Michelle leaves

The best dessert I've ever had in my life. Chocolate mouse torte cake from Beyond Bread. Oh man, I'm in love.


Michelle was not familiar with dead weighting. She told me she never tried/failed to carry someone so heavy. I thought it was pretty funny.


We always try to look our best for self-taken portraits.

Since the end of September, we've been lucky enough to have my sister Michelle living with us. Last week she left for BYU Idaho, and we sure are sad to see her go. While she was here we did tons of fun crafts, she drew countless race tracks on our driveway with sidewalk chalk, she made wayyyy too many desserts, I got to take naps, we had more tears than I've ever seen (I am definitely not the emotinal type, so this was new for me), we had tons of free babysitting, we met several of the male single population in Tucson, we discovered what it was like to have a teenager staying out all hours of the night, and we shared many, many laughs and jokes.

On her last night here, I made Michelle skip institute and she and I went to Beyond Bread for the best dessert ever and than she helped me buy make-up. She knows all the ins and outs of that stuff and I don't know very much, and now that she's not here to do my make-up for me, I figured I better learn. So Mike has often commented that Michelle brings out the goofy side of me, and this night I was particularly sleepy and so I ended up quite slap-happy and goofy. It was a great way to end her stay with us. We're so glad she's in school and getting to start that new, exciting chapter of her life. Best of luck Michelle!

Baby blessing

My dad held Devin a lot for me this weekend. I believe at this point they were both asleep in the chair.

My dad with most the cousins.

Mike's dad with baby Maggie.

Most of the cousins about to play in the river in Sabino Canyon

One of the joys of being in Arizona is we are much closer to family. So when we announced our baby blessing, we were able to get Mike's dad, my dad, and both of Mike's sisters and their families in town for the blessing. It was super crazy to have so many people at our house but also a ton of fun and a really nice blessing. We love having family closer. We had great family talks, we hiked Sabino Canyon and we turned the sprinkler on in the backyard and the kids ate a ton of frozen gogurts. Devin wore a cute little white and blue tuxedo that my grandma made for Caleb's blessing. I didn't get a good picture of it, but it was cute!

April Fools Dinner

So this is a little behind the times, but I still wanted to post it. Most years I never remember to do anything for April Fools. But this year I was trying to cheer up a very sad Brayden one day and I told him about how our friend Sharon made a jello drink for April Fools and the girl she gave it to tried to drink it and it fell out onto her face. I embellished the details here for the sake of the story, and Brayden was gung-ho (sp?) about trying it out on unsuspecting Aunt Michelle. So for April Fools we had Michelle and her boyfriend Ivan over for dinner under the pretense that we were saying thanks to the both of them for helping soooo much recently. I felt kind of guilty because Michelle kept saying, "That's so nice. You don't have to do this. Can I do anything to help?" Haha, this isn't to be nice, it's to be funny! Well, no jello spilled onto anyone's face, and Mike thought for sure none of it would work, and I was totally late getting the food on the table, but I enjoyed our meatloaf/mashed potato frosted cake and our ice cream taco salad and our jello berry drinks. I think Michelle and Ivan did too.

One month old

Sabino Canyon

Last weekend we went to Sabino Canyon and did a six mile hike. We wanted to make it to the top, but I was only four weeks postpartum, and my hips couldn't take it. It was still a lot of fun. We've had a fair bit of rain this year, so the river that runs through the canyon was actually a river. It was high enough that it covered a lot of the bridges that you hike through. It was chilly water, but the weather was nice so our shoes dried quickly. At one point we stopped so I could feed baby Devin and the boys and Michelle (and Michelle's significant other Ivan) had fun throwing rocks in the river. I was kind of paranoid about Brayden because if he fell it could really hurt his broken jaw, but Ivan was really good about staying with Brayden and holding his hand. The actual hiking was on a paved trail, so we put the older boys in the double jogger and Michelle carried Devin in the bjorn. It was a great set up. I even took a jacket to put in between Brayden's face and the side of the jogger so that if we hit a bump Brayden's jaw wouldn't hit the medal bars on the side of the jogger. I really sound paranoid, but based on the comments the ENT made when we had Brayden's follow up appointment, I need to be this way. So this hike was really pretty and we actually saw green trees by the river. It reminded me a lot of Provo Canyon. One of the highlights was when we were near the end, all the bunny rabbits came out and we saw probably 10 or so in the last half mile of the hike. Thus far, it's probably my favorite thing we've done in Tucson. Thanks for being the camera man Mike!

Two ER visits and a near miss

The hospital gave Brayden several Thomas the Train toys that fortunately work with our train set.

This weekend has been a little traumatic for Braydo. Friday morning Brayden took a thermarest camping mattress and built a bridge between his bed and Caleb's bed and was racing matchbox cars on it. Than he decided he could run across it. I heard one of those crashes where you run, not walk, to find out what is going on and found out Brayden had smashed his face into the side of his bed and it hurt really bad. A couple minutes later his speech became really slurred and he couldn't shut his jaw and the right side of his face where he hit started swelling. At that point I got worried that he might have broken something and I knew I wasn't going to be great at handling it with the amount of sleep I had gotten the night before, so I called Mike and made him come home. We took Brayden to the pediatrician who sent Mike and Brayden to the ER. After an x-ray and a cat scan, they decided he had a broken mandible and a dislocated TMJ joint. They re-set the dislocated joint and said the broke bone would heal on its own. They discharged him the next morning, he came home and by the afternoon he was back in the ER because his bone had popped out again. We thought for sure they would have to wire his jaw shut, which freaked Brayden out, but they reset the bone again, and said they would try again to go without wiring it. We brought him home and this morning he started throwing up and couldn't keep anything down. We called the on-call nurse and she said if things didn't improve by the afternoon we had to take him back in. Fortunately after a little nap (and a priesthood blessing) he was able to keep down sprite and by evening he was back on his soft-food diet. Thus far his jaw is staying in place and feeling much better. We are grateful for priesthood blessings, prayers, family, good friends, and a really tough little boy who took this like a man.

One of the more tender moments this weekend for me was that the ENT we saw Friday night seemed annoyed to be there on a Friday night and not really wanting to spend much time or energy making sure Brayden was getting the best care. When we took Brayden back to the hospital on Saturday we prayed that the doctor that saw Brayden would feel a lot of compassion for him and would care more about giving him the best care than his personal time. We had the same doctor we did the night before, but the difference in attitude was amazing. At one point he flat out said that he was going to take a different route than most doctors because he wanted this to be the best for Brayden. He said it could take a lot more of his time, but he wasn't worried about that. I love that the spirit can touch people when they are not even aware of it.

Now I just have to try and keep a house full of boys calm enough that Brayden's jaw can actually mend properly. I think we might be investing in some new board games or something.

Cute boys

I took a couple pictures of Brayden and Caleb hoping to get something that would work for taking advantage of Shutterfly's 50% off canvas prints. I didn't end up getting pictures that would work for canvas, but I think they turned out really cute (especially after Jessica doctored them a bit). I think I might have to print and frame them even if I can't turn them into canvases.