Kyle stuck in a Barbie box...

Kyle enjoys playing with boxes. We could probably get a variety of boxes, wrap them up and give them to him for Christmas and he would be a very happy camper. LOL! So, he found this Barbie box that usually holds Stella's Barbie Christmas tree. I then heard a plea for help about 5 minutes into the play and what good mom on a rescue mission doesn't grab her camera?!?!?!

Sooo...for your viewing pleasure....

Cambria Rose Yanda

I decided that I would start with the middle child. It seems it's always either the oldest or the youngest, so I'll break tradition. Maybe someday she'll read this and it will please her that I started with her. :)
Cambria is tough, spunky, sweet and joyful. We waited a looooong time for her to come to us. When we had Stella, we wanted another baby rather soon, as early as 18 months apart. However, that was not meant to be and we ended up waiting almost 3 years for her to join our family. The pregnancy and delivery had a few minor complications and then she was quite sick when she was born. We ended up having to leave her an extra day at the hospital. The worst feeling in the world is when you have to drive away from the hospital without your baby. I'm blessed because I was able to pick her up the next day.
Cambria loved to be swaddled, so we called her our little burrito for awhile. She was a difficult baby and cried pretty much non-stop. We soon found out she had a milk allergy and by 6 months she was fine and a very happy baby.
Cambria starting walking right around 12 months. She was a little munchkin and barely ever made it onto the growth charts, but she seemed to be healthy. Around 16 months Cambria stopped walking. She would instead crawl and we soon realized one of her knees were swollen and red. After a couple long months of various doctor appointments she was diagnosed with Juvenile Arthritis. It has been a tough journery for her, but she is doing really well with it at this time. You can kinda see in this dance picture how her left knee was swollen. She has come such a long way. :)
Cambria started Kindergarten this year and has just loved every minute of it. She really enjoys being "big" like Stella and heading off to school every day. She comes home ready to do her homework happily and she has progressed with the learning and reading just fine.
She enjoys anything pink, girly and foo foo - but she's tougher than anyone I've ever known. This past summer she hit her head on a table and needed staples. It was right before we were leaving for a 2 week vacation and the staples had to come out before we would make it back. The doctors gave Ray a tool to take them out with on a certain day. Cambria just laid down and Ray started taking them out. After a couple were done Ray asked her if it hurt because she wasn't even moving or saying anything. She answered, "Yes, but I'm just breathing through it". LOL! :D
When we recently got our dog, Casey, Cambria was really intimidated by her due to her fear of dogs. However, she worked through it and now is the closest of all the kids to Casey. It's really sweet and ironic.
She has THE sweetest smile. She could probably get anyone to smile along with her. Just last week she lost one of her big teeth on the top, so she has the cute hole in her mouth. It just makes her even cuter. Sooo...I took some pictures.

I have recently discovered the wonderful time wasting world of tower defense flash games on line. For those of you who are looking for more non-productive activities to fill out your schedule check out Bananageddon.com.
I have also discovered how to waste time on Facebook, which is very cool and an easy way to find out what Television shows my friends thousands of miles away are watching or how tired they are. I don't know how I got by being ignorant of these details in the past, I guess I just didn't know any better.

Just some random thoughts...

Sooo, I'm noticing that I'm falling into the same pattern I've noticed on other's blogs. Seems if I can't think of something exciting or witty to post, I don't post at all. I don't want to blog like that... So, while some of my post MAY be exciting and witty (because...HELLO...I'm ME, haha), not all of them will be. Some might be just like this, boring, yet possibly insightful and something for my children to look back on and say...OH, wow Mom went through that too. :)
Another note to add is that I added my wonderful husband Ray as an author to this blog. I'm hoping that he will add his exciting and witty thoughts as well and together we might in some fashion create an interesting read for you most days.
I've felt as though I've gone through a forced transistion these past few weeks. As many of you know, I was released from my calling as Young Women's President at church. For those that aren't members of my church, we have jobs at the church that are voluntary. Our leaders extend callings - or jobs- to us and we have the choice to accept or decline. Our church has many different organizations and all of them work together to help us learn and grow in the gospel. I have been blessed as a convert to my religion to receive callings in organizations that I haven't had experience with yet. About 2 years ago I was called into the Young Women organization. This is for the youth girls ages 12 to 18. I was first called as a counselor to the president and found the calling to be such a joy and I was able to learn all about the organization. I thought it was a wonderful blessing to work so closely with these youth and also to learn the programs that my girls would be learning in just a few short years. About one year ago, they asked me to be the president of the organization. This was a bit of a shock because I hadn't been in there very long and also because Ray has a very time consuming and demanding calling in the church as well. It was a wonderful, yet busy and stressful year as president. This month they asked me to do something different. It's hard to spend soo much time with youth and then to just be done. Little kids are easy to love, it just comes naturally. My kids are easy to love, it also comes naturally. I was unsure of how easily the love would come for these young girls that I didn't know and that were at such "difficult" ages. The love I knew would be neccessary if I was going to serve them the way the Lord would want me to. I was amazed! The beautiful, sweet spirits not only were truly easy to love, but they loved me back in a way I wasn't expecting. The trust and the level that they were thinking at were awesome. The joy that they had and shared was amazing!
So, now I'm in with the Relief Society sisters. I have always loved Relief Society and I was excited to learn I would be able to attend their Sunday meetings. I was asked to serve as a counselor to the president and work with the enrichment of the sisters. I've had this calling before and it did not intimidate me for that reason. However, I'm realizing that going back to something after so many years is not an easy transition. It's fun to think that all these women have so much wisdom to share with me. I hope that I can make the most of this time and learn and share and serve in a way that is pleasing to my Lord. I'm also able to support and help Ray in his calling more. He needs to be out among the people and visiting and helping them a lot and this was very difficult for him to do when I was gone a lot with the young women. So, mostly good things coming from the change, but a transition none-the-less and I don't do well with changes. :)
I'm looking forward to the holidays. We origionally had planned on going camping during our Thanksgiving holiday...however we decided to stay at home and use the time to get some things done around the house that had been put on the back burner. Ray has been working a lot of overtime and so a whole day off at home is hard to come by. We are looking forward to getting our house in order for the holiday celebrations come December.
Stella turns 9 next month. It seems each year gets harder with their birthdays. I'm excited for them, but sad for me. I start looking at pictures of them when they were little and think about how long ago they seemed that little and yet it seems so fast all at the same time.
You know, I think in honor of my kids, I'm going to do a post for each of them and just tell everything about them that I love. I'm so thankful for my kids and I should express it more. What better place then this. :)

In honor of turkey day approaching...

When I was 8 years old I "adopted" my father's aunt and uncle as my grandparents. They were great and wonderful people and I truly loved them. My Grandpa Charlie passed away first when I was 16. It was a sad loss, but we still had Grandma Alice. She had a wonderful sweet spirit and a lot of spunk and boy oh boy could she cook and bake. YUM! She was best known for her banana bread. It tasted like no other banana bread I'd ever had and she jokingly called it her "ticket in the door" for our family gatherings. Ha ha! She married into our family and didn't have any children, so she always felt it was an act of kindness that we included her. However, we just loved her and holidays were not the same without her. Grandma Alice passed away in the summer of 2006. She was 98 years old! She lived a great life and touched many in her time here on earth.
Last year for Christmas, my sister gathered some of Alice's recipes and put together cookbooks for mom and I. As she was going through all the paper clipped recipes and hand written recipes this one came up. It was written out with her handwriting just like any other recipe. Ha ha! This was so funny to us all, because she was so proper and always appropriate, but every once in awhile she would pop up with something funny and out of character. So I share this with you for a holiday chuckle and if any of you try the recipe let me know how it turns out, LOL! :D

Turkey Dressing

2 cups bread crumbs
1 onion, chopped
6 stalks celery - diced
1 pkg. onion soup mix
2 cups popcorn - unpopped

Mix and stuff turkey. Place in oven at 325 degrees. After 2 hours, get the hell out of the kitchen because the popcorn will "blow the turkeys' ass right out of the oven".

Playing with pictures!

So a friend sent me a link to this fun and free photo finishing software. I finally got it uploaded and had some fun with these impromptu pics of Kyle in the bathtub. Thanks for looking!

Pumpkin Carving

This is a typical face made my Cambria when she's trying to be silly.

So, usually we make time as a family to go to a pumpkin patch. However, we didn't make it this year. What we did instead is had Ray pick up a few pumpkins on his way home from work Thursday night. It actually was really cool, he found found three smaller pumpkins for around a $1 a piece. GREAT deal! The kids were happy as well. Stella drew her own face on and Cambria and Kyle chose from faces that Ray drew on paper. Then he cut the tops off and they started cleaning out their pumpkins. Kyle didn't want to have anything to do with the inside of the pumpkin. He thought it was "yucky". Ha ha! I had a couple safer cutter knives, so Stella used that to work on part of her pumpkin. Kyle was jealous and wasn't happy 'til he had his own knife. What is it with boys and knives. This past summer, I found Kyle with a paring knife and apple and a pool of blood. Yep, he needed stitches. This however, was much safer, but still made me nervous. When he got his knife though he was just so content - just worked at cutting on his pumpkin. It was cute.