A Little Bean

I handed this picture to Ty yesterday...

He asked, "What is this? A little Bean?"

My Response, "No that's the baby in my tummy remember? Here are it's arms right by it's mouth and here are it's legs, it still has a little tail but that will be gone in another few weeks as it grows bigger."

Eye's darting back and forth patiently waiting for me to finish my novel about the Bean he says, "Well, is it a Boy Bean or a Girl Bean?"

I said, "Not sure what kind of Bean it is, too soon to tell."

Ty, "Well I want it to be a Boy Bean Mom, it better be a Boy Bean."

For his sake and mine, I really hope it's a Boy Bean too. A girl bean would be great too, but a Boy Bean is ideal I think. Poor kid will have a meltdown with another Girl Bean. 

Medford Visit + Science Works

We went to Medford for the long Presidents Day weekend. 

We did a lot of hanging out, we went to cousin Tanners Basketball game, which was really fun to get a good glance at where Ty will be a in a few years with sports. I thought it was a tough adjustment to go from watching Collegiate sports all the time. But it is exciting to see kids learn new things and Tanner was pretty good! 

After the game we headed out to Ashland for Science Works. We stopped off for Pizza first, that was delicious. 

As we were paying they said it was only 15 (or something) dollars more for a family pass for a year. The family pass includes the Portland Children's Museum and OMSI so we went ahead and bought the pass. Hopefully we'll go to those places a few times more this year :) 

Ty, Maylee and Emma had a GREAT time playing! We were there for quite some time! 

 Ty disappeared, and the place was packed (we found out why later) but I found him eventually, pulling a bubble around himself.

 Bubble time

 While we were doing bubbles Emma was playing in the 5 and under area.

 Ty

 Matt was helping Emma spin, she didn't like it much. My mom did the spinner too and was sick the rest of the time.

 There was a screaming booth with a decibel reader that others could see on the outside. All of us tried it and of course, I got the highest at 116 decibels and even had the record for the day thus far. I guess I can scream pretty loud :)

 The reason it was so packed there was because it was the first day of their new Dinosaur exhibit. Ty thought it was AWESOME he was growling and roaring back at the Dino's that moved and roared on their own. The other kids around would get a little freaked when Ty in his loudest voice roared back.

 Emma really wasn't a fan.

 Mom and Maylee were building a tower for quite some time.

 Emma was still running around the 5 and under place near the end.

 Ty put little balls in tubes pictured behind him and they would all go to different places.

It was a fun time hopefully we can go back again next time we go down. We hope to visit OMSI soon too, it would be our first time.

While we were down there we also saw the Lego Movie. I thought it was pretty funny, but it was difficult to concentrate on the show with Emma the little tornado wreaking havoc. Okay she wasn't that bad, but Matt and I took turns with her in the hallway. Matt eventually just went out and forced her to sleep him his arms. He can do that, it doesn't work with me, and he came in to watch the rest of the movie. We're excited to see it again at home. As we were leaving Ty Emma and Matt were hiding in The Muppets movie display and caught Maylee off guard!

We also saw Monuments Men while down there too. Which I thought was good. I made me pretty irritated that Hitler burned so many amazing pieces of Art though.

We also got to have dinner with Lucy and Skylar too. Always good to see friends too.

Valentines!

I had a friend of mine, Rachelle come over and take a few pictures of the kids in their Valentines outfits for their actual Valentines that we mailed out to cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. 

Here are the results of the photo shoot. 

 It makes me happy that my kids love each other and play so well with one another.

I bought some red lipstick to put on the girls, to see if they would kiss Ty's cheeks, but they weren't in to it, they all just wanted to kiss my cheek.

 Matt was home for lunch so Rachelle shoved him in for a quick family picture.

It was a fun little photo shoot, the kids were great and Rachelle was the sweetest for taking time to come over and take some pictures for us with her awesome camera.  Hope you all had a Happy Valentine's Day! 

The Storm

Three weeks ago (yeah I am still that behind...), there was an ENORMOUS snowstorm! Started Thursday Night and didn't stop until late Saturday night... then the freezing rain hit. Which is the weirdest thing, to see one side of our pilot just frozen solid with textured ice. It took only 30 minutes while we were in Costco. By the way, I'll say too, I LOVE out Pilot. I drive it in and just love it. It had NO problems in the snow and Matt was even a little bummed that he couldn't purposely slide all over the place to scare the jeepers out of me on purpose. Church was cancelled even because there aren't any snow plows here, in fact we don't even have a snow shovel anymore. We left it in Utah!

On to the Photos...

 Friday morning we had a play date with the Thomas's who live the next street over. The kids and I bundled up to play in the fresh powdery snow.

 We brought our beach toys... we didn't have a sled. Matt called all the stores, thinking he would go get one on his lunch break and every store was sold out.

 Adalyn, (Ty's age) thought it was a good idea so she got out their bag of beach toys too. The kids build snow castles.

 Maylee showed great maturity and played for a long time in the snow.

 Ty is an outdoor boy. He LOVED the snow.

 Our kids were all playing together, but here is a shot of Angela with her kids Talmage, Adalyn and Joseph.

 Gordon came home early for a group shot and to catch a flight to Orlando. Lucky duck got out of all the snow! Poor Angela had 5 kids (2 of hers not pictured Beverly the babe and Audrey who was at Gymnastics) and cabin fever since school was cancelled for nearly 3 days.

 Ty was so proud of his snow castle!

Emma HATES the snow. She would fall over and say, HEP PEAS! HEP PEAS! (Help Please!) then just want me to hold her the whole time. So we went inside and played while Ty was the last one in.

Saturday morning Matt was excited to go out and play with the kids. He started building a snow fort with a bucket...

 Maylee went outside and helped Ty shovel.

 Ty in his natural habitat. He got to where he would basically dress himself to head out. (It's so obnoxious to bundle all the kids up for them to go play outside for 10 minutes and come back in...ugh) They played for hours instead of minutes which I appreciated.

 Even Em wanted to go back out, so I just put her in the onesie snow suit, which is a titch too small, because it was so much easier to put her in that then her actual snow suit, which will fit much better next season.

 She sat and watched Matt work for a surprising 30 minutes before she was ready to come back in side.

 Ty enjoyed using his dump truck to load up snow in the back to dump into his bucket.

 Eventually the green bucket broke, so Matt changed to using a more sturdy rectangular small cooler lunch box.

 I fed him lunch out there while he was working and Ty brought him out some Hot Cocoa as well. He worked for about 4 hours on it I think, he used the top of their sand box turtle for the top.

They played in it for about an hour.

Then they came in to take a nap and then Ty went out and knocked it down.... oh man... so much hard work. 

The snow only lasted about 3 more days until it was all melted. Hard to believe since I'd guess we got between 8-10 inches of fluffy snow. It was a fun February diversion.