Pumpkin Carving, etc.

It's been a good week. We finally got around to carving pumpkins this weekend. I was surprised at how much Brigham enjoyed it! He loved sticking his hand in there and pulling out little seeds, holding them above his head in victory. It was pretty cute. Kelsey still doesn't care for it, and the older three did great. We only got 3 pumpkins this year so there was some sharing and partnering up, but it worked out fine. 

 Above: their "yucky" face.   Below: "scary" face

Beautiful sunrise this morning. I took this picture from the girls' bedroom (hence the light fixture reflected in the top). They have a great view of the mountains and sunrises. Never mind all the houses and driveways :). 

Briggs is getting a lot more confident with his walking, and finally walking more than crawling. He's better at turning, stopping and starting, and even walking while holding things. The difficulty is when we put shoes on him. He does great at home barefoot, but when we go out in public and he has shoes, he trips a lot more. But we're getting there!

Kelsey's been working hard this week and not wearing pull-ups at night, and NOT peeing the bed. I've been having to get up several times during the night thanks to Briggs teething and Kelsey peeing. It's not very fun, but she has stayed dry the last two nights! So we're making progress. She has a "Pee-Free Chart" hanging in the kitchen and whenever she is all dry in the morning she gets to put a sticker on it. When she gets 5 stickers she gets to go pick out a toy or a treat at the store. She is very motivated by her "Pee-Fwee Chawt".

Wednesday we left the girls dance class early to go to the dentist. All 5 kids had an appointment, and this practice is SO helpful in trying to schedule them all at the same time so we don't have to keep coming back. The lady at the front desk when I was checking in she's like "Wow! It's Weston hour! Thank you so much for showing up!" haha. No cavities for anyone. Briggs had his first appointment, which he hated every second of. He screamed and thrashed around like it was pure torture. But the worst part was when the dentist talked to me afterwards and said we need to get rid of his binky.
NOOOOOOOooooo!!!
I don't think he understands how much that binky affects the peace in our home, and therefore my sanity. I told Kenny about it and he's really good about taking it away from him as soon as he gets home. But I still give it to him to go to sleep. I feel like it's just cruel to take it away right now where he's still got 2 molars cutting through. My poor sweet baby turns into quite the monster whenever he's teething. I know he's suffering. I can't wait till it all passes.

Wed. night I told them it was my last night of coming to scouts. Yay! Thursday night we had a training from the Stake for our ward primary presidency. Friday we had some fun family games like hide and seek (that's a family favorite) and the "squares game". Kenny invented that game last year and they hadn't played it for a while. Our living room rug has lots of big squares on it. All the kids stand in a line and get asked a question individually, usually related to something they've been learning about in school. (But sometimes it's things like, "What is grandma's name?" or something like that) Anyway if they get the question right they move up a square and the first person to make it to the other end of the rug, wins.

Our fridge was being overrun with eggs and so I just posted on our ward and our old ward's RS facebook pages that we were selling them. We brought the price down to 18 for $5 and now we've got a long waiting list! Plus 3 or 4 people that want weekly orders. We can't even do that many or we wouldn't have any eggs leftover for us. But anyway, Tyler and Brynlee are making pretty good, regular money doing this. It's good to teach them money management and they get excited about paying tithing, and the freedom of deciding what they want to buy when we're at the store. So far they haven't actually bought anything, but they like having the option. Thanks to a great interview we listened to about teaching kids about finances, we borrowed the "48 Hour Rule" which means no impulse buying. If they see something they want they have to have it on their wish list for 48 hours before we can go back and buy it. Also doing the 10/20/70 principle where 10% goes to tithing, 20% goes to long-term savings, and 70% is their discretionary fund where they choose how to spend (or save) it.

Saturday was very busy and productive. All the Saturday cleaning, plus 6 loads of laundry (including washing everyone's sheets and putting them all back on 5 beds), meal planning and grocery shopping, making dessert for a funeral at the church, Kenny was gone 3 times doing different service things for EQ. Tyler also had a play date over here (Kenny hates when I call it a play date for 8 year old boys) but his friends Max and Scott came over for a couple hours and it made him pretty happy. Oh and that's the night we carved pumpkins.

I never mentioned this earlier, but it should be in our family journal that we were quite worried about Kenny losing his job. He found out at the end of August that they were going to be making some serious cuts and laying off a lot of people. The price of oil is just so low! So for a month and a half we were just sort of waiting to find out if he would still be employed. Thankfully, our prayers were answered and he was lucky enough to keep his job. They may do some more cuts again at the beginning of next year. We'll just have to see how things play out.