Summer Time

Here are a few phone pictures of what our summer has been like so far. These are from early June.

Park days:

Safari Sam's

We have a biter at our house.  Lily took the brunt of it for a few months.  I think we have may have finally gotten it under control though.

Just hanging out:

:

I found this on the bathroom floor one day.  Eden is such a little artist.  She draws all day long. 

Reading:

Cuddles:

I was sad to pack away all of my "normal" clothes.  It is a strange thing to always be changing sizes. 

One day the kids were looking forward to a promised day to the park, but it was cold and rainy.  So we made a fort in the basement and had a junk food picnic instead.  I was the coolest mom ever that day! It was fun.

Journal

This summer is half way through already, I can't believe it! We are definitely staying busy. Swim team, swim lessons, drive in movies, cub camp, trampoline classes, etc.   My baby bump is coming along as well. That is my summer project, ha!  I have had a great second trimester! Like so good that I don't even feel pregnant good.  It has been sweet relief after wanting to die for a few weeks there.  Kind of kidding.  I am afraid of the scale though.  Last time I weighed in I was only 1 pound away from my final weight with my first 3 pregnancies.  I pretty much don't want to know anymore.  Pregnancy in my thirties is not cool in the body department.  This pregnancy is flying by so quickly!  I feel like every time I think about it another week as gone by.  Being very busy is definitely the way to go. I don't have time to get anxious or stir crazy about it.

The kids are awesome.  The toddler phase is kicking my bootie sometimes, but I still feel in awe of it all most of the time.  They are all becoming little people with their own interests and talents and personalities.  It is so cool!  I think I am going to enjoy motherhood even more in the years to come.

Lately I have felt a little lost in some ways, as an individual.  I have let go of some of the things that I enjoy creatively and that has been weird.  Blogging, photography, and a few things that remind me that I am still a person.  I am not really sure if it I am just on a new path of the ever evolving self or what.  My family needs most all of my attention, and I know that life has lots of seasons so I am not worried that I will never find my individuality again.   It does make me feel a little sad, but I am pretty content so I guess it is a good thing.  I am having so much fun being a mom, but I think I should make some goals for myself too.  I think it is time to dust of the camera and start doing my hair again. Maybe I will bring the blog back to life too.

One thing that perhaps may be shaping me is the desire to homeschool.   I pulled Dallin out of a bad school situation for the last couple of months of the school year last year.  I think having him home for that short time was a good trial period and it ended up giving me the confidence that I totally lacked for being able to pull off home schooling.  He loved it and was so much happier. My relationship with him improved instantly. I realized that it isn't as hard or scary as I thought it would be. It was empowering.  Dallin has no desire to go back to the public school setting so we have joined a great homeschooling group for next year.  I am excited about it and have finally gotten a strong spiritual confirmation for this.  It has been working in my heart for years. Now it feels like a seed that I can't stop from growing anymore.  It just feels right to me and makes more sense to me for my vision that I have for our family.  I am sure eventually I will keep them all home, but I feel that one good solid year with just Dallin and I on this journey will be wonderful.  I don't really have a homeschool identity so I am looking forward to exploring this side of myself and finding out what works for me. But the more I study and learn about it, the more it feels right deep in my soul.  Public school does not feel natural to me anymore.  So that is a start.

I am looking forward to many fun things planned for the rest of our summer.  Peter is doing a couple of relay runs, I am going to Education Week (I get giddy just thinking about it) and we are sandwiching a family Idaho/Utah vacation in between.  We are also getting our house painted.  I think it my have the original paint so I can't wait to see how it turns out!

The rest of May and half of June

Besides birthdays, I know that May and the first half of June were really busy and fun but I don't remember much.  I found a few pictures to help jog my memory, but unfortunately I threw away our May calendar page. This is why it better to be a chronic blogger! Oh well.  I gathered a few things from Facebook and from what I remember here are a few things we did, not in order.  

First, I found some cute baby bath pictures:

Eden lost her 6th tooth!

Father's Day! Eden and I got up early and made Peter's favorite breakfast, german apple pancakes!  We don't make the often so it was a real treat served on china with sausage, bacon and orange juice.

The other kids joined us and we filled out questionnaires about daddy.  Their answers were thoroughly entertaining.  Then we took everything in to sleeping daddy and yelled "Surprise!".  He is a heavy sleeper and forgot that it was Father's Day so we actually surprised him!

We tried to make his day special and I even gave him the day off from diapers.  That is a big deal since I have unofficially dubbed Sundays "Daddy Diaper Day". 

Carter graduated from preschool, which apparently is a big deal.  Peter took him and I had to be somewhere else so I didn't get to see it, but he said it was quite elaborate. I guess I will never know but they sure made it special for everyone.  They gave me a disk with some highlights from Carter's time there.

Dr. Seuss day:

Checking out a police car:

Carter's Class:

Bring an umbrella day:

Checking out a fire truck:

Graduation cap:

His birthday celebrations.  I sent him with our birthday hat and he was so proud to wear it:

Carter loved going to preschool and his teachers were super nice and everything an early childhood teacher should be.  What a great experience!

We were using a warm fuzzy jar to try to get the kids to be more kind to each other.  Then someone stole the M so we had a "war fuzzies" jar!

When there was lots of family in town for Grandpa D's funeral we had a sisters night out and went to the Olive Garden. We left the Dads in charge of the kids. It takes some good guys to walk 16 kids to 7-11 for Slurpees! I look at this pictures and think, wow these kids are really part of something special.

 Here are the girls at Olive Garden. 

 

Father/Son campout. The boys had a great time running around and making s'mores.  Peter decided to try to take Luke.  He said it turned out great and that Luke loved being part of it.  I am sure it was crazy with all 4 boys, but Peter had a great time with them.  

Peter and our 4 oldest ran the Starlight run again this year and re-used the Angry Birds costumes:

With all my blogging laziness I have taken to quick updates on Facebook more these days:

• I was tucking Carter in last night and he started singing "Pants on the Ground"! Thank you to his uncle Luke Dickinson for culturing my child! 
• Laying in bed listening to something about a "secret mission"  (this was on Mothers day morning.  I got breakfast in bed and about a bajillian home made cards. Perfection!)
• Things you say as a mom that you never thought you would: "Do not sign your brother's bum!"
• Carter went out with his uncle yesterday and got spoiled to death! He went to build a bear, sky high, safari sam's, grandma's house, goodwill, mcdonalds and subway! I don't think we can keep up with that Thanks Andy Dickinson, Carter had so muich fun with you!!!
• My first born is now in the double digits! I can't believe it's been 10 years! I just love that little boy who is growing up so fast I can barely believe it.
•  Found out that our Boy dominant family is going to be even more so. Baby boy Dickinson #7 is due December 8th! What a blessing. To answer your FAQ's Yes it was, and I don't know ;) 
• Ever noticed that if you read the first sentence of every page of a book, it still makes sense and you can get through the huge stack that your 3 year old is begging for in pretty good time?
• Leftover birthday cake for breakfast...Yes we do that! #kidsmindsblown
• When you go out with many small children( spaghetti factory) someone may forget pants!
• Very Jealous of Peter. He and Dallin just took off to spend the night at a hotel and spend all day tomorrow at Mt. Hood Adventure Park. Did I mention I am Jealous? Oh, I mean happy for them
• I am now a smart phone owner! A little late to this party but I must say it is blowing my mind! LOVE the voice command and ease of calling any place I ask for, then the GPS telling me what to do. It really is a life saver for a mama with so few brain cells left.
• Poor Carter...I think by now he probably thinks his name is Dall-Tan-Carter!          

Dallin had his pinewood derby in May as well.  My camera arrived with no battery charge, but he worked hard on making a Sponge Bob boat car and enjoyed racing it very much.  

Another memory from May is when we told the kids that we were expecting.  We took them for a little hike in the woods and found a bench. We sat them down all in a row and told them we wanted to have a special family meeting. I was thinking how amazing it was that all 6 kids are still small enough to fit on one bench next to each other.  We sang a few primary songs and then started asking them questions like, Do you like being in our family? (yes!) What makes our family special? (lots of kids) What would make it more special? This one stumped them and for about five minutes they came up with all kinds of answers like, "Be more kind to each other."  and "Clean our room more."  Finally we prompted enough and Dallin said, "Another baby." I don't think he really thought he was right so when we told him he was, all of the kids gasped.  I had told them before that we weren't sure if we would have more kids in our family so they were totally surprised.  Everyone hugged me and had an extra skip in their step on the way back to the car.  

Here is a video of Dallin receiving his Bear award. Way to go Dallin!

Birthday Season Part 4

To top off all of the birthday happenings, we threw a big combined party with a Skylander theme, since all three boys are really into that. The boys thought it was a great idea and I was relieved of having to host 3 separate family relative dinners in a row.  We invited our families and our close friends to come celebrate the 3 boys. Between all the cousins and on family friends we had about 20 kids to celebrate with.

I had fun researching ideas and planning some fun activities. I didn't want to make it over the top, but also wanted it to feel special and memorable.  So I weighed out all the plentiful ideas with what was worth my effort, time and cost and came up with what would work for me.  I had to think, what will mean the most to them? Definitely not little cute printables and punch cards, etc. I went for some simple decorations and easy games that didn't cost much, if anything at all.

For dinner we had slow cooker french dip sandwiches and a variety of salads that I made the day before, so there was very little to do right before.  Uncle Larry brought his professional snow cone machine too! Is that the best thing ever to add to a party or what?

I decided to buy a Costco cake and put their Skylander figures on it instead of trying something crazy. That made it easy and we just decorated a little around the table.

 The kids had fun gathering around and studying the poster and figures.

After dinner we played a few games:

 In the Skylanders video game there are little Chompy monsters that you kill, so our first Skylander game was to get the Chompies.  I blew up water balloons with air and we used this parachute(Carter got it for his birthday) to shake them off.  Then they ran around and stomped on the "chompies" to pop them.

 Another thing you do in the game is collect food and money to add more life to your player.  So I froze some gems in ice cubes for the kids to get.  They liked using a hammer!

 The main bad guy's name is Chaos and he is bald and wears a black cape.  Jimmy seemed like the perfect candidate for the next game! We made a "Portal of Power" (this is a portal that you set your game figure on and then they show up in the video game) with a white round plastic table cloth in the middle of the yard.  When Chaos came, they had to run and not get tagged by him or they would be frozen (so, basically freeze tag).  In order to get unfrozen, a friend that wasn't tagged had to drag them to the portal and then they were free to run again.  Everyone loved this game and they played until Chaos was completely worn out!

 Once the kids Skylanders defeated Chaos, they earned their "Upgrades".  I had preloaded a whole box of squirt guns and wrapped it.  I gave them a few guidelines and then set down the box and ran away.  Everyone went to town squirting each other for about 20 minutes! Even some dads joined in with some BIG guns they found in the shed.

 Finally, we were attacked by a "Super Chompie!" I promise these are all real parts of the game that the kids knew all about.  I was dreading thinking about making a pinata, but when I found an $8 angry bird pig one at Winco I jumped at the chance to quickly turn it into a chompie in just a few minutes.  The combination of this pinata and a cheap dollar store baseball bat turned out to be a match made in heaven.  The kids all lined up and took turns and everyone went through at least 3 or 4 times before it broke.  I love how long it lasted.  Dollar store bats, I'm telling you...

 Finally we sang to the boys each separately and they blew out candles.

They opened a few little gifts from cousins and grandparents and that was it.   I must say, I love all the little homemade cards and gifts that they get from cousins.  Some even used their own money to buy little things for them.  It is very sweet.  The biggest hit for Carter was a Skylander backpack/holder for the figures from Grandma.  He just kept holding it way up high and yelling, "Skylanders!" over and over.  He spent the next couple of weeks carrying it around and loading and unloading it all the time. 

Birthday Season Part 3

Tanner's birthday was our last in the row of Birthdays so he was most anxiously waiting for his turn! In fact, because it was a Saturday we didn't even wait until evening, it was a morning celebration.  You know if you serve cake with milk instead of ice cream, it's totally a breakfast food, right??? That's totally true according to...me. Tanner's first gift were some Phineas and Ferb figures conveniently ready to go on a cake.  He really loved that. 

 I love how he is hugging his cake.  He really did like it that much.

 Then he opened some little gifts from everyone.

 As we were all distracted with the gifts, this little guy too his opportunity. This is his guilty face:

 And this is his, "I know I am cute so deal with it" face.

That afternoon we went to eat at the Spaghetti Factory(we had free meal vouchers from doing the Starlight run!) We got to eat in the train so that made it extra fun.  Our kids sure do like spaghetti and lasagne! Oh my, you would think they hadn't eaten in a year.

One activity he really wanted to do with our family was to go to Safari Sam's so we went for FHE the next week. 

 We hadn't been in about a year so we had such a great time.  We played for a solid 3 hours.  Here they are playing a video game on the arcade side.

 Peter started timing the kids as they went through the difficult challenge course.  Some of them got their time down to around 38 seconds! We were the last ones to leave when they closed.  I think we tend to do that a lot.  Probably because we need to get our moneys worth since our family size costs quite a bit. So when we go somewhere, we must get all the fun out of it that we can.

We had done swim lessons and a couple of hours at the park that day too so these kids were ready to drop by the time we got home!

Here is a video of Luke at Safari Sam's. He loved this rolling balance beam and just giggled and giggled.

Tanner has such a fun personality and I must say, in my opinion, is the cutest 7 year old on the planet...or maybe even in the history of ever!