Thanksgiving 2010-COUSINS

        It has been a long time since the girls have seen their Fleming cousins.  It was so great to have the whole family in Colorado for Thanksgiving and for Caleb's baptism.  We also got to meet 2 new cousins.  John and Kathleen's baby girl Kyla (Kyla was born 11 days after Nathan), and Jena and Brian's little girl Ashley.  Ashley was born a couple of months after Kyla.  All 3 babies were within 3 months of each other.

Kelsey and Kyla

Nathan and Kyla-I don't know why it made the picture sideways

All 3 new cousins: Kyla, Ashley, and Nathan.  Again, sideways?



Our family with Caleb at his baptism on Thanksgiving day



Diana and Kelsey became the best of friends this trip

Diana holding Nathan

Mackenzie and Grant



Haylee and Caleb



Natalee and Spencer



New Car (or 'Van on Steroids' as some say)

     We had a bit of car trouble on our way to Colorado for Thanksgiving.  We felt very blessed to make it there safely after overheating on the I-70 just east of Salina.  We felt very blessed to have been helped by some very wonderful people as well.  The radiator cap had come off so we were out of fluid.  One of our good samaritans even drove to Salina to buy us some antifreeze.  We got back on the road and thought we had escaped without any major damage.  We made it the rest of the way to Colorado and even drove around a bit for the next few days.  It wasn't until Thanksgiving morning that we started having problems.  The check engine light came on and we could feel a difference in the driving.  We dropped it at the dealership and waited to hear from them the next day.  We thought we lucked out again and just had a burn coil that needed replacing.  But as we pulled out Saturday morning to head back to Ridgecrest, the engine light came on again.  We could smell antifreeze and we just knew we didn't want to risk driving 700 miles on that engine.  Especially with a car full of small children!
     So.....we drove to the Ford dealership and bought our monster van!  It's a 2010 E-350 that had 17,000 miles on it and still had a 3 year/36,000 mile warranty.  I feel incredibly old driving it, but it is so roomy!  It's a 12 passenger so we now have plenty of room to drive friends around.  I admit that I cried about losing my Honda Odyssey.  I got really attached after 7 1/2 years.  And I still really miss some things about it.  But I'm learning to like the new van too.

     Pictures of us broken down on the side of the road. The car was steaming so much while Daren was pouring in water.

    One last picture of our Honda Odyssey.  This is when I started to feel teary.  I know, pathetic! 

      The girls absolutely LOVE all the space!

      Here she is!  We need to think of a name for this behemoth.  Something that says giant, white thing.  I'm leaning towards Moby Dick right now unless someone can think of something better.

      Kelsey fell out of the van the day after we got back from Colorado.  Now she won't get out by herself.  I think that's a good thing for now.

Family Home Evening

     About a year and a half ago we made family home evening charts for a relief society enrichment activity.  I still need to put Nathan on (I bought a couple extra stars so that if we added more kids I could add them to the chart).  This is what it looks like.

     Since we started using this chart, we have made a change.  Whoever is on scripture is allowed to either share a scripture or bear their testimony.  It's been a wonderful thing and it has really helped us to consistently do family home evening.  I know that I still have plenty of room for improvement in the quality of our FHE.  Now that we are pretty solidly consistent (it helps that the girls actually really love to do family home evening and they are very upset if we miss), I know that I need to be spending a lot more time planning and preparing for FHE.  I'm still pulling things together on Monday afternoon without really any advance preparation.  Ideally, Daren and I would pray together to see what the topics of FHE would be and we would help our children plan their lessons so they could develop that skill for future church callings.
     This Monday was a wonderful family home evening that I wanted to share for our blog book.  Kelsey was conducting this week.  She doesn't really like that spot.  Her favorite is to choose songs and she thinks she should get to do that every week and gets a little mad when someone picks something else besides "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam."  So she was a little grouchy and I ended up conducting.  Daren was in charge of songs and our opening hymn was "Choose the Right."  Then I shared a scripture: Mosiah 2:17 and we briefly talked about how serving others is serving God because those we are serving are His children and that makes Him happy.  And also how the opposite is true-when we hurt others we are hurting Him, even if the 'others' are our sisters!  :)
     After that we had a wonderful lesson.  This lesson was special.  It was prepared without any parental guidance.  It came from a story found in the magazine, "Horse Illustrated."  Have you figured out who was in charge of lesson yet?  :)  Natalee did a very good job.  She started by asking Daren to read a story about a girl who was struggling with her badly-behaved horse and she was ready to give up but she took her to a training stable and learned so many things.  Her horse improved a lot and she also learned about her own interests and abilities and she grew a lot in a lot of areas.  Then Natalee asked us, "What did you learn from this story?"  Daren said he was interested to see how this was going to tie into the gospel.  Natalee explained, "Just as her learning grew, that is like how our testimonies grow every time we are nice to somebody.  She had done a wonderful job preparing and she had made each of the girls a little piece of paper with small dashes on them.  She handed them out and told them that every time this week they did something nice for someone, they could draw a small circle (not a large one!) on the end of one of their dashes.  The goal was to get all of the dashes filled up by the end of the week.  Then she asked if we would give them a special reward (donuts or ice cream or something like that) if they got all their dashes filled in.  The girls were very excited to get their papers and were being very nice to each other after school today.  They each earned some circles to put on their dashes!
     After the lesson, Haylee selected a game of "I Spy" for the activity and we ate some yellow, circle, lemon cookies that Mackenzie chose for dessert.  Even when it isn't perfect or perfectly prepared, family home evening does bring us closer together.

Natalee's Testimony/Kindness Chart

P.S.  Last night the girls were being particularly kind to each other and putting circles on their charts.  Natalee's chart is really helping us have more kindness in our home!

Peacebuilder of the Month...Mackenzie Hardy!

     At Inyokern Elementary School, student of the month is called 'peacebuilder of the month.'  It's part of the peacebuilder program that our school has adopted to combat bullying.  Each teacher gets to select a couple of students each month and this month Mackenzie was chosen.  She received a certificate and a peacebuilder pencil.  The teacher writes a very nice paragraph on the back of the certificate explaining why you were chosen and the principal reads it out loud to the whole school.  This is a picture of Mackenzie while the principal (Mrs. Cornell) reads her paragraph.  (The girls have received peacebuilder awards before but I never could take good assembly pictures until I got a camera with totally awesome zoom!)

     Mackenzie's teacher said:  "Mackenzie Hardy is a quiet leader in our classroom.  She sets a good example for others by following rules.  Mackenzie builds peace in our classroom each day."

     Yay Mackenzie!

Nathan-4 months old

Nathan turned 4 months old on October 27, 2010.  Here are some pictures taken November 2, 2010:

 These next pictures were taken Sunday, November 7, 2010.  He looks so cute in his little Sunday outfits!

 Here are some pictures taken Saturday, November 13, 2010.  Kelsey loves her baby brother.

 Later that evening, Nathan went from this.....

..... to this!!

 He is a big boy that rolls over now.  Actually we caught him on his belly a few days before this, but this is the first time that we watched him roll over.

I think he's very proud of his new accomplishment. :)

Catching Up

     I have taken my longest break from blogging.  I think the Fall Festival and the Trunk or Treat just pooped me out and I needed a rest.  But then I kept resting until I got through the primary program.  So it's time to do a little (or a lot!) catching up.
     We had the primary program last Sunday (Nov. 14) and it was wonderful!  All the kids did such a wonderful job and everyone said they sang so well.  I was sitting on the stand with the kids so it was hard to hear if the singing was loud enough to reach the back of the chapel.  But apparently it was great! :)  We have so many kids in primary so we decided to make some of the parts singing parts.  Especially since one of the songs was "Follow the Prophet."  It has a lot of verses and can seem like it goes on for a long time.  I noticed some of the primaries were just picking a few verses to sing for their programs.  We decided to sing them all but each verse would be a solo by a different child.  I was worried at first about finding kids to sing since I didn't know if they would be brave enough.  But they were!  They sang so loud and clear and it was adorable!  Mackenzie sang the first verse and of course I loved hearing her sing most of all.  But they were all great!
     Today I had parent teacher conferences and got the girls' report cards.  Natalee is the only one who gets letter grades (that starts in 4th grade) and she got straight A's!  Haylee and Mackenzie both got mostly 3's (meeting grade level standards).  I was very proud of all of them.  Natalee is very excited to get paid for each A.  We haven't decided for sure on the amount.  She is suggesting any amount that will earn her $50.  We told her 'no.'
     The other thing that we're very excited about right now is some new ideas we have for taking care of ourselves if horrible inflation hits.  Hopefully it won't be as bad as some experts are predicting-the Fed "brilliantly" decided to print 600 billion dollars to pump into the economy.  But just in case, we've decided to up our food storage and to do a better job on garden this year.  For our garden, we ordered some special seeds that are non-hybrid and not genetically modified.  They're called heirloom seeds because you can take the seeds from the plants that you grow to plant for the next year and continue planting year after year with each generation of seeds.  I looked at lots of different websites but my favorite that we ended up ordering from was http://www.stclareseeds.com/.  A lot of the places I looked didn't let you choose the plants you wanted to grow.  You just paid for a group of seeds and they told you what was in that group.  This website let us select exactly what we are interested in growing.  We just ordered them Friday night and they shipped first thing Saturday morning.  So we got them today-a Tuesday.  I am really excited about our garden next year because we have such a great variety.  A fun thing that we are going to plant is strawberry popcorn.  It's actually not strawberry-flavored.  But it's a red kernal that pops into white popcorn.  We think the kids will get a kick out of that.  Other than that we got some regular corn, cantaloupe, honeydew, pumpkins, different kinds of squash, tomatoes, and peas, and lots of other things.  Eggplant, cucumber, spinach, onions-30 different types so I guess I won't mention all of them.
    They sent us 3 free seed packets because they were from last year's plants, but I'm sure they'll still be fine for next year's garden.  The girls are very excited because one packet was a watermelon and it's very unique.  It's called Moon and Stars Watermelon.  It's a dark green rind with a big yellow spot and little yellow spots all over it.  They also sent us another kind of popcorn and squash that I'd never heard of before.  I'm sure we'll have more updates on our garden when we start planting next year.  It's going to be fun!
     I have a lot more catching up to do but I'll have to find time later...

Halloween Weekend

     This year Halloween is on Sunday so we celebrated Halloween a little bit early.  Festivities started on Friday Oct. 29.  The kids wore their costumes to school and that morning they had a costume parade.  In the afternoon they had their class parties.  That night we decided to have a movie night.  We decided since it was the Friday before Halloween, a fun movie to watch would be Freaky Friday.  Katie and Joey Cannon came over to watch it with us (Grace had a soccer game).  The kids loved the movie and I spent the time baking cupcakes and cakes for the Fall Festival and the Trunk or Treat.
     This morning is when the real craziness began!  I went over to the school to set up early for the Fall Festival.  The Fall Festival is what our school calls it's Halloween carnival.  It was crazy!  It started at 11a.m. and ended at 2p.m.  Daren ended up running a booth the whole time because the girl who was going to run it got started to feel really sick right after she got it set up.  There were lots of games, a cake walk, a costume contest, a haunted house, and the firefaighters came and brought their smoke house and a fire truck for the kids to explore.  It was so much work and we were so worn out, but the kids had a great time.  Daren took them home and I stayed to help clean up.
     When I got home, it was already close to time to leave for the Trunk or Treat.  We got together the stuff we needed for the cupcake walk and a couple of other last minute games.  My parents helped by running the extra games-a golf game and a donut game we put together using leftover Krispy Kreme donuts from the school.  I ran the cupcake walk and Daren took Kelsey around to trick or treat at the cars.  A very tiring day, but lots of fun for the kids.

 Haylee and Natalee were at recess when I showed up so I got to take a few pictures of them before the costume parade started.

 Natalee and her two best friends, Ryan and Katie

My friend Julie Ann Pennix-such a good costume I had to take a picture.

Kelsey wore her bumblebee costume (from when she was a baby!) to watch the parade.

Mackenzie in the parade!

Natalee and Katie

Mackenzie in the fire truck at the Fall Festival

 Haylee at the costume contest

Kelsey wore her kitty costume that she just inherited from Audrey for the Fall Festival and the Trunk or Treat.

 Haylee playing the golf game-Dad running the golf game

Haylee just looks so pretty in this picture.

 Nathan wore a little lamb costume to the Fall Festival but I never took a picture of him in it.  Then he had a diaper blow out so we had a costume change for the Trunk or Treat and he came as a cute little duck.