Memorial Day

I have this flag that I found at a dollar store back in Utah and we used to display it back there, but since we move to the house and we didn't have a pole holder, well I just didn't put it up last year. One day I found a pole at another dollar store and then just recently I found the pole holder so AT LAST!!! the whole thing is complete and we were able to display very proudly our $1.00 flag and like 20 little flags that I got at the DI before we moved :) Sorry no picture of that, but take my word for it, it looked really good, specially since none our neighbors had a flag in front of their house, I guess after becoming a US Citizen it makes me feel better about displaying the flag.
Well today we had a busy day and let me tell you what a day!!! We had made plans of going to IKEA to buy some book shelves for our bedroom and after looking at the Sunday newspaper we decided to take a look at a trampoline that was on sale at a sports store. The store was really nice and big and they had what we were looking for, a 14" trampoline and the enclosure for it. We also decided to go check out the grills they had at Home Depot and after deciding which one we wanted dropped off the kids and my mom at the house and went back for the stuff. It took two trips, the first one for the trampoline which we put together and we almost melted in the backyard, the plan was to put it together so the kids could have something to do while waiting for us to come back with the grill and then have lunch, well it was past lunch time and we were too tired. We did go back for the grill and went shopping for food and then came back home. We rested while watching an old movie and then back to work in the back yard and to melt some more. We were so proud of ourselves by the time we were done and celebrated by having our FHE and then grilling some hamburgers and hot dogs that came out just perfect. My mom made a potato salad and we just stuffed ourselves until we could no more.
Needless to say the kids were having a blast on the trampoline and I can tell they missed having one (it has been almost a year since we left ours back in Utah). Shayna on the other side was very sad and in a bad mood since she can not get on the trampoline, but she needs to wait for a little while.
I am happy we got these two things, the grill is Dan's present for father's day (which actually works better for me :) and the trampoline we all enjoy and have fun and also is something else for the kids to do in the summer time, now we are all ready for our family to come visit (both Gonzalez and Brown) in a few weeks.
We are very tired but we surely enjoyed our day off...working :)

I love my kids

Yeah I do. No for no special reason I just love them and they sure love me :) Right now as I am writing this Tristan is crying in the background but I still love them!!!
School is about to be over in a week and a half and I know it is going to be very challenging for me because they will be home ALL day and you know they will have to be entertained 100%.
They are loving school right now (all of them) and have lots of friends and even with a broken arm Shayna manages to do great with school work. She just got the results for the Math TASKS test (or what ever that test is called) and she did great, on the other one she scored 100% and she said that she almost got 100% on this one as well. We are so proud of her, a lot of her friends have to go to summer school and pass the test or they will stay in 3rd. grade.
Victor is doing great with reading and writing stories, I was going to post some of his stories here but I lost them, he has a great imagination. As I have said before, he has a very unique personality and we have to be very patient with him but he is a very clever guy.
Tristan knows a lot of things, he is so ready to start Kinder (at least that's what I think). He is learning how to read and loves to sound the letters and do math (kind of advanced for his age), he also loves to tell me what words start with certain letters and he gives me long lists not just 3 or 4 words. I have this set of books that I got for Shayna when she was Tristan's age and she learned to read with those books, Victor also used them but it was a little harder with him, now Tristan in one day after 2 tries recognized all the words in the first book and now can read it back to me, even Shayna was amazed by this. He is so smart. Sorry, usually I don't go on and on about how smart my kids are, but I just feel so proud of them and how good they are at school. Let's just hope that they continue like that.
Shayna had started piano lessons the week before she broke her arm but now she will have to wait until she gets the cast off, Amber said she did really good on her first lesson.
Aaron is sick my poor little guy has a really bad cough and 2 ear infections. He kept begging me two days ago to take him to the doctor because there is something in his ear and it really hurts. I took him to the doctor yesterday (because they had no openings the day before) and now he has his medication for the infection and the cough so he should be getting better soon.
He is also learning a lot at home, both in English and Spanish, he is really good at both but just like the other ones, prefers to speak English most of the time.
Being a mom is the best thing and the hardest thing that I have ever had to do in my life, it gives me a sense of accomplishment and at the same time of failure knowing that I could be doing more for them and teaching them better. I try as hard as I can to be a good example and give them all the love that I can give them, it might not be enough for some of them but I do love them all the same. I always wondered how is it that you can love so many little people without having a favorite, but it just comes naturally and just knowing that they are part of me brings this unconditional love for them. I hope they know that, if not now in the future, I hope they know of all the sacrifices we make for them and how everything we do is for them, we may not be the richest parent in the world but all we have we give to them.

New look!!!

The challenges we go through in life sometimes seem harder than what they are and sometimes you don't even think about how little things will change the everyday tasks. What I am referring to is Shayna's cast. We are so happy that she didn't have to have a surgery done on her arm and it turned out that the ER people were making a big deal of a minor fracture. After a 2 hour wait at the doctor we were able to finally get the cast on Shayna's arm and she will have to deal with it for 4 weeks. It has been a week since she broke her arm and the only annoying thing about it is that I have to wrap up her arm with two plastic bags so she can take a shower and not get the arm wet. Well I am so sick of it and can't deal with all the hair getting in the way and also fixing her hair everyday when she is very able of doing it on her own when she is not broken :) I know I am complaining too much, but I also have 3 other little people to get ready every day and give baths to. So what did I do? I opted for a hair cut, yes the shortest one she has ever gotten, I think she looks cute and the best thing is that she can just put some hair clips on her and she is done. With four kids I am just looking for easy ways out so don't judge me.
Going to the park is another painful thing for Shayna since she can't play like she usually does, but I keep telling her that it will be for 4 more weeks, she gets all teary but then goes on and plays with her brothers.
Life is good, we are happy and probably with less hair but happy none the less. Isn't Shayna so cute??? :)

Here she is showing off her cast all signed up by her friends and family already.

Here she is very proud of herself after fixing her hair.

Update and cakes

So Shayna still has a broken arm and we could not get her to a doctor this week but she has an appointment for Monday, they told me the swelling needs to come down on her arms before they can do a cast or anything else, so we are just waiting. It is driving me crazy not knowing what's going to happen, I am hoping for the best and I know that it is probably a very easy procedure if they do have to do the surgery, but still I am a mom and I do get worried.
More things kept happening to me this week, it is just ridiculous, we had a snake in the driveway and my mom just about to had a heart attack, I was brave enough to kill it when it got in our garage and of course I didn't want in the walls of the house, it was pretty gross. On Monday we I drove Shayna to a Dr. appointment just to get there and find out that they didn't take our insurance so I drove back home in tears because I was thinking Shayna's arm was going to get all messed up. That same day I got a traffic violation ticket in the mail, but it wasn't my fault, on the weekends Dan actually drives the minivan so I know I was not the one driving, the traffic violation was for failing to stop at a red light (he was turning right). Ridiculous!!! We still have to pay it and the good thing is that we wont get any points on our driving records.
Yesterday I finished decorating a huge cake order. It was a sheet cake (double layer) with a top hat on top with 4 bunnies coming out of it and then 4 individual cakes for each of the kids. It was tons of work and I thought it would never end, but it did turn out very cute and I love it. In making this cake I have taught myself a couple of lessons that hopefully in the future will help so the work is easier, it wasn't as fun making this cake because I was very stressed about it, but the end result made me very happy. Here are some pictures.

If you want to see the cakes I have made lately here is a link to my cake blog
http://hydescreations.blogspot.com/

Mother's Day and Shayna's broken arm

So my exciting weekend turned out to be full of unexpected situations. We had planned on going out to eat on Saturday to celebrate Mothers Day and when we found out Tristan had croup we didn't want to spread the virus, so we stayed home and had fun anyways, Dan and the kids made our day special and it was full of presents and love and wonderful cards. Victor decided he wanted to poke his nose and he made it bleed, after making a mess all over the bathroom and carpet he finally found some paper to put over his nose. That boy sure can bleed :) Later on he started to bleed for reason so I kept him downstairs with Tristan to keep a close eye on both of them. Obviously you can imagine what kind of night it was since I had to sleep in our recliner and I must say it is not very comfortable. Tristan ended up having a fever but other than that the vaporizer worked wonders for him. I didn't go to church because I was tired and I had to take care of Tristan, I was very sad to skip church today since the kids were going to sing in the primary and Shayna had a talk to give. The day was going fine today until it was time for Dan to do his school work and I wanted to take the noisy children out of the house. We went to the park like any other day and I was sitting on the bench watching the kids play while reading the Ensign. Tristan told me he was feeling tired so we walked back home, on the way home there is this bridge that goes over this river like thing and it has a concrete railing, Shayna loves to balance on it and every time we tell her to get down, today for reason I didn't tell her to get down and even I was up there with her, I turned around to look at Tristan and then I heard Shayna trip and when I looked at her she was already falling, she fell on the grass so I thought she was fine, but when she got up she was complaining about her arm. We walked all the way home and her arm got swollen and she could not move it anymore. When she got home I told Dan what had happened and told him that we needed to go to the ER. Thankfully for us my mom stayed home with the rest of the crazy people and we took our monkey girl to the hospital. They took X-rays and we were told she has an elbow fracture, a very common fracture in kids her age and they can't put a cast on it, it has to get swollen a little bit more and we need to keep an eye on it until the orthopedic takes a look a it. Most likely she will have to have surgery in the next 3 to 4 days all depending on what the doctor says. They put a splint on her arm and gave her lots of meds for the pain. She was so funny to watch because we kept telling her that her arm was probably broken and she insisted that it wasn't. We took pictures of it because it looked very weird, and then there is the after picture with a big smile on her face because the meds were working :)
I am sure that even if she has to have the surgery everything will be fine, but it still scares the heck out of me because SURGERY is a big word in my book. I hate the fact that a little girl, specially mine has to go through that and I wish I could take it away also, if croup was making me feel bad for Tristan this is killing me, she has no clue that she might need surgery, or at least she doesn't know exactly what that means yet. Of course I wont tell her anything until the doctor says if it has to happen. She told me that this was the worst Mothers Day present she could ever give me, which made me laugh since I know she didn't mean to get hurt. Actually we have been waiting for something like this to happen for years, if you know Shayna, you know that she loves to climb on everything and do all kinds of crazy things, she has fallen before, but this has been the worst that has happened to her. Please keep her in your prayers so she can get out of this one just fine.

CROUP ANYONE?...

We are giving away croup this weekend, if anybody is interested just come over and join the fun. It will make you stay up all night and you will have no fun at all. Happy Mothers' day to me :)
Poor Tristan is sick with croup, I am so frustrated right now because is something that I can't take away and just make him feel better. At least he is not having a fever or anything like that, but he complains that it hurts a lot. The poor thing was coughing all night long and since I was too tired, could not hear him at all. He finally woke me up at 5:50 am with a horrible cough that sounded like a seal was in the house. He was panicking a little bit, but I guess my mother instinct kicked in and I hugged him and told him he would be OK and just sat with him until he stopped coughing. Later I found out that they really need to calm down or the crying makes it worst. We are going to have to go buy him a humidifier and thanks to the advice of friends I know what to do in case it gets really bad. I am waiting for somebody to come pick up a cake I made and then I'll run to the store to get what I need for Tristan.
I hate it when my kids get sick, I really don't care at the moment if I'll get no sleep, as long as they get better I'll sacrifice myself, but it really hurts to see them in pain and not being able to heal them fast. GET BETTER SOON TITI, tu mami te quiere mucho.
Here he is with his outfit he wore to the Cinco de Mayo celebration at school this week. He loved his sombrero and bright red boots :)

Recharging my Spiritual Batteries

This post is all about me... let me explain the title. For a very long time now I have been working in the primary/nursery (like over 10 years) and I think I was starting loose it now. I mean there is nothing wrong with working in primary but when you have done it for this long a not being able to partake of the Gospel Doctrine classes and Relief Society you start to wonder if you should actually recharge the batteries or upgrade yourself spiritually :)
This is not something that just happened to me, it has been bothering me for a couple of years. It was worst when I was pregnant with Aaron, I felt like strangling the kids after church (nor mine by the way). It didn't matter how hard I tried to keep focused on the important of teaching the little ones, I just didn't feel like I was good enough to even try to read the lessons and go teach them on Sunday. Well lately I guess the fact that I was complaining to a bunch of sisters at church or maybe it was just mean to be... I got released today as a Nursery Leader.
When I was told last week about it I felt like a failure, I thought that it was going to be like a huge wight was lifted off my shoulders, but it didn't. I actually cried because I realized then that I hadn't been strong enough or tried hard enough to fulfill my calling.
Today as I sat during the Relief Society lesson it was amazing to see how much I really needed to be there. The whole lesson was directed at me and I feel like my batteries are getting charged already and I also feel more positive and with the desire to do better in all aspects of my life.
So I am grateful for the opportunity to go back and be the the listener again, to learn every Sunday something that will help me in the future to be a better teacher for the kids if that is where I am supposed to be.