The darkside

Jess has been asking how Seneca got so big all of the sudden and claims it has gone by so fast. I on the other hand, know it is from my milk and it has taken forever for her to become semi independent. I joke, I joke, she is trying to do so much and it all seems to happen at the same time. She loves to sing, if she can get ahold of our karaoke machine she will sit and listen to herself for quite awhile. She is the smiliest little girl you will ever meet, as long as I am holding her still. I never realized how important a good umbilical cord cut is at birth, maybe the scissors weren't sharp enough...hmmm.

 Zeke informed me this morning "My nickname is Luke Skywalker! But my real name is Zeke." He is in full Jedi mode these days and it's a good thing because the Sith in our area are out of control. He wanted to show me something and he said "Mom, observe this!" He got the missionary bear at church, (it is a teddy bear I dressed up in a tie and name tag and the kids take turns taking him home to remind them to share the gospel during the week they are to report back to us the following Sunday) he was so excited and when I asked him what he was planning on doing, he pretty much recited exactly what the little girl the week before him did. This included helping her neighbor plant a garden so he has been asking me over and over when we can go to the neighbors and plant a garden. I'm sure they won't mind us digging up their yard right?

 Katurah just copies EVERYTHING her older siblings do these days. We were at the library and they all picked a book, but she was distracted the whole time so we went to check out and she ran over to the shelf, grabbed the first book she saw and happily ran back to me. She is a big kid now. Unfortunately with the amount of potty humor in our home she has picked up some interesting words "Mom, is poop in my buttcrat!" or she points to her cute little booty and says "wook at da MOON!"

Amari has been a bit of a pill lately. She just doesn't seem to want to listen much and when she gets in trouble she tells me "I'm listening to Satan, being good is too hard." Then she changes her mind and says she will listen to Jesus after all. Her friend Vivian was over a couple of times over the past week. They always bring Amari some hand me downs, which Amari treasures. She is so creepy about it "I smell like Bivian! I look like Bivian!" So we pretend that we can't tell them apart and she is so happy!

Maybe this is why she has been misbehaving, has she turned to the darkside?

Pantera has refused to let me take her pictures as usual, someday you will  regret it my child. She had a big stake achievement days activity all day Saturday. She was the only girl from our ward there, makes me miss being out west. She is singing a solo in the Primary program this year and I am encouraging her to sing in sacrament meeting in the next couple of months. She has an amazing voice and I am excited she will have the opportunity to share her talent. We were at the park yesterday and there was a daycare group there. A little 13 month old girl just LOVED Pantera. Everything Pantera would do, just cracked this little one up and as we were leaving she reached up to go with her. The daycare worker said "She has been with us for over a week and wants nothing to do with me! She sees your daughter for 5 minutes and wants to go home with her!" It made Pantera feel pretty darn good.

This was my project for last week. It is all from the cherry wood Jess brought me. I made it as a surprise for a friend who needed a table. We went over to her house Monday night and made her go into her room while we brought it inside and Pantera staged it with flowers and such. Her reaction was priceless!!! "Are you kidding me?!? I don't even know what to say! Savannah!!!" Then she turns to her daughter and son in law who were in on it and said "Did you know about this?!?" It was so fun to build, experimenting with the legs and designing benches, but even better to give it to someone who was so happy for it. Only bad part is now MY table looks not so cute in comparison.

No Dynanite

Oh how we have enjoyed the sun lately! It is amazing how much I took it for granted growing up in Arizona. The kids spend pretty much all day outside if it is not raining and make up some awesome games to play like here I think they are getting some "Chi."

 

Katurah thinks she is too cool for school these days. She can be such a little terd. Like during speech therapy the past two weeks she has just sat and scowled at Mrs.Kristy. As soon as Mrs. Kristy leaves, Katurah is talking and happy again. She is at the age that she is kind of fun to tease because she just repeats everything you say with a no in front of it "No dynamite!" She was so scared of fireworks on the 4th again this year, so much that she wouldn't go out in the backyard again until I cleaned up all the packages. She copied Zeke and asked for a sandwich tonight and when I handed it to her she looked at it and said "What the heck?!?"

 

Katurah and Amari love to play Frozen. Here Amari is Elsa and Katurah is Anna. If you call Katurah the wrong princess name she will flip her lid and run away crying...you have been warned.

Amari is in charge of feeding the cat now. Unfortunately she has been slacking some days. I saw Bluestar was out of food the other day so I asked Amari if she had fed her yet. Amari replied "She doesn't have any food, but it's ok, she's not dead yet." Makes sense, she is going to be a wonderful mother;)  She is so drama about everything and loves to jump to outrageous conclusions just like her big sister. For example if you tell her to go to bed she may just reply "So you never want to see me again and you think I am the worst kid ever?" DRAMA!

 

Seneca is starting to pull herself to stand! She was in her crib fussing and  looked over to see her standing and crying at me all creepy like, it was awesome. She loves when anyone sings "When we're helping we're happy" so much. She will quickly get to a seated position and start waving her arms, then she usually joins in on the tralalala part.

Zeke is obsessed with how cute Seneca is. He told me "The last baby is like the cutest one to ever come out of your tummy!" About 100 times a day he tells her how "adorable" or "precious" she is and makes sure we all acknowledge it as well.

At dinner last night Amari told Jess "Dad, you're a little bit smart, but Mom is all the way smart." Jess told her that's not very nice and she tried to back peddle a bit but Zeke came to Jess' rescue by informing her "Amari, old geezers can be smart." Then looking over at Jess like you're welcome (I may or may not have told him Jess was an old geezer a few weeks ago).

Pantera was sick last night, probably the worst I have seen her in a long time. She seems to be on the mend tonight luckily. She has been watching a ton of science videos that the school gave her access to for the summer. After watching several of these she told me "Mom, I think I know why I have been so short tempered with the younger kids lately." I hadn't noticed but I asked "Why's that?" She replied "Puberty." Ahhh, that explains it. She has already unlocked the secret to womanhood: blame hormones for EVERYTHING.

Here's my latest project...

Jess got a bunch of FREE rough cut cherry wood from a guy at work who knows I'm currently in love with woodworking. This is a queen sized bed with 12 storage drawers, for the cost of screws and wood glue!

We have been enjoying our summer so far. I love having kids out of school, and Jess took last week off just to hang out...life is good.

 

Jess took Pantera to the amusement park she has been talking about since she went with my brother and sister last summer. Seriously she talked about it so much, about all the rides she went on and how she loved big coasters. She even went on the bungee jump with my brother. I guess on the very first coaster Jess took her on, she turned white and buried her face in his side. They spent the rest of the day on the kiddie rides. I still can't believe it after all that talk! She loves how busy we have been so far this summer, friends, birthday parties, roller blading, splash pad, she would have me going all the time if it were up to her. My little social butterfly.

 

Zeke has been playing with his sisters a lot more lately. I love to hear what he comes up with. Most of his play is movie dialogue, but sometimes he says things like "Amari, pretend I'm sleep driving."  Or the other day they were playing Toy Story 3 and he was being Andy and Amari was being Andy's mom and he just kept going through is toys asking if he could keep them, to which Amari would reply "Nope!" I guess Andy's mom was the real villain of the film, I never knew. He currently loves Legos, thanks to the Lego movie and Ninjago. Tonight we had "Taco Tuesday" and he was absolutely thrilled.

 

Amari was playing with my thermometer the other day (grrr) and came to me with it really upset. "Mom it told me to have a bad night!" What?
"It said I will have a bad night" "No Amari it said Fahrenheit." Another great quote "Syrup makes me feel like a cat!" When we went to Olive Garden last week she was so excited for our "fancy" dinner. She talked in her fancy voice the first 20 minutes we were there. Then on the way out a little boy was holding the door for us and she stopped in her tracks with a dreamy look on her face and asked "How old are you?" He said "4" she said "me too!" I told her to quit flirting, but her little "I just saw the man of my dreams face was hysterical! I'm going to have to watch this one!!! She was trying to talk Jess into getting another dog the other day and he was resisting so she walked up to him and put her finger on his nose then said "Oh smoochie boy, calm down smoochie boy. Now lets go to the pet store!"

 

Katurah wants a cane in the worst kind of way. When we were playing at the church the other night she made one out of mega blocks and was trying to walk with it. The other kids all decided they wanted one too. I told my mom, who walks with a cane, that she is the biggest trend setter amongst the 2-4 year old crowd. We went to the library yesterday and they had a science display where you could build your own junk robot. The kids all loved this but Katurah especially loved her "robop" and I loved to here her say it!

 

Seneca is going to stand any day now. She is all over the place trying to pull herself up onto everything. She can go from crawling to sitting up and vice versa seamlessly now as well. She is also trying to talk repeating my vocal inflections when I call for Katurah or Pantera. She says the dogs name "lettie" and "zee" for zeke, "lala" for pacifier, and of course Dada. No Mama, but Jess has to have something with this kid;)

 

Life is busy but so good!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Summer!!!

Summer break has officially began at the Hammond house! I am so happy to sleep in almost everyday. The kids have been pretty busy with friends over, shopping, puppy sitting, and Friday night campfires. Not a bad start to summer at all.


Seneca is into EVERYTHING now that she is mobile. She loves to get into the lazy susan that Katurah always leaves open. Seneca will pull herself up to kneeling on it which makes me super nervous because,well it spins. I had a gallon of paint behind the chair in the front room for over 2 months, I am terrible about putting all my stuff in the garage in between projects. I thought nothing of this gallon as Seneca was scooting around the other day. She managed to open it and dump it out then, slide in it before I caught her. I had just walked into the kitchen and my Dad and I were both right there...sneaky kid.

Katurah loves the "if you chance to meet a frown song" she is so cute when she sings it with a little sad face and a low sad voice until it says "quickly turn it upside down" then she grins so big and sing so fast and happy. She is still pretty hard to understand. The speech therapist thinks she is just trying to talk too fast like everyone around her because when we slow her down and ask her to repeat us, her sounds are pretty good. As a matter of fact last night she had a Captain America doll and was making him wiggle while saying "Shake your BOOOTY!" Clear as day, at least she has the important phrases down.

Amari is the constant mother hen in our home. She has taken it upon herself to start wiping Katurah's face, even though her face is covered in goo as well, kind of a mote and beam situation. But she is also more responsible then a lot of kids her age. She even got the priviledge of puppy sitting for a friend yesterday and was so serious about her task. She let everyone know how to properly handle this pup including "If he gets too wild, just scratch his belly and he will calm right down." She asked me to make her hair like Elsa for church last week and I did, of course you can imagine it made it through the first 10 minutes of sacrament meeting until it just looked like I didn't brush it. But the point is she felt like Elsa and she went around pretending to freeze everything and told Jess "Cutting the cheese is not for princesses!" She wanted to call her friend and asked me "Do you have Audrey's password?" instead of phone number.

Zeke is as always obsessed with his electronic devices. He is only allowed to play them at naptime and after dinner, so he always pretends to be tired hoping to get his kindle faster. Oh, but his Kindle died, I bought one of the new ones back in October and it has been a piece of junk since we got it but he will tell you "My kindle died because I didn't play with it enough" UH HUH. The other day I gave him frosted flakes for the first time. He looked at his bowl a little disgusted and asked what they were. I told him "They are frosted flakes and they are GRRREAT!" So he tried them and with another look of disgust says "I guess they are a little grrreat." I quickly told him it is ok if he doesn't like them and he said "Ok, I do not like them."

 Pantera has been enjoying her life with no school with counting down until it starts again and studying. She is determined to be ready for fourth grade. I love that she is so excited for next year already, but that is almost all she talks about...still. The other subject she enjoys is boys. She has a list of boys she has a crush on in about 5 diaries and likes to show them to everybody. One of the boys is in our ward and he told her today that he likes her too. After she told Jess and I all about it she said "I'm going to have a lot to write about in my diary tonight!" Boy crazy like her mom...yikes!

Life is flying by as always. Seneca is getting so big it's insane! She finally figured out how to scoot forward really well so now she has become  what I lovingly refer to as a "stalker baby." You see before she would just cry when I left the room, now she can cry AND follow me. She has started saying "Dada" when she sees Jess, little does she know she should be saying that to the mailman...wawawa. She also loves jumping and will jump on your lap if you hold her. This is especially nice during sacrament meeting because it really looks like I am making her jump and being really irreverent, oh well think what you want peeps. She also figured out the fishy face and does it constantly, again she is getting SO BIG!

 We had a campfire  as a family on Friday night. It was such a blast. I guess this is why people go camping just to get away from life and enjoy eachothers company for awhile. The kids took turns telling us funny and spooky stories. My favorite was probably when Pantera told a story about a werewolf and then she was asking me afterwards "What would be the worst part of being a werewolf?" I said "waking up naked" she agreed and I added "or maybe waking up with blood under your fingers and not knowing where it came from." She agreed and said "Yeah, what if you got HIV?" Exactly.
 Jess is determined not to let any of his siblings see his sweet mustache so all of his picture will look a little like this from now on...

Amari was pretending to be a mom the other day and listed some of her mom skills "I can clean the house, bake a cake, make you dinner, take care of kids, I can do all of the mom stuff." So I asked her what kinds of things dads do "They tell you to go to bed and sometimes make you an egg burrito." She invited herself to the neighbors house and I told her that was not polite to invite yourself over, she replied "I wasn't just inviting myself, I was inviting ALL of us!" In that case...

The dog was in the house and Amari went to check on her, when she came in to me to report she said "She is upstairs in the bathroom, drinking BUM WATER." And speaking of bums Amari never remembers to wipe grrr...and she told me "I have a rash on my butt." Zeke added "Mom, I wipe and there is nothing on my butt, not even a crack."

Zeke and Amari are quite the nurturers. They came to me and were so proud with Amari saying "Katurah got hurt so I kissed it better." Then Zeke said "And I told her 'poor thing''. That is how he comforts everyone now, walks up to them and says in a semi monotone voice "poor thing" and walks away. Love him.

Katurah is talking more and more. Her older sisters taught her to say "shake your booty!" She can't say her ink it comes out unk so her favorite pony Pinkie Pie is Unkie Pie. I bought her a pair of Tinkerbell shoes and she LOVES them so much that she insisted on wearing them to church and I caved, so she was all dressed up with her cute hair done wearing her "Unkerbell" sneakers. I guess I am officially that mom.

Pantera still constantly leads the kids on wonderful adventures. I love listening to them play all the creative games they come up with. She is so good at getting them all involved. You are going to be a wonderful mother someday Pantera. 2 more weeks until her school is out!!! I can't wait!

 Little miss Seneca is so close to crawling. She is doing an awesome army crawl forward and also gets up on her knees briefly now. She is into EVERYTHING, but honestly it's a really nice change of pace. A little bit of independence is doing our relationship a lot of good:)

Zeke and Amari graduated from preschool on Thursday and Zeke I registered Zeke for Kindergarten the same day. He made some really great crafts at registration including on totally sweet 1st day of school necklace that he informed me he would "Never take off, ever." Later that day he said "I was just joking, I am allowed to take it off." He seemed really happy to be done with preschool and has asked everyday if it's kindergarten time yet.

I was listening to him play with Amari while he was being darth vader. It went a like this "I am luke's father, but one time I cut off his hand, then I took off m mask and my face was white and grumbly. Then I didn't want to hurt my son anymore." Star Wars in a nutshell. And he has never seen it btw.

 Amari says she doesn't want to go to  preschool next year because she is worried she will cough on the other kids. But she does sing some amazing songs about it "I pledge allegiance to the fla-ag, I really pledge allegiance to the fla-a-ag at my pre-e-school. I'm a superstar!" Please sing that in your mind with a sweet shaky 4 year old pop voice. Last night we had salmon for dinner and while I was cooking the girls were playing bears. When Amari asked what was for dinner and I told her it was salmon she said "Pantera, let's pretend salmon is fish ok?!?"

 

 Pantera doesn't think it is fair that we have Mother's day. "It's like you get 2 birthdays." She is in charge of feeding our cat and often forgets so I have to come up with new ways to tell her she needs food. Last night I wrote her a note from the cat that said "Please feed me or I will die!!! I sure do love being alive. I'm so thirsty my tongue is like sandpaper! WATER!!! I'm blue-oo-star, super starved, I'd love to eat the  turkey you carved. (not really cat food is sufficient). 9 out of 10 vets recommend feeding your pets. FOOD!!! HUNGRY!!! Love, Bluestar. She was annoyed and said I could have just asked.

 Katurah found Pantera's glasses and was so excited to wear them. So I found an old frame and popped the lenses out so she could pretend to be her preteen idol Pantera. She sat in Pantera's seat at dinner and wanted us to call her Pantera. Yesterday at church she took my mom's  cane and walked through the chapel with it during sacrament meeting, I hope she continues to imitate wonderful women.

Swingset

 This is what my dad and I have been working on...

I installed the slide and built stairs and temporary railings on the front of the playhouse yesterday. The playhouse is made from mostly free recycled wood and would have cost a small fortune otherwise. We have a swing for each kid...thank you Papa!!!

 

Last Sunday Jess was feeling a little off, but nothing too bad. Then on Monday morning I called to check on him at work and he said his right side hurt. We decided he should go see the doctor just to be safe. They took his blood and sent him home saying to go in for a scan in a few days. Later that afternoon the doctor called back and said to go to the ER, his white blood count is really high. He had his appendix removed that night, was home he next morning and has been a permanent fixture on our couch ever since. He gets to go  back to work light duty tomorrow and I think the poor guy is ready. Totally random...I love me some medical bills...seriously though I am so glad he is ok it could have been really bad.

 

Onto the funnies...

 

Seneca does jumping jacks in the bathtub and gets me soaked everytime she is bathed. One thing you might not know about me is I HATE being splashed in the face...like really bad, so it is rather amusing to watch I am sure. The other kids probably slip her some candy or something to splash me real good, payback mom. She also does this awesome growl, she sounds like a monster! She sings at the top of her little lungs whenever she is happy but the song is just "AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH" trying to get through a grocery store with her is crazy because she sings so everyone stops to talk to her. She then kicks her chubby little legs and smiles and melts whoever sees her.

 

Katurah loves to tell us "No" these days. She has developed quite the little attitude. She is sleeping on the bottom bunk in Pantera's room now so she might just think she is so big she doesn't have to listen, just a theory. Yesterday I was taking a shower and when I opened the door she was waiting on the other side and in a really creepy voice said "Surprise!" Yikes.

 

Amari is a little manipulator with her siblings. She wanted to go down the slide first so she told Zeke "Zeke, first is the worst and I wouldn't want you to be the worst. So I will go down first so you don't have to be the worst." How kind of you Amari. She was describing a mixed breed dog to our neighbor the other day and said "She is a slice of a german shepherd and a slice of a dog."

 

Today Jess was watching his shows and Zeke saw the cars and said "Dad, is this Nascar?" When Jess confirmed it was Zeke said "Then I will watch." Then sat for the next 20 minutes watching the cars go around the track. He is obsessed with star wars and says all the names so cute like "Obi Wah Kenobi" or "Dark Vader" and "Anikin episode three."

 

Pantera was hesitant to hug Jess when she found out he had appendicitis. We had to tell her it was not contagious. She replied "Oh it's like HIV." What?!? I guess she thought she  read in her healthbook that HIV is not contagious. I think she may have misunderstood just slightly. I signed her up for a football league yesterday, she and Zeke will start practices in the summer. She is so pumped and proud to do football and not cheer. I hope they like it.