Rainbow Loom Creations

Kyleigh spent one Sunday afternoon working on her rainbow loom.  She got on youtube and found all kinds of instructional videos on how to make charms.  She made a candy corn, candy cane, and a fish.  She then decided to make a pair of shoes.  The shoe part is made of cardboard and duct tape, and the straps are from the rainbow loom.  Pretty creative.

Lego Creation

This lego creation is by Ridge and Katelyn.  It is a firehouse that can host fashion shows.

Fluff Face Comes Through

We have been chicken owners for about 10 months now.  Here are our stats...

Chicken purchased-8

Died from heat exhaustion (chicken rookies)- 1

Died from dog attack (more like a dog tease)- 1

Turned out to be a rooster (illegal) and thus met it's end- 1

Decided to eat all of the eggs and thus met it's end- 1

So, we now have four chickens.  One of the three is an araucana.  It's name is Fluff Face and it is the kids' favorite.  We got an araucana because they lay blue/green/yellow eggs and we thought that would be so fun to find colored eggs in the chicken coop.  All of the chickens were right on schedule.  They started laying eggs at about 6 months of age.  Fluff Face didn't.  We waited a few more months.  Nope, no eggs.  We wondered if there was a mix-up and some of the brown eggs were from Fluff Face, but we never saw her roosting.  We did more research to see if Araucana chickens took longer to lay, but we couldn't find anything to say they did.  One Sunday in January the girls went out to check on the chickens and came in very, very excited.  Fluff Face came through and layed the prettiest blue/green egg and has continued laying pretty eggs for us.  Kyleigh has requested that I hard boil some of them and send them to school in her lunch. 

 

Rusty's Birthday

  We started Rusty's birthday with a breakfast of cranberry muffins with butter sauce, cheesy eggs, and grape juice.  Kyleigh came down wearing the shirt we found at the quarter sale.  It says "Peace  Love  Rusty  Forever."  Rusty is a brand and with words like that how could we refuse the shirt (especially for a quarter).  For lunch we got all of Rusty's favorites.  We had jalapeno poppers from sonic and a $6 guacamole bacon burger from Carl's Junior.  I love living close to everything.  Ridge had woke up later in the morning and had a late breakfast.  I got him some chicken nuggets at Carls Jr. and he scarfed them down like he was starving.  He stood up when he was done, stated that his stomach hurt, and promptly threw up everything he had eaten that day.  So for the end of his birthday lunch Rusty cleaned up vomit, while I cleaned up Ridge.  It should be noted that he did so without complaining, ON HIS BIRTHDAY.  Dad of the year award right there!  For dinner he wanted Navajo tacos.  Mike and Holly and the girls came over.  I also made a peach and apple pie for dessert.  Per Rusty's wish the Christmas tree was still up, decorated with streamers to make it the birthday tree.  He got a new helicopter to play with.  The last one broke just as we were moving into this house, and this is the perfect toy helicopter house.  He had a happy birthday so I guess we did our job.  Happy Birthday Russ.

 

 

While the girls were at school these little cuties had a snow morning.  Next year Naiya will be in school all day so we will enjoy it while we can.

Happy New Year!

We aren't much for staying up until midnight, but I can manage a cupcake clock to celebrate the new year!

Christmas Day

We told the kids when they went to bed that they couldn't get up before 4:00 a.m.  At 4:00 a.m. they came into our room to wake us up.  They were ready!  Kyleigh said they had been up since 3:00 waiting by the door for the appointed hour.  Santa left lots of nice things for each of the kids.  The pictures show how they found each of their piles and also the pile of gifts for the whole family.  They walked right past the air hockey that was set up in the family room.  They didn't even notice it.  They were a little focused on getting into the living room.  We enjoyed all of the nice things from Santa all morning.  Ridge loved his remote control John Deere tractor.  He especially loved trying to ramp it over the top of Rusty.  He also loved dressing up in his "Tom Thomas helicopter helmet."  Kyleigh tried on her new swim cap, boot slippers, and gloves.  It made a pretty cute combo.  The girls spent lots of time working on Kyleigh's new rainbow loom.  Katelyn drew on her new computer like Barbie.  Rusty read through his journals from the past few years that were printed up in book form.  I got my hair chalked.  That was pretty exciting.  We all joined in for some play doh fun with Ridge's new tractor.  We had a delicious breakfast with blueberry muffins, a strata, and homemade grape juice.  We played and played again with our new toys.  We went outside to try out Kyleigh's new bike and Katelyn's new electric scooter.  We popped popcorn in our super cute popcorn popper.  We ate lots of snacks and leftovers.  Then ate, played, and ate some more.  We talked to our families on the phone, and finished the day off with more food.  Merry Christmas!

RM Cook Family Christmas Eve Celebration

We have taken parts and pieces of Cook and Graves family traditions and added some of our own for what we think is a pretty fabulous Christmas Eve Celebration.  Some of it has been tradition for several years and some of it was new.  For 2013 here is how it went down...

We hung our stockings on Christmas Eve.  How fun to have our beautiful new mantle to hang them from.  We put the finishing touches on our lego advent calendar.  The lego calendar was a new addition at our house this year.  I remember Jenny mentioning them a few years ago.  Neither Kyleigh or Katelyn were interested in legos so I filed the information away.  Ridge LOVES legos so this was our first lego advent year and it was a big hit with everyone.  A large portion of Christmas Eve was spent in the kitchen.  We had the pies all made and the turkey marinating for a big Christmas Eve feast.  The table was set and ready to go.  I had pre-prepared as much as I could.  I had Christmas Day breakfast ready to go, and lots of snacks prepared.  I didn't want to have to do anything but play and eat on Christmas Day. By the time Rusty came home from work in the early afternoon we were ready.  We had a turkey dinner with all of the fixings.  We read the nativity from the scriptures and used our nativity puppets.  We opened the gifts that we had bought for each other.  We took the kids to goodwill again this year to find these gifts.  This year the big hits were the tractor that Kyleigh found for Ridge.  We try to keep the kids separated at Goodwill so they don't know what they are getting for each other.  This year Kyleigh and Katelyn picked the same thing for each other.  The panda hats/gloves were pretty fun (we found them new at Goodwill).  Also the lunchbox Ridge found Rusty was pretty fun.  He grabbed it from under the tree, and blurted out "it's a lunchbox Daddy, open it, it's for your lunch."  I guess he couldn't stand the surprise for one more second.  We gave the kids a basketball hoop for their gift from me and Russ.  After presents we went on a drive to see Christmas lights.  There is one house nearby that goes all out.  We discovered that on Christmas Eve they have hot chocolate, Santa, and candycanes.  When we got home we left cookies out for Santa.  This year we had a second plate to put them on.  When Katelyn was in preschool and was doing her preschool plates (a piece of round paper they draw on to be sent in and made into a plate) Kyleigh wanted to join in.  It was near Christmas time so she made a plate to put cookies on for Santa.  This year we had a repeat of the same situation with different kids.  Ridge was doing his plates and Katelyn wanted to do one.  Now we have two Santa cookie plates and I must say they are pretty cute.  For Christmas Eve stories we utilized technology and some cute hallmark books and had grandparents read us stories.  Grandpa's record-a-book was the night before Christmas and Nama and Papa gave us one this year for a second Christmas Eve story treat.  Before we put the kids in bed we took Ridge's screen out and sprinkled sparkly reindeer food on the roof for Rudolf and the crew.  The kids all slept in Ridge's room for a Christmas Eve slumber party.  We must have adequately threatened them because they fell asleep way faster than the average slumber party night, which is pretty much every weekend night.  That was just the beginning, Santa was hard at work for a very exciting Christmas morning.

Christmas with Mom and Dad

Mom and Dad came up on a Saturday a few weeks before Christmas.  I was so excited for them to come.  We had it all planned out.  They were bringing a prime rib for a delicious dinner.  We were going to do presents and look at Christmas lights.  We only had about 24 hours with them so we were going to make the most of it.  They were set to arrive around 10:30 a.m.  At around 9 a.m., when they were well on their way, I started feeling sick.  I went to lay down and was still asleep when they got here.  I was terribly nauseous and felt all around awful.  The thought of going anywhere or doing anything made my head spin.  So we didn't go anywhere or do anything.  I finally did throw up, just in time for Kyleigh to start feeling sick.  Rusty followed shortly after Kyleigh.  It manifested itself differently in all of us, but it was definitely a stomach bug.  Kyleigh got the worst of it.  She was throwing up every 30 minutes for 5 or 6 hours.  We made it through dinner.  The prime rib was calling for me, but my stomach refused to allow me to give in.  Prime rib, just sitting in front of me.  My favorite food in the world and I didn't even get one bite.  That's a travesty.  We opened presents, with a few breaks to wait for Kyleigh while she was throwing up.  Mom and Dad looked like they wanted to huddle in the corner and not touch anything.  Maybe I just think that because that is what I would have been doing.  Despite the stomach bug, we were happy to have them here.  We hope they won't be afraid to come back and see us again.  Maybe they could bring some airborne?