Gabriel is THREE

Happy Birthday Gabriel!  We celebrated Gabe's birthday this year with friends and family at a fun little party at our house.  The theme was a Pajama party so all the little kids were dressed in their pajamas which was super cute.  We invited Ella, Nicholas, Brock, Brody, Ava, Jonah and Tessa, and they all made it! 

We had the kids decorate pillow cases and make cereal necklaces, and then watch Elmo's Silly Songs with their own bags of popcorn.

 One of my favorites things during the party was watching Gabriel open presents.  He, and every other one of his friends were each incredibly excited to open the presents.  They all gathered close around Gabriel and helped him open most every present, it was fun to watch how happy they all were.

 Instead of having the traditional cake and ice cream and since it was a pajama party, we opted for yummy "breakfast" foods like donuts, chocolate chip muffins, sliced oranges,  chocolate milk and Rice Krispies.....treats.

He had so much fun with his family, friends, and new presents!

Happy Birthday Gabe!

Oh, and Gavin wanted his pitcutre taken too:)

Genevieve - 1 month old

Genevieve is already 1 month old.  Her jaundice has cleared up nicely and she is gaining weight now at a good pace.  She still loves to sleep a lot during the day and not quite as much during the evening, but we still love her.  Everyone compliments us on her hair and painted nails, and I've now had two other family members say that she looks like me when I was a baby.  I am predicting that her eyes will be a light brown, maybe hazel... we'll just have to wait and see on that one.  At her check up her dr said she was 70th in height, 40th in head circumference, and 5th in weight.  So she's tall and skinny with a normal sized head.  Oh, and she look like a princess in this dress today.

Long Winter Months

The weather is cold but the company is good:)

We've been indoors now for what feels like forever.  Rain, snow, freezing winds and a newborn baby is all that keeps us from the wild outdoors.  While indoors we've come up with some fun games like, "push the laundry basket" and "obstacle course" and "run around the ottoman", and the names pretty much speak for themselves. The boys also love helping me cook every night, and spend about 15 minutes screaming "DAD!" and staring out the window waiting for Shevin to come home. (best part of everyone's day).  We haven't really had enough snow to build a snowman, but maybe soon.

Dear Genevieve

She's here!  Genevieve Yolanda Morris was born at 9:58pm on Thursday December 29th.  She weighed 6 lbs. 15 oz. and was 20 1/2 inches long.  The delivery was ok.  I went into the hospital at 2pm, my water was broken at 5pm, and the really painful contractions didn't start until about 8pm.  So really, I'd only said that it was really hard labor for about 2 hours.  Since she was definitely ready to come out, I only had to push 2 times and there she was!  There were some breathing and heart problems at first, so she was taken to the NICU for 2 hours which left us with a pretty quiet room biting our nails praying that everything was fine, and after the 2 hours, it was.  We are so grateful to have our healthy little girl home.  Sleep is minimal and we're living as hermits, but it's so great to have her, we all love her so much.  Gavin gives his little "shis-shta" a  "kish" about every 30 minutes, and Gabriel loves picking her up and bringing her to me while she's sleeping (he's done this twice now... crazy scary).  She has big brown eyes and tons of beautiful dark hair, and right now she has hot pink fingerails.  I just couldn't resist!  My mom thinks that she looks like me when I was a baby, and I agree; we've got a future heart breaker on our hands!

Through with USU!

That's right, December 3rd was Shevin L. Morris' last official day of school at USU, making him a Master in HR!  No more late Friday nights and early Saturday mornings, no more weekday study sessions or in the middle of dinner phone conferences, nope, no more!  He has pushed through the last 2 years with work, family and school, and it has all paid off.  Only 2 weeks later he also took and passed the PHR test, another amazing feat! I can't begin to express how proud of him I am for dedicating himself and spending so much time to further his education for both himself and his family.  Love you husband!

-Since USU only has a ceremony in April, we had our own little celebration honoring Shevin at our house the next day and most all of his family was able to come to show Shevin their support,
WAY TO GO!

(p.s.- I realize that congratulations is spelled with a T, and not a D; it was done on purpose.)

Halloween 2011

I'm obviously behind, since Halloween was nearly 2 months ago, but I wanted to remember how much fun it was.  First off, I love the Fall.  I love baking with pumpkin, staring at brightly colored leaves, and wearing pretty scarves;  It is my favorite season hands down, and Halloween is 2nd place on my favorite holiday list.  This year we spent Halloween in our new place in Lehi, and we had a great time.  We dressed the boys up as Buzz Lightyear and Woody, and we went trick-o-treating 4 times!

 

On Friday, while Shevin was in class, I took the boys over to the Lehi Legacy Center where they were having a big Halloween bash with dinner, games, prizes and trick-o-treating.  It was Gavin's first time, and although the only word he could get out was "treat", everyone seemed to understand what he wanted, and gave him a piece of candy.  The only problem is that Gavin was so excited about the candy in his hand, that he immediately came to a hault so that he could unwrap and eat the candy, holding up the rest of the kids in line.  After doing that about 10 minutes of crying because he didn't understand why he couldn't immediately eat the candy, he seemed to grasp the concept and started having fun again.   Gabriel was also being funny about trick-o-treating, Only his thing was that he didn't like people putting the candy in his actual Halloween basket (which was a football).   He would deliver his line, and then hold out his hand for the candy.  If the candy giver passed by his hand and threw it in the football he'd yell "No! Don't do that!" and then angrily grab that piece of candy out of the football, stare at it for a minute, and then put it in the football himself.  It was a little embarrising when he yelled at people, but you can't blame him for wanting to inspect every piece of candy he was given, there are some creeps out there and who knows what kind of gross things they'd try to pass off as edible:)

On Saturday afternoon we went to our ward "soup eat & trunk or treat" and had a better time than expected.  Because most of our ward is grandparents, we had far more trunks than treaters, so each trunk gave the boys 4-5 pieces of candy each instead of the customary 1-2 pieces.  Score!

Monday morning I picked up Syd and the girls and we all went to Nuskin to trick-o-treat through my mom's building.  Two of my favorite things, 1. family and B. candy, so it was a great morning.

To top off the Halloween Season, we took the kids treating around the neighborhood to a few of the neighbors who went all out for Halloween.  We saw dancing witches, floating skeletons, and we even got to walk through a neighbors fun little "Haunted House"; and we followed that with hot chocolate ("hot chocate milk" as the kids call it) in our jammies. Loved it!

Our Lehi House

We are now starting to get settled into our new home, and we really like it.  My favorite thing about this area is that it's only 1 block away from Wine's Park.  But we like that we're surrounded by older homes and older people.  Our ward is one of those "newly weds and nearly deads" ward.  About 20% of the ward in very newly weds, meaning no kids.  Another 20% is the middle age with children, and 60% is older than 50.  Another thing that I actually like is that it seems like everyone is this ward has lived in Lehi most of their life.  The older people in the ward have lived in the same house for over 30 years, and the middle agers have all just purchased their parents or grandparents old house, and they married someone they knew in High School.  I think I like it because it is so opposite of how we've been thus far, but growing up in one place for a long time is just such a nice concept I hope that we can eventually get to that place.  Back to the house, it was and still is work, but I guess that's just what we do!  So far we've replaced plumbing, electrical, insulation, windows, walls, carpet, trim, paint, and the bathroom. We still have much to do, but since we plan on being here for a while, I think we have some time:)