Medieval Feast

For our homeschool, we use a curriculum called The Four Year Plan. Basically we rotate through different subjects every year and repeat the cycle every four years. Last year we did Ancient History, Chemistry, & English Fundamentals. We had tons of fun and many great get togethers with other families who are studying the same things. The last great party was to be a Medieval Feast, but life got in the way and the Feast was postponed from May to August, then from August to September. We were finally able to have it last Friday night. We had A BLAST!!!

We ate beef stew on trenchers (trenchers are basically bread plates, in the middle ages the people didn't have real plates, so they made flat bread and ate their stew on it with their fingers). We tried to be a little more civilized and we used plates to put our trenchers and stew on & plastic ware instead of our fingers. We made shields and swords when we learned about this last year, so the kids had sword fighting tournaments. We also did arm wrestling, danced around the Maypole and had an epic battle playing "Capture the Flag" with the swords and shields.

Here are the kids dancing around the Maypole. I was feeding Garrett, so my friend, Kelley, helped Kensi when it was her turn. (Marshyl was out of town on business, so he wasn't here with us.) It is tricky making sure you stay in line to make the ribbons line up in a beautiful pattern. And once you are wound up, it is even trickier doing it backwards to unwind!

This is probably the biggest game ever of "Ring around the Rosies". "Ring around the Rosies" is a song about the plague, or Black Death that ran through Europe in the Middle Ages.
The kids finally agreed to put their swords down long enough to play. Look at all of those shields and swords on the ground.

Here are the boys with their battle gear. Nic thought that he was a good enough swordsman that he didn't need his shield. He was right!

Here they are preparing for the battle. You can see one of the flags there in the middle. Kaiden is in the red shirt on the left, Nic is right next to him in the blue shirt. Luke is in the middle with the orange shield.

Here are the little guys planning out their strategy. Luke is in the middle in the dark blue shirt.

Kaiden, doing what he LOVES to do...sword fighting. Nic is right beside him on the right. We all had such a great time. It was well worth the wait!


BTW...if you are wondering why all of my kids are dressed alike it is because we had co-op earlier in the day at our local charter school and jeans and either a red, white, or blue polo shirt are the kids "school uniforms".

Happy Birthday Marshyl!

Make a wish!

Here is Marsh blowing out the candles on his birthday apple pie. He has been talking about the apple pie that he wanted for his birthday for weeks. This isn't exactly what he wanted but it still tasted good. Of course this is homemade...with a little help from my good friend, Marie Callender! I didn't burn it when I baked it, it got burned from the flame of ALL those candles! I usually only put a few candles on since he is getting SO old, but the girls insisted that there be exactly 31 candles on this cake.

Happy Birthday, Marsh!

Marshyl

Marshyl needed a recent picture of himself for his name badge at the convention. So we took some the other night. There are so few shots of him on our blog, I thought I would share. :) He wanted to get a "natural smile", so I was trying to tell him jokes. We only got as far as, "A man walks into a bar...actually, it wasn't really a bar, more like a club...or restaurant. And he didn't really walk in, more like moseyed in..." Okay, so I can use some serious joke telling help. Hence these pictures!

I'm a big girl now!

Kensi is obsessed with chap stick and every time I put on lip stick, she wants some too. Of course I tell her "No". I left my make up bag down where she could get it the other day and boy did she ever get it! This is what she looked like when she was done with herself. She loved the lip stick and the mascara. She even got the mascara ON her eye lashes. Now that takes talent!

Luke's Bionicles

The boys love Bionicles. Lately Luke has spent hours creating new characters. He was especially proud of this one. Good job, Luke!

You just might be a city slicker...

Today we went up Payson Canyon to a place called "the Grotto". It has a short hike that ends at a waterfall. Marshyl & the boys had been there before, but the rest of us hadn't so this was one of the activities we wanted to do together this summer. We looked forward to it all week and when the rain clouds came in we tried to ignore them. It hadn't really rained all day in town, so we thought we would be okay. As soon as we got to the Grotto and parked it started raining. We waited about 5 minutes and the rain stopped and we were on our way. It was a wonderful hike, but we didn't realize when we started out that it had been raining up the canyon all day and the trail was muddy. We still had fun...even in the mud! The leaves have started to change a little and we love the look of Autumn!

Look how cute...and muddy...they are! :)

This is the waterfall at the end of the hike. It comes down into this cave. It was really neat and the kids had a great time taking off their shoes, rolling up their pants and wading around in the cold water.

Yes, it really was THAT cold!





This is the view from on top of the cave looking down at the waterfall.













You just might be a city slicker if you take a stroller on a hike up a mountain in the mud.
This is how Garrett spent the whole hike. He loved it. We had to carry the stroller over several log bridges and through the deepest mud.

You just might be a city slicker if you take your own porta-potty on a nature hike.
Yes, that is ours. We are used to going places w/o plumbing with boys; but now that we have girls, and a recently potty trained girl, we had to take the potty with us.

This was the steepest, muddiest part of the trail. Marshyl wasn't kidding when he said it was "slicker than snot" and I totally wiped out here coming down. I know...you are all wanting THAT picture. Too bad...I had the camera with me and there was no taking pictures of my muddy backside! I had to get a picture of the slope, though and Kaiden decided to pose for me.

surgery rescheduled

We finally have a surgery date. It is set for Oct. 10th. We will have to use another neurosurgeon if we go with that date and we have to meet him still. So if we like him, Garrett will be having surgery on the 10th. If we don't like this new guy we will have to wait until the end of Oct. for the guy we know we like. The guy that operated on Kensi (Dr. Kestle). Really the neurosurgeon isn't that important to the surgery. The plastic surgeon is the main guy who does most of the work and we still have our plastic surgeon that we love (Dr. Schmelzer). The neurosurgeon comes in at the beginning of the surgery and does all of the cutting of the bone where the plastic surgeon tells him to. Then he leaves and the plastic surgeon does his job putting Garrett back together again and reshaping and correcting the structure of the skull. So we think we will be going with this new guy and having surgery on the 10th.

Since this post is about Garrett, you get to see some more cute pictures of him! I know you love it!

This picture was taken by one of the kids, likely Luke or Afton, that is why Garrett's chin is missing, but the rest of his face was so cute, I had to keep the picture!

Every time I look at this picture it literally makes me laugh out loud.



So cute and perfect!

Update on Garrett

I know that there are many of you out there who are waiting for pictures of Garrett's new head. Well...you will have to wait a little bit longer. He woke up with a fever on surgery day and they won't do surgery on a sick baby. So we are still waiting. I hope to get a hold of the Dr's tomorrow to find out when we are rescheduled. Hopefully the beginning of Oct. I will keep you posted...

Afton's 5 year stats

Afton had her 5 year check up this week. She is doing great.
She is 45.8 inches tall and 45.4 lbs.

I knew that she would have to have some immunization and had her talked into 2 shots but as they reviewed her shot record she needed 5 shots! Yikes! She wasn't behind, I guess 4 is the normal amount for this age but now they do a chicken pox booster as well. She was relatively brave and only cried a little bit. Her melodrama was in full play the whole way home, but she finally decided that she would live after I gave her a pile of candy for her pain.
Yeah...I'm a good mom!

Bathroom P.S.

Our new bathroom floor was officially "broke in" today during a potty training session with Kensi. She missed her little potty and wet all over it! (sigh....thank goodness it is water-proof!) :)

Redoing a bathroom with Murphy's Law... a.k.a... the tale of the toilet

There are a lot of things that can help you when you are doing home improvement projects...Murphy's Law is NOT one of them! Let me give you a recap...

Our upstairs bathroom was tolerable when we moved in. The walls were turquoise and purple and there was turquoise peel-and-stick tile on the floor. Not my favorite choice of colors, but I could live with it. Well, here we are 3 years later. I hate the turquoise walls. The peel-and-stick tile is no longer sticking. Several tiles were almost completely off and the floor has never been water proof. As anyone with kids can tell you...when little girls take a bath, the water does not stay in the tub. The downstairs bathroom is right below the upstairs one and has major water damage on the ceiling thanks to this non-water proof floor. Needless to say, we had to paint & replace the floor. And as any good d0-it-yourselfer can tell you...if you are going to paint, do it first and then lay new floor.

(turquoise walls...yikes)

Hmmm....what would we like our new bathroom to look like? Well, we have this great bear picture that we have had for years and loved, but just never had a place to hang. This would be perfect for the new decor in the bathroom. We would use the picture as our guide and match everything to it. We painted the wall a tan color, bought oak light switch & outlet covers & found the perfect color of green for the trim. That is when Murphy and his wonderful Law entered the picture. We could not find a shower curtain to match our lovely bear theme. Not anywhere. As we are checking the very last store in town for a matching curtain it occurs to us that maybe we should have picked the shower curtain out first and matched everything to that instead. (Duhhh...?)

(Tan walls. Toilet in the middle of the floor. Peel-and-stick tiles gone. Gross floor)

Back to square one...the bear picture and oak switch plates are out...now what? You start with the shower curtain. We found a light, airy butterfly curtain that we love. We bought the paint for the trim (a different color of green than previously bought...of course) and were ready to go until we realized that they tan walls clashed with the new curtain. Of course they had to be repainted. Now they are a beautiful shade of "rice paper" and all is good in the color department.(White walls. Toilet not even in the bathroom.)

Now onto the floor. How hard can buying linoleum and laying it be, right? We walked into Home Depot expecting to quickly pick out the piece of pre-cut linoleum that we liked the best and be on our way. (This is our "5-10 year house", so linoleum would have to do.) There was no linoleum at Home Depot that we liked and once we started researching how to lay linoleum we found that it was actually quite complicated. One Saturday down...

Maybe the Lowe's would have a better selection. Hmmm...Lowe's doesn't even have pre-cut linoleum. They have this new stuff called "no-glue" linoleum. Sounds pretty easy to us! The salesman reassured us that yes, it is quite simple to lay, just cut out the right shape and tape it down. Easy as that! Famous last words...

By now it is about 8PM Saturday night...two Saturday's down. Marshyl decides that we can't have another wasted Saturday and we have to do something about the floor. We enlisted the kids help in pulling up all of the old peel-and-stick tile. It was bad underneath. Marshyl pulled out the toilet and the work began. Or should have began. The sub-floor was quite a bit more water damaged than we thought, so it had to be repaired. Two Saturdays completely down.

The next day is Sunday and the toilet is still in the middle of the bathroom, not hooked up and not functioning. Thank goodness for 2 bathrooms! We can get this done Monday night, no problem. Monday came and we realized that we had another commitment. Tuesday morning came and Marshyl thought he could get the floor in in an hour. We lay out the linoleum and measure and cut it to size. Oh oh...time to go to work. Another day with the toilet still in the middle of the room. Tuesday night we had a work party. Weds. rolls around and we realize that the tape the salesman at Lowe's gave us to lay the floor with was the wrong tape. Nothing is open this late at night. Another day with the toilet still in the middle of the room. Actually, by this time we had moved it out into the middle of the hallway. (much better there... :S ) Thursday...we got the right tape, we had the time and Hallelujah, the floor is in place. Now, to caulk the seams so that the floor is truly waterproof. The plumbers make caulking look sooooo easy. It is NOT sooooo easy. And waterproof caulk does not wash off...lesson learned the hard way. But finally, we get it done. After midnight, but we finally have a floor! woohooo! And Friday morning the toilet finally got put back where it belonged and hooked up.

Wow, it's finally done. Was it worth it? Yes, it looks beautiful. Do I want to go and do this again any time soon? Heck NO!
(Beautiful new bathroom! Toilet back in place & functioning. Woohoooo.)

Garrett's 4 month stats

Garrett had his check up today, too. He is also doing fantastic!

He is 12 lbs. 3 oz. and 23.5 inches tall.

Kensi's 2 year check up

Kensi had her well child check up today. She is really closer to 2.5 years old, but that's life sometimes. She is doing great!

She is 35.5 inches tall and 28 lbs. 3 oz.

Afton's 5th Birthday!!!

Afton turned 5 last week! She has been telling everyone for 6 months, "tomorrow is my birthday" and people say Happy Birthday and then I have to let them know that tomorrow is NOT her birthday! Finally her birthday arrived and she would not let us forget about it for the whole week before. She told me every night, "don't let dad forget to decorate for my birthday".

Not only did dad decorate, but he made her this beautiful sign to hang up.

Here she is eating her birthday breakfast of cinnamon rolls at her new Princess table.

She got this new dress for her birthday. She looks SO grown up now! She got the crown when they celebrated her birthday at church. (Yes, she is wearing her Crocs with her dress...it's summer and it's hot...get over it!) :)

Here she is opening her presents.

Her cake this year was supposed to be a ice cream cake. But we decided that brownies would be better than cake, so it was a brownie/ice cream cake. Little did we know at the time that brownies don't make very good ice cream cakes because the brownie freezes solid as a rock LONG before the ice cream refreezes. It was a little messy, but it tasted GREAT! And anything looks better when garnished with a strawberry fan! :)