Sibling Shenanigans

Louis and I were in charge of the latest sibling supper for the Brandley kids.  Louis thought it would be fun to do a St. Patrick's day party.  Last night was the big night!  Alisha and Kami helped me set up for the party and things looked great!  Sadly Ethan has been so sadly sick and Mary has had a low fever and has been sleepy the last several days so I stayed home with them so we didn't pass on the sickness to our family.  For the party we planned dinner and some St. Patrick's day themed minute to win it games.  It seems like that's our favorite go to for parties!  They're fun to play and fun to watch!

They had to shake around to get the shamrocks out of the basket

Separating the marshmallows from the cereal

Getting all of the green m&m's

The adults had to try and get shamrocks from the ground back to their team while the kids (leprechauns) tried to protect the shamrocks by hitting the adults with pool noodles

I'm really sad I missed watching this game! 

All the kiddos

Jake's clan

The whole group from the party

Everyone had a good time!  We're grateful to have family close by and 

that we can often get together and have fun!

Love Day

In our family for Valentine's day we do a family celebration!  For the last three years we have had a candlelit pizza dinner all together and we love it!  I've made a heart shaped pizza for this before, but this year we went with Little Caesar pizza.  We all love this tradition and it's so fun being all together!  Since Valentine's was on a Sunday we did our candlelit dinner on Saturday.

I had prepared some foam hearts with each persons name on one.  Before dinner we went through them and we all said a reason why we love each other and wrote it on their heart.  I'm happy that we have a home full of love and that we appreciate each other for what they do and who they are.  

After dinner we played pin the heart on the Valentine!  Avery's favorite game for any party is this game!  We've played many versions, pin the beard on the Louis, pin the glass slipper on Cinderella, pin the bow on Minnie, etc.  This was a surprise for Avery and she was so excited!  She set up the game and told everyone how to play and we had fun.  

When we had all had several turns of pin the heart on the Valentine we settled down on the couch and read some scriptures about love.  Our favorites, 

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."   John 3:16

"But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him."  Moroni 7:47

Then is was off to bed for the kids!  

On Friday night Louis and I exchanged our gifts.  Louis' gift was sweet, he had printed off a bunch of Harry Potter coloring pages for me and a note that said it was to color while we had a Harry Potter marathon since I had just finished all of the books.  So that will be a fun date night in the future!  I got Louis a new brown coat as well as a cuddle kit!  I've done this for him once before.  It's everything we need for a perfect night of cuddling, a cozy blanket, a movie, and some chocolates.  So after the kids were in bed we snuggled up on the love seat, watched a movie, and ate some chocolate.
It was a really nice night together.

Ethan turns 1

Our Ethan buddy boy is 1 year old!  He is a sweetheart and loves to smile.  He is a busy boy and crawls around all over the place.  He's starting to stand on his own for a bit and will probably be walking in the next few months.  Ethan loves music and dances when he hears it music he starts shaking his booty!  (I'm sure he'll love reading that when he's older!) He loves most food, but is starting to get picky.  His favorites are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bananas, and crackers.

We celebrated Ethan's birthday a day early.  We did a monsters theme.  We watched Monster's University, Avery and Mary drew several monster pictures that we put up on the walls, and I made some monster cupcakes.  Ethan dove right into his cupcake!  He ended up eating two of them!  Although he mostly just ate the frosting and crumbled the rest of the cupcake.  He enjoyed opening presents and his favorite present was a ball ramp.  We also got him a little remote control car, it just has two big buttons you push, one to go forward and one to go backwards.  Avery and Mary have had fun playing with it and Ethan will chase it around.

We love our Ethan and have loved the last year with him!  We are excited for this upcoming

 year and all the things he is going to learn and experience.  

Christmas 2015

This Christmas season was filled with sickness in our family.  One after another starting right before Thanksgiving.  We started out by taking turns with a stomach bug, it passed from one of us to the other.  Luckily it only lasted a day or two for all of us.  Then a bad cough went through the kids.  Mary's even progressed to croup.  So that was our December up until Christmas.  We did squeeze in a few fun things, like going to a few large nativities around Cache Valley and driving around a few times looking at Christmas lights.
Christmas Eve night we all gathered around and Louis read the Christmas story as the kids were able put together the nativity during it.  Christmas Eve dinner was lots of fun!  Earlier in the day we gave each of the kids $5 and they got to choose anything they wanted at the store with that money.  Here is what we came home with.

From left to right, I chose pizza and rolls.  Louis used Ethan's $5 and got mini corn dogs, chips, and refried beans so he could make bean dip.  Avery chose two bags of Flipz and a ridiculously expensive Dora apple juice bottle.  Mary picked frozen blueberry waffles, candy corn, and strawberry lemonade.  Pretty great well rounded meal right??  The kids loved it and looked forward to their dinner all day!  

After dinner the kids got to open their Christmas Eve pajamas and we watched The Muppets Christmas Carol. 

The self-timer on our camera was only taking blurry pictures

so we had to settle for a selfie this Christmas Eve.

We sent the kids off to bed after the movie.  We may have skipped quite a bit of the movie because the girls went upstairs and played in their room after the first 20 minutes.  Once the kids were in bed put in a movie of our own.  Jurassic World.  We hadn't seen it yet and Louis made us turn it off after an hour or so because I kept jumping and grabbing his arm and he didn't want me having nightmares that night!  

The morning of Christmas we all lined up on the stairs until Louis checked to see if Santa had gone up the chimney.  Once we got the all clear we headed down and the kids got started on their stockings.  Avery was SO excited to see that Santa had brought her what she wanted, a stuffed Santa toy!  She hugged it and hugged it!  The rest of the morning was breakfast and opening presents.  Ethan even got into opening presents a bit, but got tired towards the end.  

After Ethan's morning nap we headed down to Louis' parent's house and spent the rest of the day there.  It was a very nice day and I enjoyed being able to have our own family time at home in the morning and enjoyed being with family the rest of the day.  Merry Christmas!

And Then There Were Six

Most everyone knows now that Louis and I are expecting our fourth child!  

Come mid to late July we will be a family of six, and I can hardly believe it.  

Since I know I am going to get several of the same questions over and over and over again in the next few months I am going to answer them here.  I really hate getting the same question over and over so hopefully this will help that not happen haha!  Here we go!
The question I've been getting most of all is, "Was this a surprise?"  No this baby was not a surprise.  Since Ethan was probably only one month old I could physically feel that someone was missing from our family.  I didn't know what it meant exactly.  Maybe that another child was coming to our home soon.  Maybe we only had one more child waiting to come down.  Maybe both?  Clearly another baby was coming soon.  I still don't know if it is our last kid or not.  Which has never been the case.  With every other baby I knew that it wasn't our last kid.  Back to the fact that this child is not a surprise.  When I thought about having a baby, the month of November came to my mind and it kept coming to my mind.  And what do you know we got pregnant the first month we started trying, November!  When I looked at the test and it was positive the exact words that went through my head were, "I can't believe I'm pregnant"  Followed by, "man I'm going to be fat, I haven't even lost all of the weight from Ethan!"  My heart was racing and I honestly felt like I was going to throw up.  I also couldn't stop shaking for the next 30 minutes.  Then Louis got home from work and Avery ran up to him and said, "Mom's pregnant!"  Louis looked over at me with a big smile and the shock was gone.
The follow up question to "was this a surprise" is, "How old is Ethan?"  He is 10 months old.  He will be 18 months old when the baby is born.  I am not worried about how things are going to go.  At least Ethan will be in nursery already!  Avery and Mary are 22 months apart, so this will be a slightly smaller gap, but I really think it's going to be great!
I am feeling fine.  With each previous pregnancy I have gotten pretty bad morning sickness.  It has been the worst with Avery and it lasted the longest with Ethan.  So far this pregnancy, I have been feeling pretty good. I have been getting nauseous every now and then through out the day, but overall have been great!  Which makes me so happy because it is just awful throwing up for two months straight.  I do expect to eventually start getting sick, but I am extremely grateful that I have made it to almost 8 weeks without being too sick.
Another one I've been asked A LOT, yes we will be moving at some point in the next 7 1/2 months.  This is a tough subject for me and I would appreciate it if people did not ask me about it all of the time.  I promise when we do move I will let everyone know.
I think that goes over the questions I've been asked the most.  We are excited about this baby, the girls are super excited for a new baby!  Mary says we have two babies now, Ethan and a baby in Mommy's tummy.  Avery has not said anything about what we should name the baby yet, hopefully she comes up with something as great as Hammer!