Helping Hands

Oliver loves to help. If he ever gets his hands on a screwdriver he will spend hours "fixing things". Here he is helping Grandpa with the power washer. He also loves to stir and pour. Yesterday I was making a pasta salad and I let him stir it while I turned around and chopped olives, when I looked back over at him he had poured the entire bottle of Salad Supreme spice into the salad and stirred it in. It was a bit potent. His favorite way to help lately is in bossing the dogs and animals around. If he ever hears anyone say anything to the dogs he will come running from wherever he is shouting the same command. He loves to yell at them to "sit" or "get down" even if they are all the way across the yard.

In case you were wondering, Ruby is also a big help. Here she is holding all of the laundry in the basket for me. What would I do without her?

Our little gem...

I felt so bad about not taking any pictures of Ruby lately that I decided to post these simply for the sake of posting something (I have no cute story or anicdote to accompany it). I will say though that we are madly in love with our little Ruby, she really is such a gem (no pun intended). She smiles and coos and keeps us all begging for more.

Whew!

I had to begin this post with this picture of Sam because it pretty much sums up how we all have felt about this past week. Our week included packing all of our belongings into boxes and moving them to a storage unit (with the help of a U-haul truck and a couple faithful Elder Quorum members, thanks again!) Cleaning our rental house and then driving to Utah through a horrible snow storm that turned our nine hour drive into fifteen. Once here we quickly unpacked, bought a pumpkin, celebrated Halloween, then began cooking and cleaning like crazy to get ready for everyone who came on Sunday for Ruby's baby blessing. I just have to add a special thanks here to my mom, without whose help we would not have survived. She flew to Colorado Springs to help with the packing and cleaning then flew home with Ollie so that I would only have to take Ruby in the car with me. Once here she worked tirelessly to get everything ready for the blessing so that it would be a wonderful day for all of us (which it definitely was). And, she even had the energy to chase Oliver through the corn maze at the pumpkin patch. Thanks again mom, you're amazing!

Before coming to Utah we got to celebrate our first real snowstorm of the year in Colorado Springs. Oliver was fascinated with making tracks in the stow and spent a good hour just walking back and forth across the backyard.

Oliver is currently obsessed with machinery, i.e. garbage trucks, tractors, trains, etc. So, you can imagine his delight when he discovered a whole row of tractors at the pumpkin patch we visited.

They also had a corn maze, but Ollie was more concerned with chasing the chickens into the maze than finding a way through himself.

Out of all the pumpkins, Oliver set his heart on what he dubbed the "white baby pumpkin" I'm not sure whether it was a pumpkin or a squash because it was misshapen and slightly rotted, but we took it home with us anyway

And here is our little monkey. If you ask him what he is he will tell you he is a "monkey jumping on the bed." He had me put the costume on him a few times leading up to Halloween so he could jump on my bed while I sang the song. He didn't care too much about the candy on Halloween, but as you can tell he thought the pumpkins were fascinating. He made us relight them every night until finally the pumpkins got mushy and had to be thrown out.

For the record, Ruby was dressed up as an adorable little pumpkin. Unfortunately, we forgot to take any pictures. We also forgot to bring our camera out for the blessing so you will just have to take my word for it that she looked cute (despite the fact that her cute hair bow and the panties to her dress both got lost somewhere in the move). It was wonderful to have so much family here to support us and Sam did a beautiful job on the blessing. All in all it was a great week, but I am sure glad its over!

Gone Fishing. . . . .

Sometimes life feels like a game of Go Fish. You hold a certain set of cards and then spend all your time looking for the right match. Well, right now we are looking for just the right match. Sam has been offered a good position in Colorado Springs with the company he interned with over the summer. We knew that they would be making an offer and that is why we decided to move to the Springs back in May. Now however Sam is thinking he would like to begin his career elsewhere and has been interviewing and sending in resumes to companies from Utah to Timbuktu. We are currently waiting to see if we receive any additional job offers. In the meantime the lease on our house ran out and we didn't want to get stuck in another lease if we aren't really going to be staying. The solution: we packed all of our belongings into a storage unit and I brought the kids out to stay with my parents while Sam stays with some friends for the remaining weeks of school. While it is not the ideal situation, we figured that it would give us the most options whilst we play yet another round of Go Fish.