Lovin' life

Life seems to be back to the uneventful for a while and I love it. We spend our days reading, playing the piano, doing laundry, playing games, doing dishes, cooking and just being together and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Remi and Broden both started piano lessons in November and are doing great! They take them from a 12 year old girl in our ward and they love it. She is amazing! She played for the primary program and also got called as a ward pianist and plays in sacrament meeting. Such talent. Remi and Broden are really good and practice every day. They also do reading ever day. Broden is doing a book where he learns to read in 100 days and is a little over half way done and I love the results. It is an awesome book! Remi is also becoming quite the reader. She enjoys reading scriptures to us sometimes at night and always has books from school to read. Alissa also likes to do her "piano and reading." She'll sit down at the piano and talk about doing her piano lessons. Then she gets Broden's reading book and wants to do reading. We have done a couple lessons with her, but we are waiting a few months to actually do it hard core.

Parker is so fun these days. He has such a fun personality and is starting to babble things like dadadada, mamamamama, and this morning he was saying mimimimimi, which is how Alissa says Remi. He also likes to say GO and Ba(ball) while he is running and kicking things. He also is getting taller and loves to push the little kid chairs around to get things off the counter. He has succeeded in getting cinnamon rolls, brownies, cups of water, and a knife(scary). He also has learned how to climb out of his high chair and he will stand there and scream until you get him out or he will try climbing down. Sometimes he just sits on the tray in whatever mess he just made eating. This week he had lots of firsts! They are in the pictures below.

Broden kept yelling Parker is in the toilet.  We stopped what we were doing thinking he was playing in the toilet and this is what we found.

Literally in the toilet. Luckily we had just cleaned it.

Yesterday he learned how to climb on to our dining room chairs and on to the table.

And he thinks big people cups are really fun. I think he has spilled water down his front  6 times in 2 days. 

As hard as it is keeping up with him and 3 other little ones I love it. They keep me active and I like the challenge of trying to accomplish things during the day while being a mom. This week we cleaned out, organized and decorated the craft room(that was a 5 day job!) we reorganized toys(again) and made dinner every night without going to the store! I love trying to feed our family healthy meals without spending a ton of money. I love baking and coming up with new recipes that don't have oil and sugar or artificial anything in them. It is fun for me and even more fun when everyone eats it and likes it:)

My goal when I went shopping 2 weeks ago was to make the food last 2 weeks. It did! We only had to get like 6 things at the store. But now we are out of all fresh fruits and veggies and flour! It was nice to have meals planned for 2 weeks. I think I will do that more often. Now I just need to get the guts to ask someone if I can grind wheat at their house because I don't want to risk using my wheat grinder on a transformer. It's supposed to be hard on motors.

It's amazing how much of a difference it makes when we are trying to do what is right. Scriptures, church, prayers, FHE, all these things we have been taught our whole lives. Things still happen(see toilet picture) but we have a different attitude or perspective. Those things don't really matter when you look at eternity. They just give us a chance to laugh while we are learning. Things are still hard, but we know we can do it. We are promised that we won't be tested with more than we are able to handle.