HighMark Charter School

Jessika, Lisa, Royce and Dallin all go to the same school. Isn't that cool? I really like it. It's a brand new school and our kids started there the first year it opened. This is our 3rd year there. Jessika is upstairs in the Jr High this year and the other 3 are downstairs in the Elementary School. 

We visited the school on Tuesday for Dallin's President's Day report. He is in first grade and it was their very first report. The grade had a walk through where parents and the students from other grades could walk through and see their posters and ask them questions about their president. Dallin was assigned to report on Ronald Reagan. We had fun doing his poster. 

While at the school I saw Royce's picture up in the commons room for being on of the Students of the Month. That was a fun surprise! He had previously mentioned calmly that he was Student of the Month in his class but I didn't know it was such a school wide honor. 

Jessika's class was meeting in the library and they were split up in groups with a little free time so the teacher said I could send Ryan and Lillian in to briefly say Hi to her, it was really cute. I think Jess liked it, I hope it didn't embarrass her too much. She had me come in her room last night to talk about life. "Mom, can we talk about Life" she asked me while I was washing my face. Luckily, I had the energy at the end of this day and said yes. I will write the details of what we talked about in my private journal instead of here.  I love her. I love all our kids so much and an grateful for them. 

Valentine's Day 2015

This year for Valentine's day Erik took me out to Texas Roadhouse for a yummy steak and shrimp lunch, then we ran in to Tinseltown in Layton to switch our movie ticket time because Lisa had a Valentine's party to go to at 1 (Olivia's) and Dallin had a Birthday party to go to at 2 (Bryson Hone's). True love to switch our date around for our kids :) We got them home after their parties and went to our movie. It was called Jupiter Ascending, it was a Sci-fi love story. Ha! So romantic. The movie turned out to be pretty ok though. It was nice spending some time together. 

Here is a picture below of my pretty Valentine flowers from Erik. I sent him to the store for some milk and he came back with these, too! So fun! Below that is a picture of our cute mantle for Valentine's Day. It's a big sappy picture of Erik and I. The picture is usually hidden more privately up on our bedroom wall but I bring it down to the TV room for two weeks or so during Valentines to be a little sappy and to celebrate us! I thought I'd take a picture of how it looked today before I take it down and get ready to redecorate for Easter. 

Cub Scouts: Royce's Blue and Gold Banquet

This month's Family Home Evening lessons are on Journals. I am so behind in my journaling but I'm trying to block out the temptation to try to catch up (because then I would get overwhelmed and not start at all) So I'm starting where I am and hope to be better from here on out. 

Yesterday was Royce's Blue and Gold Banquet for cub scouts. They were supposed to bring a creative cake. So we went to Pinterest for some ideas and found this cake. It was funny because when we got to the cake table there for about 10 cakes there and 3 of them were versions of these campfire cakes :) I guess I'm not the only one who goes to Pinterest for ideas. We had a good time and were happy that our kids stayed in their seats. Going to these things where there is a sit down dinner with 6 kids age 12 and and under is sometimes a bit much for Erik and me. But last night the kids were awesome and stayed in their seats. The only thing that went wrong was a spilled cup of water, We can take that. We were proud of them. Royce didn't pass off anything to qualify for any awards last night, we have been scout slackers. They moved it to Friday recently and we usually have "Friends over Friday" so we need to adjust that to a different day so Royce can get to scouts instead of having friends over.

We love this boy!

Lillie sat pulling on me and ended up crying while I wrote up this post. Why is journaling such a challenge? I'll have to figure something out so it's easier. I will prevail!! :)

Family Photos

I really wanted to get a Christmas card out this year since I missed the last 2 years. So I was happy to get our family photos taken today!! I'm excited to see how they turned out. We should know in a couple of weeks. We did a "Mini-Sesson" through JaNeal Martinez Photography (recommended to us by a ward member and friend Tatha Enz) and boy was it painless!! :) We were in and out in 15 minutes, which kept the kids and Dad in this family very happy. Ahhhh, feels good to have it done.

Night Night,
Shelese

Pregnancy and Volleyball

Photo of us in the garage on Dallin's first day of Kindergarten yesterday. Too bad Dallin's blurry.

Well, Summer time is over and we are back in school. So much for my goal of documenting our fun Summer.
I have 6.5 weeks left of pregnancy. I am slowing down a little bit but still doing yoga every morning for 15 min or so. We are pretty sure this will be my last pregnancy. We've prayed a lot about it and we feel like we will finally have all of our kids here with us. So since it's my last pregnancy I'm trying to enjoy the magic of it as much as possible. I have had an epidural with all 5 of my deliveries. When I haven't been pregnant I would often think, "I should have one child naturally with no drugs, just to experience it and to say that I did it". But here I am 6.5 weeks left and the Braxton hicks contractions are kicking in and they KILL, I'm barely able to handle those. If they stick around too long I get scared of the pain and scared of delivery. So yeah, I really hope I can make it to the date that I can be induced and get an epidural in order to not feel one second of the delivery. That's my new goal. This baby girl is due October 30th, so I can be induced on October 23rd. October 23rd, is RJ's birthday so I debated that date but I think it will be fun for them to share a birthday. RJ even says "The baby is coming on my birthday" and loves it right now so that's good. When they are older if they hate it we can celebrate on different dates if they want. Erik was a twin and shared a birthday and he loved it of course, so there's hope :).

Today Jessika (11 years old, 6th grade) found out that she didn't make the volleyball team. That was a bummer. We are proud that she even had the guts to tryout. The team is of 6-9th graders so of course the 9th graders have the advantage. She fasted two mornings in a row to make the team. So I hope she doesn't lose her testimony of fasting. She didn't seem bitter at all. She did say that when she saw the list posted at the school, she scanned it looking for her number. When she saw that her number was not on there she said her stomach did this big growl at her. She thought it was saying "Why in the world am I starving then?" ha ha. I of course took this opportunity to testify and make it spiritual by saying something a long the lines of "No, Satan wants you to think fasting was a waste of time. But it's never a waste of time to fast for something you really want. That way you know that you did all you could to make it come true. So right now YOU have the confidence knowing you did all you could. You fasted, we all prayed, Dad took off work to come help out at tryouts so we all know that we did all that we could. And Heavenly Father always tries to gives us what we want, unless he knows that what He has in store for us is better than what we think we want. So I'm excited to see what you end up doing this year, because it will be even better than being on the volleyball team". We were loading the dishwasher together while this conversation was going on, so I looked over at her after my mini "speech". She was looking down working and said "Cool, yeah maybe. Or maybe I just need to take volleyball lessons and practice harder. I didn't even practice all summer".

I got a big inner smile and thought to myself, "Oh, yes that too".

In the huddle after tryouts.

Pregnant at Age 39

Ryan was born at the end of October and this baby will born the end of October so it was fun to compare belly size this morning. 

Me Before Ryan J at 35

(Erik below at 36 looking the same age as now, no fair :)

Me Now at 39

I feel 2 times bigger than I was with Ryan, so these pictures were fun to find to see that I'm not so far off. I do remember when I was pregnant with my first baby that I didn't tell my boss that I was pregnant until I was 7 months pregnant (like I am now) so I wasn't showing at all. CRAZY!!

Testing:
I think I have finally figured out how to blog from my phone... We will see if this works.