Rain Rain Rain!!

Well we went to the zoo and it was on and off drizzle rain the first few hours that we were there, but then it started to pour, it shorted our stay, but two of the three kids, the boys, had a lot of fun playing in the rain.  It was so warm.  Julia did not want to get wet and would not share the ONE umbrella that we brought!  Needless to say, we now have an umbrella for each person in the family and also a pair of rain boots.  I guess this takes the place of gloves, hats and snow boots!!

Here is Julia being Julia, not sharign the umbrella! 

Sawyer thought it was a lot of fun to play in the rain.  Not much different than a splash park, because it was soooo warm!!

Houston Zoo

For Columbus Day, it was free day at the zoo, so the kids and I headed downtown to see the zoo.  We stopped and had lunch with Dennis at his work and a lady at his work, loaded the kids up with freebies.  The greatest freebie was a backpack, so that they could carry all thier own stuff at the zoo.  Here they are standing in front of a eagle with vines growing all over it.  It was way cool, things grow like crazy here in Houston. 

This was so beautiful!  I wanted the kids to sit on this branch for a picture, but there is a big sign on the brach that says to keep off!  These huge trees, where the branches grow down to the ground and then back up again are my favorite!!  Aren't the kids so cute in thier halloween shirts!!  Thank you Grandma Updike!

This was way toooo cool.  In the aquarium area, there was a tube right through the middle of the water that the kids could crawl through, of course, I had to take a picture!! Ryan thought it was the coolest thing ever!

This picture was taken toward the end of the day.  It ws not very hot, but it was raining a little and it was SUPER humid, so we were really moist.  The zoo was a lot of fun, we did not get to see everything, but we are for sure going to go bcak again and again!

New Baby Alex and big sister Gabby

Alex Lee Hansen  August 28, 2009

I was able to fly out to Utah the beginning of October to see my new nephew, Alex.  This is my sister, Mandy's baby boy.  I had a lot of fun hanging out with the Hansens and my mom.  It was a great weekend.  We ate some great food, (always a favorite of mine) enjoyed each other's company, took a ride in the mountains to see the coming of autumn and giggled.  Gabby is sure turning into a cute little girl and the thiings she says are so cute!! Alex is a darling little boy and looks just like his daddy!(anyhow, that is what I think)  It was a good weekend and I hope to do it again soon!

2 postings with no pictures

#1) Last night we had brownies for our family home evening treat. It must not have settled well with Sawyer, because in the middle of the night we were awoken to him omitting it form his body through his mouth. Of course, the middle of the night clean up is never that fun, especially on our white carpet with the color of dark brownie throw-up. I was not happy and Sawyer was being his normal AWESOME self and asked me sooo nicely, "Mom, are you done cleaning up the mud?" I said, "WEll Sawyer it is throw-up." Then in is matter-of-factly voice says, "WELLLLLLL, I threw up mud!!!" (I am sure you can imagine the color, after eating dark chocolate brownies)
I just had to laugh, even though the last place I wanted to be in the middle of the night iscleaning up throw-up! What a character!!

#2)The girls in this family, Julia and myself, are not morning people. Getting up in the morning is the last thing that we want to do. Well needlessly to say, getting Julia up to go to school every morning is not a fun activity. Well you can not believe how happy this week has been when I have gone upstairs to get her up and she is already in the tub!! What motivated this behavior??? The chance to read!! After Ryan goes to bed each night he gets to stay up for a little while and read. We have not let Julia do this because she is so hard to get up in the morning. SO when she asked why she does not get to read in bed, I told her because she is too hard to get up in the morning. So I said that if she got up all by herself without me having to fight her for a week, then she could read in bed. Welll it is working marvelously! And all because she wants to read!! I hope my kids always like to read as much as they do now!

always playing catch up

well I am finally caught up through September and if you are really lucky, I might start October before MONDAY, but no promises. Enjoy the last 6 entries!!

Building!!!

Dennis and the kids enjoy spending a lot of time in the yard doing yard work and tinkering! I love our yard, but mostly looking at it and playing in it!! I will be the first to admit that I do not like yard work! Good thing that it is Dennis's favorite thing to do!! So one night Dennis picked for the activity for Family home Evening to bulid a shelter on the playhouse. EVery one was sooo excited, except me, but I did participate. i could not believe how fast they were at going and finding their own hammers!! Well I must admit, it was not the most boring thing that I ever did, and it was very awesome to see Dennis and the kids so happy. The shelter project might not make it through the next storm, but if it is true that a family that works together stays together, then at least we will make it through the storm.

ITZ

ITZ is a chucke cheese gone way good!! It is a pizza buffet/arcade. Way more fun than chucke cheese. It was a lot of fun and the food was so much better! Ryan has been begging to go here ever since we moved here and we finally did it. It was fairly expensive, so we will not be frequent guests, but super fun! Dennis introduced them to a shooting game that they loved, I thought it was a little much, but they loved playing it and since they were only shooting overgrown bugs I guess it was not that bad, just very gross!! of course they got a ton of tickets and spent way to long deciding what to get!! Fun night all in all!!

Sawyer goes to school

Well Sawyer gets to go to school one day a week this year. To him it is school, really it is just an organized play date, where moms get a break. There is only myself and two other moms doing it. There are three cute little boys altogether! it is fun. Sawyer was SUPER excited to go and could not wait, he got to pack his own lunch and ring the doorbell all my himself. He was soooo excited that he rung the doorbell 5 times. It was super hillarious. He is having a lot of fun and learning to share, super important!!

Ryan gets the rank of bobcat(finally)

Well Ryan has been in scouts for almost a year now, and he finished the requirements for his bobcat about 9 months ago and finally got his rank! He really enjoyed it. I am his scout leader(suprise, suprise!!) and am getting to spend a lot of scout time with him. When Ryan is taking scouts seriously, he is a grand young man.

Jam Session-WII style

We are really lucky and have a house it a GRAND neighborhood. The people are so nice and the kids have some great friends. Ryan's really good friend Elijah comes over a lot and his older brother comes with him a lot also. Ryan plays with him everyday that I let him. They mostly play at our house, which I love, or in the front in the cul-de-sac. This particular day they came over to play the wii. All five kids, our three, plus the two nieghbors, got to participate, so it was a lot of fun. Sawyer was really getting into it dancing and singing his brains out! It was so cute. it was driving everybody else crazy though!

FROG FACE

Sawyer and I have been having a lot of fun going to play group. A grand thing about living in a big city is that you get to go to a lot of fun places. This particular week we went to one of the children's museums.
Unfortunatley I forgot my camera, so I did not get to take any pictures, but I did take this one when we got home. There was a lot of really fun things to do. My favorites included an old car that was painted with chalk board paint-so you could write with chalk all over it, a parachute to play with and the face painting. Sawyer's favorite, a toy made for infants to sit under and look at that had a mailbox on it. He made one piece of mail and then for hours would put it in the mail and walk around and take it out. TOOOO funny. He did like getting his face painted, he know exactly what he wanted, a green frog. I think that it is the cutest thing in the whole world. The best part, the children's museum was in a mall, the best mall, so we went shopping when we were done. What a great day!!!

Galveston Beach

Well we went to the beach for the first time on Labor Day. WE LOVED IT. It was so much fun. We loved jumping in the waves, playing in the sand, looking for and trying to catch crabs and cool little fish, seashells hunting, relaxing in the WARM WARM WARM water, and just being together in the ocean!!! We will definately go back time and again!

LIZARDS

If anyone knows Ryan very well, you know that he loves, animals, especially reptiles and amphibians. Well our yard in TX, is a gooey creature paradise. There are lizards everywhere, frogs, toads and even snakes. Luckily we have only seen one(not me, even luckier) snake, and it was not a bad one. Dennis sees the frogs and toads when he is mowing the yard. And we all see the lizards all over all the time. Ryan is very fast at catching these little creatures. Here is a lovely picture of him with one of the bright green ones.

Our New home!!!

Well we did it agian!! We moved from Wyoming to Tomball, TX. It is NW Houston. Dennis took a transfer with his company to Houston. So here we are in the south. We are looking forward to living in a big city and all that has to offer. So look forward to all the fun things that you can read about that we are doing in Texas. We will miss Wyoming, especially our families, but we are excited for a new place. if you would like our new contact information email me at birdchrissy@hotmail.com and I will send it to you. Welcome Texas!!!

Car ride to Houston

It was a long drive from Green River, Wyoming to Houston, TX. it brought back a lot of memories from all out trips between wyoming and kansas. One thing I remeber the most was the beautiful sunflowers in Kansas in August, and we got to see them on this trip. Also on the way we saw the most beautiful rainbow I had ever saw!! The picture does not do it justice at all, i was driving in construction, so i did not get to take a good picture. It was a full one and the kids all thought it was the grandest thing ever. It was a great sign of happiness for our new home in Houston.

Rainforest Cafe

One thing that we promised the kids from the first time that we told them that we were moving to Houston, was to eat at the Rainforest Cafe the first night that we are there. So we did and it was a lot of fun. It is a great place for kids, food is not that great, but the atmosphere is grand. The kids love it. The best things, according to the kids, is the volcano dessert. It is a huge brownie sundae with a sparkler in it. You might already know, but Sawyer hates fire. So he was not as thrilled for the dessert, just look at him in the picture. We are going to have a lot of fun in Houston!!!!

Armpit wipe

So a very funny/wierd thing that Ryan does is the armpit wipe. It all started about a year ago when we were at the Little America Restuarant and Ryan was going to eat his meal and I saw him pick up his fork, wipe it is his armpit and then start eating. I asked him what he was doing and he informed me that he was "cleaning" his fork to eat with it. Of course being the MATURE parents that Dennis and I are, we started laughing out heads off,(I mean who thinks of thier armpit when they want something clean) and said something stupid like, you could wipe it in your bum also if you would like! of course he got mad at us and to our great luck, the waitress came at that moment and saw that Ryan was upset and asked him why. Being the honest kid that he is, he informed the waitress that we just told him to wipe his fork off in his bum!! I know, our own fault. Anyhow, for some reason this method of cleaning his utensils is a instinctive habit. We are constantly catching him picking up a utensil and wiping it in his armpit to eat with it. I am not sure how he pick up on this or why, but he does it all the time. It is quite humerous, you have to admit.

Our New Pool

The greatest thing about our new house is the pool. We love it and have so much fun playing/relaxing in it. The kids want to be in there everyday and ask all the time to get it. It feels great in the hot hot hot weather of Texas. It is great becasue there is a gate you have to go through to get to it and the kids have been forbidden to even touch the gate, so it is working out well keeping them out when we are not with them. Dennis and I have even been able to enjoy it while the kids are in bed and it feels great. The kids think they are the luckiest kids in the world. It is so much fun!!!

1st Day of School

Ryan and Julia started school last week. Julia was very nervous, been she is doing well and is so happy that she was able to meet two friends, Emily and Sophia. She giggles every time she says Sophia and then says, " you know like Lis Sophia." little does she know that the name Sophia was a name before it was a jewelry!! Ryan did not seem nervous at all and in fact would not let me walk him to his classroom, he said he is big enough to do it himself. He also uses an alarm this year and gets up by himslef and showers and get ready all by himself. I love that he is so independant, even if it means he is growing up! All in all, I think the kids are enjoying school!!

Chick-Fil-A

One great thing about being in a big city is the unlimited supply of eating out!! The kids and I have found a favorite place to go. Chick-Fil-A on Tuesday nights. It is family night and there are some great perks. First of all all kids get to spin the wheel and get free food. So they got free ice cream. there is also kid entertainment, balloon animals, hello kitty visits, a playland, and of course the mascot, the cow. Sawyer loves the cow and in a 30 minute period will give him about 10 hugs. I love it because it tastes so yummy and the kids want to play so they eat well and are very happy when we leave. They asked if they could go there every Tuesday, and even though I would, we should probably make it a max of once a month.