Getting my Isak to eat his vegetables is difficult. I will admit, I am not a super strict mom when it comes to this. He is rather picky, it is probably my fault and most of the time, I don't want to battle. I am trying to improve, get him to eat something green once in a while, but in the meantime, I have to improvise. I put spinach in his smoothies in the morning and whatever other pureed vegetables I want to dig out along with whey protein powder. I cover it with some orange juice and yogurt, and he can't even tell. I usually add frozen blueberries or strawberries or whatever else I have laying around in my freezer. I think I might start adding some flaxseed as well. He loves them and asks for his "shake" every morning. Lucy loves them as well, although, she is much more adventurous when it comes to eating compared to her brother. Anyway, I am always feeling like I am a horrible mother because I let Isak eat a whole lot of chicken nuggets and honey and PB sandwhiches. Knowing that perhaps I do one thing right in his diet a day makes me feel a whole lot better.

What a happy kid! He doesn't even care that his "shake" is a lovely green color today. How do you get your kids to eat whats good for them?

Lately we have been very busy with some home renovation projects. We are tiling our entryway/hallway and bathroom. So Kevin and I have been scraping old linoleum and cutting carpet out in our spare time. This week we (really Kevin and his dad) are laying the tile. Isak has been "helping" the demolition process, donning his safety goggles and snow gloves. I will post some pictures of the lovely before and after once it is all done. I feel like our projects in this house are neverending, there is always something to be painted or replaced or torn out. Like that oh so lovely green oven that is going to be in the garbage very, very soon. I think I might set it on fire and dance around it in my backyard.

Last week the kids and I spent a lot of time indoors going stir crazy. We did a lot of playdough, lots of bed jumping, dancing, painting and playing random games that Isak would request me to make up at a moments notice. I also spent quite a few hours being a bad guy, robot talks with green eyes, the eliminate guy, and purple spiderman. Yes, I was quite happy to get out to work last Friday afternoon for some adult conversation. I found a super sweet Rescue Ranger Castle for Isak at Goodwill for $3, I forgot a picture but he LOVES it. I got that and a huge bag of action figures for $4 and a Spiderman sleeping bag for $4. I don't know why I ever buy any of my kids toys new, they never know the difference! Lucy really loves to play with playdough and eat it as well. She also loves to paint and will bring me the paint bottles, yelling, "painnt! painnnt!". Tonight she was waving and yelling "bye bye!" to herself in the mirror and then running away, coming back, and doing it again. Such a crazy nut.

My brother Aaron got us this super sweet trampoline for Christmas and the snow finally all melted so we set it up on Monday. We still need to put up the safety net around it but Isak was so excited. He's been asking everyday for weeks if it was warm enough yet to have it up. They both love jumping on it and get really upset when I make them come in the house.

Lucy loves to sing. Its not always intelligible, but some of her recent favorites are the Cat in Hat Theme song from PBS and if your happy and you know it song from primary. On Sunday I was singing the latter with her and she grabbed some boxes of pudding and was clapping to the beat. She always makes sure to cheer for herself at the end :).

It has been pretty cold around here lately and the snow hasn't gone anywhere. I try to take my kids outside once a day unless its super duper single digits cold. I got lucky and have had so much family around lately, I have gotten out of this duty but I realized yesterday we were all going stir crazy since it had been a few days. Lucy was begging to go outside as well although I am not sure she knew what she was asking for, judging her reaction to the cold.

We were outside for probably 2 minutes when she started complaining "Im cold, I'm cold". and wanted to be held. Yes, she is not too tough that one. So I bundled her up in the stroller and Isak and I walked to Kathy's house. It was just what we needed to get out of the house and none of my kids got frostbite or any sicker than they have already been. We got a lot of weird looks along our way, Im guessing you don't see too many strollers out in snow. Although, it wasn't too bad and we really enjoyed our walk.

Those are trees behind my hair in that picture, I swear I think I remember combing my hair that morning.
Kevin and I joined the gym here in Othello this week so I no longer have to run outside in super cold temps unless I really want too. We also bought our tickets to New Zealand for this spring for our trip we have been planning forever. I am so so excited and now we are looking for motels to stay and planning our activities/sights while we are there. Kevin still knows some people there from his mission and it will be fun to meet some of them too.

Isak and "Big Bear" that him and Lucy got for Christmas. Its been added to his stuffed animal fleet that he sleeps with everynight. This is how we found Isak the other night in his bed. Loved the cross legs.
Lucy will be 2 next month and despite all her cuteness, she is no longer a baby, so I have been trying to be stricter with her and more dispilinary. Which really means, telling her no and making her give things back to Isak when she takes them. The video below will demonstrate how well this is going.....

Christmas 2010 was a success, if I do say so myself. I once again attempted to save money by buying toys in advance, only to buy only more with "such great sales!" and really didnt' save that much. So, I now have birthday presents for this year. We spent christmas eve with my parents and had a wonderful, quiet evening watching the nativity and reading the Grinch and the Christmas Story out of Luke. The kids opened their christmas pajamas and I of course could not get them to pose together so separately, here are there pajamas. Isak was old enough this year to understand about Santa and being naughty or nice and still continues to threaten to call Santa once in a while and tell him I am being a mean mommy. Anyway, we put cookies out for Santa and we had to get our kids up early christmas morning because we had to be over to Kevin's parents house in time for his whole family to open gifts. It was a little nuts. The kids were pretty groggy when we woke them up and it was rather anti-climatic. We had to remind them to keep opening presents. They were pretty excited though, Isak got his Iron-Man that walks in the snow that he's been asking for for months. We left it unwrapped and put it outside in the snow christmas morning. Kevin took him outside to get it, he was pretty excited. Lucy got a Buzz Lightyear pillow and an alphabet of wooden, painted letters and some other things. We had presents left that weren't unwrapped yet so I just stuck them in the closet for their birthdays. I didn't even get them that much stuff but I think next year I'll stick to 2-3 presents a piece. Isak was a little overwhelmed by it all.

At kevin's parents house, we had 5 families and 7 grandkids opening presents at random. Isak got this awesome Ironman shooter gun. Sense a theme? Yea, it keeps going.

Kevin bought me a beautiful necklace and earrings and I suprised him with a Kinnect for our Xbox, which happens to be the most fun thing ever. Anyone want to come over and play Dance Central with me? Its AWESOME!!Lucy got a stuffed Buzz and a Woody doll with some books and other toys. Kevin and Isak also got matching IronMan pajamas but really, how awesome is that? My sister made my kids these great dress-up costumes. Isak and Lucy got matching dinosaur ones and Isak also got a leopard one. He's been wearing them quite a bit sense Christmas. Below he is trying to figure out how to shoot webs with his fingers while wearing the dinosaur costume.
We went to Kevin's Grandma Grimmett's for Christmas dinner and Lucy provided some entertainment for everyone by jumping on the table and clapping for herself. She cheers for herself often.

We went to my parents house Christmas night to open gifts and Isak got an Ironman Costume. Now he can be IronMan that Walks in the Snow. He was super excited. Lucy got a doll that she can take in the bathtub. We all had a great Christmas and it was nice to be able to share it with family.

December Happenings

Isak made gingerbread houses at his preschool a few weeks ago at their little christmas party. He was pretty excited and I think it turned out pretty awesome. Definitely looks like an Isak creation. I let him pick off a little bit of it for the next week till the candy was gone. Santa also showed up at Isak's little party. This was like the 3rd time Isak had seen Santa. He was getting a little confused as to why Santa kept popping up at random places. This might also be why he's looking a little bored in this picture. Santa gave Isak a present that was a book that I had wrapped for him previously. It was a cute night before christmas book with flaps and cute illustrations. Would've been a pretty awesome book had his little friend not got a Spiderman book that was way cooler. I was reading Isak's his when he ran over to check out Spiderman. Yea, I felt pretty lame. Isak didn't complain though, just was obviously way more interested in the other book.

Kevin's brother Jason and their family came up a week before Christmas to visit. We went to the Lowe's kid build project one morning and each of the kids got to build a train. It was a nice little wood train that they spent the next hour running all over the store.

Afterwards they had cookies and Juice from, you guessed it, Santa. Isak was more confused than ever and his little cousin Claire asked where he parked all his reindeer.
Since Jason and Vicki were visiting, we decided to ditch our kids for a night and run up to Levenworth. I have never been there at Christmas when all the lights are out and it was super pretty. Kevin's cousin Todd and his wife came too and we had a great time. We did some shopping, ate at this nice Italian restaurant that was probably a little too trendy for us (we all split entree's), and took an embarassing wild west photo at one of those little "dress up photo shops". The shop was actually ran by some members of the church and the lady who was helping us was pretty funny. She brought us boas to the dressing room so we would feel more "covered". Yea, it was slightly awkward. I'll spare you the picture.
We stayed at a very cute little inn there that had a fireplace and no kids! It was great!

Vicki and I in the snow the day we left. Next up, Christmas!!

Playing Catch-Up

I realized I still haven't blogged about Thanksgiving. Aaron and Mark were able to come up and Isak LOVED having two of his uncles here to give him lots of attention. We took him bowling and he had lots of fun nudging the ball down the lane at 2mph. He got bored after about 5 turns and went to play in the arcade. Lucy spent the whole time trying to run after the ball in the lane so she was quickly banned from that area.

We had so much snow! We usually don't get that much in this area but we had a TON at Thanksgiving! There were drifts all over our backyard. Most of it melted this wekkend but we got some more snow last night. Isak is loving it so hopefully we at least have a little through the winter. Isak and I built a snow fort out in the front yard one night and he was insistent on drinking hot chocolate in his snow fort.

Last Saturday Kevin and I went to Apple Cup with my parents. I graduated from WSU back when their football program was a bit more stellar but I will always be a true Coug at heart. It was actually a really good game, WSU played better than I thought and it was close up till the end. It was fun to visit the campus and see the changes that have happened since I was there. Oh and it was freezing cold! I wore running tights under my jeans in addition to hand and feet warmers.

I still am sad we didn't make a Boise State game this year. We will have to go to 2 next year to make up for it.
We finally got our christmas lights up, although this picture doesn't display that. I was helping kevin just finish them in the front when I must have tugged on them wrong or something and they ALL CAME DOWN. Like dominoes. Kevin turned around just in time to see them one by one, all fall off the roof. We just had to laugh, I didn't even know that was possible. Luckily they went back up pretty quick.
Lucy has been loving these plastic animals lately, particularly the sheep, horse, and elephant. She takes them to bed with her and makes them talk to each other. Sometimes we find her in the morning with them lined up at the side of her crib and buzz lightyear jumping on them. She's awesome.

Our ward christmas party was last night. We had dinner then the kids decorated sugar cookies. They did a children's theater and read the Grinch that Stole Christmas. Isak was particularly excited for this part as he just loves stories. I didn't realize just how excited or I might have had him sit back with me. See, all the kids were sitting in the front where the adults were passing the microphone and reading the story. Isak was hyped up on sugar cookies and quite excited for story time. He started repeating the story back to them, quite loudly, and would pick out phrases he liked. Such as "AND ROAST BEAST!! HAHAHA!" "HE CAME DOWN THE CHIMNEY!". He wasn't being super disruptive and he was just really excited, not trying to be naughty, so I let him listen and do his thing. It was pretty dang funny.

They during the nativity scene, Isak yelled at me right before they started to sing, "OH NO MOM! MY COSTUME, HURRY FIX IT!". So then I had to run up there and fix it to which he yells, '"NO tighten it, mom!". Anyway, people laughed so apparently no one was too annoyed. I had several people come up to me today and yesterday and say they enjoyed Isak's "performance" last night. One girl even asked me if he was like that at home. When I said, Oh yes, She said, "wow, you must be really busy". Yea, I just assumed everyone's kids were this nuts but apparently Isak is especially crazy. Just wait till he's in sunbeams, I'm doubting it will be this cute in the middle of sharing time!

"Cheese!". Lucy just found kids to run around with and screamed a lot. She's starting to be very verbal which is great but its kind of a pain too. She was yelling "I want to go ooome!" over and over towards the end. Yea.

Then yesterday Kevin and I also had the chance to go the temple together, one of my very bestest friends was going though for the first time and I got to go. It was super awesome and a great experience. I am so excited for her and know she will be an awesome missionary!

"Isak-isms"

Some weird things Isak has told me lately:

"Mom, I love you more than bad guys, electricity and fire."

"Mom, I want a real knife for christmas. Then, I can just cut through the wall and get to the
electricity and the plasma!".

"I'm going to tell you a story about my mission. There was a huge fireball that came in the
meetinghouse and just blew it all up. Then bumblebee came and brought a sea otter. I know a lot about sea otters mom. Sea otters are usually mean!"

He keeps telling me he wants an Ironman that walks in the snow for christmas and also told Santa this. Funny how I have gotten him everything but the very thing he has asked for. Although, I am not sure the Ironman toy I am thinking of could actually walk in the snow.

I really don't know where he gets some of this stuff.