After two months of negotiating, financing, closing, painting, and packing, we are finally moved into our new home!

We like this house because it is close to a top-rated elementary school AND middle school. The kids can walk to school for a lot of years! The house also sits at the end of a quiet little cul-de-sac and has plenty of room in the backyard for the kids to play. Another one of my favorite features is the multitude of closets — something our old house lacked — I am very excited to fill up every one of them!

Raine and Carter’s only requirement was that the new house have an upstairs, this one fit the bill with a “Texas basement.”

We visited the Center for Animal Research and Education (CARE) this weekend and it was AWESOME! When I read in the newspaper that this big cat sanctuary was having a fall festival, I knew it would be perfect for Carter. He has been obsessed with big cats for the last little while and lately has been sporting this little get-up every chance he gets.

He’s even made more than one trip to the store wearing it — although, I’ve successfully negotiated with him to leave the head-piece and gloves in the car so he doesn’t scare anyone. He wears this thing constantly at home and anytime he doesn’t like what I have to say to him, he roars at me! He really gets into character.

Saturday afternoon we loaded up the car and drove to Bridgeport. There were games for the kids to play while we waited for our tour to start. One of the activities was painting boxes — a perfect activity for crafty Raine.

And what were the boxes for? Well, we dropped a chicken leg inside, closed the top, and then threw it over the fence to a waiting tiger!

This guy quickly tore open Raine’s box to get to the chicken and then laid down to finish tearing the box to shreds. It was AWESOME!

Raine loved it, but Carter decided that he didn’t want a tiger tearing up his box so he brought it home to play with himself.

There are 40 big cats at the sanctuary and the tour took about an hour and a half to see them all. The kids were riveted the entire time. They learned all sorts of things about tigers, lions, cougars, and leopards. The cats were only about three feet away, with just a chain-link fence between us and them. A number of them kept their eyes on the small children in our group; here is one particularly large male who was more interested in Carter than the pumpkins in his pool. It was a little disturbing!

Did you know that the darker a lion’s mane, the more intimidating he is to other lions?

Did you know that a cougar can’t roar? Carter knew that one because he LOVES cougars — and he’s obviously never been to a BYU football game.

This girl loves to show off. Terrible photo, but she is scampering from one platform to another on just that three-inch wide support bar.

The black leopards don’t photograph well, but they look really neat in person.

They also have a rare snow leopard at the sanctuary. We saw him . . . sitting by the fire in the living room of the house watching his favorite movie, “How to Train Your Dragon.” I wish I had gotten a photo of it. He had just taken a bath and would get too cold outside because he is a Texas native and can’t handle the cold!

You don’t realize how big these cats are when they’re walking around on all fours. I started wondering if these fences were really high enough after seeing this demonstration.

I kept trying to convince the kids to pose in front of one of the tigers, but they had a hard time taking their eyes off long enough for me to get a photo.

The baby lion cubs were adorable.

Did you know that lions only weigh about two pounds when they are born?

They also have a large family of lemurs at the sanctuary.

Watching the tigers bob for pumpkins was a lot of fun. This is a video that our tour guide took, you can see Carter (in a red sweatshirt) and me (kneeling) behind the tiger.

The last stop on our tour was the tug-of-war area. Daddy decided to try his hand against JP the tiger. JP knew what he was doing. He would pull a little at first and then just hold it while everyone took their photos. When he got ready for some chicken he would start backing up, dragging everyone on the rope along with him.

Raine’s class took a field trip to the Botanical Gardens this past Friday and I was able to tag along.

Four parents came along to help with kids so we each only had two or three kids to keep track of — I had Raine and her current BFF, Belle.

Snack break

Play house in the vegetable garden

The girls in Raine’s class call themselves the cool cats — they have songs and cheers that they practice during recess. This is their “cool cats” pose.

Wednesday was the ward trunk-r-treat.

Thursday we carved pumpkins.

Friday was the big day. The kids went door-to-door with Alice, their little sister from across the street.

Every year, our neighbors bring their horse in to give the kids rides by the lake. Raine is always up for riding a horse.

I couldn’t believe it when Carter said he wanted to ride too. This is a first for him.

The first and second graders have been practicing all year to perform during chapel today. (Don’t they look excited?!)

Raine is in the second row, right next to the director’s left elbow.


Here are the words to the song (as remembered by Raine):

You’re the God of all the ages
The beginning and the end
Omnipotent and mighty
I cannot understand
But I can come to you in worship
And you hear this one small voice
Your love and peace surround me
And in wonder I rejoice

Abba, Father! Abba, Father!
You hear me when I call you
And I know I’m not alone
Abba, Father! Abba, Father!
You love me like a child of your own

Carter loves electronics! In order to keep him off my phone, I have resorted to bio-metric identification. The only problem, as Carter quickly found, is that you can get to the camera without logging in to the rest of the phone. So now, I find HUNDREDS of Carter-selfies on my phone! And not just selfies, he’ll take pictures of pretty much anything: I’ve woken up to the sound of my phone’s shutter, I’ve heard it while I was in the bathroom. I am getting pretty adept at deleting unflattering photos of myself! But here are a few of my favorite Carter-selfies:

9/26/14

9/27/14

9/27/14

9/29/14

9/29/14

9/30/14

10/2/14

10/5/14

10/5/14

10/6/14

10/8/14

10/9/14

10/11/14

And here is a sampling of the random other things that he takes photos of:

9/14/14 Carter’s fire ant bites, his entire ankle was swollen over

9/14/14 our home teacher, Brother Jeppson

9/15/14 waiting to pick up Raine from school

9/18/14 Carter loves to sit on my lap while I work at the computer and he loves to take photos to keep from getting too bored. Don’t my nails look great!!

9/28/14 Carter’s picture of Raine

9/28/14 Raine’s picture of Carter

9/28/14 Raine’s picture of Carter being a dog

9/30/14 Raine and me!

Now I can go reclaim some of my phone’s memory!

May 31
Carter: Do they cut their fingers off?
Mom: Huh? Whose fingers?
Carter: The chicken’s fingers. Do they cut off their fingers and cook them for these? (Indicating the chicken fingers he’s eating.)
Mom: Oh, no they don’t cut off the chicken’s fingers.
Dad: They call them chicken fingers because it’s chicken that you can pick up with your fingers.

May 17 I was preparing to paint my toenails when Raine came in asking me to paint her fingernails. As I was finishing up, Carter asked if he could paint my toes. I knew that if I said no, he would ask me to paint his fingernails. And not wanting to be the unfair mom who paints one of my children’s nails but not the other, I agreed to let him paint my toes. I figured that it wasn’t a big deal since I could just clean it off when he was done and re-paint. Unfortunately, he selected a very cheap, very sparkly bottle of Raine’s polish that did not come off AT ALL! I had to go to the ward party with paint smeared all over my toes. Lucky for me it was a very light pink so it wasn’t obvious!

June 8
The kids and I went to visit someone in a nursing home after church today and every time someone would walk by Carter would ask “Is that a really old person?”
Apparently I should have used a different phrase to describe to him what a nursing home is!

Aug 4 Scripture time — we pick our battles and this one we gave up on when the “audible” and “reverent” criteria were met.

As I was taking the video, I accidentally took a still-shot as well. Apparently, we have full-contact scripture reading at our house!

Aug 27
R: “Did you know that prairie wolves are spread all across North America, aka coyotes.”
Every morning, the first thing out of Raine’s mouth when she first wakes up is an animal fact. She’s usually stretching and scooping hair out of her face as she says it in a raspy morning voice.

Sept 14
Raine, in a fit of rage after not getting her way: “I wish I wasn’t part of this family.”
M: “Oh really, which family do you wish you were a part of?”
R: “None. I wish I was a penguin.”
Me, not seeing that coming: “A penguin!?!!”
R: “Yeah, a penguin at the zoo. With a purple tag on my wing.”
I had no response to that!

Oct 1
Raine, as we drove past our neighbor’s house: “What!!! No fair! They have way more flowers in their grass than we do!”
One man’s weed is another man’s child’s wild flower!

Oct 2
I sent Carter to put some things in his bathroom and bedroom at the new house. Later I discovered the items in the master bedroom and bath. I told Carter again to take them to his room and he told me that his room was the blue one (i.e. the master). After correcting him he complained, “Why do you always get the biggest room?”

On Sept 29, Raine had her well-child check-up:
Weight: 53.8 lbs (86%-ile)
Height: 50 in (99%-ile)

Raine’s height placed her in the 50th percentile among EIGHT year old — not seven, EIGHT! And it makes sense, everyone always asks if she is in 2nd or 3rd grade.

Being so tall is great, but it sure makes it hard to find dress-up clothes that fit! Raine generally wears a size 8, sometimes a 10 to get it long enough, but most dress-up clothes only go to size 6. I finally found this Elsa dress on ebay, shipped direct from China, and was so relieved that I would not have to sew one!
Raine loves her creative play!

Saturday morning we had a birthday party for Raine at our neighborhood park with her friends from school and church. We don’t have many photos because I was too busy running all the different animal themed games we did, but here are the ones I managed to snap.

One of our games was the platypus egg rescue relay. The hand-off between Raine and Corrine didn’t go too well — good thing we were using plastic eggs!

The boys’ team won.

Some of the other creature powers we used were bat (pin the tail on the donkey), wolf (Lupo Delle Ore, a game Raine learned from the Friend magazine), and cheetah (tail grab tag).

We had pizza delivered for lunch…

… and then ate cupcakes.

Here they are watching Raine open presents. Their creature power suits turned out really cute, if I do say so, and the kids all loved them!

(clockwise from top left) Karsyn, Corrine, Raine, Elyse, Joshua, Carter, Boston, Hudson, and Cade

Boston, Karsyn, Cade, Corrine, Raine, Elyse, Conner (standing on right), Joshua, Carter, and Hudson

Carter and I met Raine at school for lunch on Monday. We brought cupcakes for her class.

Bella, Mayla, Klara, Raine, and Hannah

Ms Cepeda stood Raine on a chair and everyone in the lunch room sang happy birthday to her.

The she handed out the cupcakes.

Raine and Zoe