Turkey Days

Not to toot my own horn or anything- but I cooked a turkey for the first time and it was delicious! I know, it shocked me too. I have a healthy disgust for raw poultry and so my friend came over to help me get through it. After a nice butter massage and herbal rub- the cooking part was a piece of cake.

Our friends the Garza's made it a fabulous day filled with food, football, food, black friday ads, music and dance performances, food- but no naps. Next year I want a nap :). Joe played in the ward turkey bowl and for the first time the kids and I made it out to support him. He threw a few touchdown passes and looked great- almost like high school again:).

Christmas Traditions...for beginners

By choice, we are staying home alone for Christmas this year. We will miss our families like crazy but we (i.e. Dawnelle) thought it would be a good idea to establish some traditions and make it a magical season without the stress of travel. I know we are only 2 days into "The Benson 25 Days of Christmas Extravaganza" but I just know that this is going to be the best Christmas season ever! So far the traditions we are establishing have either come from my childhood or from my head but Joe is going to throw some into the mix. He took it pretty hard when his 25 days of football idea was vetoed...:). So here's what we have so far:

1. Making paper snowflakes to hang in the windows. (I can tell we will probably be making these every day :).

2. Christmas Advent Tree (My sister Brittany made this for me with little decorations in the pockets and they get to take one out every day. As an extra twist we put a clue in each pocket as well so that they get to go on a little treasure hunt every night. Yesterday their clue led them to a treat and today they found little snowglobes. And a shout out to my friend Jessie for the great treasure hunt idea!).


3. Candy Cane Countdown to Christmas (they get to untie a candy every day)

4. Daily Christmas Devotional (we read a few scriptures provided by the primary and take turns picking a favorite Christmas song. I think Carter is confused, he keeps calling it family home evening).

5. Christmas Lights!!!! I LOVE driving around looking at Christmas lights and we have done it 2 times in the last 3 days. The kids love it too and even if there is only one strand of lights up we stop and ooooh and aaaaah. Usually there is hot chocolate involved. Sugar free :).

6. We are going to do the 12 days of Christmas and I am super excited!! My family did this growing up and I am itching to do it again!

7. Deliver cookies/candy and sing Christmas carols

Any suggestions? I love to hear what other people do during the Christmas season. I just discovered the other day that I have a Christmas music channel on my tv. Since I live either in my car or at home we are listening to these lovely carols all day. Even Ellie has memorized a few! Here is a sneak peek at my sweet Ellie's Christmas princess dress (note the matching pacifier and the car in her hand :). I love having a girl...

On an almost unrelated topic- I made the candy countdown when Carter was at preschool and Ellie was my helper. I don't know how many candy canes she ate but I think it would probably take 2 hands to count them all! Well, I later spotted one of the candy canes stuck to her pant leg and I had to snap a picture. Probably the reason it was so funny to me was because yesterday she got a sucker stuck on the exact same spot :)!

What makes me smile...

Here are a couple of things that made me smile today:

Carter asked me if there are little people in the traffic lights changing the colors.

Ellie let me read her two books in a row, and then she full on ran away from me when I asked her if she was poopy :).

I went to the store at Cracker Barrel and bought stocking stuffers (GO, it's the best place ever)

Joe did the dishes. We're talking ALL the dishes and the counter is clean. Wierd, but awesome.

A few months back Carter saw a tampon and asked what it was. I choked and said they were for cleaning the toilet. Today I was cleaning and he said "Mom, can I have one of those little toilet cleaners so I can help you?". I hope he isn't going to be thoroughly traumatized when he someday finds out what those are...:).

We made snowflakes for the windows by our front door, it was Carters first time making them and he loved it! Then for FHE we drove around looking at Christmas lights and drinking hot chocolate. Does life get any better than this- I submit that it does not.

Dear Grandma

Dear Grandma,
I miss you. Things are not quite right when you aren't here. I love so many things you do and I want them done just the way that you do them. Like the way you push me on the swing- you pull me WAY back and then let me go. Mom doesn't do it right, she just tries to push me forward first. But she's learning. Almost every night I ask Mom if we can go outside and look at the stars just like you did with me. Sometimes the clouds hide the stars though, why does it do that?


We still have lots of leaves outside- Mom and Dad are not as good of rakers as you are. I'm kind of glad though because I still love to slide into a pile of leaves every day- you have the greatest ideas Grandma:).




I still like to make up my own recipes. Yesterday I microwaved some salt, flour and milk for almost 10 minutes when Mom was distracted making dinner- Mom doesn't have quite as much patience as you have though :).

Do you remember when we went to the corn maze?! I was a little nervous about getting lost but you were a good map reader- and an all around good trail buddy. Ellie got really muddy though, silly girl.



For Family Home Evening tonight we went and looked at Christmas lights and we had hot chocolate for dessert. I loved when your birthday cake was dessert, I wish we could do that more! I hope it's my birthday soon.

Mom and Dad tell me that I'm the luckiest boy ever because you are my Grandma, but I already know that! I love you Grandma, please come play trucks with me really soon. And bring Grandpa, we miss him around here too.
Love,
Carter

The Puppy and The Mailman

Halloween this year was EXTRA memorable for at least 3 reasons:
1) Grandma Benson was here!!
2) Carter was actually something other than a marine!!
3) Our powder room toilet flooded spilling water through the wall and all over our master bathroom/closets (yuck).

Though it was raining we still perservered and did a respectable amount of trick-or-treating with our friends the Sessions and our sweet Grandma. Ellie was a freezing ball of stickiness when we got home but she LOVED it. I made Carter and Ellie messenger bags to put their candy in AND my sisters Brittany and Bonnie collaborated to make all the nieces and nephews super cute Halloween bags so there were plenty of places to put candy and carry it all over the house. There is an immensely talented woman in our ward who turned the bags I made into true awesomeness with the personalized monograms. I thought they looked amazing and Carter still wears his costume for dress-up (yes, I said dress-up).

Our ward had their trunk-or-treat at our old Bishops Christmas tree farm and the kids waited almost a half hour in the cold drizzle because Carter really wanted to go on a hay ride. The happy memory will have been well worth the wait! Joe was the chili cook-off judge and he took his responsibility very seriously. He was a fair, unpartial though sometimes harsh judge :).

Couple of extra confessions:
1)okay, our neighborhood had a big halloween party the week before Halloween and I didn't have their costumes ready sooooo....they were both marines...
2)we totally grew the big pumpkin in that picture!! Carter couldn't bear to cut into it so a little permanent marker turned it into a masterpiece.

Our $30 zuchini

If our vegetables continue to grow at the sparse snails pace they have been then this, our first zuchini, cost us about $30 to grow! I think I mentioned before that between the lumber, dirt, seeds and plants it wasn't cheap to put this garden together and Carter and I have not produced much vegetation (though Carter doesn't know that- he thinks the garden is awesome and fruitful :) but I tell myself this is my learning year. I have never grown my own garden before- and gardening in the south is a whole new ball game with different bugs than we had back in Kansas (where I grew up) and our soil here stinks as well. In one picture Carter is holding our beautiful zuchini as well as a shrimpy store bought zuchini- he was pretty proud of how great ours looked. We sauteed them up with some olive oil, onion and garlic salt and it was delicious! We now have a whole one pumpkin growing as well as one banana squash and lots of tomatoes- maybe things are looking up for the Benson garden!

My Monkey

All who see Ellie on a regular basis know that her hair is almost always stuck up in a "Pebbles" style ponytail on top of her head. Her hair doesn't grow well on the sides so I don't have many options. She was sitting so happily on my counter the other day, playing in my sink, so I experimented with a few new do's. I showed Carter and he said:

"Uh, Mom- she looks like a monkey".

So we took it out and went with the "Pebbles" ponytail once again!

Carter, me and our green thumbs!

I figured that I needed to grow a garden this year. I told Joe we would save lots of money on vegetables but when you factor in the cost of the wood for the raised bed, the dirt, the seeds, the plants and the fact that we have only harvested 6 tomatoes and some peas we are definitely just counting it as a learning experience instead. For some reason we grow beautiful pumpkin vines, squash plants and watermelon plants but NO ACTUAL VEGETABLES themselves. If anyone knows why that would be please let me know. The first thing Carter asks EVERY morning is to go look at our tomatoes and peas- thankfully they grow okay. He loves it when the tomatoes start to turn orangey-red and his eyes shine with excitement. That is all I need to remind me of why we are growing a garden!

Grandma Time!

Well this is another post that is a few months late in coming! We are so blessed to have a Grandma Benson- everyone should be so lucky! Joe's Mom is amazing and every time we see her the trips are too short, and we miss her like crazy when she goes. We love you Grandma!!

Ode To Brittany

Many moons ago (almost 3 months!) my sister Brittany and her brave husband James drove 16 whole hours here with their entire family (three kids 5 and under AND Britt's pregnant with #4) in the ultimate show of love. My sister is one of those supermom's who puts all of us to shame and I always enjoy being around her and gleaning tidbits of her vast mommy knowledge. In my almost 2 weeks with her I learned many things. Here is a brief list:

--How to do Ellie's hair with elastics!
--How to cook ribs and onions straws
--That chalk + spray bottles= hours of entertainment
--How to make a raised bed garden planter
--That I can and should make my own jam
--That you can easily fit two adults, five kids AND an Ikea bookcase in one minivan (Joe- I want one!!)
--Dollar stores are indeed awesome
--You can be pregnant and dang cute
--every mommy needs a power nap (there's no shame in it)
--And, she lives MUCH MUCH MUCh too far away...

And a big shout out to James for being totally awesome and finishing Joe's entire honey-do list. Joe is quite pleased that I no longer nag him about all of those things:). I have, of course, found plenty of other things to nag him about.

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Somehow I have no pictures of James, darn! And I forgot to mention that Grandma Bensons trip overlapped a little and all the kiddos LOVED her (no surprise there:).

By jove, I think he's got it!

So after almost 6 years of marriage I do believe that Joe is beginning to "get" me! Thursday night I put the kiddos to bed and ran to see a movie with the ladies in my ward and when I came home I found an almost completely clean AND vacuumed house AND he had put all my dirt into my raised garden bed (something I have been procrastinating because there were 10 bags and each was 40 pounds). I noticed the second I walked in the door and my jaw literally dropped. It's not that Joe doesn't help around the house much (well, even he would admit he doesn't) but only a few times in our marriage has he ever done something all on his own like this. He said he did it because the next day was my birthday. It was the perfect gift! EXACTLY what I would want- he finally gets me!

Hilton Head

Over a month ago we took what we believe to be our very first family vacation. What I mean by this is that we were not going to visit anyone, no one was getting married and there was no holiday involved. We just packed up the car (not very well as it turned out, a lot of shopping was required once we arrived) and drove to Hilton Head Island South Carolina! We met up with our friends the Bettes (whose vacation we actually invited ourselves along for- thank you!) and hit the beach, ate yummy food, scootered, swam in the pool and enjoyed a long weekend. We even stopped off in Savannah on the way home. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, sunburns and all, and though we do love visiting family and friends we will definitely hit the road as a family again very soon. And by soon I mean when the humidity goes away and being outside is bearable again!

Elise Marie Benson

Our Ellie-bellie turned one today. It makes me happy and sad all at the same time. We didn't do much for Carter's first birthday and I have always felt bad about that (my mentality then was that he would never remember, I still feel that way but I will remember :) so I stayed up super late last night putting streamers up and blowing up balloons to put all over her floor and the house for when she woke up. Carter was more excited than she was but she does love those balloons, she can't quite figure them out. Elise is SO different from Carter! She loves to hold things, especially soda bottles or cups with lids and straws, and will turn into a crazy person when I try to take it away. She is a very opinionated eater and refuses to eat anything slimy (bananas, pears, baby food, most healthy things) so I have had to get really creative to keep her alive. Since she weighs 22 1/2 pounds I think we're okay though:). She didn't crawl until she was 10 1/2 months old, probably because she knows exactly how to manipulate her mother (who can do almost anything now with only one hand). Joe taught her how to throw a ball back and forth and now she LOVES to play with balls and if we walk by one in the store she must hold it, or else. And "else" isn't pretty, she can throw quite the convincing tantrum. Carter was not a tantrum kind of guy. I knew having a girl was going to be quite the roller coaster ride. We've never called her "princess" or overly pinked her up, she's more of a tomboy in our eyes- probably because we only have boy toys at our house. She loves her paci and blankie and when she is REALLY tired she will lay her head on my shoulder and snuggle to sleep. She loves the beach and swimming- she has only done each activity once but she was SO adorably happy. She loves her big brother and although he has discovered the joy of antagonizing her she always wants to be near him. She loves the bathtub and thinks she can crawl, stand up and lay down in the there so I have to bathe with her for her safety. She sticks EVERYTHING smaller than a tennis ball in her mouth, Carter did not do this!! It's probably for the best though as my house gets swept and vacuumed a lot more these days. The last year has been wonderful, though my right arm still gets a little sore on days when Ellie really needed the up-close view of me cooking dinner or changing the laundry or grocery shopping (which I almost refuse to do with kiddos right now). I know these days aren't going to last forever but for now I will relish every moment of being her whole world. We love you Elise. We waited a little while for you, with the miscarriage and everything that happened before and after, you were worth the wait. We're sorry we wanted a boy so very badly- really we just wanted an Ellie-bear.

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Look what I did!

I made the baby AND the dress- pretty cute work if I do say so myself. I'm in charge of a Relief Society craft night (for the record, I am terrible at being in charge of things) and for March we made pillowcase dresses. It was a lot of fun and once we got the hang of it, it wasn't hard either! It's now one of my favorite Ellie dresses and I want to make her another one for Easter. If only I could make something for Carter to match...

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And yes, I know they both still have pacifiers. But look how cute they are, and they both sleep well so I'm not going to rock the boat. I'm a pretty casual Mom who knows when to pick her battles. Or a wimp, whatever...

Memory Lane

What a wonderful morning I've had! Ellie and Carter woke up at 7:15 this morning but Ellie went back down at 8:45, Carter has been playing independently or watching a show and I have been looking through old pictures for over 2 hours! My parents sent me two huge boxes that have giant folders filled with pictures and souvineers of each year of my life. I've only looked through 3 years worth and I can't stop smiling :). I love remembering the crazy things we siblings would do- shaving cream fights, playing in the rain, and the mud. And remembering people from my past whom I love and miss- The DeShazers for instance, and the Pattersons. I've also found some wonderful blackmail photos, my favorite being the picture of my brother Bryon after we had painted his face to look like a clown- complete with mascara. Mostly it was important for me to remember how much I loved growing up in my family. I love that I know they loved me, I was practically a mother to Breckon, McKenna and Briley and they made me feel important. I love that we did fun things- we bummed around Disneyworld and Florida for almost a month, we scuba certified and went camping! My parents provided us opportunities to live, serve, and laugh and documented it all with a plethera of photos. Thank you for that. And thank you for loving me even though I wore a variety of deplorable outfits throughout my life and my hair was disgustingly long (you guys kind of dropped the ball there)...

C is for Carter, and concussion

So on Saturday Carter received a giant bear hug from a friend that knocked him down hard onto the concrete. He cried quite a bit but we really didn't think anything of it. Sunday he seemed fine but then monday he was acting a little odd- he would fall asleep on the floor or his chair and he had no energy, he wouldn't eat much and he cried a lot. All VERY off behaviors for my child and yet I thought maybe he was just getting sick. When the behaviors continued on Tuesday I got worried. We figured, better safe then sorry and so Joe took Carter to the ER last night where he was such a trooper. He let them take his temperature, his pulse, touch his ouchie bump on his head and stayed very still through an entire catscan! Joe said he was so quiet and brave but often there would be little silent tears running down his cheeks. The catscan tech was very impressed that they didn't have to sedate our little munchkin. Apparently he had a little concussion and they call all of these symptoms part of post concussion syndrome. He's gonna be fine- but if he's anything like his Dad we are in for quite a few more trips to the ER in our future...

Celebrating Valentines in March

I got a tip from a gentleman at church to check out the Valentines candy clearance at CVS. So I checked it out today and was not disappointed. Do we need all this chocolatey sugary yumminess? No, but I got it all for $4!! I've got to hide it all from Carter and myself because we cannot be trusted to control ourselves...

Eating 101- What Not To Do...

Things I never let Carter eat until he was WELL over 1 but Ellie (10 months) has eaten...

--Churro at Costco

--McDonalds cheeseburger

--Soda (diet- does that make it worse or better?)

--Brownie & Chocolate Cake

Have I gone a little too lax in my parenting this go-round?

What They Are Doing...

Carter Taft
- He can reach the garage door opener on tippy-toes and open the garage, for some reason that made me sad. He's getting so big so fast...
-He is an amazing scooter-er! We move the furniture and set up a course inside (I use Joe's scooter) and he can lap me within three times around the course. He's super quick, can turn a corner on a dime and has little fear (so he HAS to wear a helmet at all times).
-Carter and I were SUPER sick on Wednesday and once when I had to excuse myself to go lose my lunch (or whatever I lost, I hadn't eaten in almost 24 hours), I came back to find Carter feeding Ellie her applesauce. What a helper.
-I discovered this week that he can, and wants to, get dressed all by himself. I know this should have come sooner but I stunt his growth so he will stay young and dependent on me :). Apparently it's not working...
-He can carry Elise, though I might add this is a super supervised activity :).

Ellie-Belly

-grabs my hand & pushes it away when I am sucking her nose, or feeding her yummy food that she doesn't like the texture of (I may have my first picky eater)

-her hair is finally growing, it's long enough to use a little elastic band!

-she has learned to clap. It's adorable to watch them try to get those hands together and miss but then to have sweet success and flash a giant grin :).

-she can drink out of a sippy cup like a champ. As a side note, Carter weaned himself at this age but Ellie is still going strong in the nursing department.

-she crawled her first few paces yesterday, though she then flattened out on the floor and resorted to reaching. My kiddos are a little slow in this area and while it worried me with Carter, with Ellie I don't mind a bit because I know how much harder life is with a mobile child. Which reminds me we should probably go buy gates today...

-she is the best waker-upper I have ever seen. She smiles, plays peekaboo, laughs for no apparent reason and pats my back rigorously when I first get her out of bed.

Here is a rare picture of me and my munchkins. So now people can know that yes, my children do have a mother...