Big Changes!

It's been a while since I last posted, but that's because life has been...well CRAZY! So here is the reader's digest verson:

-There was going to be an opening on St. George Fire department for volunteer who they would be hiring from in the next little bit, but there's a catch you have to live in St. George. We think to ourselves. Well if we happen to find the perfect place to move in town that is in the right spot that they'll be hiring and is also close to Alex's real estate office and the college then we'll do it. A week later we found just that. So we packed.

- About a week before the move school starts (I'm taking two online classes) and I find out...I'M PREGNANT! Surprise!

- Day of the move we find out that Alex didn't get accepted into St. George recruit camp because...now are you ready for this...because we were not living at the St. George address at the time of application. "Seriously, we are moving like as we speak." Too bad.

-To late now. So we load all our stuff into three trailers and park them at Alex's parents until we can get into our new place. We finally get the okay to move in and what do we find. A house that was not cleaned very well and a garage full of someone else's crap. And now at only 5 weeks I am already feeling sick. ALL THE TIME!

- But thanks to some very nice neighbors that suddenly appeared out of no where we got everything moved in and together with one very anti-change child (Allie) and one that loves to antagonize her I have been unpacking by day and doing homework by night.

-Things I've learned:
Endometriosis does not always mean infertility.
Do not attempt school with a needy two year old.
Do not move with said two year old when you are pregnant, you just don't have the patience.

The good news is, Allie will have settled in by the time the baby gets here and will hopefully have calmed down, Tate already has names picked out so no worries there, we have really great neighbors and the house it cute. I'll send pics when I get another second to just do nothing.

The ants go marching...by the hundreds!!!

So a couple weeks ago I had gone over to Dan, the manager of our townhomes and informed him that we had some ants that kept showing up on my kitchen counter every morning. Since the day we moved in there have been mounds of ant hills in the back yard, but they've only attempted to come inside once.

Well this morning I went to the cupboard to get the kids some snacks and when I opened it, to my horror, the shelves were wiggling with little black ants. I bolsterously conveyed my disgust at their audacity to intrude upon my cupboard space, but more so upon my FOOD! They were inside boxes of unopened granola bars, inside the bread bag, in the salt shaker, EVERYWHERE! I quickly started pulling things out and began shaking, pounding, squashing everything that moved. But with each item I attempted to save from the squirming shelves, it only revealed more of the tiny little monster.

I didn't have any bug spray so I resorted to Mr. Clean to take care of my dirty work. After a long fight and at the expense of some banana chips and a half a loaf of bread I finally got all the tiny demons out of my kitchen, but they retaliated because when I went into the bathroom there was an army marching from the window above the shower, around the toilet and under the sink. Luckily I happened to see Dan walking by outside and ran out to tell him to send reinforcements.

The bug guy came a couple hours later and thoroughly fumigated the house and surounding areas with pesticides. I'm still finding ants here and there, but they don't look too healthy. Victory! But sweet Tayden told me as I was celebrating the demise of our unwelcomed visitors that I should just let the ants live cause their black ants not red ants so that means they're nice. I quickly told him that may be so, but no bug in any house I live in will survive if I catch them trying to have a picnic in my cupboards!

Allie is TWO!

Allie Rose Cornwall was born August 1st 2007 at 11:51 a.m. sunny side up and screaming! She didn't stop screaming until she was about 6 months old thanks to collic and acid reflux and then suddenly she got a personality and her personality has only gotten more complicated since.

And now she is TWO! Terrible half the time and the other half adorably captivating. She naturally draws people to her and relishes in the audience. Here are just a few pics of my baby girl who is now not quite so much a baby. She can count to 20 (it gets a little mixed up after 14 though) and she loves to sing! The video at the bottom is Allie on the potty singing all her favorite songs.

WARNING: Extremely Long Post!

It has been a very busy summer. Here are some of the highlights. We've been able to go to our family cabin a few times this year (It's up above Kamas) It was so beautiful and Allie and Tate loved the horses. One day it rained so hard that the Weber river which runs just behind the cabin rose and backed up the septic tank so Alex had to take a shower in about 35 degree pouring rain. He requested I not post those pictures :)


This was one day when Allie actually let me braid her hair and it looked super cute for about ten minutes. She is getting so big!



On the 4th of July we went down on Main street in St. George and watched fireworks. Tate the photographer took this picture of me and Alex. He did a good job. (I just have to say that my Alex is the sweetest, hottest, studliest guy in the whole world! Love you honey!)

Tate and Allie had so much fun running around with glow sticks. Then when the fireworks started Tate suddenly realized that he had to "really" go potty, but he didn't want to miss the fireworks so he wiggled, squirmed, danced and jumped until the fireworks were over. Silly boy.

This was our 4th of July patriotic cake. Alex and the kids decorated it to look like a flag.

Then the most exciting of all was when we drove up to Jackson Hole Wy to run the snake river. All of Alex's family are white water fanatics so I'd been a couple times, but this year my parents came too. This is us on our first run going through 'lunch counter'. For all those who've never been it's MUCH bigger when you're in the boat.

Well the first run was fun and wet, but I had this grand idea to turn a 13 foot self bailer raft from a oar boat to a paddle crew. Everyone agreed and we all grabbed a paddle for the next run. Alex and another guy decided to go in the ducky (an inflatable two man kiack.) So we had three people on each side, including me and my dad, two 11 year old boys sitting in the middle and my brother-in-law Jeremy as paddle captian in back. Well the first thing that happens is a mutany on board. Alex's brothers started arguing over who was in charge which promptly turned into wrestling. It ended quickly when Doug pushed Jeremy into me. We both went in the water, but Jeremy made sure he took Doug and one of his friends with us. It was cold! Luckily I had my spray top on (a jacket that keeps water out and body heat in). I made the critical decision to take off my spray top when I climbed back in the boat so I could dry off.

So after that was all out of their systems we continued on. Now in this particular stretch of river there are two monster rapids: Big Kahoona and Lunch Counter. The lower the water gets the bigger Kahoona gets and the smaller lunch counter gets, but on this run the water was just about int he middle so both rapids were enormous! We psyched ourselves up as we paddled full steam into Kahoona. We hit it perfectly straight too and the first wave swallowed us and spit us back out, but as we decended back down something went wrong. For whatever reason the boat turned just slightly a wave on our left side lifted the front of the boat and flipped it right over! Again Jeremy landed on me only this time it knocked the wind out of me as I fell into the churning water. I waited for the boincy of my life jacket to pull me back up, but I realized that I was getting sucked backwards underneath the waves. So I reached out for something and found Jeremy's life jacket strap. I held on and hoped he was headed to the surface. A moment later I popped out of the water gasping for air just as another wave clobbered us.

Mean while, my dad, Doug and the two boys were underneath the raft when it flipped. They managed to get out, but the one little boy was hysterical and falling out of his life jacket. So my dad and Doug each grabbed a side of him and held onto the boat.

Okay flash back to me. The wave that hit me when I first came up took me away from the boat and Jeremy toward it. I knew that I was suppose to put my feet forward and just ride it out, but the waves were fifteen feet of crushing cold, so cold that your lungs were constricted and you could hardly breath. "Forget it" I thought. I was still holding onto my paddle and started swimming toward the boat. On the way I found a hat and decided I'd rescue it too. I made it to our capsized raft just has we headed into lunch counter.

I set the hat on top of the raft,but I couldn't manage to lift my numb limbs high enough to put my paddle up there too so I had to heod onto it and the raft. If you've ever been flushed down a huge toilet that's what it feels like. We barely had time to take a shallow breath before another wave would hit you, then another and another each one trying to yank your hands from the rope. Finally it spit us out the other side. And it was then I realized that I had to get out of the water. If I had left my spray top on I probably would have been a lot better off, but I didn't and the water started to feel like thousands of burning needles.

My dad and the boys got to Charlie, my father-in-law's boat and the rest of us were trying to swim our raft into the eddie, but when the water began to feel warm and I started getting tired I gave up on the boat and held onto a rope until I made it to the rocks. Everyone siad my lips were a lovely shade of blueish purple and I looked like I was spasming I was shivering so bad. Not to mention I felt sick and couldn't stop burping from all the river water I'd drank, but once I got my spray top back on (which had stayed with the boat) I warmed up quick.

Everyone helped to flip the boat back over and even though I was still shivering I took my paddle and took my place again on our boat and we finished the run. Miraculously we didn't lose any paddles, but the river God's did take my sunglasses, Jeremy's hat, and Doug's hat and sunglasses. My dad's hat, which I had rescued somehow made it.

So despite our near death experience, I am really looking forward to next years trip as are the kids.

Tate and Allie stayed back at camp with my mom while we ran the river. They had fun playing in the dirt and have talked about nothing except when we're going camping next.

Besides the fun of camping they had not one, not two, but three grandma's and two grandpa's all together on this trip. Yeah, they got spoiled!

I was very impressed with how well Allie did with sleeping in a tent. She's a really light sleeper and I was worried never go to sleep, but we had no problems at all. She was one happy camper!

So like I said, we've had a busy summer!

Long Time No See

Sorry it's been forever since I've posted. We don't have internet at our house anymore, but hopefully will be getting it back soon. So just to fill everyone in on what we've been doing. Alex had a birthday on June 29th and I surprised him with a party. It was way fun and he got a camera! Yea! So the next time I have my camera and the internet at the same time I'll post some pics.

We're super excited because this weekend we are heading up north to Roy first to see our brand new niece Carly (my brother Philip's second daughter) who was born about a week ago. Then we'll be heading up to our cabin before driving up to Jackson hole to run the Snake river with Alex's family, my parents and the kids. Tate is so excited about going camping! Don't worry we won't take the kids down the river. My mom's not much of an extreme sports person so she'll stay at camp with the kids.

Wish us luck. I'll post pictures when we get back.

Sleep over!

So Alex's parents went out of town and took their dog, but left ours (who's been living with them for almost two years now). So we've been hanging out at their place a lot with Oscar. (We can't even have a dog on our property so we have to go there.) Sorry I don't have a picture of him so those of you who haven't met Oscar let me just give you the reader's digest version of our history with Oscar the pug.
Oscar is on his tenth life, we discovered his unusually high levels of anxiety when he was about a year old when we left him for the first time while we went on vacation. We had to cut our vacation short and rush home because our Oscar had collapsed after throwing up all over Alex's parents house. But don't worry after some I.V.'s and a few days at the vets he was just fine. From there he's done a number of things like walk into oncoming traffic several times, get chased by an angry moose, swallow a fish hook, have a $2000 surgery to get said fish hook out (paid for by an anonymous donor) and now has some kind of strange yeast infection that is all over his skin.
So since we've invested quit a bit in this stupid dog Tate and Alex decided to sleep over tonight so that he wouldn't be alone. And that meant that me and Allie were going to have a sleep over at home. (Alex told Allie that she got to have a sleep over with mommy so I had no other choice :)
At first I tried just laying her down in her bed and then laying on the floor next to her. That didn't work because she wanted to sleep with mommy. So I pulled her out of bed and laid her on the floor next to me. I figured I'd just put her back in bed once she fell asleep, but all she could talk about was how I was laying on her princess pillow and using her butterfly blanket (She has a real hard time sharing with anyone!)
So I told her that I was just going to go to my bed and go to sleep then. That did it. She wanted to sleep in mommy's bed now. Okay. We can have a sleep over in mommy's bed. It was already almost 8:15 and she's usually in bed asleep by now so I figured we'd lay in my bed for a few minutes and she'd fall asleep and then I'd carry her back to bed.
Yeah right! She talked and sang and babbled about everything from Mickey Mouse to how the five little ducks go over the hills and far away and every ten seconds she stopped to ask the same series of questions: "Mommy, a daddy go? A Tayden go? A Oscar go?" I'd tell her they were having a boy sleep over and we were having our girl sleep over. That meant that she needed to go to sleep.
But then she had to go potty (yes she is getting the potty thing, though not so much the pooping on the potty thing) Then she had to put her flower sticker on her potty chart and get a treat before we could go back to bed. So then I tried a new tactic. Just like you do with a preditor, I layed perfectly still and avoided eye contact in hopes that she'd just forget I was there and go to sleep, but her preditor instincts were too good. I finally gave up and chatted and laughed with her until she was rubbing her eyes.
"Let's go read a book in your room now" I told her and and so we read a book and I layed her down and said goodnight. She went right to sleep. So our first sleep over only lasted an hour or so, but it was really fun. I hope the boys are having a good sleep over too.

Busy, Busy!!

We have been so busy and yet have nothing to do. It must be summer! We have been going swimming nearly every day so we are super tan. I told Allie and Tate to pose for me for a picture before we went swimming one day and this is what I got. That's Tate's "Muscles" and Allie's "pretty smile". They crack me up!

Thank you for everyone's advice on potty training! Our internet has been screwy so I haven't been on the blog for a while. I agree that I just need to loose the pull-ups and go cold turkey. It's really not Allie so much as it's me. She's ready I'm just too impatient and busy with all these projects I keep taking on, like...

Ta da! Tate's fancy new dresser! It actually was Alex's when he was little and we kind of inherited it when we didn't have any furniture for Tate's room. I should have taken a before and after, but it used to be that caramel stain that was graffitied with pen and water spots. So I started sanding it and the stupid stain would not come off. I was running out of sand paper for the electric sander so I asked my awesome neighbors, Josh and Lotti if they had any. Before I new it I had sand paper, another sander, their air compresser, spare blue paint and lots of great advice. I never would have been able to finish it in one day without them. Thanks guys!

Another one of my many projects is my potted garden with is, needless to say, very sad looking. this is my lowly tomato plant. I have one green tomato growing and if it wasn't for that one thing I would have thrown it away along with my spinach that died, but somehow it's still hanging in there. But my watermelon plants are thriving. You can live off watermelon, right!?

And finally there's my Tater bug who is becoming much more flamboiantly open about his opinions and has developed a nasty case of selective hearing . In other words he is being a major pain in the butt! We had to establish a "behavior chart" with stars and X's. It's working to help him remember to obey and stop bossing. This is him working on his online preschool after we had gone to the library for story time. Doesn't he look so cute.