My Boo bear is 3!

Sleepy boy not even knowing he had balloons everywhere!

His balloons!

Opening his first b-day present! I made him wait all day to open anymore, i know i am mean!

He got a "chow-chow" aka Cars scooter for his birthday, to bad the first ride he ended up falling and scraping his head, poor kid!

He loved being sung to!

I can't believe how fast time flies, but my baby has now turned 3. A lot of the times i don't feel like he is 3 since he still talks gibberish and refuses to go potty, but what can i do, i love the little guy way to much!
We started his b-day celebrations at my brothers house. It has become a tradition to have a BBQ the Sunday before memorial day which always ends up being the Sunday before T's b-day so we celebrate it there. My beloved Aunt Paula made him the most awesome cake ever! Tyler really wanted Toy Story so she made him this amazing 2-layer cake which I don't have a picture of, i need to get it from my mom's camera. It was so amazing it took 5 cake mixes, insane!!
On his real birthday which was the 31st of May I got one of those helium tanks you can fill up balloons with and filled his room with balloons while he was asleep, really for $20 i would have expected them to last longer than a couple hrs but he still loved having all the balloons around. Then that morning i took him to the discovery gateway, it is his favorite place to go so we went with Isaac, his favorite person, and Angie and Callie. He had a blast and the best part was it wasn't busy so you could actually enjoy being there. After that we got some ice cream and let the kids run through the fountain, it was a lot of fun. Then that night when Daddy got home we went to his 2nd favorite place to eat, Famous Dave's. He really would have rather had McDonald's but i refused. I had made him a train cake, wasn't to impressive but he was excited! Overall he had a great birthday and still can't believe my baby is 3!

For Paula!!!

Ok So i still haven't blogged I know...but just so everyone knows, i will blog soon, maybe this weekend, i have got a lot to blog about. So i know what you think everytime you open this blog Paula so heres a picture just for you!

My baby girl is 6!

I can't believe how fast time flies! It seems like yesterday that I brought Shaylee home from the hospital and now she is 6, in Kindergarten and really learning to read! I have to admit that the past few years have been a struggle and I wish that a lot of the sassiness would just go away, but I honestly would not trade any of that for anything! I love Shaylee so much and I am so glad she has come into my life!





On to what she did for her birthday. I didn't want to have a full blown party but she really wanted to have a party, so i let her choose 3 friends to go to the Classic Fun center with her. So we took four five and six year olds to the CFC, and Issac and Tyler. These kids had so much fun. They bounced away in the bounce houses and rode their scooters around the rink and play $17 dollars worth of games and came out with a little piece of candy, whats up with that! Oh well it was so much fun and the beauty of it all was it only cost me $15 thanks to citydeals and their gift certificates! I love seeing Shaylee be with her little friends from school, they are so cute, but they sure can talk a lot! After the fun center we came back to our house and had cupcakes and ice cream, it really was a lot of fun!

On Shaylee's actual birthday December 1st, we told her that we would take her out to dinner and she chose to go to Famous Daves, we weren't complaining, really she was thinking that Famous Daves was Sizzler, but oh well we still went because we had coupons for free kids meals. We also invited Great Grandma Pingel to go with, I love having her with us, she sat and played the games on the kids menu with her, she really is awesome. After dinner we invited some family and friends over for cake and ice cream. Shaylee really wanted a Tinkerbell cake and we found a cute design for a tinkerbell cake made with a tinkerbell doll and of course we asked Aunt Paula if she would make it and of course she did! It turned out awesome, Aunt Paula is absouletly amazing and she is so good to my kiddos. Overall Shaylee's birthday was what she says "The best Birthday Ever", so Happy Birthday to my baby girl!

Happenings from the last month or so!

I admit I am a horrible blogger and should really keep up on it, maybe now that all my children do is watch TV (darn winter) I will update a little more. Life has been going pretty well, Mark has been very busy at work getting ready for the holidays, but that is a good thing because we get good paychecks. Preschool has been going good. I had 2 new girls start at the first of November, they are twins and i am having a hard time figuring out who is who, but i am getting better, so between preschool and the kids I haven't had much time for anything else, so here is just an update of what I have been doing lately with the monkeys

Shaylee:
She is loving every moment of kindergarten, she wishes that she could go to school everyday all day. We had her first SEP (student education plan) and I went in and talked to her teacher and he teacher just adores her. She got straight 3's which is like straight A's, just meaning that she is at grade level for everything. She also got an ideal student award and was able to go to the book fair and choose a free book. She is picking up on reading like she has done it forever, i am really proud of my sisser and I love watching her learn and grow.




Tyler:
Tyler is just a sweet heart, but at the same time the biggest monster. He has been in a serious destructive mode, he likes to dump out all his toys and then come in my preschool and dump out all the toys there. He doesn't care, its fun to him, I just need to teach him he needs to pick them up and maybe he won't do it anymore. And today he has started a naked phase, he thinks its fun to take his clothes off and run around naked, or just sit on the couch and watch movies naked. It was all cute and fun until he peed on me. As far as his learning, he is starting to really pick up, he is starting to put more than two words together and he can count to 4! He definitely is different than Shaylee was but he is a sweetheart and I love him.



Park City:
I think it was like the end of September we decided to go on a family night out and we went to park city and met up with April and Heath who were also staying up there, it was a lot of fun because we don't really get to spend a lot of time with them so it was a great opportunity to stay with them. We met up with them and had dinner at the Park City mountain resort, I don't remember the name of the restaurant, some Mexican place, but it was very yummy and Tyler thought it was funny to run out the door constantly, so it wasn't much fun for me. The kids did find a cute dog outside and that at least kept them in one spot. After dinner we went back to the condo and went to check out the hot tub, Tyler thought that he could walk on top of the cover but he couldn't and he was crying and wet and we just laughed. After we put on our suits we went and sat in the hot tub since the pool was ice cold but it was still fun to us and then we watched Furry Vengeance, horrible movie but Shay loved it.

The second day of our trip we went to ride the Alpine slide, I was a little nervous about Tyler and going up on the ski lift but he did awesome and we all had a great time until Tyler started to be so grumpy that we went home, we didn't even get to go shopping! But it was a fun little trip, I think it was something we all needed since we have both been so busy and tired.

Tyler thought he had to ride in the sled on the way to the slide, it was not easy pulling that huge thing and him.






Shaylee and April

Mark and Tyler, i had to ride all by myself

The zoo:
We decided that over UEA we would take the kids to the zoo, none of Shaylee's little friends could go so she thought she would invite Haylee. We had a lot of fun, but I tell you what, the Hogle Zoo just isn't that great for as much as you pay for it. Also we have been to some amazing zoos, like San Fran Zoo and the San Diego zoo, so there wasn't anything exciting about our zoo trip. I did take pictures though!






Halloween:
Halloween was really fun this year because Tyler was really into it, he carried around his Elmo bucket so proudly and wouldn't let anyone at all touch it. We went around the neighborhood with Shaylee's new best friend Sammy and her mom and sister, it was a lot of fun, but very cold and rainy of course. I didn't get many pictures from it because I am a horrible picture taker, but we did try to take some of Isaac, Callie, Tyler and Shay, but it wasn't to great, so this is all I got.

Our attempt to get all 4 in a picture

Shaylee and her cousin Gabby. My mom made them both the same costume. Gabby is 9 and is the same size as shaylee


The only good picture i got and it was with my phone!
1st Santa visit
we went to winegars one night and Santa was there, so I decided to take the kids pictures, that child that you don't recognize is Shaylee's new friend Sammie, she is always with us it seems. Let the Holidays begin!





I am hoping to keep up on my blog now that winter is here and it seems so boring, so lets see if I can keep my word, and hopefully I will post stuff from thanksgiving!

Ahh life!

Now that life has kinda settled down around here and no trees have fallen into our back yard, and i am back into the routine of teaching preschool I thought I would update my blog.

The tree...we got it removed about a week after it happened, and came out pretty good with the insurance company. They gave us almost $1200 and we split the cost of removal with the nieghbor so we only spent $200 to remove it, good deal eh?? To bad we don't know where most that money went now...i am horrible with money! It was pretty cool how they removed it, this guy came in with a big crane and just pretty much picked the tree up and shoved it in the truck. The aftermath wasn't so pretty, our poor trampoline was finished, but to be honest I am ok with out the danger trap in my back yard. Here are some picture of the removal and the cleanup.






Preschool has been a lot of fun, it has been very hard getting used to teaching in the afternoon. Now that i am in the routine of it I am having alot of fun. I only have one class that is large and they are all kids I have had before so its not to difficult and all the others are still getting used to school so it is fun having them. You can check out the Rainbow Preschool Blog for pictures.

The Circus... I for some reason always go to the circus, I am not so sure we will go every year anymore just because i think the kids are getting bored of it. This year I took the kids with my friend and her kids, and i tell you what i was so done by intermission. Tyler would cry at everything!! I am not sure if he wanted it to keep going or if he was scared but it got really annoying after a hour. I also took Isaac my nephew with and he really enjoyed it mainly because he had never been to the circus. Personally I should have just taken him and left my kids at home!







and finally....our big front yard tree :( It has been infested with boars, which is a bee like creature that as our nieghbor whos a tree expert put it "humps" its stinger into the tree and lays larva which then infects the tree more and eventually totally kills off the tree, so today I had to say goodbye to my tree that used to provide a lot of good shade, this year not so much, but still i will miss that big tree. Its not all the way down but this is whats left!

Life at the topiks is never boring!

We have had a very interesting summer to say the least. Between getting our new van hit twice within a one week time period and then getting screwed over by the company that fixed it, we thought that our summer couldn't get more interesting until last night when we found this:



Yes that is a tree consuming our entire half of our back yard. Oh and we used to have a trampoline, but its kinda underneath that tree, that is consuming half our back yard.

So the story is about 10:15 last night a huge gust came though, according to weather bug it was a gust of 59 miles per hour, and Mark was outside putting away Shaylee bike and the wagon because it was so windy and he walked into the backyard to go put her bike away and he heard a crack, then a brand off our neighbors tree fell off, and then another gust came through and the whole tree blew over, crushing our fence and trampoline.

So now that it is daylight we are trying to figure out what is going to happen. Our neighbor called their insurance and filed a claim and now we are waiting to have someone come out and look at the damage. I was told I needed call the insurance as well and I did and I asked them about putting in a claim and I was told that in order to have any damage fixed on our part we would have to file a claim and pay our deductable, so we need to get this all figured out and see what will happen, in the mean time, here are some more lovely pictures of the tree in our backyard.