Kite Festival

This past weekend, we went down to Hurricane/St. George to play. I've been wanting to go down for a while since the last time we went was for Halloween. So when I heard the kite festival was coming up, I decided that would be perfect! I picked Alex up from school 30 mins early on Friday and we headed down. The boys were amazing on the trip down! Ryan was working, so we had to leave him here. It's always hard for all of us (especially him) when he has to miss out on fun stuff like this. We got down there in record time... only 4 hours and 15 mins!! I think that's pretty good with only 1 parent and 2 kids. We went right to Beth's house in Hurricane and unloaded our stuff. My other sister Hayley, came over with her family that evening for pizza and play time. We did some crafty stuff while the guys played Mario Kart. The kids were on a huge high being around each other. We finally ended the evening and went to bed. Saturday we went out to the kite festival around 11:00 in the morning. I guess we had the worst timing. There was no wind. None. If we ran really fast, we could get a kite up in the air for a few seconds. But we had a great picnic lunch there and enjoyed??? some of the music that was performed. We went from there to Jumpin Jacks. We had so much fun there! We played for a few hours there and were exhausted! We all decided to go back to rest for a while. Around 7:30, Hayley and her family came back out and we played outside as long as we could. We had a big bouncy ball and had at least an hour of entertainment with just that ball... until it popped! :) We all came in and had some ice cream and just hung out. Honestly, that evening was my favorite. No stress, no where to be. Just having fun. We said goodbye to Hayley's family. We stayed up as long as we could manage. I slept really well that night. The next morning we just hung out and packed our stuff up. Right before we left, we went over to a home for sale in La Verkin that is an amazing deal. We were all talking about how cool it would be to have a home like that. Especially at the price. It's a 7 bedroom, 3 bathroom home on a really good sized lot with all new carpet, roof, tile, etc. We never really got to go in it, but were able to see a tour online and look around the outside. It's been priced down to $169,900! If I had any desire to live in Southern Utah, I would consider it. But the desire is just not there. After looking at the house, it was time to leave. Alex had a really tough time saying goodbye. He had a huge breakdown. Total hysterics! I don't know that I've ever seen him like that. He just really did not want to leave. He ended up crying himself to sleep and slept for 2 hours on the way home. Other than his breakdown, we had a great ride home and made it back in 4 hours, 30 mins. We were very happy to see Ryan for an hour before he had to leave for work.

So even though we didn't get our kite up in the air, I'm so glad we went down. It was a great weekend, but of course... way too short! I love my family and spending time with them. It's hard being far away from each other. I hope once we're all settled, that we'll be a little closer. Not necessarily around the block from each other, but an hour or two away wouldn't be too bad. :)

Name Blocks

I have wanted to do name blocks for each of my boys since we got the twins. But I've just never really gotten around to it. So yesterday while I was looking for chipboard at Heartland, I came across these letters. I don't know what possessed me to do it, but I bought them for all my boys and got to work. I think they came out really cute and I can't wait to find a place to put them.

Alex is my fun and laid-back kid. I thought this color and paper would fit him well.

Darek has that fire personality and is always moving, so this fit him perfectly.

And Ian, my sweet, beautiful baby boy. I love these colors for him.

I'm planning for these to go in the boys bedroom, but I still have no idea where. I'll figure it out soon.

Killer Deals!!!

Sometimes I look through my weekly ads... sometimes I don't. After getting the mail yesterday, I decided to look through the grocery store ads for the week. I love the whole idea of couponing... but I'm just not organized enough to keep track of all the different coupons and such. So the deals usually have to be pretty easy for me to take advantage of. I looked through the Smiths ad and saw that they had a 5 for $10.00 deal going on with some of their Quaker products. If you used your Fresh Values card, that deal went to 5 for $5.00. Definitely going to take advantage of that one! But then I went through Winegars and Fresh Market and saw that they had coupons for $3.00 off when you buy 5 Quaker products! Really??? Doesn't that seem a bit too good to be true? So I turned to my couponing blogs to see if others had picked up on this, and of course they had. Plus they had an additional coupon to use specifically to Quaker oatmeal. Last night I was so excited about this great deal, that I actually woke up early to make sure I was ready to go after taking Alex to school. After a few trips (and taking a few Winegars ads for the extra coupons), here is what I scored today!







Here's how it all priced out...

I had to do this in a few different transactions to make it all work, since you could only get the $5.00 fresh value discount once in a transaction.

3 transactions I did were just of the 5 products:

1 cereal 2.00
1 cereal 2.00
1 cereal 2.00
1 cereal 2.00
1 cereal 2.00

sub-total 10.00
- 5.00 fresh values
- 3.00 coupon

TOTAL 2.15 (with tax)

So had I just bought the 18 boxes of cereal and 12 boxes of oatmeal, my total would have been $12.90!!! That's .43 per item!!! But I wanted to buy a few other things. Here are the other good deals I found.

Mountain Dew 4 for $11.00 (Not the best deal, but it's the new flavors of Mtn Dew, and I just couldn't pass that up.)

Club crackers $1.88

Cheez-It crackers $2.39 a box, but on one of the boxes it had a coupon for $2.00 off when you buy 2 boxes. So it ended up being $1.39 per box.

Large box of Huggies Diapers - On sale for 18.99, but I had a coupon for 3.00 off the box. Again, not a massive savings, but anything is good!

Smith's also has some great case lot deals.
24 count case of mandarin oranges $7.99
24 count case of fruit bowls $8.34
12 count case of Hunts Meat Sauce $8.99

So altogether for my purchases today, I spent $74.34!! I'm not smart enough to figure out the percentage saved, but I think it's right around 60%. Anyway, I'm on a total high right now with my savings. I just hope my family is okay eating Life, Oatmeal and Cap'n Crunch for the next little while! :)

Another Baby....

But it's not mine. We found out about a month ago that my sister Bethany is pregnant! This is her first baby and we are so happy for her and my brother-in-law Chad! They waited a little while to tell everyone they were pregnant, so we didn't have to wait long to find out what the gender of the baby is. They have come up here the past 3 weekends. The first two were hard because we wanted to shop for the baby, but couldn't do much yet. Even though they were only 17 weeks when they came up this past weekend, they found out she was far enough along to find out the gender. They booked a session at Fetal Fotos and invited us to come with them to see the baby. We all kept it a surprise for my Mom and Dad. We all watched with amazement as this tiny little baby moved and kicked up on the tv screen. This was the first ultrasound Alex had ever been to in person and he loved every minute of it. When it came time to see the baby "parts", we were told to turn our heads.... even Beth and Chad. After the tech got the shots she needed, she put the "parts" pictures in an envelope that Beth and Chad would open while we all went out to eat. On our way to the restaurant, we took .50 bets on whether it was a boy or girl. I think we've all secretly hoped for a girl just because boys dominate our family. There are 8 boys and only 2 girl grandkids. The youngest girl is now 3 years old. But there was a definite split with the votes. Beth said boy, Chad said girl. Ryan and I both voted boy, but Alex said girl. Finally at the restaurant, Beth opened the envelope, looked at the picture and laughed. She handed it off to Chad who also laughed. He handed it to me and my Mom and it read, "I'm a boy!" There was a little shock, but we were all thrilled. Another boy will fit perfectly into our crowd. A girl would have also... but we'll just have to wait a little while longer for her. Who knows, maybe she'll come from us! :) One can hope!

We can't wait for little Gryn(n) (they aren't positive on the spelling yet) Titus Baker to join our family around mid September. I have already bought him a little shirt that says, "My Aunt Rocks." So at least we know he'll have some stylish clothing. :) Love you Beth and Chad and we are so happy for you guys!

Alex is 7!!!

I just saw that it has been 3 weeks since I've blogged. I've gotta stop this. Gotta get back in the groove of things. And it's not even that I haven't had anything to blog about. There has been plenty going on. I'm totally a loser. Well let's get to it then!

On March 25th, my "little" Alex turned 7 years old. I'm still trying to figure out where the time went, because when I add it up, the numbers just don't match. :) As usual for our kids birthdays, we had a few parties. The first one was on his birthday. That night happened to be the 1st soccer game of the season. So we headed over to the field to practice and then play our game. Our team has not been great at winning. Of all approx. 10 games last season, we only won 2 of them. Not that it really matters. They all have a great time. But I was suspecting that since we hadn't had any practices in 4 months and winter keeps you from really playing outside, that we were really going to bomb this 1st game. Well, the boys all proved me wrong. We won! It was a great start to the season and a great thing to happen on his birthday. My parents, Ryan's parents and one of our nephews were able to watch Alex play. After the game we all went back to the house. Ryan's sister and other nephew met us there. We watched Alex open his presents and then we had cake and ice cream. It was a fun, yet laid back evening.

Two of our nephews - Dylan and Marc

Grandpa and Grandma Wood

Alex with his presents

These little creatures are puffles. They are from Club Penguin and are currently Alex's favorite thing. I must admit, they are adorable!

Alex holding one of his Club Penguin's. This is the Ninja Penguin.

We didn't do too much for Alex's birthday on Friday, but we were gearing up for Saturday. Saturday morning I went and picked up Alex's puffle cupcakes (more of an explanation on what puffles are in a bit). Soon after, we headed down to Draper for his birthday party at Boondocks. I let him invite 6 friends, although 1 was a no show. So the party included Ryan, me, Alex, Darek, my Mom, my Dad, my sister Bethany, brother in law Chad, and friends Reilly, Aaron, Jaxon, Ben and Cade. I'm not sure why I didn't think the crowds wouldn't be bad... but I really wasn't expecting the madhouse of people that were there. We had our table time first. We ate pizza, the hostess tried and failed to entertain the boys with really lame magic tricks, opened more presents and ate more cake and ice cream. (And I wonder why I'm not losing any weight.) After table time, we had a total time of 3 hours to go on rides, laser tag, arcade games, etc. I thought we would get bored way before that time was up. The boys headed over to the race cars first. A few were a little nervous, but they all went on them. The line didn't look too long, but I didn't realize that the track was shared with another line as well. So 45 mins of our time was spent standing in line for the race cars. The boys were adorable on the cars and had HUGE smiles on their faces as they came off the ride. Luckily we were smart and had Ryan and Chad stand in line for us for laser tag while the boys were in line for the race cars. The boys only had to wait about 15 mins to get into laser tag. I was lucky enough to get to join them for this. Our team consisted of all 6 boys, myself and two teenagers. Yeah.... we didn't win. :) Although I was the high scorer out of both teams! Even though we didn't win, the boys had a blast. Of course they are little boys, and they had guns that they could shoot people with. What's better than that??? After laser tag, we went to the arcade. I used all my helpers to keep track of all the boys. We combined all the tickets won and split it evenly for prizes. They all loved picking out their prizes. We had just enough time to take the boys to the XD theater and watch a short 3-D movie. Again, they all loved it. I wish we had more time, but our time was up. I couldn't believe we had stayed the whole time. Two of the boys went home with a Mom that had come. We took Reilly, Aaron and Ben home. After taking them all home, we rushed back over to The Gateway to see How To Train Your Dragon. Although I was exhausted and ready for bed, the movie was really cute and kept me awake. :) After the movie we came home and took it easy the rest of the evening.

While we sang Happy Birthday to Alex, he spun as fast as he could to get 200 tickets around him. He was able to get them all!

Lame card trick

Going around the table from left - Aaron, Darek, Ryan, Jaxon, Cade, Reilly and the back of Alex.

Aaron, Alex, Ben and Darek

Reilly and Cade in the race cars

Ben

Aaron

Jaxon

Cade

Alex

Alex and Reilly

Darek

I don't know how many times throughout the weekend the comment was made, "boy is this kid spoiled!" I know we spoil both our kids to death. But honestly I never regret any of it. These are experiences they will always have.... hopefully. I adore my boys and always want to give them everything I can.

Alex had an excellent birthday. He got everything that he wanted (and more). I truly cannot believe that he is 7 years old. He is excelling in school. His math skills are amazing. He can do addition and subtraction easily and you can give him multiplication and division problems and he can usually figure them out (within reason of course). He reads between a 2nd and 3rd grade reading level. He amazes me with how quickly and easily he figures things out. Sometimes he's a little too good. :) Alex continues to be an amazing big brother. He loves being a big brother and continues to ask for more siblings. If only it were that simple! We love our big kid and love watching him grow and learn new things. Happy Birthday Alex!