Thing I don't want to forget my children are doing right now:

Maxson (3 1/2):

-Loves trying to catch lizards in the backyard, except he says "widuh" and no one except Casey and I can understand him.

-Always saying "I'm so big" "I'm such a big boy"

-Is a great helper when it comes to putting the dishes away

-Always wants his back tickled at night while you tell him a story

-Loves listening to Primary music and singing along. Maxson's enunciation is a little difficult to understand probably for a lot of people but as his parent I can tell he's saying pretty much all the words of the songs.

-Loves pointing out his "new friends!" we've made at church when they show up.

-Always asking to go to grammie and grandpa's house and talks about how it's his "favwit"

-likes to tell you things are his "favwit" suddenly

Bryson (22 months):

-loves to be held, he's always begging me to hold him when we go places. and then if I do hold him, Quinn goes crazy and apparently needs to be held too.

-calls his teddy bear his "nigh nigh"

-thrives on one on one attention, his giggle and scrunched up nose when he laughs is just the cutest

-Loves shoes. He's always putting on everyone's shoes and coming to show us

-He thinks it's hilarious to call our name so we'll look at him with his finger in his nose...goof ball

-he's the best sleeper. Never wakes up in the middle of the night, bless that child

Quinn (22 months):

-When grammie and grandpa enter his mind he comes up to you with big eyes saying "grammie, papa, house! grammie, papa, house! derrick! tay tay, karkar"

-will hold the water hose at people teasing to shoot it at you with the most evil and happy look at his eyes knowing he has all the power in his hands

-obssessed with "muht!" or milk. OBSESSED. milk and lawn mowers

-always wants to go outside to tell the birds to go away, sounds like "doh wahy burr! doh why!"

-once upon a time was our peacemaker...not going to lie now he's kinda the meanest, ha! Poor Bryson constantly gets bullied by lil Quinny

-His speech is flying. He connects multiple words all the time, it's incredible. He has a great memory of words I taught him a long time ago.

Love this little family of mine. We are in a really really fun hilarious cute adorable stage with our kids and also a really really awful exhausting screaming tiring intense stage with out kids. I know the whole "you're kids grow up fast" "blink and you'll miss this" "you'll miss this stage" "you'll want this back" and I'm trying my hardest to enjoy it, truly! But at other times I'm like "this is way too freaking hard, I need more breaks!!!!" ahhhhhh... this too shall pass, for good and for bad. I love my children, oh I do. I just wish there was less screaming and crying...

By the way on all these swimming pictures, the kids loved swimming in AZ. Bryson was our most fishy fish of the 3. SO awesome and independent with floaties. Maxson loved some of the day,s his bad ear infections put a damper on some of the days but truly he did love the water.

Plastic and children

That moment when you realize your life is ruled by plastic and little children

A new home!

After one unfortunate event after another we are officially moved into a new home and are now calling Rock Springs, Wyoming home! It was a whirlwind of events the 2-3 days before we moved out of Nebraska but we know that the Lord's hand was in everything and we kind of just went with the flow having faith that it would all work out in the end. It was hard. There were some really hard days in there but we've almost completely made it to the other side. Just have to wait for Casey to officially start work mid September!

Our home happens to be the neighboring town to Casey's parents! It has been such a blessing to have them close by. They have all seriously been the absolute biggest help. If we had moved into this home in any city not by them it would have been a TOOOOOOON of work (not to mention a lot more money because we've borrowed so many of their tools, ha!)

It was a true blessing that we found this home to rent on Facebook. Big enough for all our needs, a HUGE backyard, and we could move in in about a week. We felt so very fortunate. I have officially named this Wild Rock home due to the large wild rocky area in our backyard for kids to explore and it is in rock springs :)

It is kind of like one of the kind of split level home but not a true split level. You walk in to a little family room and then will walk in to the kitchen/eating area. The kitchen is nice and big and plenty of room. But unfortunately there's no pantry :( Ugh. I will be very happy when I get a real pantry in my life, ha. (Actually, let's be honest I am already SOOOOO happy having so much more space than our Nebraska shoebox, ha) The kitchen cabinets are quite old, but still function just fine. It's a HUGE sink which is great except that the faucet barely goes over the side that has the disposal (yay I finally have a disposal!), the fridge is huge and new but doesn't have hookups behind it for rate and ice. We do have a dishwasher right next to the sink, love it! It has a broken wheel right now but that's supposed to be getting fixed soon.

(all these pictures are for the benefit of me seeing where we started with this place, they're not cleaned up, organized, cute, whatever, but it's our home right now so bear with me)

There are a total of 4 bedrooms. 3 are in the upstairs portion, the master and 2 kids room. There are also 2 bathroom upstairs. It seems like such luxury to have my very own bathroom in my room! (The shower has room to complain about but oh well). The kids have their own bathroom for baths which is again just a nice luxury too. It's great to have enough room on one level to gets ids dressed, bathe, brush teeth, bed time stuff, it's just nice to have SPACE!

Downstairs there is another family room where we have our big couch and TV and the 4th bedroom which we've made the playroom! Oh man I love having an actual room for all their toys and a place where it's fine not to pick up the toys every stinking hour! There's also another full bath downstairs. It doesn't get that much use, but it's convenient to have for potty breaks when you're in the playroom and not having to go all the way upstairs finally.

We have a 2 car garage, woohoo! It has some extra stuff we need to sell before we can try to fit Casey's car inside. It's going to be a tight fit with both cars, so we'll see how it goes!

But the backyard is really the great area. There's a large grass area  for kids to play in (to be completely honest it's actually not grass though :( The owners who just moved out had 4 dogs and kids and just let it go to pits. So Casey has been working his tail off trying to reseed it, keep birds off of it, getting sprinklers to work, water it like crazy, and just overall baby it, ha. He has done a marvelous job and we're seeing new seed growth! Hopefully in time we'll have a luscious  green backyard.

There's a nice big newer playset that the kids LOVE playing in, a huge deck- which in the evenings gets the bet shade coverage, it's so wonderful to be outside- and we also bought a trampoline! Definitely a highlight of the backyard for the kids, especially Max, he begs us to jump with him like 5 times a day. It's in a perfect spot right off the deck where it's shaded in the morning with a big tree o that side and then again in the evening with the house shading the other way. It really has been so much fun for our kids.

The rest of the backyard (it's huge I tell you, 17,000 sq ft supposedly!) has a big fire pit area, a big shed, a big greenhouse (don't get too excited reading that, it hasn't been used in like 10 years, the roof is broken in, not sure I'll fix it up either, there's plenty of room elsewhere for me to have a huge garden without putting in a bunch of effort for a greenhouse, my next door neighbor's garden is HUGE and luscious so I'll hopefully just pattern my time and effort after there's!). After all that there's still a huge area in the backyard that is kind of like a mini Wyoming mountain: sagebrush, sandstone, paths, trees, small hills that max has LOVED exploring to find lizards in! We also love trying to spot a bunny rabbit or two that cross our yard each day! But Casey and his family have done a massive amount of work in the back making it nice hauling off loads to the dump.

The old greenhouse

Trimming so many bushes back

Brad weed eating, Derek helping set up the tramp

Making the sprinkler go to the corner up here.

The sprinkler goes to this barren bottom right corner, I guess there used to be bushes in here at one point but we want grass to grow.

The first days working on the non grass backyard , we raked all the dead grass and trash away, the kids LOVED helping throw seed out.

After about 5 days you can see more green coming through!

So that's our new little home for now. Our neighbors on both sides are oh so nice. They are both older married couples, one side, his name is Ken, has been so kind to let us borrow one tool after another to get small jobs done. He's also given great advice on small projects we're working on like getting the grass to grow and the land around our house in general. The other side the woman is actually a member of our ward we realized the first day at church! That was a nice pleasant surprise! They're the ones with the super nice garden.

I kind of feel like we're renting a fixer upper. It's not in that bad of shape but there's lots of little things we can do to make it better, like painting door frames, touching up baseboards, filling in lots of little holes in the walls and then painting those, lots of yard work of overgrown trees and bushes, picking up trash and dead stuff in the backyard, picking up dog poop (ugh you read that right), cleaning walls and ovens and inside cupboards. Just lots of little things that add to my overall happiness of living there but that weren't quite up to the standard of our landlords living situation.

Moving in has been an absolute pain though. Without the help of my inlaws, the Cutlers, we'd been living in a mess sill. They helped me get this place into shape and mostly unpacked in about a week. It has seriously been so difficult to unpack and get organized with kids around, like seriously so so hard. And then trying to make food for everyone. And then naps and crying and fighting and getting hurt and the list goes on, ha. And then since I'm pregnant I get so tired so quickly from doing a little work and I have to take naps during the day to function. After reading this do you understand the difficulty of moving in with my kids? Ha.

And our home in Nebraska just had that huge unfinished basement where we just put EVERYTHING. We didn't need a craft area or office area, or storing old baby stuff area and the list goes on. So the creativity of finding new spaces to fit it all has been a tiny challenging but we're making it work just fine.

The weather has been incredible here. Highs in the low 80's everyday and then it drops down to low 60's high 50's at night to cool down your house.

We'll make this place for however long as necessary. I'm glad we found a place to fit a lot of our wants, needs and wishes. At times it leaves more to desire, but it's not our forever home, we can do it temporary :)