My handsome

With each of the kids James' has given them nicknames that have stuck around.  When MacKayla was a baby and swaddled all the time he used to call her a grub.  Well as she grew up a bit she became Bug.  When Annika joined the family MacKayla became Big Bug and Annika was Little Bug.  Once we had Arabella we expected her to be Baby Bug, but that hasn't really stuck.  I call her, Bella, Bells, Bella Boo, Bob-a-Lou, or just Bob.  James calls her Beloved, and Beautiful.  Now that we have Johnny he gets his own fun nicknames.  James calls him Handsome, Boy and John.  I never intended for him to be called John, I actually prefer Jonathan over John, but even I have found myself on occasion calling him John-John.  Mostly I call him Johnny, Johnny-boy, Little Man, or Sweetie Guy.  Overall you can see that the last two have been far more spoiled, I guess that's what happens when you are finally done with school and have time to relax.

This weekend I was finally able to get some cute photos of Johnny and his cute gummy smile.  He will smile at me sometimes, but we found that just like when Bella was a baby it is Annika that can get the best smiles out of him.  She jsut has to look at him and smile and he turns into a happy gummy mess.  Oh well, at least I was able to capture the cuteness.  So for your viewing pleasure, here is Johnny-boy.

I especially love the shirt he has here...gotta teach them young.

Annika's hand as she is getting his smile.

Happy guy.

Finding his Annika.

Isn't he adorable?

That's my boy!

For good measure, here are my wonderful little girls!

Name that baby: Answers

I guess it was easier to identify the kids in their baby pictures than I expected.  The guesses were all right.  The answers are as follows:

A: Arabella
B: Jonathan
C: Annika
D: MacKayla

Name that baby

It's time again for a fun round of can you name that baby.  I did this with Bella, I had each of the girls in the same outfit and same position and had everyone guess which kid was which, however, I am not going to put Johnny in a dress, so that makes it a bit tough.  I tried to find pictures of the kids around the same age.  So here it is, can you name the baby?

Baby A

Baby B

Baby C

Baby D

Way to go Annika!

Annika is loving kindergarten and is doing really well.  Last Friday she came home with her kindergarten skills book (it tests the kids on letters, numbers, shapes and words), we spent about an hour working on it and she had finished the whole thing!  Today she was tested by her teacher and passed the book off with her.  The whale that she is holding was the prize from her teacher for finishing. 

Way to go Annika!  We are very proud of you and of how hard you have worked.

Moments to make it all worth it

Johnny boy is six weeks old today!  I can't believe how fast the time has gone by, but at the same time, I feel like he has been a part of our family forever.  Johnny is a sweet little guy and is usually a really mellow kid.  A few times in the last week he has been "fussy" as in he whines a bit for a few minutes.  James was trying to figure out what was wrong one day and said "why is he so fussy today?"  I laughed at him for that and he realized just how lucky we are with this guy. 

As for his stats, Johnny is 12 lbs now.  He is also long enough that he is outgrowing his clothes.  He is sleeping pretty well now, he goes to sleep about 9:00, wakes to eat at 10:30 and then sleeps until about 4.  He will then sleep until 6:30 and sometimes will go back to sleep for a while after that.  Overall he is doing great.

This morning Johnny gave me one of the best mom moments.  He gave me his first intentional smile.  He has smiled before, but not really at anything or anyone.  This morning I picked him up and smiled at him and he gave me the biggest gummiest grin.  He has done it several more times this morning as well.  My next goal is to collect a picture of my smiling guy, we'll see how long that takes to get.

Are they really mine?

Do you ever have a day where you look at your kids and question whether they are really yours?  How could someone related to you do something so crazy?  Well we have had a few of those lately.

Looks a bit like Medusa here, but at least still cute.

On Sunday James was helping with the church service at the nursing home in the ward.  While he was gone Arabella came upstairs wearing a bead necklace and talking about her beads.  She then tells me that she has a bead in her nose.  I thought she had just misspoke, for of course she wouldn't be a goober and put a bead in her nose.  Well I looked in there and sure enough I could see a blue bead deep in her nose.  When asked why she did it, she smiled and said "I don't know," her standard answer whenever she does something wrong.  I then tried to see if I could push the bead out from above it, that didn't work, so I called the doctors office to see if we could get in for them to get it out.  Our home teacher happened to be with James at the nursing home so I called his wife to see if he had his cell on him, because of course James who takes his any other time didn't have it.  Our home teacher didn't have his, but his wife offered to go over and get James for me.  When told of what was going on, James just hoped it wasn't the older girls or Johnny, the older ones because they really should know better and Johnny because he was so little.  Bella was the only one that he could see doing it and not be really annoyed at.  Anyways, James gets home and he decides to play doctor.  He gets his Swiss army knife out and uses the tweezers to try and pry the bead out.  That didn't work unfortunately.  He then got out the toothpick from the knife and wiggled that into the bead.  He was then able to pull the bead out and become the hero of the day.  We canceled the doctors appointment and told Bella that she would get a shot if she ever did that again.

Seriously, that is what she came up with!

For the last few years I have let the girls pick out their own clothes for school.  For the most part I like all of the things that they have and the combinations that they came up with passed the decency test.  Today that changed however.  Annika decided that she wanted to wear a skirt to school today, I said sure.  She then came out of her room looking like this.  The shirt is cute, the pants are cute, I even like the skirt, however the combination of the three is crazy.  I let her go like this but I laughed that she would want to.

Now of course since Annika was going to wear a dress to school MacKayla wanted to as well.  She picked out her really nice fancy church dress to wear, I vetoed that on account of it being a nice one.  I told her she could wear one of the other dresses that she had but not the one she wanted, well the water works started at that point.  She went into a full crying jag because she couldn't wear a dress to school.  Again I laughed (away from her of course) at the situation.  In the end she wore a nice pair of jeans and a t-shirt, now that I approve of. 

When I was a kid my mom would have given anything for me to wear a dress to school.  I absolutely hated to wear them, still do actually.  I always thought they got in the way of having fun at school.  You couldn't flip on the monkey bars, you had to sit carefully on the rug and any breeze would blow your skirt up.  I loved nothing more than a nice pair of jeans and a comfy t-shirt.  I guess I didn't pass such on to my girls however, oh well....

More for fun

I know there's been a lot of updates lately, but here's another one with lots more fun for you to see.

This is Arabella singing Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam.  Sorry it's kinda dark, but it was too cute not to share.

Here she is singing I am a Child of God.

Last one, this is ABC's and  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

These are from the second day of school when the kids rode the bus to school.  Annika thought the bus was the coolest thing in the world.

MacKayla and Annika were able to go to Yellowstone with their grandparents (will post those photos soon) and brought back shirts for all of the kids, so here they are modeling the shirts.

I love Panda Express and the kids decided that they wanted to try it today as well, but only if they could use chopsticks.  I said sure, but was prepared for quite a mess.  They were both actually quite good with their chopsticks and ate all their food that way.