Wishing you all a. . .

It's been a crazy, fun, and happy year here in the Partridge home. Some days are wild and some days are sad, while others are full of excitement and laughter.  Many days just seem like a repeat of the day before, while others are imprinted on our memories.  The boys are growing older, smarter, taller, and more independent.  While Brett and I grow older, and that's about it:). No matter how the day happens, at the end of it we have each other and that is what brings us the most happiness.  From our family to yours, we wish you all a joyful Christmas and a happy New Year.    

Kindergarten Christmas

This wild and crazy little boy has been so excited for Christmas.  This is by far our most exciting Christmas, because Hyrum and Noah both are fully aware of what's going on and can't wait for Santa and lots of presents.  I can really feel the the excitement and spirit of Christmas.  In school they had a 'Who-bilation' and they were supposed to dress like a Who.  I think girls have it pretty easy, but for a boy Who I could only think of a silly bow tie and sticking up hair.  It was fun.  

Have I mentioned lately how much we just love the Kindergarten bus driver?  He's such a fun man.  For a few weeks before Christmas break he pretended that he was the Polar Express conductor.  When each of the kids got off the bus he had them ring the bells and yell "I believe!"  Then the last two days before break he dressed up as Santa.  Santa visited each of the Kindergarten classes.  Hyrum said he knew it was Richard and that he was only Santa's helper.  

Christmas Preperation

I can't say it was the best trip with a cranky pants in our presence, but Temple Square was beautiful.  It's such a blessing to live so close to so many amazing temples.  

On Christmas Eve Ryan and Jennifer's family invited us over for an amazing meal and a fun Christmas sharing time.  Brett and the boys practiced reading a really cute book about the true gift of Christmas.  Noah decided not to participate, but he performed a very cute arrangement of Jingle Bells singing it well and playing the piano.  It was a fun night and a great way to prepare for Christmas.

Phone Picture Dump

I love looking at all the pictures I have collected on my phone.  They're kind of fuzzy and sometimes crazy, but I finally got around to uploading them onto the computer and wanted to share some of the highlights:

This was the most fun ride at the new Carsland at Disneyland.  We loved it:

Adobe had a work party in the summer.  They had animals to pet, acrobats, hula hoopers, face painting, and balloon making, etc.  Noah was so excited to be a pirate:

For the past several months whenever Owen gets nervous about something or really tired he puts his pointer finger up his nose.  Occasionally he even puts his pointer finger in his nose, thumb in mouth, and other pointer finger in his ear.  It's pretty funny, but I can never capture it on my camera, so I was excited to catch this one picture:  

Brett has been so awesome to support me in a crazy tradition I have with a group of my friends.  We've seen all of the Twilight movies the night before the premier during a special charity showing.  It ends up being a really fun girls night out.  With this being the last segment in the series we went all out with movie, shopping at the new Outlets, and a nice dessert at Kneaders.  There were more girls we met up with at the show, but this was our car full:  

Albuquerque Thanksgiving

We started Thanksgiving with the annual Turkey Bowl that Brett represented the family at.  Next to the field was a nice park that Grandpa Rushton and the kids got to play.   

(Hyrum had fun playing too, but whenever the camera came out he seemed to disappear   

Grandma Rushton spent most of the day in the kitchen and it all paid off with an amazing meal that filled everyone beyond the brim.  Here's the big kid table: 

Kindergarten Thanksgiving Feast

With Hyrum in school this year, it is the first year in our family that Thanksgiving became a little more of understanding where it all started.  It's been really fun to hear the things he learns.  He memorized a few poems about Thanksgiving and he was really proud to share them.  I got to help out at his Kindergarten Thanksgiving Feast.  It was SO fun!  Hyrum was so happy that I was there and excited to show me all of the kids in his room, where he sat, etc.  I love that he loves being around me at this age. I know it won't last forever.  :)  His seat was at the head of the table so he told everyone that he was the King of the Feast. 

Snow

At the first 'big' snow of the season, the boys were SO excited to get out in it and build snowmen.  They built one big snowman and a baby snowman.  They did it together, with my help, and took turns painting it with the water/food coloring in the spray bottles.  It was a fun day and it ended with some yummy snow ice-cream before bed.  Good times:)

Hyrum

Hyrum is getting so much older and really growing into his own person.  It is exciting and heartwarming. Today we were playing at one of the boys' favorite parks and Hyrum was swinging on the swings.  He looked very contemplative for a moment and said, "My brain is telling me to slow down, but my heart is telling me to go higher"  after another few swings he decided: "I guess I should go really fast for a little bit and then go really slow."  His mind is always working and he says the cutest things.  

He really loves his bus driver that drives the Kindergartners home in the afternoon.  He is the nicest Grandpa that loves his retirement 'job'.  He knows all of the kids and they all just love him.  Today right before bedtime Hyrum told us that he needed to draw a picture for Richard (the driver) because he promised him he would.  He drew this picture of Richard and Hyrum holding hands in front of the bus. He said the bigger guy is Richard because he has a bigger belly:).  He put it in his backpack and then laid it down next to his shoes so that he wouldn't forget anything for school tomorrow.  I snuck it out so I could post it tonight.  It just made me smile.

This was another picture that amazed me for his creativity.  It is a haunted house he made for Halloween.  He said that each door on the house had different monsters and scary things behind them.  Ghosts came out of all the windows.  He is so creative and such a blessing in our family.

Halloween

Today started early with the Elementary School's costume parade.  Hyrum loves his brother Owen so much.  He was playing with Ethan (behind him) earlier this week and Ethan was telling me all these stories about 'Baby Bubbles'.  Hyrum and Ethan don't play together very often so I asked him how he knew so much about him.  I found out Hyrum talks about Owen during Kindergarten every day.  He only refers to him as Baby Bubbles and the rest of his class can tell you all about him:)  I caught this picture of him when he first saw us.  He pointed at Owen in his costume and was so proud and excited to show his friends Baby Bubbles.  Hyrum was really excited to be a robot.  It was a dream come true. 

After Hyrum's class was done Noah and Owen got bored and the playground was calling them.  So, here is Superman minus his cape that was getting in the way.  I really wanted to dress the boys up like Phineas and Ferb, but they had their own plan so I went with it.  I was really glad that Noah wanted to be Superman since we already had the costume.   

And, of course, where's Perry? 

Spooky!

We had such a fun Halloween.  It started yesterday at Brett's work party.  Adobe party's are epic and here were a few of the highlights.

I do kind of wish I got my camera out sooner in the exhibits.  I didn't get any pictures of Brett's awesome Zombie Night of the Dead with a lake in it and everything.  There was also a walk through of The Hunger Games movie that was really impressive and SO many other exhibits that I can't even count them, not to mention the acrobats, jugglers, snakes, cheerleaders, and other performers outside entertaining the line to get in.   

I thought the S.H.I.E.L.D exhibit was pretty fun.  The boys liked it because it had a bunch of superheroes and training stuff.  

After a few of the more 'scary' exhibits the boys were pretty excited when we saw this:

They did a great job of making it very Disney-esque with lots of characters even Mickey, Minnie, Cinderella, Snow White, and her evil step mother.  

One of the favorites was the Peter Pan exhibit.  It had Peter Pan and his shadow, mermaids, the lost boys, and Nanna (a real identical dog).

Here's the awesome pirate ship this group built.  They blew circle smoke at everyone and there was a slide that Noah was able to sneak three turns on.  

Owen made such a cute Perry the Platypus.  He discovered his love for candy and now he can't get enough.  Amazingly enough the weather was so warm that we had to unzip him and let him cool off a little bit.  I'm loving this unpredictable warm weather we've been having for the past couple of days:)

Play Room Painting Project

I started working on the playroom a few weeks ago, but the project was only worked on a little bit while I was taking care of Owen.  I finally got done today.  Just in time to stop procrastinating making Owen's Halloween costume.  We still need to re-hang bookshelves and put things back in the room, but at least the painting is done.  Here's a peak at our 'under water' playroom:

This was really fun for me to do and it reminded me how much I miss doing art projects.  I think I really love doing huge wall pictures, it was fun and a learning experience.  My all time favorite part of the whole playroom is something you can't see in these pictures.  The jellyfish and octopus glow in the dark, really!  I also have 4 extra jellyfish in the room that you can only see when the lights are out.  The boys really love it.  They let the room 'charge' with the light on for about ten minutes and then they shut the door, turn the lights out, and are surrounded by glowing sea creatures.   I love having this playroom in our basement, because I feel like I can experiment and have fun with it without caring if things look bad or not.  Not many people will ever see this room and it's small enough to paint over quickly if we ever need to.  I let the boys be in charge of painting the secret room in the playroom. They took it very seriously and were very careful and determined to make it awesome.  Here's them at work:

(you can see the octopus outline the day after I first drew it in this pic:)

Ok, it might look a little scary when you see this picture of craziness, but I promise you that every single part of this picture is essential in the boy's minds.  The part that Hyrum did has a whole story to go with it about our family leaving our house and walking to a giant playhouse/rollercoaster/funhouse.  Each of the lines resembles a different slide or rollercoaster.   There are also swings, 'spinning things', and mazes.   

 Noah was having a little more fun with the color and brushes then focusing on what he was actually drawing, but he did work hard on it.  

It was a really fun project to do and now on to the next project:)

Sick baby

Brett was gone for a whole week.  We had a lot of fun activities planned and we stayed busy the whole time until Thursday when out of no where Baby Owen woke up from his nape burning hot.  I was in the middle of teaching Joyschool when he woke up and I ended up cutting my lesson short.  At first I figured the fever would go quickly, but throughout the day he got hotter and hotter.  By dinner time his temperature read 105.6 and I was certain that our thermometer must be broken.  I ran over to a neighbor and borrowed their thermometer.  I wasn't able to get a good reading because he was screaming and wiggling a lot, but it read 103.4.  I decided I really should take him in to see the pediatrician.  I gave him some Tylenol and got in to see the doctor an hour later.  His temp was 104.5, and his Strep test was positive.  I felt horrible.  My poor little baby was miserable.  I got him on an antibiotic right away and alternated Ibuprofen and Tylenol every three hours.  He was up most of the night.  The next day he did pretty well in the morning and then his fever spiked again that afternoon and evening.  Brett came home that night.  I was so happy to have him there to help with the other boys.  It's Monday night now and he's still up a good chunk of the night.  I called the Doc today and he told me that it sounds like he probably has Strep and a viral infection, since he hasn't show as well of an improvement as expected.  I'm tired.  Brett's tired.  Hyrum and Noah are tired.  Poor Owen is just so sad.  I hope he feels better soon.

Dear Santa

I realize it's a bit early for a Christmas post, but oh well.  We've been getting a ton of toy magazines in the mail lately, and so I finally decided to keep them around for a few days before they got tossed.  The boys wouldn't stop looking at them.  They loved seeing what was out there.  I gave them both markers and told them to circle what they liked.  They circled almost everything in the magazines, sometimes they would even circle the really good stuff a few times and write an H or N on top of it so that Santa would know who wanted it more.  Noah like a few of the baby toys too, and when I told them they were baby toys he would circle them and put an O on the top of the picture.  He said Santa could get it for baby Owen, and then he would share it with Noah.  After that went on every day for about a week it turned into writing letters to Santa.  Once we were all done I told them we would scan them to Santa and then we had to get rid of all the magazines so that Christmas would still be a surprise.  Here's what they came up with:

Hyrum did his letter all by himself other then asking me how to spell things.   I was really impressed with how clear he was about how things worked and what they did.  

Noah was being really funny.  I told him what letters to write for the intro and then I just quickly wrote what he told me.  A few times he got stuck so I would ask him a question or two about things he liked, and then he would continue going.  

A Big Hole

Kennecott Copper Mine is 45 minutes away.  It's the worlds largest man made excavation.  I figured since we live so close and people travel from far away to see it, we should probably take the trip to see what it was all about.  I thought the boys would like to see all the massive trucks and equipment.  Well, I was pretty impressed.  It was cool to see, and the two room museum was impressive although small. The boys were mostly disappointed because they misunderstood me and thought we were going to dig up pennies while we were there.  So, after 20 minutes of touring we decided it was a very big hole and then we went back home. :)

Beautiful Fall

I absolutely love the colors of Fall in the Canyon.  The boys and I had a fun drive with some friends and did some exploring.  

Aren't the colors amazing! When we got there one of the girls found a fuzzy caterpillar, and then we put it down when we went on the trails.  When we got back to the parking lot Hyrum found the same little guy and seriously was in love with it.  He didn't want to leave it.  He kept petting it and telling me how much the caterpillar loved him.