too cute

and don't they look like twins?



When dave gets home from work he is bombarded w/ children. HIS CHILDREN!

They hold his face in place for a picture
yell in his earand drive him silly

Alexey is starting to bloom with personality. Maybe she is studying to be a dentist or ENT.






I just love these kids!

thoughts by clare

"Mom, I am the princess and you are THE MEAN OLD WITCH!"

(She wasn't mad or anything, just being silly. And what's sad is the part that hurts me most is being called OLD!!!!)

personal revelation

Yesterday I gave a talk on personal revelation. If you want some great reading, below are the talks I used as I prepared mine.

Here are the links:

Elder Hales: Personal Revelation: The Teachings and Examples of the Prophets

Pres. Packer: Personal Revelation: The Gift, the Test, and the Promise

Elder Oaks: Eight Reasons for Revelation

Elder Holland: "Cast Not Away Therefore Your Confidence"

Elder Wickman (member of the 70 and personal family friend): Confidence Tests

Pres. Eyring: Listen Together

sleep study

sat afternoon we saw shi in THE WIZ and she was the tinman! She was great, as usual.


Saturday night Calvin had sleep study.

Our report time at the hospital wasn't until 9pm so we took Calvin and Clare out on our "date" to in-n-out and best buy so that Dave and Calvin could drool over the TV's and video games.
All of the little "things" are put on with glue and then dried with a air gun. It didn't hurt at all but it was super stinky.


eventually the tech started letting Calvin help him by placing the "thing" in the "thing" (I have no clue what all these things are called!)

by nearly 10pm Calvin was still hanging out in the chair getting the wires placed.


look at all the beautiful colors of wires! you can also see the tan line on the side of Calvin's face from his glasses.
calvin was curious about the little thing on his finger

Calvin is always a very easy going and cooperative patient. He had had an eye drop earlier in the day so his eye was dilated and a little irritated. Turns out he is allergic to the preservative in the drops so we use them 1-2 times a week instead of every day as we would like to be able to.

Calvin got cozy and started reading while waiting for everything to settle down. He was asleep probably within 5 min of this picture being taken once I laid down and started reading to him. I slept in the room with him but on a different bed.


Calvin slept from about 10:30pm-3ish when he woke up to go to the bathroom. AFter that it took him 'til about 4:30 to go back to sleep. They woke us up at 5 to go home. It was not a great night of sleep...I am still recovering!!!!

On a happy side note, Calvin slept through the night last night for the first time that I can ever remember. (7pm-6am). It was great!

PS. Should have never let calvin wear his michigan shirt when I knew I'd be taking so many pictures! It is terrible seeing so much michigan on the blog!

dave

It has been a while since I posted about Dave. We have a little catching up.

Dave hasn't worn a wedding ring for YEARS. Probably since 3rd year of med school so that was about 5 years ago. He never really liked wearing it before that time either but he tolerated it. Once he had the excuse of needing to take it off in the operating room he just left it home in the drawer.

This seemed to work out okay since everyone he works with knows he is married -- nurses, dr.s, residents, staff all routinely ask how is family is doing and many even know all of us. However, last year he rotated to a completely new hospital and found that since he was a completely fresh face nobody knew he was married. Most residents aren't married so it is understandable. Apparently a few girls tried to pickup on dave so he wanted to figure out a way to wear his ring to work. Here's what he came up with:
He says it is noticeable.


I should, at some time, do an entire post about bathroom delimas we've had but for now I'll just share one that I realized I had forgotten. I'm not sure the best way to share the story but I think I'll share it conversation style.

Denise: Dave, did you pee on the bathroom floor?

Dave: well, I got up to go to the bathroom in the night and it was dark.....somebody must have put the toilet seat down and I didn't know.....I kept wondering why pee was splashing on my legs?

Denise: didn't you bother to turn the light on and see what happened? or you thought it'd be fine to just leave it for morning so I'd find pee all over the bathroom?

Dave:..........no comment.

Does this kind of thing happen to anyone else? Just wondering.

spring break

Last week was spring break for us. Many of our friends are members of a local swim club so we went swimming a few times. The weather was lovely!


ALexey was absolutely obcessed w/ the water ring. She stole it from a friend so we will probably need to get her one of her own to calm the fighting.

Our pool usually doesn't warm up 'til mid-june so for now we just dream about the day we can hop in.

Actually, the kids did hop in one day and it was super cold. they hopped right out!

tidepools

We went to the tidepools at Cabrillo National Monument in Point Loma.


The rock wall that has been layered by the water was beautiful.


notice the kids in Mich shirts and me in my Ohio state shirt.


here I told Alexey to smile and she said, "No Smile"



The girls were afraid of EVERY little creature we saw. Calvin was brave enough to hold a hermit crab.


It was a gorgeous San Diego day.

Check out this beautiful shot of Alexey!

trip to Arizona

Over the weekend we took a trip to Phoenix and Tuscon Arizona. It is about 6-7 hours there + 2 hours inbetween them. Lots of car time!

The kids have been looking forward to our trip to Arizona for months because we promised them a swim in the hotel pool. The kids think hotels are awesome! I was even able to get Calvin to wear his patch in order to earn some new goggles for the occasion of swimming the hotel pool. I didn't realize 'til we got there that the kids didn't know the real reason for the trip - my cousin's wedding. But it was just as well since they weren't invited to the wedding anyway!This was the only pic I took at the wedding. I don't remember a moment when Trish wasn't smiling so it isn't very represenative of a great evening but thought I'd post it anyway...

So, here are a few highlights of our trip. most occurred in the car since most of our trip occurred in the car! Overall it was a really good trip. We squeezed in a lot of fun and didn't (very often) think we wanted to dump any kids on the side of the road and leave them there to rot in the hot AZ sun. :)

1. The first funny and notable incident occurred before we left the house. We were all in the car and I ran back in to get something in the house. Dave teased Clare by saying, "let's just leave mommy here. Let's go on our trip w/o her!" Clare said, "NO DADDY! NO!" and he said, "okay bear, we'll wait for Mom." then sweet little inquisitive Clare stated, "dad, you always lie to me. Everyday you tell me lies. You are such a noob." (Noob is a wonderful word that dan introduced to our household. Recently Calvin brought home some school work where he had practiced the letter N. For one of his n words he wrote noob. It is still hanging on the wall as one of Dan's favorite homeworks for the year!)

2. We passed the biggest cow farm I have EVER seen. we showed the kids the cows and then it started to stink, of course! CAlvin said, "DAD, Alexey is stinky" and leaned over and smelled Alexey. He repeated "Alexey has a stinkey diaper" and Dave said, "no, Calvin that is just the cows." Calvin smelled lex again and said, "nooooooo, it is alexey." He was getting pretty upset now.....Dave repeated, "Calvin the cows are stinky, not Alexey." now Calvin is in tears.....
"Dad. STOP TEASING ME. ALEXEY IS STINKY." By now, Dave and I were in tears too, from laughing so hard that we couldn't answer him. In a minute or so the bad smell passed and Calvin did eventually believe us when we told him it was the cows.

3. You might have heard about the 7.2 earthquake that hit Mexicali. It was felt here in SD and all the way into LA. When the earthquake hit we were in YUMA -- about 100 miles from Mexicali -- inside Carls JR. letting our kids stretch their legs in the play structure (after 4 hours of driving). The building started shaking and the play structure was pretty wobbly. I would say the shaking lasted 30 seconds, which is quite a long time. We had time to get our kids down and step outside. After the shaking passed we went back to let the kids play only to feel another little earthquake, much smaller, but we decided to hit the road. Carls didn't feel like the safest place to be!

4. warning: some race-ism and law breaking in this one. You have been forewarned.

There are several border patrol check points along the I-8 which at some points runs right along the US/Mexico border. At all checkpoints we were told to keep moving since we are clearly white and our car was filled with even whiter kids and obsiouly had no room for extra passengers or drugs. As we came to one checkpoint on our way home, dave says, "Denise, how about when we get to the stop I will jump out and start running."

"Why?"

"For fun!"

"Okay dave, but just know that I will not stop for you and will abandon you here."

"well, I don't want to be left here so I guess that isn't a good idea."

"oh really, not a good idea?!!!!!" (where does he come up w/ this stuff?)

At one point on our car trip home Calvin was falling to pieces b/c he wanted to sleep but didn't have room. (We drove in Dave's Mazda3 so the kids are packed in like sardines in the back seat.) He finally decided to lay down on the floor of the back seat and slept there for a couple of hours. I know, I know we are terrible parents and you are feeling the need to call CPS now. Anyway, as we enjoyed a quiet and peaceful couple of hours w/ Calvin sleeping on the floor of back seat we came to a border control checkpoint. I wondered if they would be concerned to see a kid w/o a seat belt so I covered him up w/ his blanket. Dave thought this was super funny as it resembled smuggling in Mexicans. That is all. It is an anticlimactic story but it was funny to us. I guess too much time in the car can make a person a little loopy.

Side note: at this particular checkpoint in 2009 they found 10,000 lbs of drugs. crazy.

Kid movies for the trip: Mary poppins, Kung Fu Panda, Backyardagins, Little Einsteins, Monsters INC, Annie, ....

Dave and Denise book on CD. Superfreakanomics. (RATED PG-13. The first two chapters are about prostitution and have some interesting details). Reminded me a lot of Outliers which was our last travel book. In fact both books reported the same findings about athletic success and birthdays.

Out of the car highlights:

(Sorry I don't have hardly any pics to document our fun trip)

-visiting the Ben and Vanessa Peterson and family!

-seeing my cousins and their kids + dogs (lexey heaven)

-kids swimming in the hotel pool

-seeing Heather Carter who happened to be in town and was willing to babysit our kids for the wedding. bless her heart.

- Trish's wedding and seeing many of my relatives there.

- Two nights of Dave sleeping w/ Calvin (ie - I didn't have to get up w/ him at 4am. so this was a highlight for me and not so much for dave)

-breakfast w/ Bob,kari, shi, joyce, cal. Grandpa pushed the "go" button on Alexey by singing tomorrow with her. She let out all the stops and sang at the top of her lungs. He was quite surprised as he had no idea how enthusiastic she was about annie!

-Calvin got to play Shi's nintendo DS at breakfast.

-I remembered to pull out the camera at breakfast.

dad and kari
a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhet-HyG8nWfXh7UMakVPiG1cMezdFW1m62CpeY-BTYrhGmbBbI6Ajj-ykQ8PyGQCVJXgykfr4Y9QBYwOYM5A22wBpVSG7aq1s4fGR40U3Z9vraidTtkPjEtY8MYjTq2Hanmdq3Svvkf9uP/s1600/013.JPG">
my dad and alexey after singing tomorrow

me and my grandma joyce



clare took these pics


grandpa calvin