I need your advice...

So I may be opening up the floodgates here, but I need some advice.

Kelton is 3.

Kelton wears a diaper.

I think he is now the oldest child at church who is not potty trained, or potty training.

I do not want to potty train him. I am actually quite happy to just change diapers. I am lazy and only change him in the morning when he wakes up and again if he is messy and then before bed. It's easy. Potty training is a mess. It's not easy. I don't like it. I don't want to do it.

I have potty trained one child, so I should know what I am doing, right? Well... I'd rather not go into that whole story right now. It's depressing. And I think it's the real reason why I never want to potty train another child. How am I supposed to potty train another child when the first one used up my ENTIRE (plus some) potty training patience reserve? And Kelton is headstrong, stubborn, always right, etc..., etc..., etc... I'm afraid one of us might not survive.

So. Help me out here. I need advice, strategies, methods, books, whatever you've got. I want to hear about it. For the sake of a very stubborn 3 year old (who really is a sweet boy) and his already-frusterated-just-thinking-about-it mother, please tell me you've found something that works. Please!

Mesa Temple and a Baptism

This post is a little late, but I wanted to track down some pictures first, and I didn't have my camera with me.

On Friday, January 14th my sister-in-law Tina got to go through the temple for the first time. She asked me to be her escort, so it was a really exciting day for me too. I love being able to hear the temple Matron, or one of her assistants, talk about the temple. This is the third time I've had that opportunity, and I love it every time. The session was in the evening and we didn't take our kids with us. Nate's parents were able to come down and stay with our kids at our house. It was so helpful to have them do that for us. And the kids loved spending time with Grandma and Grandpa.

Then, the next day (Sat. Jan 15th), my niece Hannah (Tina's daughter) was baptized. She's been waiting for about a year for this to happen, so this was a really exciting day for her. It was also exciting for my brother Rob, because he got to baptize her. Also, January 15th is his birthday. So not only did he get to baptize his daughter on his birthday, but he was also baptized on his birthday. So they were baptized on the same day--just many years apart.

Now this is where this post kind of ties into the one about Kelton's birthday. All of these events kind of happened at the same time. So it is because of the temple and the baptism that Kelton was able to celebrate his birthday with both sets of grandparents. (We celebrated Kelton's birthday with the family and the cake on the same day as the baptism.)

Blog post about my blog book :)

A few weeks ago I finished making my blog into a book using Blurb. I just got the finished product today and it is so awesome!
You can arrange your posts however you want, put your pictures where you want, etc... It was really easy to do and didn't take that much time. (granted, I just finished turning my husband's mission journal/letters into a book, so this was a piece of cake.)

The best part is, I was able to buy a Groupon to Blurb a few months ago--$60 value for $20! So, the total for my 150 page harcover book came to $60 and some change, plus about $7 shipping. And I only paid $27 for it. Awesome. (thanks Chad and Erica for letting me know about the groupon!) To anyone who might be contemplating this, it is totally worth it. Now that I have the finished product, I even think it would have been worth paying the full price if I had to. I upgraded the paper to Premium (lustre) and I think it is worth the extra few dollars too. (I think it added $6 or so to the price of my book.) The paper is nice and heavy and has a nice sheen to it. It doesn't have a glare like glossy paper, but is not dull like matte.

Anyway, I am very excited about my new book. It actually inspires me to blog more. I used to keep a written journal. I was actually pretty good at it. Then I had a baby. But I still did a good job about writing every few months. Then I had another baby. Journal entires dropped off to one or two a year. Add baby number 3. My last journal entry was... January 31, 2008... 3 years ago...written just after Kelton was born. Wow. But then I started blogging. I don't really like that it has replaced my written journal, but that's just kind of the way it is. So, now that I have this nice little book, I am inspired to write more so that my "replacement journal" is accurate and not missing any of the little things that make me smile from day to day. I know it's not the same--I don't put the same details in my blog as I would in my journal. But for now, it's better than nothing, right?

So maybe you will see an increase in posts. Maybe not. But if you do, at least you will know why now.

Look who's 3!

Happy Birthday Kelton!!!
Kelton's birthday is today and he is three years old. I can't believe it! I'm starting to think that every time one of my kids has a birthday, I am going to be amazed that they are as old as they are. I don't know if I will ever get used to them getting older. I started asking Kelton about a week ago what he wanted on his cake. I threw out some suggestions, like Lightning McQueen, but when his dad threw out an "A" cake, Kelton was sold. He changed his mind a little depending on the day, but the "A" cake was requested the most. So here it is. I did two things with this cake I had never done before. This was my first ever cupcake cake and I did it using a method called "frozen buttercream transfer." It turned out to be pretty easy, and I'm sure it helped that the "A" and the balls were about the easiest design I could have used to do the frozen buttercream transfer with. (for anyone wondering, the condensed nutshell of the method is: get a picture, put waxed paper over it, pipe in the colored frosting in the appropriate places, freeze, then peel off and put it on the cake.)

Kelton loved his cake. And so did a handful of other adult U of A fans who happened to see it.

He was excited about the candles and us singing to him.

He was not so excited about the flames on the candles being gone after he blew them out...

Cupcakes!!! Kelton loves cupcakes.

Kelton does not love messy hands. My poor kids. I hope I haven't done permanant damage to them. I do not like for them to have messy (with food) hands. And it has rubbed off on them. They don't like having food on their hands and after eating, insist on getting it cleaned off right away.

We actually did the cake yesterday because we had some family gathered together. (I plan to do another post on that when I get some more pictures.) So we also had Kelton open his present from Grandma and Grandpa Burgess after we had cupcakes. He got a wooden train set, similar to the Thomas ones, but at a bazillionth of the price. Kelton has no idea who Thomas is anyway.

He loved it.

So much so, that he went a little crazy.

Earlier in the day, Grandma and Grandpa Webb were at our house. So he got his present from them a day early too. He got a new Zhu Zhu pet with a house and a garage with a car. It really is fun. I didn't realize that Zhu Zhu pets did more than just scurry around aimlessly. My favorite is when the Zhu Zhu pet goes toward the car, makes a car-starting noise then gets in the car and "drives" it. Kelton was having a lot of fun playing with it.

We were really glad that we ended up celebrating Kelton's birthday a day early because at about 2:30 this morning, he woke up with an upset stomach and started throwing up. Nate was such a good husband/dad and took care of him and cleaned everything up. Then he slept on the couch with Kelton the rest of the night. Kelton had a bit of a fever this morning and was really tired today, but he's feeling better now that he was earlier. (Ironically, it was exactly three years previous, 2:30 a.m., that we were on our way to the hospital for him to be born.)

When he first woke up, he didn't want to open his presents, and he was quick to make it known that he didn't want us to wake him up by singing "happy birthday," which is our tradition. After a few minutes, he decided that he did want to open his presents. I was afraid he was going to feel too sick to enjoy it, but he was still really excited to get some new toys and was even smiling and laughing.

Here he is with his daddy, sitting right in the very same spot where they spent most of the night. It's too bad I didn't take a wider angle; you would be able to see the throw-up bucket sitting on the couch next to them. Poor little kid. No fun to be sick on your birthday. Like I said, I'm glad we celebrated yesterday.

Happy New Year?

Here's a great way to start off the new year... have a pipe freeze and break. (Will someone smack the homebuilder and tell them that yes, it does freeze in southern Arizona, quite frequently actually, so pipes should not be exposed.) I don't know how long it had been out there gushing before I found it. I could hear the water but thought it was my neighbor washing something off. I don't know how well you can see in the picture, but a few inches under the spicket, the first elbow joint completely broke and blew off. Water is pouring full blast down out of the pipe. And you can't see this at all because of the shadow, but there is a nice little 2-3 inch deep river over by the trash cans which ran all the way down to the street (this picture is taken on the back side of the house.) So Nate got to go out by the street to turn the water off, which turned out to be not so easy, being that the box was flooded with muddy, ice cold water and filled with rocks. It took a while before Nate could even find the shut-off valve (like maybe 15 minutes) and even longer for him to be able to feel his hands again. When I talked to the guy from the water company, he said he had already been to about 20 houses to turn off the water because they had had the same thing happen. But everything turned out okay. Nate got a cap to screw on to stop the water and fortunately, the broken pipe was outside and not in the house.

So this post should probably be a couple of different posts, but I can never remember what order the posts show up in when you do multiple posts on one day, so they are all lumped into one so I can make sure they are in the order that I want.

Since coming home from Christmas, Damon has become quite the little box climber. He loves, loves, loves to climb up/into any box that is on the floor. Take a look...


And there he goes.

And he's so proud of himself.

Damon has also figured out how to pull up on things to be able to stand up. He hasn't mastered it yet, but we have caught him a couple of times at the bookcase and most recently at the bathtub, throwing toys in to make loud noises. Problem is, he is too little to get back down. Oh, and he also can't figure out how to climb out of the boxes once he gets sick of being in there. So overall, Damon has recently learned that up is easy, down is not.

These next pictures are for Grandma and Grandpa Burgess. The kids love their scooters! We got them out and put them together a few days ago, but it was nasty cold and windy outside (and I think it was raining). So, we pulled the car out and let them ride in the garage. They had a lot of fun.

And how cute are these pajamas?!

How cute is this BABY?!

Grandma and Grandpa Webb gave Damon these pajamas for Christmas (along with the U of A ones) and we put them on him tonight for the first time. I absolutely love the reindeer on the bum. So adorable.