Here they all are after a nice bath on Christmas Eve, all in their new pajamas from the pajama elf. Emily and Annie said they were just what they wanted!
Trying to get pictures while we were at the table was not easy. Between them trying to pose and trying to eat I could barely get a picture that wasn't blurry. Here they are...
This post I've been thinking for awhile and writing things down here and there about what I want to remember about our kids at this stage in their lives and it has been a lot of fun.
Emily: this first picture of Emily I want to remember that right now if given the choice she would always, always choose to wear this outfit. Her Chipettes shirt and pink sparkly tutu (which all the sparkles have washed off because i have to wash it so much)
for some reason i couldn't turn the picture.
She is the BEST big sister and a good helper to her parents. She is very artistic and is getting really good at drawing things. She is so smart, sometimes too smart for her own good. She figures things out that Ben and I are trying to talk in code about. And she asks SO many questions, which i guess is good so she will learn lots. She is learning to read and always asks what things spell. On the drive home from St George it was just she and I awake and she would ask things like, "mom what does, t-d-r-g-d-q-i-l-y-b-q-w-s spell?" over and over and over, i don't know that she ever actually came up with a word. She loves to play with her friends and stands up for her brother and sister anytime someone tries to take things from them (but has no problem herself taking things from them). This is her favorite stuffed animal and loves to sleep with her and she named her herself.
Emily and Pettygoat
She has learned to cross her eyes and will always look something and say "2 mommy's " or whatever it is that she is looking at. She loves to sing and dance, especially High School Musical songs and when you ask her what she wants to be when she grows up she says a performer. Loves to wear swimsuits and will sneak them on under her regular clothes when we go out and we usually don't know until she has to go to the bathroom and it takes her forever. She is more cautious and won't ever do ANYTHING that seems scary, even if it's not remotely scary. She is very thoughtful, Annie was just really sick and she wanted to write her a note and draw her a picture and made sure that she used purple because that is Annie favorite color. Loves acting out her favorite shows. Has a super super big imagination and loves to get caught up in whatever she is playing. This is her on her first day of school, her teacher has told me how much she loves having her in her class and she's the only student who laughs at the jokes in the books and that it is so much fun to have her there. She is learning so much and always tries to incorporate what she has learned into just normal stuff. For example, she knows how to spell all our names and this morning she said, would M-I-K-E-L like to help me zip my boots?
Annie: Annie is HILARIOUS! she does and says the funniest things and the look on her face it what makes them even better. When she is telling a story her face often looks like this...
She wants to be bigger than she is. She is without a doubt our daredevil. She will try anything and isn't scared of anything. She is feisty and stubborn, which can be not fun at times. She also likes to change her clothes about 15 times a day. Something that she does right now is if Ben and I are on the floor or couch or bend over for anything you can almost bet that in a couple seconds she will have jumped on your shoulders.
it's precious
She either hits her head or gets her head hit with things ALL the time. She is a pretty big clutz. She is obsessed with lip gloss and loves to eat it.
Here she is trying to sneak some lip gloss
She is so so skinny and small, it is usually easier to carry her around than Deacon. One of my favorite things she does is that if Deacon or one of her younger cousins is hurt, she goes up to them and tries to calm them down in a high pitched voice, it's very sweet. She is learning a lot right now, while Emily is at school we try and have our own school. She loves, loves, loves animals. I have always thought she should be a veterinarian. From the time she could walk she would go up to the biggest dogs and try and touch them and not be remotely scared. She is beginning to love to draw and getting better at it. She loves to make stuff up and tells us the funniest stories that aren't even close to accurate or even possible. She is very entertaining. She is gross, which i didn't know if i should put on here but right now it's one of the things that makes Annie, Annie. She will put most anything and everything in her mouth like sucking on the kitchen sponge or rubbing her toothbrush on the toilet then putting it in her mouth. Another charming thing about Annie is she gets tired really quickly (lazy) but also another thing that makes her who she is. It cracks us up to see what she will be too tired to do today.
An example of her laziness she was trying to lay down and ride her bike at the same time. She crashed.
Deacon: is so SWEET! I don't know if it's just his age but he is so sweet and so fun. He is also a big stinker, he is going to be an even bigger handful than his sisters.
Something about him is that anytime he was sad or cries you can turn on the song "not over you" by gavin degraw and he calms down almost immediately. Some nights I would put my phone in his room and if he woke up crying i would just go start the song and he would go right back to sleep, it was awesome. Right now he is also OBSESSED with toy story 2, he will sit and just stare at the tv while it's on. If at some point while it's on he starts getting into stuff, it's because it's a commercial.
Here he is right after his first haircut
He hit his head on everything, he typically has a bump in the same spot on the left side of his forehead. He changes a lot which one of us he prefers to hold him and who he goes to when he's upset or hurt, right now he is obsessed with Ben and always wants him when he is home. He loves to bug his sisters if they fall asleep before him. Here is is with Annie.
My video stopped working right before he pushed her off the couch. It's pretty funny because it's like he knows he can get his revenge for all the things they do to him during the day when they are sleeping.
Love these cute pictures of him... he is so sweet
at the zoo
at the park
They are growing so fast and learning so much. it is a lot of fun and want them to be able to know what they were like at these stages in their lives.
To make sure we have this down somewhere I wanted to make sure i put Deacon's surgery on here. Before he was born we knew that he had too much fluid in one of his kidneys and that we would have to get it checked out after he was born, it's not uncommon for that problem to just resolve on it's own after a baby is born. So when he was about 3 weeks old he had his first ultrasound and found that he still had too much fluid on one of his kidneys, so the next step was to figure out why. Sometimes there is just reflux and the liquid goes back up into the kidney after his first very unpleasant test, that was ruled out. Next they look for a blockage that require more unpleasant tests. For this particular test, a renal scan, they sand bag him down and inject him with a radioactive dye and then flush it out to watch the glow for 45 minutes and take pictures of his body every 15 seconds and see how it goes out of the body, that's how they were able to tell that exactly what was going on with his body and they discovered that the top of his ureter is narrow and that it causes it to drain at a very slow rate. They also could tell that his kidney functioned fine, which was a relief. He had to have lots of ultrasounds and this done 2 times, here he is getting his last scan.
this picture isn't very clear but the bigger dot on the left side is his left kidney that wasn't working right and the smaller on the right is good one. it shows how much faster things drained from the right kidney then the left. By the end of the test, everything would be gone from the right and the left would look the same.
Once they knew the problem the doctor suggested we wait until he was closer to 1 and see if by chance there was any improvement and if there wasn't that they would need to operate to fix the problem. On his 1st birthday he went back for the tests again and found that he had actually gotten a little worse so they thought we should for sure do the surgery and that the longer we waited it would be more likely to lessen his kidney function, so we scheduled his surgery for August 30th.
Here he is playing waiting for them to call us back.
His surgery took 2+ hours and all they did was go in and cut out the narrow part and reattach it to his kidney. While they were in there they found out that the ureter was kind of routed wrong around nerves and things they had to fix that as well. After his surgery i got to go back and be with him until he moved to recovery, he did so well that they moved him in practically no time. He was so thirsty and drank these bottles so fast, part of the reason they let him go because he was doing so well. He was so sweet and once he woke up enough to notice us he just wanted to be held even though it was kind of awkward with all the cords and tubes. I don't like these pictures but this is what he looked like after his surgery and a few hours afterwards.
Overall he did great, we got to Primary's at 6 in the morning and we were on our way home by 12, we were so shocked, he did so awesome that they were fine with him going home so quickly. For this surgery they typically have to stay one night but his doc thought he would be a good candidate for outpatient and I am so glad he did because he would have been miserable at the hospital since he felt fine.For a week after his surgery he had to have a tube that drained out of his back and that was kind of a challenge because it was GROSS and because he had to wear two diapers, we kept him in a onesie at all times so that he wouldn't be able to pull on it. Here he is later in the day after his surgery for the first BYU football game. We couldn't believe how well he did, I was hoping he would want to be extra cuddly and sit with me all day but he wanted to play like normal. It was only about the time he was due for his first pain medicine that he acted cranky but once he got it he fell right asleep and was the same little boy after that.
He recently had his follow up ultrasound to see if there has been any improvement and it already showed that there was a great decompression which is exactly what we wanted and as of now the doctor said no more follow ups or tests. We are so happy to have this all behind us and very thankful for his doctor, we were very lucky and loved him. He was great.
I thought getting a picture of them in the car would be easy...I was wrong. There Might be one picture where they all look good, maybe. But I did at least get some fun ones. Annie is sick and was in a bad mood, that's why she looks so grumpy in a lot of them.
Since I'm so far behind that its no longer summer I decided to use the picture I took of them eating donuts together the day we moved to our new house. They love donuts!
This year for Deacon and Annie's birthday we decided to combine their birthday parties and have a water party. It was a lot of fun We had a big slip n slide, sprinkler, and little pool with a slide into it. The kids had a blast.
as you can see from this picture, the weather was not ideal.
Deacon with his cake. He had chocolate oozing out of his eyes for the rest of the day.
Annie when she saw her bike. I wish i got the look right before this one, it was priceless.
We have had so much going on the last couple weeks that I have gotten even further behind, but I am going to finish.
This week is supposed to be with a special family member so for this I decided to put pictures of them with their newest family member, their cousin Ryder! They love him and are always so concerned about him.
I love the look on Annie's face, so serious!
It's always a little scary when Deacon is around Ryder because he likes to poke him and pull at him, so I just included a couple of my latest favorite pictures of him.
Something about him is that anytime he was sad or cries you can turn on the song "not over you" by gavin degraw and he calms down almost immediately. Some nights I would put my phone in his room and if he woke up crying i would just go start the song and he would go right back to sleep, it was awesome. Right now he is also OBSESSED with toy story 2, he will sit and just stare at the tv while it's on. If at some point while it's on he starts getting into stuff, it's because it's a commercial. 
