One boy, One year

Amidst our last few turbulent months there was one event more significant and pleasant than others. Kael turned one!


In his first year here, he has won over the hearts of many girls, but none as completely as his sisters...


and, of course his photographer mom who thinks he is the best subject she has ever had...

He's made a best friend...


and been about the happiest baby anyone who has met him has ever known. For instance: I shot this just before putting him to bed tonight after he started rubbing his eyes and yawning and getting his version of cranky.

We celebrated at Chuck-E-Cheese again- the twins' birthday party was there, and Mia wants hers to be there in September... (oh boy.) We had just found and moved into this apartment that morning, (we had thought we'd be moved into a house, but that fell through a couple of weeks before, and thought we'd have a townhouse to rent, but that fell through the week before,) so I didn't have time to find my kitchen and bake the cake I'd been planning. (Pretty much nothing has gone as we planned since about the time we had the twins... so no sweat, right?)

We got him a Cookie Monster Cake at Albertson's.
Cooookie! Oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy.

You sure this is okay, Mom??


"Yes, dear. Blue sugar is a great thing to give a baby. Why don't I throw a plastic knife in for good measure?"

Kael felt SO lucky to have a party at Chuck-E-Cheese... he was just too overwhelmed to show it.


This was the only shot I got of him on his actual birthday. I figured I'd post it since he's wearing the appropriate birthday attire. Those are goggles in the tub there, not... something else. Which something else would have been blue if it were in the picture a few days after the party.
FYI.

In the tunnel

My brother Dallin drove down in my dad's van with a bunch of our stuff, while I drove in ours with the kids. We left in the evening so the kids would sleep on the way, since Kael has a hard time staying in his seat after about an hour. The trip took over 7 hours because we stopped for dinner in Payson and a couple other times. Kael never got too fussy and fell asleep, and the girls fell asleep just in time for Mia to not get car-sick in the canyon... around 11. The canyon was a freaky little stretch because it was dark, rainy and there was construction. But we made it at about 12:30 our time.

I thought I'd be able to make the trip alone, but it would have been awful. I'm so grateful he came. While I tried to get a bunch of cranky kids to bed, he unloaded all of our heavy boxes in the muggy heat, expecting to turn around and head home as soon as he finished charging his cell phone. I tried to convince him to stay one more day- the kids don't get to see him much and were calling him Uncle Tyson. He's going into the army and won't be back 'til next year, so I told him I hoped he'd stick around longer, and went to bed.

Dallin stayed the next day and that afternoon we all went to see the house. It was so big! I thought I'd be turned off by the gross carpet and messed up paint, but it was easy to imagine how nice it would be once we got it cleaned up. The girls had picked their rooms out from the video a couple of months ago, so it was fun to see them claim them again in real life. When we left, the twins were confused... they've been moved out of their home in Ohio to two different grandma's houses and into an apartment, so when they were told THIS was going to be their house they wondered where all their stuff was and why we were leaving it.

The next morning our realtor called to tell me the bank decided not to sell the house because of repair costs. (Which they don't have a correct estimate of- our underwriter pounded out a sloppy list of repairs that he said needed to be done based off the appraisal, and a few of the more expensive fixes weren't even needed... he just didn't look closely enough at the appraisal to see what was actually needed. So the bids that should have been coming back at around 4 or 5K are coming back at 15K.)

I asked the guy we're currently renting from if we could stay longer, like we'd talked about. I told him we'd be willing to sign a three month lease and we'd probably be longer than that. He had a lady lined up to see the apartment on Saturday who was wanting to stay for two or three years, so he said he'd like to rent it to her if he could.

We cleaned the place up to show her and she seemed really interested.

So after she left we went looking for apartments. As we left the house, we told the girls where we were going. They looked panicked and thought we were leaving to move right then without their things. It's kind of funny, but it kind of breaks my heart how much stress they are going through. I can't believe I have to move them two more times within the next six months.

Zach is on night shift this month so we're trying to keep quiet during the day... it is too hot to run around outside during most of it, but we've had some awesome rain and went out to play for that. After we looked at apartments Zach took the girls swimming. We're looking at a three bedroom house for rent later, and I think the hardest part of the decision will be to have our own house with a garage and enough space for all our furniture, or an apartment with a pool.

The girls keep saying things like "I don't want to live here anymore." And "I want to open the trailer." (They know where all their stuff is being stored, and we've been living out of our suitcases for five weeks. I can't make a lot of the things they ask to eat now because we have very limited kitchen tools and ingredients.) "When we make friends can we go swimming with them?"

I'm ready for this "camping trip" to be over, and it doesn't help that right now we have no idea how or when it will end.