Sparkly, Shiny, and Swimmy

I'm still not sure exactly what it was that created Savannah's sudden obsession with having a pet fish, but it's been all she talks about for the past week or so. Then on Wednesday at school she was talking about it to her substitute teacher and telling her all about how much she wants to get a pet goldfish one day. That wonderful teacher said to her, 'Well why don't you just go get one? They're only about a dollar!' Savannah came home from school SO excited (and imagine how thrilled I was at her teacher's response). Savannah asked if it was true that they were so cheap and I reluctantly admitted it was true. I was quick to jump in, though, with the fact that we'd have to buy a fish bowl and food and other things that would make it more expensive. She asked if she could use our spider cage from her old pet "Spidey" (a wolf spider she found outside one day who lived to be over a year old after the guy at PetSmart told me it probably wouldn't last more than 2 or 3 months). I didn't know anything about goldfish our how much space they needed to I said I thought it would be fine to keep them in there, but we'd still have to buy food. That still only added up to about $4, according to my estimations, for 2 goldfish and some food. I was a little desperate scrambling for more reasons why we shouldn't get fish so I sat her down and tried to rattle off a long list of duties that would go along with having a fish.
1-You'll have to feed them everyday. "No problem!" she quickly blurted out. (Of course, I know it's true that feeding the fish is probably any kid's favorite part about having them)
2-Since they eat, that means they poop so you'll have to clean out the water at least once a week. At first she was a little grossed out as she started thinking about that and asked hesitantly, 'you mean I have to touch their poop?' But after I said yes and gave her a look like the decision has been made and we won't get the fish, she found courage from somewhere and bravely replied, "Okay, I can do that!"
3-I thought and thought to come up with a 3rd thing. I was hoping to come up with a big long list! But after a few minutes the only thing I could think of for the 3rd and last item on the list was to love them and talk to them and sing to them and give them kisses (on the outside of the cage) so they'd know they were loved. And of course that is what Savannah most wanted to do with her fish. She already loved them before she even knew she was getting any!

Trying to make my list and explain the financial burden of goldfish made it painfully obvious to me that there was really no reason why I shouldn't just go buy her a few. I told her she'd still have to do something to earn the $4 it would take to buy them, so I had her help me sort through and hang up every piece of clothing in our house. That was a big job because it included the much dreaded seasonal switch where you put away all the old summer clothes, pull out all the winter clothes from big tupperware bins, and hang them all up or put them away where they go. I'd been procrastinating doing it for a while so I was glad she gave me the motivation to finally get it done. So, once it was done we all packed into the car and headed out to buy her 3 little goldfish ($.28 each), some fish food, and a net (to scoop them out when they died, which I figured wouldn't take too long to happen). It came to $4.03, and she was so excited to be able to pay for it all by herself. I admit it was really fun at the store watching all of the kids so excited as we ran to the fish tanks and they started pointing to the fish they wanted. They were skipping all the way to the checkstand and it was really cute.

Here's a picture of the girls when we got home from the store.


Well, now that it's Friday and we've already had the fish for 36 hours, I regret to inform you that Swimmy and Sparkly passed away during the night and the littlest one, Shiny, is sick. I feel like a goldfish murderer! If you notice in the top picture, Savannah had just fed her fish and there's SO much fish food in the water! I knew it was too much, but wasn't really sure how big of a deal it was. The next morning Swimmy and Sparkly were laying at the bottom of their cage on their sides. Apparently fish will eat themselves to death. I've also learned that goldfish are very dirty and when you're using a small bowl, the ammonia from their own wastes will turn the water deadly in a day or two! We changed the water yesterday morning and planned on doing it daily, but this morning when we woke up the water is so cloudy and gross looking! I'm assuming it's from the two dying, which must have caused the otherwise healthy one to get sick, too. The water looked totally fine last night. We have Shiny in clean water now, but it doesn't look good for her. Savannah woke me up crying this morning but I tried to comfort her by telling her her pets were in heaven now in the most beautiful goldfish pond ever and they're with their mommy and daddy and they're so happy. I think we're done getting goldfish until we can get a much bigger fish tank. I would've filled up our little swimming pool and moved them there if it wasn't so cold outside. Maybe next summer we'll get more when we can do that. It's been quite an eventful and dramatic few days around here! Poor little goldfish...

Katie's 2nd Haircut

Okay, summer is over so it's time to get back in the house and back at my computer. I've completely neglected my blog but I am grateful for a good friend who got on my case about it and reminded me to keep writing. Thanks, Maria! =)

Earlier this year I had a blog entry about Katie's 1st haircut when she chopped off her bangs. Well, the Sunday before last Joe was watching the kids while I took a nap and Savannah went on a cutting frenzy. She's old enough to know that scissors are only for paper but for some reason she got the idea to start giving her dolls haircuts and then the neighbor boy (luckily he just had a buzz cut, though, so it wasn't even noticeable) and then she started on Katie! Supposedly Katie asked her for a haircut, which made Savannah think it was just fine to do it. Joe saw Savannah with the scissors and took them away from her but didn't even notice anything different about Katie when she looked like this:

I just searched a little in vain for a good picture of her hair before it got cut for a comparison. You can see where Savannah missed a little bit, though, and it was easily 4 inches that she cut off. Plus it was all her beautiful little baby curls that once you cut them off they're gone. I was so sad!

I normally try to cut the girls' hair myself to save money but this was enough of a hack job that I didn't want to attempt it on my own. The next day I took her to Fantastic Sams because I had a coupon but it was really crouded and hectic and there was a wait and while I waited I realized that getting her hair styled (which I knew I wanted so I could see how to style it short) would be $6 extra so it was going to cost $14. I had heard a friend talk about a place called Cookie Cutters that specializes in kids haircuts but I imagined it would probably be about $30 for haircuts there. I figured I might as well just call them while I was waiting and I couldn't believe it when they said haircuts were $13.95 and that includes styling! We drove right over and I was SO impressed with that place! I would HIGHLY recommend it, especially if you have a kid who's a little afraid about getting their hair cut or if it's a first haircut or something where you want a place that's camera friendly. The kids get to pick a cool little car to sit in instead of a normal chair and they also pick a DVD to watch while they're getting their hair cut. Then when they're done they get a balloon with a sucker and a cute little cookie cutter on it. Katie LOVED it! Alex also had a great time playing on the little slide while he was waiting. Here's a picture of her in the place so you can see how fun it is (plus another pitiful looking "before" picture).

She was so immersed in Dora I don't think she even realized she was getting a hair cut!

Katie's first look of her new haircut in the mirror.

She picked this plane to sit in.

The "after" picture.

I was very happy with how it turned out. It looks like such a little school girl haircut to me and I think it makes her look older and more grown up. It's sad but also cute and it's perfect timing because she'll be starting preschool in just another week. It's crazy how fast kids grow!

Happy Mother's Day!

Wow, I can't believe I've already had this blog over a year! I remember writing for Mother's Day last year, too! Today I just have this cute little poem that I found online. I reflects so many of my own thoughts and experiences as a mother that I feel like they could be my own words! I really loved it so I wanted to share it with any of you moms of young children or anyone else and I hope that you enjoy it!

Every Mother's Prayer

Dear Lord, it's such a hectic day,

With little time to stop and pray,

For life's been anything but calm,

Since you called on me to be a mom.

Running errands, matching socks,

Building dreams with building blocks.

Cooking, cleaning, and finding shoes,

And other stuff that children lose.

Fitting lids on bottled bugs,

Wiping tears and giving hugs.

A stack of last week's mail to read,

So where's the quiet time I need?

Yet when I steal a minute Lord,

Just at the sink or ironing board,

To ask the blessings of your grace,

I see them in my small one's face,
That you have blessed me all the while,

As I stop to kiss that precious smile.

(http://www.hugsandsmiles.com/everymomsprayer/index.html)

Here are some pictures I took today of my "precious smiles" that I daily kiss, with gratitude to their Maker for allowing me the amazing blessing and privilege of being their mother. No matter how hard a day may be, they're worth every second of it! I love these three little people more than I ever imagined I could love anyone. I feel so grateful to be celebrating Mother's Day today as a mother myself.

Happy Mother's Day to all of you mothers!

Our new car!

Well, I guess we're officially a Mormon family because we finally broke down purchased a minivan! We bought it a week ago at a government auction, which is the same place we bought our Taurus that we've been driving for the past 5 years and we've had a lot of luck there. It's nothing fancy, just a 2001 Dodge Caravan with no power anything so it makes me feel so old school rolling up and down the windows by hand and manually locking each door, but it runs great and the best thing is it only has 16,000 miles so it drives like it's practically new! We paid $4000 for it which is about all I can stand paying for cars anyway. I hate car payments so it was nice to just pay for it from what we'd been saving for a new car, knowing we'd need one once we had another baby and ran out of seats. Our double stroller doesn't really fit in it very well and I do really miss my nice big trunk, but other than that I'm surprised how much I'm liking it so far! I was really dreading getting one but it's not so bad! We went to the auction while Savannah was at school and we didn't tell her anything about it since we didn't know if we'd actually buy anything so it was a surprise for her when we got home and she was SO excited! She's been bugging us about wanting to buy a minivan this whole school year since my neighbor that I carpool with has one and she loves it.

I think the biggest reason Savannah really wanted one so badly is because she always wants to take extra people in the car with us but we never can since our Taurus barely had enough seats for the 5 of us. The first thing she she said was "Now we can take Julian with us everywhere we go!" (Julian is our 4 year old next door neighbor who's an only child so he's sort of like their adopted brother) So of course here are the kids, including Julian, just a few hours after buying it as we drove around to show it to my brother and mom.

This is a picture of the back seat of our Taurus after we got the car seats out of it. I had such a ghetto mom car! I'm determined to keep this new one much cleaner.

Some cheesy pictures of Joe at the auction site right after he bought it.

This is a big, exciting step for our family! I guess now we're one step closer to baby #4! We'll have to start working on that... =)

Ward Talent Show

This is kind of embarrassing but I thought it would be fun to post it anyway. We had a ward talent show tonight and Savannah really wanted to sing in it, but I told her it was mostly just for grown-ups. They were looking for people with interesting talents or that played unusual instruments and some of you may know that when I was little I played the accordion. So the song Savannah wanted to sing was "On Top of Spaghetti", which is one of the songs she performed last week with her little singing group, and I had the idea that that would be a fairly easy, fitting song for me to play on my accordion while she sang along. Then it would also be good because she could take some of the pressure and attention off of my playing so I wouldn't feel so nervous or embarrassed at my meager skills. I totally had to practice for weeks and I was SO nervous about performing it, but now that it's over I'm glad I did it. I think Savannah really liked doing it and it was fun doing it together. She's such a natural little performer and it amazes me how she doesn't get nervous at all and she just thinks it's fun. She sure doesn't get that from me!

Here's the video if you want to see it. By the way, my cheesy little dancing side to side was totally Joe's idea--he made me do it! =)

Happy Easter!

Today has been a beautiful, wonderful Easter! I'm pretty tired now after all the festivities, cleaning up all the candy wrappers and plastic grass, and getting my kids to bed when they were on such a sugar high, but it was still a great day. Yesterday we went to an Easter carnival at Wheeler Farm because Savannah's singing group was performing there and we ended up having a lot of fun there! My brother Ryan and his wife Savanah brought their three kids, too, so all the cousins always have a fun time together. Afterwards we went back to Ryan's house and let the kids dye Easter eggs and then today after church we hunted them in my mom's backyard. We had a family dinner at her house and church was really nice and all in all it was just a wonderful Easter celebration. Here are some pictures:

The kids before church

After church with their Easter baskets

Savannah and Katie swinging at Nonni's house

Alex having a great time with the Easter Egg hunt

Family Photo

Our visit from Spot

I did so well about writing last month and here it is the LAST day of March and I'm barely squeezing in an entry for the month. It's funny I've kept thinking I just had to get on here and change my background from the snow theme to something more springy to match the weather but now all the snow has kept coming back right here at the end. How frustrating! Maybe changing my background will bring better luck in that area. =)

Okay, so I wanted to write about this and never did but I'm doing it now. It was last month when I took Alex for his 1yr well child visit that the pediatrician told me he had 2 ear infections! He'd never had an ear infection before, at least that I knew of, and it made me feel bad that he was probably in pain and was just being tough and didn't let me know while he was suffering through it! The doctor prescribed Amoxicillin and Alex took it for 8 days straight without any problems. Then on the morning of what would've been his 9th day of taking it, he woke up looking like this:

I know I'm horrible but I didn't even notice at first. I changed his diaper and everything and must have still been half asleep because it wasn't until Joe picked him up that he said something about him having bumps all over him and we realized he had a mild rash all over his body. We called his pediatrician and they said to stop taking the Amoxicillin and recommended that I take him in to be seen. He'd also eaten cauliflower the night before for the first time and Joe is allergic to it so I thought maybe it was a food allergy since he'd been taken the medicine for 8 days with no symptoms at all. The doctor couldn't tell me what the reaction was from but said it was definitely hives and said I could give him Benadryl and a pain reliever. The ear infections were gone, thank goodness, so he didn't need anymore antibiotic.

That night when I was getting him ready for bed the hives seemed to have gotten worse and he looked like this:

The next morning was Saturday and this is what he looked like when he woke up. You could tell he just wasn't feeling good:

This was taken 2 hours later in his car seat. At this point we came up with the nickname "Spot" because he sure didn't even look like our little Alex anymore:

Again, two hours later. You can notice the hives on his face are growing and getting closer together so it started just looking like a really bad sunburn all over his skin:


And this is him in the bathtub that 2nd night, only 36 hrs after first noticing any sign of hives:

After getting him out of the bathtub I got him dressed and gave him medicine and he started feeling a little better. He and the girls were playing 'store' in the kitchen and eating animal crackers and I was glad to see him feeling better and playing! This picture made me laugh:

The next morning, on Sunday, he woke up with a pretty high fever at about 8am and was really fussy and not sleeping well so I took him to an InstaCare. Come to find out he had gotten tonsillitis and had ear infections in both ears again! They said the tonsillitis is a viral infection so it was unrelated, just unlucky timing, and the ear infections were a result of that. Poor kid! They didn't prescribe him another antibiotic because they wanted to wait until the hives were all cleared up but they gave me some numbing drops to put in his ears so at least they wouldn't hurt. None of us went to church because tonsillitis is contagious and that afternoon Alex was playing with his sisters a lot and seemed to be feeling a ton better.

By that night in the bathtub you could tell a big improvement with the hives. They at least were starting to not be so red and it looked like they were soaking back into his skin. He was obviously feeling so much better!

What an adventurous couple of days those were! It took about 3 days after this for any sign of the hives to be gone, but it was just those first 3 days that were the worst. By the way, I was told this was definitely a drug related reaction, and wasn't caused by food. Yippee, Alex, you get to have cauliflower again!

Party Time

Yesterday we had a fun filled party day, celebrating Savannah's 5th birthday and Alex's 1st. This was the first year Savannah got to invite friends to her party so she invited many of the kids in her primary class plus her cousins, making a total of 8 kids that came. Including my 3, that meant 11 kids in my little house and it was a bit of an adventure! It was fun, though. Savannah wanted to have a butterfly party so we had all the matching butterfly party supplies from the dollar store and I made her a butterfly fairy birthday cake. For games we played pin the antenna on the butterfly (using pipe cleaners for antenna), then Joe read them "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and afterwards we had them divide into two teams, gave each team a roll of toilet paper, and they had a race to completely wrap up one person on their team like a cocoon. I think they had fun. Mostly they just had fun playing with each other in Savannah and Katie's bedroom and climbing on the bunkbeds and stuff. Savannah also didn't realize that all the kids were going to bring her presents so that was a very exciting surprise for her and she had so much fun opening all of those presents with everyone watching. That girl really loves being in the spotlight and she got really fun presents so she just loved it!

For Alex we just decided it would be easier to throw his birthday in with Savannah's even though everything was all girly because my family would already be coming over and it was more convenient than making them all come on a different night just to watch a little 1 year old eat some cake and open a present or two. I mean, really, 1 year old birthdays just aren't that exciting or eventful. I made Alex a Thomas the Tank Engine cake that had a 1 on the side and he seemed to enjoy sitting in his high chair eating it all by himself and making a huge mess. Here are some pictures from our fun day.

Here are the kids with their cakes. Savannah is with her cousin Dylan showing how they're both 5 now. Making two cakes turned out to be a little more time consuming than I'd imagined so the cakes got pretty sloppy. Definitely not my best work, but I was past the point of caring. If you can't tell, I did Alex's last so his was really rushed. Sorry buddy. I guess a 1 year old doesn't care that much.

Grandma and Grandpa Bilanzich gave Alex a little outfit and some shoes. He was pretty excited about those shoes! He wanted to carry them around with him everywhere!

Savannah's favorite present. She's not really into High School Musical that much but she LOVED this!

Alex may not have been too happy about that hat, but by then he was pretty worn out from all of the commotion, too. We all had a fun, but exhausting day. We went to bed early last night! No exciting, romantic Valentine's Day for Joe and me, but we had a great day.

Alex is one!

I can't believe today is Alex's 1st birthday! It seems like especially the past 5 or 6 months have gone really fast. That first little while when they're little babies is so hard and seems to take forever at times but then it starts really speeding up. He's so much fun now, though, and our family would be so different without him.

I just barely switched him last week from his rear-facing carseat to a big kid, forward facing seat and he was so cute how happy he was. He loves being able to look out the window and look over at his sisters and I think he feels so big and cool like them. Usually there are lots of times he screams when I try to put him in the car but now he almost always seems happy and even excited to go somewhere. He looks over at his sisters with big old smiles and kicks his legs excitedly. I think he's still relishing in the fact that he CAN kick his legs and move them freely while he's in the car! I'm actually surprised I held out so long with switching him over. With both the girls it seems like I couldn't handle seeing their scrunched up legs pushing against the backseat of the car at around 10 months--maybe he's shorter than they were. Or maybe I waited because I didn't want to give up being able to sit next to him in the backseat and nurse him while we were driving (I really try to cover up for the sake of passing motorists, I promise!). We just go on so many road trips and stuff and it makes it SO much easier to keep peace in the car when I'm right there to shut him up when I have to and not to stop for feedings all the time. Now we have a whole seat full of kids and I know it's not going to be much longer before we have to give in and trade our sedan for a minivan or something bigger. I'm not looking forward to that. I like how close the kids are in our Taurus plus I love our huge trunk...I'm going to miss that.

This is what my backseat is looking like these days:

Alex fell right to sleep in his new carseat on the first night!

Katie's 1st Haircut

Well, actually I should say haircuts, since there were two. The first was self-inflicted and the 2nd was my sad attempt to correct it the best I could. In hindsight I'm really wishing I would've dealt with the inconvenience of driving her to a professional hair stylist, but there's not much I can do about it now except hope it grows quickly. The first thing that came to my mind when I saw what she'd done to herself was Jim Carrey from Dumb and Dumber. What do you think?

This is what she did to herself:


And here is my attempt to fix it, along with a pic from Dumb and Dumber, just for a reference.








Every time Joe looks at her he just kind of puts his hand over his face and laughs and says she looks like she has a mullet. Poor girl. Grow hair, grow!

Draper Temple Open House

About a week ago our family was lucky enough to go to the open house of the new Draper Temple. What a beautiful temple! Savannah had been so excited for months that she'd actually be able to go inside the whole temple and see everything. I loved when we went in the celestial room because all 3 kids got quieter and more reverent and the girls looked so in awe as they looked around. It felt really great for me to be in there with my whole family. Savannah also really liked being in the sealing room and we looked in the mirrors together where you can see forever and she gave me a big hug and told me she loved me and it was just a sweet moment. Now we're really looking forward to going to the new Oquirrh Mountain Temple soon, too!