Kids

So, it’s been way too long since I posted pictures of my cute kids, so here they are. Talmage, my favorite three-year-old in the world.

Bath time. Nice face Talmage.

This picture is Talmage holding his carrot cake that he made. He totally did it all himself. First he peeled a carrot and asked me to cut it into small pieces. Then he put them in this little pan. Then he asked me to get him up on the counter so he could put some spices and things in it. So I got him up and he pointed and told me things to put in. He put in some baking powder and I suggested some sugar and cinnamon. Lemon juice, a bit of sugar (just sprinkles of all these things really), and then he told me to put it in the oven. The oven was still warm from whatever we had had for lunch- fish sticks or something, so I put it in, and I think he really thought a cake was going to come out. Anyway, after a while, he got out his luke-warm carrot sticks and went outside and had a picnic with it with Ethne. Good times.

This kid is adorable any way at all, but gosh I love a guy in a cowboy hat!

And then he and Jethro shot each other from across the couch. (And he put on his Batman suit.)

I bought myself some flowers.

Hazel colored little paper Russian dolls.

And Ethne colored a Japanese doll.

The boys helped me bake.

Hazel drew a “sketch” of me and Talmage.

And that inspired me to draw a sketch of her.

Pretty darn good for a 3-minute effort, I would say.

( Trisha Thanks for the beautiful drawing. It's hanging in my room right now.
Napoleon Dynamite Really? It took me like three hours to finish the shading on your upper lip. It's probably the best drawing I've ever done.)

Last Saturday we went to Murtensee with the Nicks and had a good time running around and playing.

This is Josephine and Orrin, who were born only a couple months apart.

Those pictures reminded me of these pictures of Talmage and Isabel a couple years ago:

And here’s Talmage and his best friend Janice. Talmage absolutley loved racing that day, and kept telling everyone to line up and run. Sometimes we raced holding hands, sometimes not.

In other news, hmmm, Jethro’s latest craze has been Star Wars, and whenever I allow it he’s on the computer reading- nay, PORING over, wookieepedia.

Brett has been very busy lately. Also, I was so proud of us that we didn’t fight at all while we were in Morocco but then we came home and were like children coming home from a vacation—ornery and bad-tempered, and fought about three nights out of one week. We got better though.

We have been trying to make some decisions about what to do with our lives in the next few years. Hard decisions are hard.

Ethne is speaking pretty good Swiss German these days- it seemed like she just came home in February and could suddenly speak. Crazy.

Brett and I went to the temple on Friday night and I heard someone speaking American English so I started chatting with her and she’s an American who lives on a base in Germany with her husband and 5 kids. It made me a bit jealous because she goes to an English ward, has a lot of American friends, gets American food at the commissary, etc. but as she said to me, her kids aren’t learning German either. And we both miss seeing family.

I had a nap today after church and dreamed that my entire family came over here to surprise visit me. It was awesome. Traveling is awesome, but just know that if you feel jealous for every neat place I get to go to, I feel jealous for every baby blessing, birthday party, Sunday dinner, wedding, reunion, etc. that you get to go hang out with your family at.

Brett had an early meeting this morning and I was very late to church. It was the start of daylight savings time here (although that’s not why I was late).

My sister Kami moved to Texas. So did my brother Ethan I think (not sure if he’s there yet). Different parts though.

Yesterday we went geocaching, but I left Brett in charge of picking the cache- and he picked the same one we’ve tried finding about three times before! Which was annoying, but this time we actually started figuring out the clues (it helps that our GPS coordinates are correct now). But then we couldn’t finish because we had to go to a baptism.

Talmage brought his bike, so this is Brett with a sweater around him so that he didn’t get going too fast as we were going downhill. Brett told me that he let him go really fast for just a second, and then Talmage told him, “Nebba do dat again!!”

Orrin is sooo close to walking I think, he’ll walk along furniture and walk along with us even if we’re only holding one of his hands, but he still does this gorilla crawl, which is pretty hilarious:

I decided to learn all the European countries, because I am absolutely terrible at pretty much all geography. So I did- the games on here are pretty fun: http://games.co.za/topography. Next I think I’ll learn Central/South America, because it’s not too hard, and then maybe something hard like Asia or the states. I’ll probably never learn Africa.

The end.