Hey Jude

Truly the saddest part about my lack of blogging this year is this awesome little guy has not been accurately documented.

Jude is just the best kid.  He is my sweet, giggly mush ball of awesomeness.  He makes our lives so happy.  I really wish I would have done a better job of documenting all of his awesome moments.  But hopefully instead of documenting, I was just enjoying all of  your glorious moment Jude.  Here's a few tidbits about my baby stud.

Jude is the king of cuddles.  Sometimes this guy just needs some time cuddling with mom.  He loves stories right before nap and bed.  He prefers mom reads them but Dad, Scarlet and Rhode have taken turns and he just happily sits and listens to every tale.  When you ask him how many books he wants to read, his standard answer is "5".

He is such a smiley guy.  He says hello and goodbye to everyone and everything.  "Hi doggy"  "Bye bye store"  As you can imagine, everywhere we go there are people sighing telling me how cute that just was.  It doesn't get old either.

This boy would spend every minute of his time at the park on the swing if I could talk myself into pushing him that long.  Thank goodness for Scarlet who should earn sister of the year entirely for her time spent pushing this guy.

He loves hats.  Loves them so much.  I really should own more for him... but when he gets his hands on one, he will wear it all day long.  Helmets, head bands, hard hats, baseball caps, doesn't matter.  He digs them.

Jude is a little guppy.  He loves the water.  He loves putting on his life jacket and the run diving into the nearest water source.  Luckily for this mom, he is at least aware that he needs his life jacket.  All summer he just cruised up and down the pools, following his siblings with his kicking feet and scooping arms.  He occasionally hops out and then cannon balls back in just as quickly.  Such a water guy.

Doesn't he look so big with a haircut?  This kid also potty trained at 21 months after only about a day of me half trying to teach him.  And not only did he start peeing in the potty basically of his own accord, but from day one was potty trained during naps and night too.  I have saved a fortune on Pull ups with this one.  

I also picked up one of those amber teething necklaces on Amazon really cheap one day.  It is supposed to help with teething because amber is a pain reliever... or something witch doctory like that.  I'm not a big believer that it worked any great miracles, but he loved that necklace so much. And I thought it just looked adorable on him.  He wore it 24/7 for months and months before he decided to move on.  

Jude is everyone's favorite at the moment because he is just sweetness personified.  Even his tantrums are adorably sweet.  He probably won't turn out very well as we dote on him entirely too much.  But we just can't help ourselves.  Who could?

When the boys are away...

Jon, Rhode, and Asher took of for a Father Sons campout, leaving the girls, and the honorary girl Jude, to play.  The boys went to Lake Lindsay and had a fantastic time.  They came back with stories of kayaks and camels... or something like that.  I wasn't there, no pictures were taken.  Hope you boys have good long term memories, but I can tell you you had a really good time.

As for the girls (and Jude), we took off to try the brand new Shake Shack at New York New York.

Car selfie!

We ate huge burgers and got a concrete.

  Jude might have eaten more than his fair share of the chocolately goodness.  But the fact that he scored any with Scarlet vacumming it up next to him was a win.  Pretty much I was the one that got ripped off.

And then we swung upstairs to see the Hersheys Chocolate Store.  Who doesn't want to get a pic with a giant Hershey kiss?

Jude went to bed while Scarlet and I stayed up to watch a movie.  Having only one girl sure works out sometimes.  Can't wait until next year when we get to send all three boys!

Some good old ML Time

Sometime during TD season, the kids and I road tripped up to Moses Lake.  We got to hang out with Courtney and Dean as well so double awesome bonus.  I even got to babysit Dean for a day.    I am the best babysitting aunt ever.  I bathed him, taught him how to hold his own bottle, 

 and even sent his mom fun selfies so she would know how good I was doing.

 On the way up, it snowed in Utah while we stayed in our hotel.  My kids were severely underdressed... and severely dramatic about it.

We got to stop at a beautiful park and there was a lake full of goslings.  They were the cutest.

 Well... almost the cutest thing in the park.

 Jude and Dean were great buddies.  Well as much as any kids their age are buddies.  A few great moments, a few toy stealing moments, a few face grabbing moments.  Ya know, the usual.

My kids and I took a little trip downtown to see all that Moses Lake had to offer.  It didn't take long.  But we found this fun stage and my kids performed for me a routine of their own creation titled "Ice Cream."

This was a later trip to ML when I taped the recital but a great weekend with Courtney and my mom.  Love hanging out with these guys, even when we spend the whole time running and doing.

The Day When Jude Wins

One day I was feeling ambitious so I got up early and made a cinnamon coffee cake for breakfast.  I thought I had gotten an early enough start on the morning but obviously I hadn't, because my kids joined me shortly after.  And for whatever reason, Jude woke up ravenous.  He was extremely uninterested in waiting for my delicious breakfast cake to be done.

So I distracted him for the last few minutes while the cake baked.  Once it had finally popped out of the oven, I immediately served pieces to my children, who at that point were wasting away to mere skeletons.  Shocker coming, cake straight out of the oven is crazy hot.  And this cake was especially not cooling down very quickly.

I had a brilliant idea.  Why not add ice cream on top to cool it down quickly?  Heck I was already serving cake for breakfast.  So I added a small scoop of ice cream.  Jude, happy as a clam, reached in for a large bite of cake and somehow missed the ice cream entirely.  Instead, a full mouth of very hot cake was now filling his cheeks.  As you can imagine, he was a bit miffed about the situation and refused to further injure himself with the scalding breakfast dessert.

And that, my friends, is why my son had vanilla ice cream for breakfast.

Once Upon a Mattress

I have been involved in the school musical since Scarlet was in Kindergarten.  That first year, Scarlet had an amazing audition and got one of the lead roles.  But it wasn't the role that Scarlet wanted.  She went from the boisterous energetic kindergartener that stole auditions to the shy girl that cowered in the back.  They gave her role to the understudy and Scarlet became part of the ensemble.

The next year she did a little better but was still hesitant a lot of the time.  She would get nervous when called to do things in front of the group and really didn't seem to want the limelight.  But when auditions came around for Once Upon a Mattress Jr. she gave it her whole heart.  

She even got a call back to audition for the queen.  She did so well at her audition, but, partly because of her previous nervousness, they double cast the role of queen.  But Scarlet was so excited to get to play the queen in one of the shows.  She had several lines, was in a ton of scenes and had a full solo.  

As they play got closer and closer, I was nervous that she wasn't ready.  She rarely wanted to rehearse her lines with me and I was trying not to push her.  I did most of the choreography for the play so I was there a lot after school but I wasn't really involved with her scenes.  

I did make a dress for her that I thought turned out really well.   The other queen wore it as well and Scarlet was a good bit taller than she was.  It was an interesting hem job but both girls looked adorable.

Here's her queen hair:

This is the dress she wore during the matinee show when she was in the chorus.  The double casting was perfect for her.  She loved being a lead but didn't have to miss learning all of the fun ensemble numbers.

And the dress with crown at dress rehearsal.

And then it was performance night.  I was running sound in the back and it was pretty hard to pay attention to my sound cues when all I wanted to do was watch her every move.  Don't worry, I still nailed my cues.

Scarlet was awesome.  She nailed every line.  She was sassy and dramatic.  She spoke clearly and was easily understood.  She used her staging and body language beautifully.  And her solo was spot on tune and beautifully executed.  I was the most glowing, beaming stage mom in the history of time.  As I walked through the crowd to the front of the stage, I could hear voices on all sides of me saying, "Can you believe that queen?  She was fantastic!  Did you hear she is only in second grade?  Second grade, no way!"  I could have died a happy mom right at that moment.

Rhode was a knight in the play.  He happily participated since his mom and sister spent so much time involved.  But, I would not say we have discovered any latent acting talent from this dude.  He sure is cute though!

School wrap ups

The kids finished out their school year strong.  Scarlet and Rhode got to join the kickball league.  It was one of the funnest extracurriculars we have ever done.  

Kickball is awesome because you get to learn the rules of baseball without having to suffer through the bore that is teaching kids how to hit a baseball.  

It took a few practices to learn things like tagging the base instead of lobbing the balls at the kids and kicking the ball towards third so you don't trip on the ball on your way to first, but once they got it they got it.  They were the kickball champions.  It was a blast.  

Rhode's class had a theme class contest day.  Each class had their own theme.  All of the kids in Rhode's class dressed up as 101 dalmations and their teacher dresssed up as cruella deville.  Talk about adorable.

 

And before I could blink an eye, my oldest son was graduating from kindergarten.

Rhode makes schooling and parenting seem easy.  He is such a great student and an even better kid.  He has a sweet heart and a sharp mind.  

Here's Ms. Ayala.  I would ask her all the time how Rhode was doing and she would say, "He's perfect.  Don't change a thing."

A collection of short stories

Asher is many things, but helpful is not one of them.  If I am not watching his every move, he will not finish a single assignment given to him.  And, he's a third child.  So he has gotten away with more than his fair share of undone housework.

But the one day Asher decided that he loved vacuuming.  He is about as talented as you would expect a 4 year old to be with a vacuum, but I am a believer that any vacuuming is better than no vacuuming.

Here's hoping we can build on his cleaning repertoire one day

And one day, we dog sat for our friends, the Rosenlofs.  The Rosenlofs own three English Mastiffs.  These are called dogs, but really they are small ponies.  They are such massive dudes.  We watched Sampson for a weekend while his other puppy friends stayed elsewhere.

My kids were extremely wary at first, excited about the idea of having a pet in the backyard but equally parts terrified as well.

Then we took him for a walk or two.  They warmed right up to him.  They even though it would be a good idea to have Jude take a hold of the leash for a bit.  Thank goodness Sampson is the sweetest big dog on the planet or Jude could have been dragged halfway across the park.  Instead he fondly remembers his "doggy".