Free Range Family

Isn't this the most precious couple of pictures you have ever seen?   Yeah, I came across these two being oh so adorable yesterday morning. Lon was watching them while I did a few loads of laundry during his mid shift break at home. He hollered at me to come look at the kids and I found the cutest two children ever! Alan was gently laying on Anna's belly while she played on her play mat and he was telling her about the loin and their faces in the mirror. He was pretty much explaining reflections to her! I thought it was the sweetest thing ever, I tried to snap a few pictures of them playing but you know how well a mama can hide with a camera lol, before I knew it I had both kids attention. :) But it was still a very sweet moment for the whole family! You can really tell that they love each other so much, and that melts my heart so.  I love my family! How did I get so lucky? 

I have always understood the importance of children being outside on a daily basis. When I was young, my parents would not let us come inside for a while so that we would get out fill of being outdoors. Somedays I hated it, but now I am very grateful for it. I wanted to do a similar thing with my children. Before we moved to this new house, we did not have a yard to play outside. I would try my best to take Alan to parks on a weekly basis but it would not always happen. Now that we have a new yard, I have been trying to take him out more and more. According to ABC News, nearly half of the children in Alan's age group do not go outside at least once a day. The ones that do usually get their outdoor activities in at daycare or preschool. The remaining 49% who do take their preschoolers outside are usually exercisers themselves.  "Parents might not realize the importance of getting preschoolers to exercise when they tend to be thin, but doing so instills good habits that can pr

I have so much to be thankful for, I am still realizing this everyday. I know I have been MIA, but we are still getting our new place figured out. Earlier last week, my cousin Blake and his girlfriend Maddie had their beautiful baby boy. He was born at 5:30 in the evening and is a healthy seven pounds! They named him James. :) What a sweetheart he is! We have yet to meet him but cannot wait! I bet he is just gorgeous! We had a wonderful Thanksgiving. The children let Lon and I sleep in some and when I woke up, I made a big breakfast of eggs and bacon for everyone. Alan and I made four dozen pumpkin cookies for everyone, it was quite a bit harder than making cupcakes with him. There is a lot more to making pumpkin cookies than just mixing everything into one bowl. But they turned out fabulous nonetheless! Everyone enjoyed them, a complete success! First, we went to Great Grandma Carol's house. Aunt Carolyn and her whole family were there, including the adorable Miss Sophie. My

Happy Thanksgiving!  I thought I would participate in this on my Facebook this year and also post them on here. It is always a good idea to be thankful, not only over November but everyday of every year. But for now, here is my 22 days of thankfulness! November 1: I am thankful that my family is not affected by Hurricane Sandy. I cannot imagine what some people are going throuhg right now because of that storm. Even though my family is struggling with our move etc., we are at least safe and sound. I pray for anyone affected by Hurricane Sandy. May you all find your way home. Our family does not have alot to give, but we have already donated to funds helping these people. I urge everyone to do the same! Our American brothers and sisters need some help! November 2: I am thankful for the gas man and MDU today. If not for him stopping by during his lunch break because they were so busy yesterday, we may have moved into our new house too soon and been in somewhat of a dangerous situatio

Still fixing and figuring out A LOT of things with our new house and I still have yet to get our internet set up at all. Plus, I am so busy dealing with everything, I barely have time to sit down during the day, let alone write a blog post. Le sigh...  But we are still here, still alive and still HAPPY, so that is good. Here is what has been happening with us this week. Let me say, I love where I work!!  I love that my job has occasional little perks like getting ballon swords and shields blown for your three year old... FOR FREE!!!!  This was Alan's treat I brought home from work this last Saturday. Yeah, I knew there was a reason I worked there lol! Not really, there are many  other reasons, but the perks are just wonderful! One way to find out if you stay at home too much??? You take pictures of fallen towels because they look artistic to you. Check! We have been having unbelievable amounts of problems with this new house. I do not even want to fully go into it y

It snowed over the weekend. We were the last people in Montana to have a snowfall, I think Missoula got it first, but we got it pretty light thankfully. The day started out with light rain and ended with heavy snowfall. By the next morning, there was a blanket of snow all over the ground. Alan was so excited when he saw it falling, it was almost like he had never seen snow. I guess it was a year ago that he last saw snow and he was really little. :) But the first words out of his mouth that morning was, "Mama, let's go play in the snow!!" He could not even wait for his snow pants to be washed. My little snow lover, he is just like his mama! We went outside for maybe only twenty minutes but by the time we were done, there was not a bit of snow untouched in our yard. Alan ran from one fence to the other, all around his tree and chased after me with snowballs. He would trip and fall face first into the snow, giving himself a "white wash" (I think that

I did not anticipate it being so hard to move out of our old place, but it was. We had previously lived there for two years, moved in when Alan was still a baby. I had picked it out, it was my baby. I loved the bay windows, the fireplace, the whole house. It was 105 years old but full of life and character in my opinion. It was our third apartment to live in as a couple but our first to move into with two bedrooms. Alan pretty much grew up in that house. It was the first and only house he remembers living in. A lot of memories were made in those several rooms. I discovered how truly hard it was to move while moving. I was packing up various things in Alan's room, when I remembered all the nights I spent with Alan in his room: dressing him, rocking him to sleep, playing with him and comforting him when he woke up scared at night. Alan took his first bath in this bathtub. He learned how to use the potty with that toilet. This was MY child's childhood home and we were getting

I am quite late on posting but we got rid of internet at our new place, so my posting options have become limited. I do not want to abandon this blog though, so here we go! Be sure to tune in the rest of this week for more updates on our family! At four months old, Anna Ariel: *Weighs 10 pounds and 14 ounces and is 25 1/2 inches long. *Has grayish blue eyes just like her brother's and dark red-ish auburn hair. Its down to her shoulders blades now too! *Can sit up against the corner of our couch with supervision! It makes her feel like such a big girl! She loves it! *Can now sit up only slightly supported. She is so strong with her little core now! I think she is almost ready for a jumper! *Has her own little language she uses to communicate with us now. She will tell us a whole story or cuss us out when she is angry. I love it so much! *Can roll from her back to her belly and the other way too. And NOW, it does not scare her when she does it lol. Big girl! *Is s

I attempted to take Anna's three month old photos just before Halloween. I say attempted because in my  opinion, they did not turn out as nice as I had wished but they were good enough. For Alan's three month photos, we put him in a stocking as it was so close to Christmas. I love those pictures and wanted to try and think of something equally cool. That's when I thought of the pumpkins. I figured we would cut out little holes on the bottom of the pumpkin and put her in it like a Bumbo seat. Well after trying this with not a lot of luck (I kept getting her stuck in it and upset) we decided to just take pictures with her next to it. So here are the first set of pictures, unedited still. I will posted the edited versions later. I like the way the natural sunlight makes shadows on everything, this makes for a cool effect when I edited them. I think they turned out pretty decent, for how crazy the whole photo shoot was. Here is the edited versions too:

I have also neglected posting about Cordelia's party, in addition to posting about our moving problems, because I have yet to develop the pictures from the party and correlate them with the ones her mama Heather took. But I have the pictures from Heather, so I guess now is as good of a time as ever to do this post. I need to stop slacking! Well... maybe once I am unpacked. Anna's friend Cordelia had her first birthday party last month. Since she is a Halloween baby, her party was Halloween themed. All of the children dressed in costumes, ate creepy Halloween food and played some spooky games. Cordelia's older sister, Tatum and Alan ran all over the house, terrorizing the younger children. They were wild but had quite the fun time. Heather was so creative, she used lots of Pinterest projects to make many different Halloween snacks. There were peanut butter eyeballs, pretzel spiderwebs, apple and marshmellow toadstools and even jello worms! I loved how cool everything looke

October was a good month for my family. We participated in several fall activities, found a new place to move into, celebrated my two year blogiversary, I worked Color me Rad and we even had some Halloween fun! What a busy month! Here's what we did: This month we celebrated Lon's birthday and Uncle Aaron's birthday. Alan and I made Lon a birthday card and birthday cupcakes, and we got him some new clothes for his birthday. Anna's friend Cordelia also celebrated her first birthday, she had a fun costume party at her house for it. Mama Heather made so much cool food, it was so awesome! I also celebrated my two year blogiversary, along with it came some new changes to my blog. Hope everyone likes it! Its not a big anniversary but Lon and I also celebrated our year and a half wedding anniversary. We are pretty excited to have made it a year and a half! :D We hope for at least sixty more years! We also celebrated Halloween this year. Alan is old enough to enjoy Hallowee

Friday, I said that I would post about all of our current moving challenges and obstacles we have faced this past month with our dream house. Well if irony would not have it, we had even MORE challenges and obstacles presented to us this whole weekend. Thus making it near to impossible for me to even have a chance to write this post, let alone actually proof and post it. Ugh life is so difficult lately. I remind myself daily that we are in soooooooooooooooooooooooooo much better of shape than a lot of those living on the East Coast, but I still find myself occasionally slipping and complaining. Its frustrating, really. To prevent myself from just completely sounding like a cry baby whiner, I have been with holding information from you, my readers, again. I am sorry, I seem to keep doing that. What I am realizing is that this is not really whining, this blog is a form of a venting system for me as well as a chronicle of my life. Looking back on my life so far, I enjoy remembering the h

Happy Friday everyone! I am sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo very delighted to say that today is one of our last days in this old house! We only have beds in our living room right now, from our co-sleeping adventure last night (for another post lol) and we will be moving them out Monday! We just need the MDU gas man to give us the okay on our house. We have had a lot of problems with this house we are moving into (I will write a post about this today) so I am very glad that we have finally gotten everything fixed and can move in! Hooray! Not much else going on today or this weekend, just a ton of unpacking and cleaning the old apartment. I might try and take a break to visit my friend Jessica, who had her second baby last Monday, or take Alan to a park but other than that, just unpacking! With all of this moving we are doing, I am reminded how lucky my family is to have possessions to move right now. In some places arcoss the states, there are people who do not have anything right now.

We had a good Halloween this year. Alan was finally old enough to truly enjoy everything and it was Anna's first Halloween. To answer all my curious readers, Alan was the Incredible Hulk and Anna was a cupcake. :) I dressed up as Anna's birthday girl and she was my cupcake. I woke up Hallween morning to this wonderful post on Facebook from a great friend. I instantly shared it on my own page, but for those of you who are not my friends, here is the post: Tomorrow, a lot of creatures may visit your door. Be open minded. The child who is grabbing more than one piece of cand y might have poor fine motor skills. The child who takes forever to pick out one piece of candy might have motor planning issues. The child who does not say "trick-or-treat" or "thank you" might be painfully shy, non-verbal, or selectively mute. If you cannot understand their words, they may struggle with developmental Apraxia of speech. They are thankful in their hearts and minds. The