sewing for a boy...

I think I might really be having a boy... sewing for him has made it official! Now we just need to paint and decorate his room to match these so cute fabrics I found. Thanks Kristi for the tips!
First I made this bumper cover for the crib bumper we already have. It has cars on one side and planes on the other, very BOY! No animals or neutral colors for us! Then I made the blanket below. I still need to make a matching crib skirt and curtains. So fun!

Thanksgiving

We had a great Thanksgiving, all by ourselves! Eric and I had lots of fun cooking together and making several things for the first time. It was relaxing and the girls were happy and tried a couple of foods they haven't had often. Plus, we got to see Allison and her family 2 weekends in a row, Katrina and her family, and we had a Murray family dinner with Elizabeth, KJ, Ryan and Cortnee. Lots of family fun and good food!

We were excited to play in the snow with our California cousins! Whitney kept licking the snowman though, gross!

Our Thanksgiving dinner.

It is SO awesome to be pregnant at the same time, due 11 days apart! Except for the part where I'm WAY huger... oh well, I'm the one who chooses what I eat every day, so I guess I can't complain. :)

Here are the shots of all the Hansen cousins! Maybe Allison got a better one?

Cute Caleb, Katelyn, Lydia, Natalie, and Whitney! Isn't Lydia adorable?

And now on to Christmas!

Happy Murray Day

I sadly did not get any pictures of Happy Murray Day! But it was fun! Katelyn got the Masterpiece Murray Award, for her very detailed and beautiful drawings of late. (Whitney's drawing skills have exploded in the last couple of weeks actually- she is doing really well!) And Whitney got the Movie Murray Award, because she loves movies so much that she is willing to work very hard for them! Except for special occasions, if Whitney ever wants to watch a movie, she has to do 5, yes FIVE chores. I purposely set the bar so high to discourage movie-watching, but sometimes she just amazes me with her energy and focus as (for example) she does dishes and helps me clean her room and the toy room and both bathrooms in order to watch a movie!

For our Murray celebration we went out to dinner, and then were going to see How I Became a Pirate, a Theater for Young Audiences production at the SCERA. During dinner though, I remembered that I left our tickets at home! So Eric jumped in the car to drive all the way back home, and I got on the phone trying to find out if we could get in without the tickets. 15 minutes later I finally discovered we could get in, but by then the girls and I decided to walk the half-mile to the theater and meet Eric there. So it became a fun and memorable adventure walking down State Street in Orem at night, at least it wasn't too cold! It did rain a little though, and we ran for a minute, and someone stopped to offer us a ride a block from our destination. Then we met Eric and got to enjoy the awesome play. It was the second show we have seen there and it was great, very high quality. So much fun, great songs and age-appropriate acting. Whitney was smiling and laughing in delight the whole time, clapping and dancing on the floor in our row during the musical numbers. Katelyn just stared and smiled. We love theater!!

Anyway, it was a fun night.

Halloween

Ha! I did it, I am posting about Halloween before Thanksgiving, barely!! We had lots of fun. Here are our pumpkin carving efforts:

I thought this was hilarious- Eric hacking away at the rock-hard shell of this big pumpkin with an ax! He did a good job, but apparently I did not get a picture of his completed pumpkin.

Whitney digging out seeds

Katelyn making a funny face with the pumpkin she designed. This was her first time actually doing the carving herself too! Very nice.

Whitney with her pumpkin. She is ridiculously photogenic!

me and whit before we went to Katelyn's class party- I went with the easy witch costume, and isn't Whitney the cutest clown ever?? The best was when she was mad once, we couldn't stop laughing at her trying to make a mad face with that smile painted on. :)

this year all we bought was some face paint and a pirate sword. Yay for using costumes you already have!

a close up of Katelyn's awesome whiskers! They really made the costume.

funnies

I decided that I need to save some of my facebook posts on here so they become part of this record of our family! So here's Tuesday's:

Big news! No cavities for me, Katelyn, or Whitney! Most successful trip to the dentist ever! Now we will celebrate by eating a caramel apple, haha.

And todays:

My kids learned a lot about electricity today when the power was out for a couple of hours! Whitney freaked out at first and kept trying everything in the house to see if it needed "lectrictity". She was like "will the doors still open? do the cupboards still open? do books still work?" it was hilarious.

Let's hear it for the boy

Almost 2 weeks ago my little brother came home from his mission in Denver, CO. And 2 days later made the trek to Utah to see a bunch of us! Party time! It ended up being just as fun, memorable, and action-packed as I hoped it would be. And I got to have more meaningful one-on-one conversations with individual people than I thought I would in all the chaos.

Mostly it was great for my girls to get to get re-acquainted with Derek and have SO much fun with him, and my sisters, and my parents, and Donny and Christine and Taylor! After they all left for the last time Monday morning, Whitney said sadly "I'm going to miss them a lot." Uncles and Aunts, Grandparents and cousins are the best!!

And I also had fun remembering just how much fun Derek is. He's not just the spiritual, hardworking missionary we've heard from for the last 2 years, he's also hilarious and caring and knows how to be a bit silly. :)

So here's my pictures and a few I stole from Melissa.

So Friday night I stayed up until close to 2am- the latest I have in a long time! Everyone got there around 10 and we had a party until it was finally time to sleep.

The next morning we were up at 8 and Grandpa Jamie was making pancakes. What a fun wake-up for my girls! A house full of people to play with!

Soon we were off to Provo to eat lunch before the BYU game.

Taylor kindly offered her cute apartment for our use.

I got shots of everybody:

Donny and Christine

Katrina, Phillip, and Melissa (with Lydia on the ground, she is SO CUTE I'm sad I didn't get a picture)

Jenae, Kate and Eric, our cousin Ryan, Dad, Derek, and Taylor

Whitney and my mom (Whitney is a pizza-eating machine by the way! Katelyn of sourse packed a sandwich to eat since she doesn't like pizza...)

Then we walked to the game in the gorgeous October sunshine!

The game was a total blowout win, which was nice. We got to sing the fight song about 8 times!

I love watching football with Eric. :)

and with no children! My mom babysat my girls and Lydia so we could enjoy the game.

Thanks mom!

Group shot of almost everyone

In addition to the fun game, the afternoon was also full of

fashion statements

and girl trips to the bathroom. :)

(I got up to go-pregnancy calls- and as I walked down the row everyone followed me! I turned around and there was a line of girls joining me, it was funny.)

I didn't get any pictures at dinner at Katrina's, or my house that night or Sunday night. This is Monday morning before they left. It was inside-out and backwards day at Katelyn's school, thus the strange clothes. :)

Anyway, I'm still feeling the lingering happiness from that weekend.

Along with the sadness that I wasn't there for the party this last weekend for Derek's Homecoming talk in church. Ahh the difficulty of living 12 hours from my family... oh well at least they come up here a ton and I get to live by whoever's attending BYU at the moment. :)

It's a good life.

Halloween preview

I found these black shirts on clearance at Walmart for $1 and they just screamed "make a Halloween shirt out of me!" So I did.

fun fun.

and we had a Halloween party at church, so we had a trial run with our costumes. It went great!

"arrgh!"

Payson temple groundbreaking!

Okay so we did not have tickets to attend the actual groundbreaking, so the next day (Sunday evening) we drove over there to see it at least. To our surprise there were 30-40 other people there, and the shovels were still at the site (guarded by some official church guy!) for us to participate and take pictures and stuff, so cool!

The girls really liked shoveling, they could have kept going all night!

We also walked all around the temple site and talked about how the girls could get married there someday, and about where they would put in a waterfall and plant trees. We're so excited to have a temple 8 minutes away. :)

PS this is my new haircut and I made the skirt I'm wearing!

babies

The two most important babies in our life right now:

#1, our little boy at 22 weeks, whoa buddy! slow down there! and no my behind is not nearly that big, my pants are just baggy. I am in full-on maternity clothes mode!

I'm now 23 1/2 weeks and I chopped off my hair. :)

#2 our cute cousin Lydia. She and Whitney really like each other, it's so cute! And even Eric held her last time we saw her, he was so cute playing with her. As much as he says babies are useless until they're at least 9 months old, he is really good with them and has fun with them when they're not crying. :)

Goblin Valley again

We enjoyed a trip to Goblin Valley again this year. Next year we are going to a forest though! I need some pine trees around me to really feel like I'm camping.

As soon as we got there the girls started climbing around on this formation which was about 3 feet from our campsite. (I love having 3 and 5 year old children that I don't have to worry too much about!) Eric joined them as soon as we got things set up! He lives to climb (and jump around on) rocks.

The three of them up on a ledge that made me nervous- although lots of things make me nervous in my pregnant state. I didn't climb around too much because I don't have great balance right now!

The next morning we went exploring in the valley of the goblins, and found our way to some cool parts we hadn't seen last year. One of our favorites was this turtle!

Some of the coolest things we found were caves! This is in the back of one cave, so fun! It had a tiny whole with light coming in so it wasn't totally dark in there.

In the mouth of the cave

Me and Whitney and my little belly!

I love camping- sleeping in a tent, singing around the campfire, cooking delicious beef and veggie kabobs over the fire, obviously making smores, and star gazing! Me and Katelyn saw a shooting star, and Eric and I enjoyed looking at constellations and planets with the help of his stargazer app. :) Good times together on our last time camping without a baby for a while. :)

BYU Homecoming Races

For the third year in a row, the Saturdays before and after this race were beautiful 60 degree+ days, and the day of the race was a high of 45 and raining. Awesome. But still fun! The girls were sick during the week previous so we didn't get to practice on a track beforehand and it showed! Whitney was super cute and ran the whole way no problem, but you could tell she didn't really know where to go and she just jogged it. Usually when she would run around with Eric during Kate's soccer games she would really sprint! But that's okay.

She kept telling me after how she wasn't even scared of the starting gun- this starting line picture looks like she might have been a little concerned!

plugging along on the home stretch of her 200 meter race!

happy with her ribbon afterward

And then Katelyn really surprised me by starting off fast in the 400 meter race! Here she is coming around the first curve in the middle of the pack (#28)- she looked like she was actually running fast! ( I guess I was just used to her silly runs in soccer!) She looked happy and excited and it was so cute.

But by the end she was really tired, she barely made it the last 50 meters and got passed by a bunch of girls. She didn't stop though, she finished it all the way. :) And had fun! I forgot to take a picture of her with her ribbon. We're already excited for next year!