Parker's Birthday Party

We had Parker's first friend birthday party on January 17th. This was a few weeks after his birthday, but with the holidays it was just easier. Poor kid, he was a little confused. He thought he was now turning 5. It was a construction party. I made a construction cone for the pinata.His grandma made the cake. It turned out pretty cute. The kids had fun.

The '!' on the end of Maseda

This little girl may appear to be an angel.... Well she is, but she keeps me on my toes. She is either standing on top of the dinning room table or sticking her blanket in her toilet. Her new found love is lipstick. She can ruin a tube of lipstick in about .05 seconds. I am grateful that she is a healthy little girl. When I was pregnant she had a cyst on her brain which could of caused problems if it didn't go away. I worried about it for the rest of my pregnancy. She is such a blessing in my life - Even when she is driving me crazy. She sleeps from 7 p.m. to 7a.m. which I count as a blessing every night when I put her to bed. I live to see her daddy melt when she says dada and runs to him when he gets home from work.
No Joys on Earth Bring Greater Pleasure Than a Little Girl to Love and Treasure

COWBOY PARKER

This is a picture that I took of Parker when we were playing in his room. It turned out great. He has a cowboy room so we had plenty of props!

Thank You Week

We had a ton of fun making Thank You Rice Crispies to give away. My kidos thought it was the neatest thing to shape Rice Crispies into letters. We delivered them and then had some for ourselves. As we ate them we talked about what we were thankful for. We made a Maseda Family Thankful Tree. It is still up. It is so cute, I can't take it down. The next two weeks are going to be recycling week. We are going to collect bottles and cans from friends and family and take it to the recycling center. What ever money that we make, we are going to donate it to a charity, Should be fun!!

A Year of Service

Our children truly do love each other. I know this from how I have seen them lovingly act towards each other. I know that kids will fight, but it seems like my children are constantly fighting. (Am I the only one??) I have pondered about what we can do about this in our family. With Tom being a Bishop, he can be gone several nights a week. However, we have one special night set aside for Family Night. Which I might add that I have been more grateful for in the past 8 months then ever before. We have decided that 2009 is going to be our year of service. I am going to try to have one service oriented thing to do each week and that our family home evening lessons will be focused around. Last Monday we started. This week is our Thank You Week. We talked about people in our lives that help us. We sat at the table and made thank you cards and colored pictures for those people who help us. We had some really cute cards given to us by our children. We also made some for different people who help us outside of our home. This coming Monday we are going to make Thank You Rice Crispies and deliver them, along with the cards.
To try to help bind us as a family and teach our children that we need to take care of each other, we started Service Pixies. I found these ideas in a book entitled "52 Weeks of Family Service". Our children love this idea. They do a 'Secret' service for someone and when they are done, they leave a Pixie Stick for them. They have had so much fun with this. However, they haven't figured out the secret part yet. They have to run to the person that they did the service for and tell them that they have a Service Pixie waiting for them. Since we have started, the fighting had been better. My hope is that they can develop a greater love for each other and help them know that it feels good to make other people happy.

"You are good. But it is not enough just to be good. You must be good for something. You must contribute to the world. The world must be a better place for your presence. And the good that is in you must spread to others." -President Gordon B. Hinckley.

A Wonderful Start to a New Year

Today we started 2009 out by going to the Sacramento Temple for our stake temple day.
It was such a wonderful experience. I hope that we can work hard to attend regularly this year. We are so blessed to have a temple close by.

New Years Eve

We have an exciting life being parents of four children. We had fun on New year's Eve. We played games and ate yummy food. Tom's parents joined us. Of course we made it up, but some of the kidos were out. They were trying so hard. Addy made it to her usual 7:30. Parker was awake until about 11:30. Taylor fell asleep about 10 minutes before the ball dropped. Bailey was able to stay awake with very, very tired eyes. We were laughing about how we were tired and about how when we were dating we could stay up to all hours of the night. Funny how things change. I like my sleep!