!!

Donovan loved these chairs, he played with them a lot.

Walking on the dock with Auntie Dawn

Clare enjoying herself swinging

I was trying to set the kids up so I could take a nice picture of the four of us. I sat the kids down and took a couple of shots and was getting the camera set up for the rest of us and Clara started screaming really loud and out of control. She threw something on the ground and when we looked down we saw that it was a wasp. She was stung 3 times. Poor girl. Needless to say, I made sure I took care of that wasp, it wasn't going to sting anyone again.
She handled it really well, but it was really sad. I think I was almost as upset as she was. I just felt so bad to see my little girl so sad. They swelled up a little but by morning there wasn't much left of her stings and within 24 hours you could hardly tell they were there. I am grateful for that.