His new "funny face"

I love this sequence of pictures. If you know my E girl at all, you'll know these pictures are so her. It cracks me up just looking at them! (click on it to make it bigger)

I love it! The head thrown back, then the slapping of the knee and then she gets both hands and arms into her laughing fit! I can just hear her little cackle laugh just by looking at these pictures. That is so E for you! I like that J is looking at her, he's probably wondering "why is this funny again?"

Recently J boy has started making a new "funny face" for the camera. This is it....

Pretty silly boy and cute!

So I was taking video of him doing this goofy face and E asked me if she could also take a video of J doing this face. I said she could and I showed her how to record on our camera.

In the sequence of pictures above E is watching the video she took of J boy making his funny face. Apparently she thought it was hilarious! In the pictures you can see me laughing too but I'm laughing at E who is cracking up while she listens to herself on video. Have I confused you yet?!
By the way, she made me replay that video like 50 times and this sequence of pictures was taken after the like 49th time of watching this video over and over.

Here is the video that E took of J making his silly face, and this is what she was cracking up over. It really isn't that funny of a video, but E thought it was hilarious, especially when she points out that he was picking his nose!

Some times I wonder about her

My little girl is growing up so fast and, well she's not so little any more and is getting so smart. I'm getting less nervous about putting her in K-garten in the fall. I know she will love it and I know she is so ready for it and that makes it just a little bit easier for me.
Any way, I have a story to tell about my funny girl....

Some times I wonder about her! She can be a little strange.
The other day in the car she was so talkative with C and I. She was rambling on about who knows what and then she stated this comment....

"Did you know boogers are like glue?!" She said all excitedly.
"No E, I did not know boogers are like glue, how are they like glue?"
She says "Cause when they dry up in my nose they get hard and glue gets hard when it dries! That's why my boogers are like glue!"
My response "wow, I guess you're right, boogers and glue do have something in common after all! You're so smart!"
She was so proud of her new found boogers being like glue observation.
What a funny girl! Such a strange thing to observe, but whatever.

Here is another reason I wonder about her......

She has an obsession with blood. It's weird. I already posted one story about her liking the feel of blood on teeth, yeah weird, I know. So anyway she talks about blood a lot and it kind of creeps me out a little.

On our Sunday walk yesterday we went out to a near by park and walked in the "woods" as the kids call it. We went in the evening and the mosquitoes were out and we had to make it a quick hike because they were attacking us. C and I kept saying to the kids "hurry hurry we got to get out of here, these bugs are eating us alive." After a while E said "They are mosquitoes mom and they don't really eat us, the just SUCK our BLOOD, right mommy?" Ok yeah, but I was trying to be a little less graphic about it!

At Church in Primary E colored a picture. They were discussing repentance and forgiveness. This is her picture.

It says on the bottom "We can feel peace by saying we're sorry and making things right" (you can click on the picture and it'll make it bigger)Now lets take a closer look....(click on the picture again and look at the little girls right hand and her thumb on the other hand)

If you didn't notice she colored blood on the top of the girls right hand and gave her a bloody thumb on her left hand. She immediately pointed out the blood to me and C right at church after primary was released. She said something to the affect of "Look she was cleaning up the broken glass and got cut, so I drew blood on her hand and some on her thumb."

See what I'm saying! She's a little weird when it comes to blood. I know she hates the sight of blood, it freaks her out, especially if it is her own blood. But for some reason she loves to talk about it, why? I'm not sure!

You know her Daddy is in Dental School when.....

You know E's Daddy is in Dental School when....

*When she's asked in Primary what she wants to be when she grows up, and along with princess, fairy and ballerina, she adds "a Dentist" at the end.

*When she begs to leave the dinner table so she can go floss her teeth.

*When you hear her telling her friends that she "can't have too much candy cause you will get cavities."

And my favorite...

* When she's at the dinner table and loudly announces "Hey Mommy/Daddy I'm going to bite down on this carrot with my incisors!" (She seriously used that term, which is a dental term for your front teeth)

We had a good laugh at that last night at the dinner table. It's even more funny though because I asked C if he taught that to her and he said "no, I don't think so." and then E blurts out "I learned it on 'Sid The Science Kid'!" funny girl, she didn't even learn that term from her Dental Student Daddy, she learned it off of PBS kids! Thank you Public Television!

This one was for you Mom,I thought you'd get a kick out of this story!

Playing catch-up with the blog

So I'm playing catch up with the family blog here.
I have posted several posts below this one and by several I mean lots! So scroll down if you want to see more pictures, if not, then don't! This is mostly for the family anyway (keeping you up to date Harkers!)

In case you are wondering, here is how I blog.....
First I go through and sort out the pictures I want to post up on the blog.
I edit (if needed) the photos then file them in a folder called "For the Blog"
When I have all the pictures in there that I want for a particular post or two, I then blog about them.
I then remove them from said folder.

Well in this case, my "For the Blog" folder was very very full and this is why I am catching up. So I can empty it.

Here we go....

Here's what we have been up to these days......

Me: I have been keeping on top of gardening. The RS garden is turning out wonderful!

Our lettuce came up in abundance but it doesn't last long in this heat, we have harvested most of it.

I can't wait to have fresh red tomatoes from the garden!

Our poor pathetic broccoli, so small. Oh well there's always next year.

Not only have I been doing the RS gardening but I had some wonderful help from my neighbor planting some cute flowers in the front of my house. Our management here passed out free flowers to anyone who wanted to help "beautify" our neighborhood. I was excited for this opportunity and I'm pretty sure they wanted me to participate because my front "mulched" area looked pretty pathetic because my kids dug it all up. But nooowww....

It looks a lot better!

I love these cute flowers, they are very happy flowers.

C: He's been busy with clinic, which is a good thing. See posts below about his first filling on me. He has made appointments with several patients for the next few weeks to come. This is such an exciting time for him, he gets to do what he has wanted to do this whole time and what he will do for the rest of his career, dentistry! We are all so proud of him!

The kids:They have been staying busy hanging out, playing outside, taking hikes, riding bikes, playing with friends, helping daddy, they helped me plant flowers too. E loves to wake up and help water them.I ask her everyday "Why are you so beautiful?" and her response is always "Cause you made me that way!" Good answer!
She's gorgeous, and I'm not just saying that!My silly girl, runn'n around!

My cute boy just relaxing in the grass.

Fixing bikes with daddy, a spring/summer ritual at our house.

Like I said, lots of pictures.

mmmm they smell so sweet

A while back we went strawberry picking at a local "U-Pick" farm. The kids had fun...for the first 5 minutes and then they ran around the field while we finished the job of filling our buckets with strawberris.

I thought that is why I brought the kids, to help work and pick the berries for me. Not so much. Oh well.

I then made home made strawberry freezer jam, my favorite! I love how the strawberries smell while I'm mashing them up mmm. Well, it turns out the kids love the jam too. They loved it so much we are almost out of the 4 jars I made (and kept). So I'm making more this week.



While we're on the subject of strawberries.....

The kids and I went down town with some friends to a strawberry festival. We wanted to check it out and see what it was all about.

Well not to our surprise it was about eating strawberries on short cake!

It was fun and the strawberry short cake was good! Just not $6 good, oh well it was still fun. It made us laugh though, they could have at least had strawberries from our state, but no, they had ones from California. It's okay though, they still tasted so good.And to work off the calories we got from the cake we danced while a fun jazzy-type band played some up-beat music. Well, Marty danced with E, Micah danced by himself and J stared at the band while I took pictures.

It was cute to see Micah and E dance though. Micah had the crowed ooohing and aaahhhing at his cuteness, for good reason, he was darn cute! And at the end he would turn to the crowd and smile and clapp as if he were saying "your welcome for the show", it was too funny!

I love this picture below! I know you can only see the back of E's head but she's clapping and making Micah laugh and dance and as you can see he was having fun.

A fun family weekend

A while back on the long weekend we had (Last month) Friends of ours invited us along on a short day trip out to a State park (I think it was a state park) Any way. It had this fun hike where you could walk through the creek and eventually get to a small waterfall that we played in. It was really fun and I'm glad we found a new fun place to go during the hot summer.



Daddy even found the kids a turtle swimming around in the water. We played with it for a while then released it back to it's home. E was not happy about letting it go, she wanted to keep it.

It was such a gorgeous hike. I love how green everything is here, from spring and all through the summer.

Cool cave that we played in before lunch.

I think we stopped a dozen or so times to let the kids throw rocks into the creek. J could have done that all day!

More on J boy

This boy is strange some times. But he keeps us laughing and we love him, weirdness and all.

His newest thing he says/does...
He find something, usually something random like a tomato or my face cream or a sock and he will hold on to it. When I try to take it away he'll say "But I love it mommy, I love it." and he'll rub it against his cheek all soft like.

Yes, he even "loved" a slimy wet worm he found on the sidewalk. Gross!

Loving a tomato. Strange boy!

The following pictures are just cute!

This is the face you get when you say "J show me you're happy!" Or he'll come up to me and say "mommy I'm happy, see..." then he makes this face.
He's so stink'n cute!

Rainy Days

I used to think I liked the rain.

I think I'm getting sick of it.

Mostly because you can't do a whole lot outside when it's raining. You can only "Play in the rain" so many times a week/or month, before the kids get bored of it and want it to go away.

I guess I should be grateful for it and I am. It just comes at the wrong times, or so it seems.
Especially when I'm trying to garden. I want it to come. Just not on days where I need to plant, till or weed the garden. The rest of the time, PLEASE rain! Then I don't have to water it.
The kids got rain coats and umbrellas and had fun several times playing in the rain, before the "fun" wore off.

The final result....it's good!

I really wanted to take my camera to the school and have someone take a picture of C working on me, but I forgot and I feel kind of silly bringing my camera to places like that.


So to document it, C took a picture of the final result when we got home.

Isn't it pretty!
(I'm laying upside down, it's on tooth #13, for those of you who care)

He's lucky I have such bad teeth! He's going to get a lot of practice on me :)

Here goes Nothing

C has started Clinic this week and today he gets to do his first filling on, you guessed it, ME! I'm getting more nervous than I thought, ha ha(nervous laugh) sshhh don't tell him.
No I'm sure he'll do fine. I know he's going to try extra hard not to hurt me (or my jaw) so he won't have to hear it for the rest of his life.
Wish us luck.
(saying a little prayer)

Here's to us

So we're pretty lame, I know.

Let me explain....We "celebrated" our 6th wedding anniversary this weekend (kind of).
We are not the mooshy smooshy, lovey dovey sentimental type of people.

We love each other very much we just aren't very public about it. I mean we hold hands or give a quick peck on the lips saying good bye in public but we just never have been the PDA type of couple and we like it that way.

We love recognizing our marriage anniversary every year but I guess we are in a place in our life that we can't afford to do a whole lot to celebrate it, so we do just that, recognize it as something special to us every year.

So we were kind of lame this weekend because all we really did was go to dinner to celebrate, just the two of us. Our friends were kind enough to watch our kids for us so we could spend a few hours alone with out them. Some may say it's lame, but that is just us for you. Simple and yet just what we wanted.

I guess it seemed kind of lame this year because our actual Anniversary was on Sunday, making it hard to actually go out on our anniversary. So Friday we went out on our date to celebrate our anniversary that was really on Sunday.

Sunday came and it was like "oh yeah Happy Anniversary to us." "Lets get ready for church, go to church, come home, make dinner, eat dinner, go outside before bed time, get kids ready for bed, put kids to bed.......we're tired, lets go to bed."

Like I said, we're lame :) but we like it that way!

So here's to us, and our wonderful happy six years!

And it really has been happy, all six years.

I know some of you may take this the wrong way but I will say this anyway...(this is my attempt at being sentimental in public, or at least for all to read)

I don't want to sound "braggy" or "better than anyone" because I know I am NOT better than anyone but I guess what I want to say is that what I have loved about our marriage is that we never had that "hard first year" that many say you will have. I know many people say that their first year or two of their marriage was the hardest, that they didn't know if they made the right choice by getting married. Well I am grateful to say that was not the case for us.

Now I won't lie and say we haven't argued or disagreed or been mad at each other, but I think what made our first few years great was that we worked through them together, never holding grudges and just working out the kinks and loving each other all along the way. But I can say, it was never hard to be married to my best friend. I can also say that having a child before our first year made things rough (in the parent department) but also making us more grateful for each other and the time we had together before we started our family and making us grateful for the time we had after the babies came along.

It has been easy to enjoy each other all these years because I think from the beginning we loved each other more than ourselves and isn't that what a marriage is all about?! Forgetting yourself and loving your spouse, it seems so simple and it was for us.

I love that I married my best friend. I love that it is easy for me to love him and that it is easy for him to love me, weird quirks and all!

So roll your eyes if you want. Say "yeah right" all you want. I don't really care.

But I know it's true and I know C knows it true. Looking back at our first two or three years of marriage I still smile. I have happy thoughts of living in a tiny one bedroom run down apartment on main street of Rexburg. I laugh about getting pregnant two weeks after being married. I some times smile at the thought that I gained 55 lbs. with that pregnancy and my sweet hubby still told me I was beautiful. I get butterflies of excitement still in my tummy when I see my husband's car come around the corner of our street heading home. I couldn't have asked for a better husband and father of our children. I am grateful for these wonderful six years I have had with C and I find joy in knowing I have eternity with the one Man I love.

So there you have it...this is as cheesy and sentimental as I get!

Happy day!

I love days like today!

There are days like the other day, where I am woken up by two grumpy children too early (for them to be awake). They begin the day bad and end it just the same. There was pouting at each meal, fighting with each other non stop, just plain ornery-ness all around ALL day!

But then....there are days like today. I woke up before my kids woke me up (that rarely happens) and I waited for them to wake up, hoping it would be a happy morning.

IT WAS!

My sweet girl comes down stairs and yells "Mommy!" hugs me and tells me she loves me. She then starts rambling off why she loves me. Then she tells me why she loves daddy "Know why I love Daddy?" she asked "Because he is so funny!" She then asks where he is. I tell her he is at school, as usual and she said "Oh I wish he were here with us so we could be together like a family." She is so cute. Just melting my heart this morning.

Then I hear quiet singing coming from my J boy. I go up to his room open the door and get another sweet greeting "Mommy!" and a big hug as I get him out of his crib (yes he's still in a crib). Then with out me saying it first he says "Mommy I love you!" then kisses my cheek. He has never said "I love you" to me with out me saying it first to him. It was so sweet.

We came down stairs and the two kiddos greeted each other. J yells out "EEEE! Hi sissy!" and E responds similarly with excitement to see J. I thought to myself "Yesss, it's going to be a good day."

They picked out their breakfast with out complaining or whining. They both ate their breakfast with out playing with it, throwing it or whining about it. It was awesome. Just two happy kids eating and talking and laughing together.

I love days like these. The days that start out right and hopefully end right. We shall see.

As I type this, this very moment, they are sharing toys and not fighting over them, sharing them! E handed J his sticker book when he said "hey that's mine." Then he opened it up and said "here sissy, you have my sticker, ok?!" She thanked him and now they are sharing!?

It's gonna be a good day.

It may sound like simple things that most children do every day. And I don't want to say that my children never share, or never eat with out being forced because they do do these things a lot but for some reason, they are doing these things more happily, more willingly. The all around mood is so much better today. I'm loving it.

I can handle the bad days. I just push through them, knowing they will come to an end. Knowing not every day is going to be bad like this.....
And then I wait......
for wonderful days like today.

I savor days like today, trying to enjoy every moment.

I know I am blessed from above with these good, awesome, fun days for putting up with the bad, awful, ugly days.

I love days like these! (knocking on wood so as not to jinx it, I hope it lasts all day)