Gifts of Christmas

Tonight Emma was reading in the scriptures about the Three Wise Men and the gifts they brought to the baby Jesus.  In her words: "Gold, frankenstein, and myrrh." I promise we haven't watched "Nightmare Before Christmas" this year.

Es-sushi-cargot

The other day Peter came up to me and spit something out of his mouth into my hand (this is not an especially rare occurrence).  The first thing I said upon looking at is was that it looked like a chewed up crustacean (although later research confirmed that I meant to say it looked like a chewed up mollusk).  Here's a picture (it is small at Leslie's request, but for those of you who like looking at gross things, you can see a somewhat bigger version by clicking on the picture):

After discarding the offending mush I walked into the family room and saw a pair of Talmage's pants on the floor.  I picked them up to put them away and a few small things fell out of his pocket:

Peter really had been eating snails!  RAW snails!  Leslie described it best as es-sushi-cargot.  I guess Peter will grow up to like all sorts of fancy, expensive foods. :)

Crazy Tarantula Migration

Who knew that northeastern Oklahoma was for tarantula migrations in the fall?  Actually, we did - we had heard about it from our neighbor and have been watching every year to see some.  Well, we finally did tonight.  Leslie's mom and dad and sister came to visit us so we went to our favorite nearby state park to have dinner in the wild. As we were driving in to the park we saw something large and hairy crawling down the road.  We were in two cars so I called Leslie and told her.  Then we decided to turn around and get out to see it.

We ended up finding two fairly large tarantulas!  Leslie's dad, Merrill, was brave enough to catch one in a large plastic cup, and Morgan caught the other one in an ice cream bucket.  We watched them while we ate dinner and got brave enough to touch their back legs while they were in the bucket.

Peter loved watching them!  We had to make sure that he didn't reach in and smash them.  Actually he did push on them a few times with his chicken nugget.  Hopefully tarantulas are sanitary!? (You might want to scroll down and pause the music on our webpage before watching the videos.)

We showed them to a few other people and then decided to walk down a trail before letting them go.  When we got to a good place we decided we were brave enough to dump them out onto someone's lap.  Morgan and I sat down and Merrill got ready to let the tarantulas out.  Peter decided to climb onto my lap, too.  One tarantula ended up on him and started crawling up his shirt toward his face.  Everyone screamed and we tried to pick Peter up and brush off the tarantula, but it crawled under Peter's armpit and onto his back.  It was an Indiana Jones moment as we tried to get it brushed off him as quickly as we could.  I only wish we got Leslie's face on the video (but you can hear her voice)!  If you watch closely you can see the spider on Peter's back for a second.  This video might be worth watching full screen (click on the YouTube logo at the bottom right of the video and then a new webpage will open up; then click on the icon of the four outward pointing arrows at the very bottom right of the video).

 

Finally we decided the tarantula wasn't too bad and we let him crawl on our hands and arms.  Merrill was the first one brave enough to try it (besides Peter, of course).  Then Morgan tried it and so did I (the tarantula crawled up my arm and onto my back, touching my neck for a minute - ahhh! - before it crawled down my other arm).  We even got Leslie to try it for a minute!

We ended up having a lot of fun before we let him go.  We hope we didn't traumatize the poor tarantula too much!

Oh, What do you do in the Summertime?

Here's what WE did. I finally caught up on blogging about our summer. Just click the links below (or simply scroll down through the posts) to see some of what we did during the hot, hot summer.

May

Greg and Meisha's wedding

June

July

Clark and Kaylee's wedding

So there is a brief report of what we did. Don't worry this is not my journal, as so many blogs say, I keep a pen and paper version for that. Someday i will get around to catching up all the way about Back to School, etc. Enjoy this update until then.

Wedding #2

At the end of July the kids and I drove to Utah to be there for my brother Clark's wedding. How did we do it? Our very nice Grampa Steve flew to Oklahoma and drove with us to Colorado and then with Tutu, too, we drove on to Utah. They were so nice (and very brave) to make the drive with us. It actually went pretty well. We listened to alot of books on tape and made some long rest stops. It was a good adventure.

I didn't take as many pictures on this trip but we did have alot of fun. We stopped in Morgan, UT the first night to spend some time with Nate's sister and her family who were there visiting from North Carolina. It was fun to stay in that beautiful place and swim and have fun with cousins. Big thank you to the Thompson's for letting us stay.

Then it was on to my parents house. They were so helpful to me with the kids. We had alot of fun playing with cousins, playing at the school and park, drinking slurpees, picking apricots, and being outside in my parents' beautiful backyard. We enjoyed a huge rainstorm one day. As the kids were out playing we realized that all the garbage cans were being pushed down the street by all the water. We ran out to save the cans. We got completely soaked and all our little boys were confused and crying, but we had alot of fun and got in our good deed for the day.We also got to see some more of Nate's side of the family. We had dinner with lots of family at Aunt Ruth's, we met our new nephew. Carrie took us to see the renovated BYU campus. And later got to go to the Discovery museum with Kamrah and her two boys.We celebrated Emma's birthday early with a trip to the pioneer park. The kids had lots of fun playing games in the old school house, and panning for gold, and riding the horses, etc. We also got to celebrate on the actual day with the family that was still left in town. She made her own list of simple things she wanted to do for fun. She was the sweetest birthday girl. The night before the wedding we had a little informal party with our family and Kaylee's family and some of Clark and Kaylee's closest friends. We later dubbed it the "Pop-up Party" because we literally set everything up in about 20 min. It was so fun to meet her family and give a little advice to the couple. It was especially a great night because it was the night that everyone was finally in town. My other brother and his wife arrived during the party and Co-Nate flew in just as it started. Nate flew really late that night so he missed the party but I was soooo glad to have him with us again. Here is everyone except Nate and Peter (who had to be put to bed early).Friday was the wedding. They got married in the Salt Lake Temple. It was wonderful to be there again. It is such a beautiful place of great strength and peace. It was a busy day for weddings so there was a bit of a wait for pictures. The little boys got a little tired, bored and hungry. Luckily the luncheon was across the street. We were delayed getting to the reception because of a major traffic jam. It was at a house near Park City. It was fabulous. My sister Karen made hundreds of mini banana creme pies and beautiful sugar cookies with edible flowers on top. She is amazing. The yard was beautiful and had a small playground to keep the kids happy. We had a good time there.
Here's the happy couple. They met before Clark's mission and when he got back in January they picked up again pretty quick. We are so happy to have Kaylee in our family. I have had fun getting to know her. She is beautiful, and positive, and so kind. (And she has been a good friend to Clark's twin sister Holly which is hugely important.) Clark has always been a cool guy. We are glad he found someone so great for him. I am excited that our "Sisters Brimhall" set is now complete. Yeah! Congrats guys.

July

July is a month of Celebrations. There is Independence Day and Pioneer Day (my favorite!), plus my birthday and Nate's, and lots of other family birthdays. We had a good month partying and just trying to stay cool in the long string of over 100* days.

At the Vaclaw Family Fireworks. It was awesome as always!Hiking on Turkey Mountain (or at least as close as we get to mountains around here)My birthday! I made a list of things i wanted to do on my birthday and I accomplished all of them. The list included play outside, swing really high, wear a bow in my hair, and take treats to friends, etc. It was a great day!Our very special visitors from Taiwan. Nate's best friend from school, Forrest, came with his wife and cute baby for dinner when they were in Tulsa visiting family. It was great to see them.Pioneer Day tri-ward activity (notice that we are all dressed up and other people - not so much. I am a little nutty when it comes to Pioneers).Just hanging out. Peter potato face (I think this was the same night that Talmage and Emma had a heated discussion about whether they were called "Smashatatoes" or "Buh-tatoes")Emma's teddy bear hair.Snuggling boys on a blanket made by their great-grandma.Talmage and Peter singing a duet.Unfortunately we have no pictures of Nate's birthday because the kids and I were gone in Utah. We celebrated with him before leaving and he was happy to spend his day with some good friends.

June (lots of pictures)

In June the big kids took swim lessons. They did a great job and advanced to the Seahorse and Dolphin classes. We were lucky enough to do them at the same time as several of our friends and had a fun time playing in the plaza after lessons and i had a great time talking to the other Moms.We missed our Dad while he was at fire school in Nevada for a week but we were glad we got to see him in his gear before he left.Morgan started a collection of cicada skins. These are the skins they shed when they come up out of the ground after hiding our for 13 years. He found them stuck to trees, bushes, flowers and even blades of grass. He filled a large bucket with them. Crazy! (the picture would not load)
We also enjoyed playing and reading at the park, spending time with friends, and even the splash pad by the zoo (when we found we had chosen the one day the zoo closes for the year to drive down to Tulsa). And Peter got his first haircut! That was a hard thing for me. I felt so sad afterwards - it just made him instantly grow up. But I really like it now. (this picture is the before