Happy 1st Birthday Camden!

Two days before Camden's birthday we wanted to go up to Park City and get in some high elevation running in preparation for a relay race Robert, my brothers, Dad, and I were going to do the next weekend. And since we were all going to be together anyway we figured it would be a good time to celebrate Camden's birthday.

This was our view before the celebration as we ran up, up. and up from the elevation of the freeway all the way up to the cabin.

When we all finally made it up we were able to celebrate Camden's birthday (and listen to conference. Remember, Camden was born on conference Sunday last year, so his birthday is always going to fall around conference time.)

He was tired, but was interested in opening his presents still. But as you can see in the video, so were Julia and Micah.

I told everyone no more toys. We have plenty of toys, especially for his age since we've had two other kids go through that same age already! He got a lot of snacks, sippy cups, some clothes, and books.

Then it was on to the cake.

He is very interested in everything right now, especially a bright cake set right in front of him.

He started out just eating the blue frosting on top of the cake.

He really liked it.

He finally did make it past the blue frosting at the end and enjoyed his first taste of chocolate cake (I think, you never know with Grandma around what he's been fed).

Blue frosting monster.

Camden's personality right now is busy and friendly. He loves to babble, he loves to explore and experiment. He loves his siblings, but also wants everything that Micah has, so he often butts heads with Micah. I imagine we can look forward to that for a long time even though they do really love each other.

He is getting a mouthful of new teeth right now, so it's hard to say exactly how many he has since the new ones are just coming in. Eight? I still think of him as my little baby, but really he is almost toddler size, especially since he wears 18 month old clothes.

On Camden's actual birthday I told Micah to go give Camden a happy birthday hug, and this is what happened. For the record, he was giving him a hug, a very aggressive hug.

Unpacking

You know the point when your house is so messy you don't even care anymore? Yeah, I think we're there. I am in middle of finally unpacking everything after waiting a month after we moved to remodel. The remodeling work isn't done yet, but it's done enough that I can unpack. And unpacking while also trying to feed, clothe, and entertain three kids makes for a very chaotic scene.

But not caring doesn't mean I've given up cleaning or unpacking. It just means I'm not looking at the mess anymore and thinking that I need to get it all cleaned up before I go to bed. It means it's okay if it doesn't get done today or tomorrow or the next day. Until then we just keep plugging along, little by little getting stuff organized.

Micah was excited to have is own bed at last.

Camden is at that "I need to explore everything" age. Now you understand how things can get messy fast around here.

Julia's First Day of Kindergarten

Julia started kindergarten this year. Julia and I were both excited for her to go to school and make new friends and learn new things. She is actually a pretty good help with the boys, so I was sad not to have her help. But she is horrible to take to the store because she wants me to buy her everything, so now we go grocery shopping and run errands while she is in school.

First day of school pictures. Julia loves Sophia the First.

 Micah misses Julia when she is at school, they are buddies and best playmates.

 This was before school on the first day. We were still living at my parents house. When she looked inside her backpack when she woke up that day it was all full of Frozen picture books and Frozen magnets. So here they are putting the magnets on the fridge.

 We've already gotten her school pictures back, she looks too grown up to me.

Lining up on the first day of school. I forget that Julia is short for age until I see her with other kids her age. She is one of the shortest in her class. After class on the first day I met her at the door and she introduced me to her new best friend and they hugged each other as we left. Now they draw pictures for each other to take home.

Julia on Laughing Gas

Julia had her first cavity at her last doctors appointment. They said she has been brushing well, but she needs to do better on flossing. It's true, we all need to do better on flossing.

So this week we went back to get the cavity filled. They gave her some laughing gas so she wouldn't be as nervous. Turns out Julia on laughing gas is the same as Julia normally, but just with more arm and leg waving. She was chatting it up with everyone, but that is how she is normally. Her speech was a little slower than usual, but the main difference with the laughing gas was she just liked to move her arms and legs all over the place and was just very loose.

It worked though, she hardly even noticed they were working on her mouth between watching the kids movie on the ceiling and breathing the laughing gas.

House Pictures

A few pictures of moving into the new house.

Camden being a Dodger super fan

Living in a house of boxes

As we were unpacking the toys, they were the first to get unpacked.

Getting our first peek at our stuff on the moving van after it got delivered.

Camden tries out crawling on the new floors.

Robert and his dad installing for in our bedroom.

Julia deems the new floors danceable.

Before photo of the living room.

Rainbow picture from our new house.

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

Our family was nominated to participate in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge by my cousin Katrina's family. We had fun doing it as a family to raise awareness to a disease that, admittedly, is rare but for that very reason should have awareness raised about it. I wanted to share our challenge video here as well so we can remember our experience. Almost everyone knows the challenge by now, but indulge me a little here since in ten years when we come back and read this we may have all forgotten. The challenge is to dump a bucket of ice water on your head, then nominate others to do the same. Complete the challenge within 24 hours of when you were nominated or donate $100 to the ALS Association (or other ALS asociataed organization) We decided to do the challenge and donate $10 to ALS. A little about ALS from from www.alsa.org

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as "Lou Gehrig's Disease," is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS eventually leads to their death. When the motor neurons die, the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is lost. With voluntary muscle action progressively affected, patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed.

A-myo-trophic comes from the Greek language. "A" means no or negative. "Myo" refers to muscle, and "Trophic" means nourishment–"No muscle nourishment." When a muscle has no nourishment, it "atrophies" or wastes away. "Lateral" identifies the areas in a person's spinal cord where portions of the nerve cells that signal and control the muscles are located. As this area degenerates it leads to scarring or hardening ("sclerosis") in the region. 

As motor neurons degenerate, they can no longer send impulses to the muscle fibers that normally result in muscle movement. Early symptoms of ALS often include increasing muscle weakness, especially involving the arms and legs, speech, swallowing or breathing. When muscles no longer receive the messages from the motor neurons that they require to function, the muscles begin to atrophy (become smaller). Limbs begin to look "thinner" as muscle tissue atrophies. 

I feel like you should watch this four times to catch everyone's reaction when they get dunked.

1. Micah's expression when he goes from thinking this is really fun to realizing what it really feels like to get dumped with cold water. We actually filled his cup up with warm water, but either Micah or Camden dumped it out and, as you can see in the video, I filled it up last second with cold water. He was a champ though, just looked a little shocked.

2. Julia had seen a lot of other ice bucket challenges so she was excited to get in on the action as well. She insisted on doing it in her swim suit and doesn't even look cold at first. We realized the coldest part is sitting in your freezing wet clothes until you can change.

3. Robert filled up the buckets and filled mine up a little less than his, but not less enough! I picked up my bucket, but couldn't lift it over my head. So I stop mid way, then see everyone else has dunked themselves and I better just do what I can. Therefore I cheated a little because my hair never gets soaked because I couldn't lift my bucket high enough.

4. Robert doesn't even look fazed. It IS cold water, we did have ice in it, but most of it melted while we were setting up. Also, note that Camden really wanted to participate and was mad he was left out. Afterward he crawled over to where we did it and got wet anyway, and I didn't bring any extra clothes for him (we did this at our new house, but we weren't moved in yet so I had to plan ahead and bring extra clothes for everyone). He went home (to Saratoga Springs) wearing no pants and an extra shirt of Micah's.

Cam-Man's Walking

Also last week Camden started letting himself go more so we can now say he is walking. He turned 11 months on Saturday, which means he beat out his two older siblings who started walking at 11 1/2 months and 12 1/2 months.

We've Moved

Blogger mobile doesn't do pictures and I rarely get onto an actual computer anymore, except to blog. It would make things a whole lot easier for me if the mobile app could actually do something besides text. So anyway, we moved into our new home in Draper this weekend, but since I have no computer that is not in a box a picture-less post will have to do. Otherwise weeks will go by and I will never blog about.

We "moved in" on Friday, but we are still not done remodeling, so we are moved in as far as living in a house with no usable kitchen and half of our stuff in the garage is moved in. It was nice to see all of our stuff after 7 months after it had been in storage. I was afraid the worse would happen and we would have water damage, or half our stuff was broken, or have a big ant infestation or whatever else can go wrong when you move and leave stuff in storage. But so far everything looks good.

The kids think it's Christmas in September because they got all their toys back. We packed up soon after Christmas so a lot of the toys they got for Christmas they never got to play with very much. Julia was playing with a barbie yesterday that I didn't even remember her getting, but she said she got it for Christmas. Micah doesn't even really remember his old toys since 7 months is so long for a 30 month old. All his toys seem new to him. (Ex. "We have a Thomas train! " We've had it for years, Julia got it for Christmas before he was born.)

Right now we are pretty much living in the basement while the main floor gets finished with the remodel. Robert is busy with work right now (September tax season) so he doesn't have a lot of time to work on it. Hopefully we'll have a working kitchen soon, then move on to the bedrooms (master, Micah's and Camden's.) Julia's room is in the basement so she is the only lucky one who gets to sleep in her real bed. Living room is getting finished last since it is the lowest priority for functional living. So, come visit us!.... in a month.... or next year...

Mini Wheats on Bikes

A follow up video to the bike riding post