Aloha!

This year for my parents 40th anniversary, my siblings and I all pitched in and bought them a trip to Hawaii. I'm sure they were so glad when we told them we were coming and bring our 3 little kids! That's what everyone wants on their vacation right? Stacy and Taylor also came and brought little Palmer. It was pretty funny to see the looks we got just in the airport with 4 little kids. Pretty much every look we got said "are you out of your mind", or "I really hope I'm not on that plane!". A week or so before the trip I started getting serious anxiety about the whole thing with 3 little ones. But it was too late to back out now. So Tuesday (Nov. 29th) we loaded up and headed to Vegas (that was one lame part of the trip was that we flew out of Vegas). We got there and found our room at the Luxor and eventually got the kids settled down and to bed. Wednesday morning we headed to the airport for a long day of traveling. We flew from Vegas to Seattle (about a 2 hour flight), where we had a FOUR hour layover. Luckily the airport had a play place for kids so we parked it there for a few hours and let the kids play. Then came the long leg, Seattle to Honolulu (which was I think around 6 hours). To my surprise, the kids all did pretty dang good on the flight. Trent sat between Maxon and Scout, and I was across the aisle with the baby. I sat next to a girl that had a 2 month old baby, and the poor guy next to us probably thought he was in for the longest flight of his life. Luckily, both babies pretty much slept the whole flight and when we got there he even told us how he wasn't super excited to see who he would be sitting by, but that both babies were angels. We landed around 9 PM Hawaii time, which is midnight Utah time. Kids were all asleep, and getting 3 sleeping kids plus all our luggage through the airport and to the hotel was a little tricky, but that's when grandma and grandpa came in handy :) We made it and hit the hay right away. The next day we had scheduled a bus tour around Oahu, luckily it was pretty low key and mostly just sitting on a bus because we were all pretty tired. A few of the stops we made were Hanauma Bay, North shore (where the waves were humongous and a big surf competition was going on), the Dole plantation and it ended at the Polynesian Cultural Center where we spent the rest of the day. We took a shuttle over to the Laie temple, and it was so pretty!

At the PCC we took a canoe ride, visited a few different islands, and watched the dancers in the water show. Scout and Maxon learned some new moves.

That night we went to the luau and ate some yummy dinner. Poor little Denver was having a rough day and wasn't too happy. I think the traveling messed him up a little. But other than that it was great.

After dinner we went to the show they do there, Ha Breath of life. It was amazing! So cool! I can't remember the last time I was that tired though. I was pretty much doing the head bob thing the whole show. After the show was a bus ride back to the hotel and finally to bed :)

Friday we decided to go back to Hanauma Bay for some beach time and snorkeling. The kids were in heaven and would have stayed at the beach all day every day.

After a few hours at the beach we went back to the hotel and took about half the sand from the beach with us. We showered and got cleaned up then took a sunset walk on the beach.

The kids were totally worn out so we went and found our beds and were all out by like 8 PM.

Saturday we took a shuttle over to a mall for a little shopping before we headed to Aloha Stadium for the BYU/Hawaii game (which was kind of the purpose of the trip). BYU won pretty easily. After the game we took the longest bus ride of my life back to the hotel and hit the hay.

Sunday we got up and took a shuttle to Pearl Harbor. We visited the USS Arizona memorial, which was pretty awesome to see.

Luckily we had my dad to give us a little recap history lesson of what happened there because when it comes to history I'm pretty lame. Mostly what I knew of Pearl Harbor came from the movie :) We also visited the USS Missouri battleship. Maxon LOVED it! He thought it was awesome. Scout liked it for a while, then started panicking a little worrying about if she was going to be able to find a way out because the thing was so massive.

After taking a tour we went back to the visitor center, then found a shuttle back to the hotel. That night was date night. Stacy and Taylor took our kids for a few hours while Trent and I got to go have dinner. We wanted sushi, but failed. We found a sushi place pretty close, so we walked about 10-15 minutes to it. When we got there it looked kinda fancy and we were in t-shirts so we were a little afraid they wouldn't let us in. So we kept walking hoping to find another place. We ended up right back at our hotel and ate at the Chili's in our hotel lol Kinda disappointing. Then we picked up our kids and took Palmer for a while so Stacy and Taylor could go out for a bit. The kids all went to bed pretty easily that night.

Monday, our final day, we headed over to Waikiki beach to sit in the sun for a few more hours. Again, the kids were in heaven.

After the beach we went back to the hotel and showered and packed up all our gear. We ate our final meal at The Cheesecake Factory (delish!), then headed to the airport. Our flight left at like 9 PM there, we got to LA 6 AM and had a 1 hour layover, then a 1 hour flight to Vegas. At this point we were wishing more than ever we had flown out of SL. Instead of a 45 minute drive, we had a 6 hour drive :( After a very exhausting day of driving home, we were happy to find our beds waiting for us. We had such a fun time in Hawaii. The kids had a blast and it wasn't nearly as stressful as I had imagined (although I still don't think I would recommend taking 3 small kids to Hawaii, especially without the help of a grandma and grandpa). I think we'll stick to Disneyland for our family vacation from now on :)

Happy Turkey Day

This year for Thanksgiving we decided to stay here and have a quiet little Thanksgiving at home. This decision was made the day before Thanksgiving so I had to try and throw together a full meal by myself. Thanks to the girls at ourbestbites.com I pulled it off. I made Kate's Thanksgiving turkey, the garlic-rosemary roasted baby potatoes and the Pumpkin Cheesecake with Pecan-Gingersnap Crust (YUM!).

I also made a couple other dishes not from their site; Cheesy Cauliflower Bake and a Lemon Cream Cheese Pie (deeeelish!) For throwing a menu together the day before, I was pretty proud of my little meal I busted out. Those 24 hours I spent in the kitchen were totally worth it!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I have so many things to be thankful for.

Life. is. good.

3 months old and a blessing

Little man (or bubba boy as Scout likes to call him) is 3 months old

He seems to be growing like a weed and passing up all the little girls born a few months before him. He is so strong and I swear going to be walking any day. He'll probably have to figure out rolling over, sitting up, crawling.... things like that before walking I guess. Anyone who holds him can't believe how sturdy he is. I don't really realize it until I hold another baby and forget I have to support them.

He still gets plenty of love from big brother and sister. He is a pretty happy boy for the most part, until you put him in his car seat. He pretty much screams anytime he's in his car seat. He always wakes up happy in the morning. He's very vocal and lays there jabbering in his crib until I pick him up. As soon as he sees my face he gets a big ole grin on his face that melts my heart. It's not a bad way to start my day every day. He also loves to giggle. Sometimes him and I will get in a laughing contest where I start laughing at his cute little laugh so he laughs harder, so I laugh harder, it's pretty funny. He also loves to laugh and Maxon and Scout. He has officially been sleeping through the night since he was 8 weeks old. He hasn't slept less than 8 hours since Oct. 5th :) Makes for a much happier mama. His sister is still doing her part to wake us up EVERY night around 3 am, but that's another story.

I love this little guy to pieces. His big blue eyes make me happy.

We blessed Denver a couple weeks ago, on Nov. 6th. Trent did a great job and gave him a sweet blessing. Sometimes when I have things going on at my house I forget to get out the camera, even when it's an important event I need to document. Luckily grandpa Lyman got a few :)

Love this little nugget!

This is Halloween, this is Halloween.....

It's official, I have no say in what Maxon and Scout are for Halloween. Maxon's awesome aunt Jessica made him this super cool Jedi knight costume for his birthday and he's been sure that was what he was being for Halloween ever since. Scout has been obsessed with Tangled since she first saw it and was dead set on being Rapunzel. Luckily they were both super cute, so I didn't even have to argue.

Little Denver on the other hand had no say in what he dressed up as. But I gotta be honest, I didn't put a whole lot of thought into it. I was at the Disney store, Simba costume was 25% off, sold! But he was a dang cute Simba!

I didn't really get a decent picture of Denver, but as you can guess, he loved being Simba!

Happy Halloween!

Princess Scout is 3 years old

My little princess turned 3. She had a Tangled birthday party and partied with all her friends.

When the girls arrived, they colored while waiting for all the guests to get there. As soon as all the princesses were there they got their popcorn and drinks and headed to the theatre in the basement to watch "Tangled".

I don't know how much of the movie they actually watched, because they all eventually just ended up in the toy room playing. Whatever keeps them happy. After they were done playing, they came upstairs to open presents.

Scout got so many fun things and loved them all! Then we sang Happy Birthday to the birthday girl, cut the cake and ate.

As a thank you to all her friends for coming, we made these little flower barrets connected to a rapunzel braid.

The next day was Scout's actual birthday. We gave her the presents from us when she woke up.

She definitely got a lot of Rapunzel gear, and loved it all! That night we went to Cornbelly's and the kids played and played. She's definitely one spoiled girl!

At her 3 year check up she was 36.75" tall and weighed 31 lbs. (50% in both). She is definitely growing up and seems bigger and bigger every day. She finally got the potty training thing down about a month before her birthday, halleluja! We thought she had adjusted to having a new little brother really well, the first month after he was born she didn't seem to have any jealousy or problems. Then month 2 hit and our nights haven't been the same since! She started saying she was scared at night and I don't know if she is actually scared or just realized she got more attention from saying that. I didn't want to just blow her off if she was actually scared, so I tried and tried to comfort her. One month later it has gotten worse. Putting her to bed at night every night is a battle. She cries and says she's scared over and over. We basically have to lay with her until she falls asleep. But even worse than that, she wakes up EVERY single night usually somewhere between 2 and 4 AM screaming and comes into our room saying she's scared. We've tried having her just sleep on our floor when she comes down in the middle of the night, and that worked for a few nights, but then the floor wasn't good enough and she wanted in our bed. If there's one thing in parenting that I'm a stickler about it's that my kids will not sleep in my bed. That's the one thing I have that's mine, and I refuse to give it up. So... we have pretty much resorted to one of us (usually Trent because I have to stay with the baby) taking her back up to her bed and sleeping with her. I'm not gonna lie, it's kinda cute to see Trent in her castle bed cuddling with her. He's not loving it though and informed me today that he's too long to even fit in there so his feet have to go into the tower part of the castle in the corner for him to even lay in there. Needless to say, any advice from fellow parents who have dealt with kids who are "scared" at night and won't stay in bed is gladly welcome!

Other than our night time battles with her, Scout is her sweet and sassy self and we love her to death. Happy birthday princess Scouty!