The New House

For three days straight now our family has all been over at the new house working to try to get it ready for carpet. Okay...that's not necessarily true. I should say Nate has been working on the new house and I've been doing pretty much the same thing I do when I'm at home: nursing baby, rocking baby, changing diapers, feeding kids, taking kids to the bathroom, etc. Every once in awhile I can grout some of the tile and if I'm lucky my grout doesn't get all dried up before I can get it all on, but hey, I guess at least we're there for moral support. I don't know what I would do without having Kristi, my sister, right there a block away. Just today, I think we took at least 5 potty stops over there, on top of going there to get a new outfit one time and a diaper another time. (And I thought I was prepared enough to be out of the house for a whole day.) Actually, what happened is Kenzi locked the keys in the car and the diaper bag was still in there. Luckily, I also have a wonderful dad, who came and picked up our other set of keys and brought them to us. And while I'm talking about how lucky we are: Eric, my brother, and Austin, Nate's brother, have also been over at our house busting their tooshies to help us get our house done. Thanks guys! Well, sorry there's no pictures. I've been meaning to take my camera over there all week, but it's all we can do to make it out of the house with all of the kids dressed and fed, so maybe I'll get around to taking pictures someday.

Vinyl Business

For those of you who don't know, my friend and I own our own vinyl business. We've done so well that we've been able to buy a second vinyl cutter. I love doing vinyl and it's perfect for us to be able to do out of our house. We get so busy doing projects for other people that we don't do much for ourselves, but these our a couple of my projects. Feel free to copy any of my stuff because I just copied most of them from someone else, just make sure you order your vinyl from us. Here's our web-site for our business: http://wordexpressions.net/

Summer Fun

We don't have any big plans for our summer since we just had a baby and we have a gas guzzler vehicle and a diesel guzzler vehicle. Neither which permit any cheap traveling. Plus, we are still building a house that we need to get finished. We did decide we needed to take a long overdue trip to visit Nate's brother in Provo, Utah, so that might be our only vacation for the summer. I decided if I didn't try to do something fun with the kids every day then our summer was going to fly by with all work and no fun. So with the girls help, we came up with a day-to-day schedule including fun and work: Miracle Grow Monday- We started this last year so that we would remember to put Miracle Grow on our flowers and garden once a week, so we still call it that, but it actually means "all yard work." Time-Out Tuesday- This is the one day a week that I'm going to brave taking my kids out of the house to do something. Some of the things we talked about doing are going to the zoo, a movie, the park, having a picnic, or getting slushies. Not necessarily big things, but just something to get us out. Water Wednesday- This is why we went to sit in the hot tub last Wednesday. Hopefully the rest of the summer will be warmer and this will be the day we put the sprinkler under the tramp or get the pools out (we bought three little cheap pools a couple of years ago to play water kick ball and the pools were the bases and my girls just love them for all different things) or something involving water. Thinking Thursday- This day can be games, books, puzzles, coloring, or I also bought Katelyn a workbook to teach her numbers and letters and told her Nikosha was her teacher and going to help her with her workbook. They both have so much fun with Katelyn being a good student and Nikosha loving to be allowed to boss Katelyn around. Friend Friday- My kids always get to play with the neighborhood kids, but when they ask to play with anyone else I'm always too lazy to want to leave and pick them up and take them home and decide a time that will work good with their parents and yada yada, so one day a week, if the girls want to, they can have a friend, other than the neighbors, over for a couple of hours. Soapy Saturday- That leaves Saturday for chores! My girls have been wonderful at doing at least one chore a day. (They have some things that they are required to do every day like make their beds, clear their dishes off the table, and put their laundry away, but I don't call these chores, so then they only think they're doing one chore a day.) For the most part we don't have a ton of cleaning to do when Saturday comes. That will be our fun summer! But we'd be very, very excited for anyone to come hang out with us this summer! We'll drop all of these plans for visitors anytime!!

Circus and Snow

We got to go to the Circus yesterday here in Idaho Falls. I was so excited because I don't remember ever going to a circus. It was a lot of fun! The only problem was that it was outside and about 57 degrees with 25 mile an hour winds, so it was pretty cold and they couldn't even do some of the acts in the wind.

(My sister-in-law, Bre, is holding Kenzi and our friend, Nicholas is on the end)

Then after the weather almost ruined our circus experience, we woke up to SNOW this morning! Can you believe that?!! Snow in June. Luckily it was all melted by about 9:00, but it was still cold all day. So we decided to take advantage of the cold weather and went and sat in my parent's hot tub. The hot tub feels really good when you have that cold Idaho wind blowing on you too! I guess instead of complaining we'll just try to make the best of it.

Time Flies

May just flew by for us. We had so much stuff going on. You know how I figured out that we had a lot more events going on than usual? Because we had more pictures on our camera from one month then we usually have in a whole year. No wonder why I felt like we were going a hundred miles an hour. These are some of the highlights of our month:

Nikosha lost her third tooth, but it was her first top tooth and the only one she pulled out by herself. How cute is that! Most of her friends had lost their teeth in kindergarten and it wasn't until January of first grade that Nikosha lost her first one. It didn't matter how many times we told her that it meant she had good, healthy teeth and that's why they weren't falling out, she still kept trying to make her teeth loose. It was a wonderful day when she finally lost her first tooth.

On May 6th we finally had a little boy. Kyler Nathaniel Loftus was born at 2:20 and was 8 lbs. 6 oz and 21 inches long (I actually had to go look up the length because my memory is so bad). We have the best friends and family ever!!! Not only did we have dinners brought to us for a week and a half, my mom came and stayed the night with me when Nate was gone, my mom and a friend came and did some laundry, two of my friends threw me a wonderful baby shower, I had people call me when they were at the store to see if I needed anything, friends and family watched the girls for us, I even had two friends show up and clean my house for me (embarrassing but very much appreciated). The list could go on and on so I just want to tell everyone that helped out thank you so much!!!! We felt so loved and appreciated every little phone call and everything everyone did.

A week and a couple of days after we had Kyler, Nikosha had her dance recital. We are so proud of how well she danced!! She has improved so much! Plus, she got to wear a cute, frilly purple costume and danced to "Best of Both Worlds" from Hannah Montana. She's living a 6 year old's dream! Nate waited until her dance to figure out how to focus the camera and was worrying about that instead of making sure he was filming Nikosha, so he doesn't have the camera on Nikosha all that much. Luckily, Nikosha's good friend and neighbor, Paige got recorded quite a bit, so at least someone we know is in the video, right?

A week and a couple days later was Katelyn's dance recital. (Her dance pictures were taken the Saturday after Kyler was born and I totally forgot. Talk about the "loser mom" award. The sad part about it is my friend offered to pick her up and when she came to get her I still didn't even remember until she said, "is Katelyn going today." Well, Katelyn was at our new house with Nate and it was 10 minutes until picture time, so I called Nate and told him Katelyn missed her pictures so he needed to make sure he did something special for her so she wasn't too mad.) Katelyn's a great dancer too, but she'd be just fine just getting a costume and getting her hair done and just standing on the stage.

Then on the final Saturday of May, Nikosha had a piano recital. It was a Disney themed recital. So she played "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid and dressed up as Minnie Mouse. She even won the best costume award. And she played wonderfully!!

On top of all of this stuff going on, Nate was still working on building our new house. This isn't a very good picture of it but it's the only one we have, so I guess you'll just have to come see it in person! Our house we're living in now is for sale and we were showing it a ton before we had Kyler, but luckily not a single person wanted to look at it for a month (and it just happened to be the month of May), and exactly one month to the day after Kyler was born we had someone come look at it and two more since then. What great timing!!

Now that I've written a whole book for everyone to read I better stop so that you will keep visiting our blog and not have to wonder if you'll have to read for 20 minutes or not.

Taking Pictures

Now that Kyler's a month old, I thought I would take a picture of all of my kids together. Ha-ha! I don't know why I haven't done that yet. Taking pictures of 4 kids is always interesting, isn't it?

First, we have Kenzi, who doesn't know how to smile on command and Nikosha, who LOVES to have her picture taken:

Then, there's Katelyn, who is annoyed by my instructions so she refuses to smile:

And Kyler, who is trying to sleep through all of it:

We got some pictures of my 4 wonderful kids, though, so that's all that counts. Thank goodness for digital cameras, though.

Our Blog

Can everyone believe we're actually getting with the program and getting a blog?!! This is our first attempt at a "post". It's a whole new language for us since we're pretty computer illiterate (I don't even know if that's how you spell that). Anyway, we hope you enjoy our page and come back and visit often.