Corinne's Laugh

We were watching old videos this morning and found this one. It made us laugh so hard that we had to put in in the blog. Corinne can still do this laugh too.

Home, Sweet, Home

Here it is... now time for landscaping...

The road you can see on the left-hand side of the picture is an Orem city service road. It also allows access to the Bonneville Shoreline Trail. It is sooooooo fun to walk outside and step right onto a trail to go hiking. I love it!

Our New Home

This past year has been pretty crazy selling our home and now finishing the building of a new home. We moved in over spring break. We have been so blessed to be able to build in a place where our kids have a "forest" to play in. Our appraisal came in higher than we expected. I was praying hard for the appraisal to come in as high as we would need it in order not to have any mortgage insurance. Heavenly Father loves us and blessed us through the whole process.

Corinne "Mountain Biker" Young

While Allana was at school, Gideon, Corinne and I went on a little adventure. I wanted to see if my stroller would fit on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail (it did, but not very well). Corinne rode her strider bike and gideon hiked most of the time, which left me with an empty stroller to push. We parked the stroller and kept on going.

This was the first time Corinne has ever taken her strider bike on the trail. It is a single track trail and her favorite parts were the spots with lots of gravel, rocks, or hills to ride down. I haven't seen her smile that big and laugh that much for a while. She would go down a hill and laugh and laugh and then ride back up and go down again.

When we got back home she said to me, "Mom! Now you need to call me Corinne "Mountain Biker" Young!" If you know Corinne that is a pretty big deal. Ever since she could talk if you call her anything, like "Sweetie" or "Cute" or anything she would get really upset and say, "No, I Corinne!!!" So this is the first time I've really seen her taken another identity besides "Corinne"

"I happy, Mom, I happy!"

Yesterday I was in a hurry to get out the door and get Allana to kindergarten. I have spoiled Gideon by carrying him up and down the stairs, so as I started down the stairs with him and he made a whining sound I thought he was begging me to pick him up. "Gideon I want you to walk." I continued closing the door at the top of the stairs not realizing his pinky was being squished in the door.

Gideon: "Ow! Ow! Ow!" (with tears starting to come down is cute cheeks)

Me: "I'm squishing your fingers!" (I kissed his pinky and saw that I had broken the skin, it had to have hurt badly!) "Gideon, I am sooooo sorry. Can you still move it?"

Gideon: (wiping tears from his face and smiling) "I happy, Mom, I happy!"

I gave him more hugs and kisses and ended up crying myself. He and all my children are so forgiving even when they are in pain. What a great example! Most of the time when he topples and falls (as he does often trying to balance his big head), he jumps up and says, "I okay!"

Does it look like it is ready for us to move in?

So our house was supposed to be done by now... look at Allana's face in this picture... It makes me laugh. It is like she is shocked that it won't be finished in time for her birthday. It would have been nice, but I think it has been a blessing in a lot of ways that it has taken the extra time to get it finished. This too shall pass, right?

Spontaneous Hiking

We dropped Allana off at school at 11:15 then came to the building lot. Corinne and Gideon wanted to go on a hike. I thought we would only end up going a short distance, but they kept hiking and hiking almost all the way to dry canyon. This video is after 2 hours of hiking and they still wanted to go farther. I made them turn back since we had no food or water with us. It was a fun hike. I am excited for this to be our backyard.

Happy New Year!

We set the clocks forward and let the kids count down to midnight (9pm). We played games and then had ice cream at "midnight". The kids were so excited to stay up and they gladly went to bed saying, "I can't believe we stayed up until midnight! I am so tired!"

The house is breezy, but the sunset is AMAZING!

Andy finally had a camera around for one of the spectacular sunsets we've seen from our place. The pictures definitely don't do the view justice. Beautiful.

What Fall is All About

It was so cold today, but there were so many leaves in Grandma and Grandpa Young's yard that Andy and the kids couldn't stay inside! Andy raked up a huge pile of leaves and they had a blast burying each other under the pile, jumping in the pile, they even got out an umbrella and dad would burying the kids in their tent of leaves. I can't believe the kids staying out playing so long. I was freezing!

Gideon was so cute. He would want to be covered in leaves and then we'd say, "Where's Gideon?"

"I'm right here." would come his cute little voice from under the leaves.

Andy is so good to do all the work of raking up the leaves over and over as the kids scatter them again. After a good day of playing we still got quite a few bags of leaves filled up. Even though it was cold, at least it was dry!