Beginning of Summer Fun

The beginning of summer (like a week after Kindergarten graduation) started out like this. We had a yard sale in our back yard put on by Tucker selling his broken or otherwise un-useful toys to...um...us I guess. Yvonne fell sucker and gave him $.25 for the butterfly that was in one of the plants on the patio and $.25 for a broken shovel head. I told him I wasn't going to pay twice for the things I had already bought. LOL! (Everyone sing along, "Every party needs a pooper...") I was more concerned with the fact he was only wearing his undies and it looked like he had nothing on with the Crayon Piggy Bank in front of the undies. He was afraid that if he moved it he would be "exposed" so he made sure to cover up. I thought it was ineffective...funny kid! Either way I guess we know why my kids always get so tan in the summer!

Then we have all the fun in the water during the summer. H2O is a lifesaver when the summer heat wave comes along and the kids spend most of the summer wearing only their swimsuits. We just had a blow up swimming pool (seen below), but unfortunately it has met an early death. McKinlee thought it would be great to give the cat a bath and unfortunately the cat wasn't so cooperative and poked holes all over with his claws trying to get out. I tried to patch them all, but no matter how many I find there's always "one more." They go straight from their jammies into the swimsuits first thing in the morning and just get wet all the day long! Titan loves his big brother and Tucker is ALMOST always so good with him...he's patient ad loves to make him smile and laugh! You can see that one of Titan's favorite things is hanging out on the towel like a stinkbug. What cute kiddos!

Short little story about our cat. If you look at the post below where we got "Precious" you'll see that I referred to the cat as a HER. Well, we found out about a month ago that it was definitely a HIM. I don't know how silly you have to be to take the person giving you the cat's word on the gender and not check yourself, but hey, who's judging?! Anyway, "Precious" is in need of a more manly cat name so we're open for opinions.

More funny stuff

Tucker runs into the living room holding one of Titan's big triangle crayons he got for his birthday saying that he ate the crayon part off. He starts staring at the words on the bottom of it and says to Yates, "Can you read me this part on the bottom? It's either in cursive or Chinese." Apparently those are the only two "languages" he is unable to read.

Yates and Tucker were just wrestling on the bed and he starts singing, "There once was a girl that loved a boy and slicked tongues with Daddy. They slicked tongues clear up to heaven." He is in this crazy phase with people kissing (french kissing obviously) and calls it slicking tongues.

Never a dull moment in the Wright household. P.S. Yates thinks I'm dumb for putting this stuff on here. LOL! Enjoy the dumb-ness!

Kindergarten Graduation

What a big step...how could I have not blogged this already? Did we cry? Nope. Did we laugh? Yup. I think Kindergartners have to about be the cutest and most neurotic children ever.

Tucker had a great first year of kindergarten and had 4 teachers. Who gets to say that? His first teacher had a baby, 2nd was a sub until the 1st teacher came back and then she ended up going part time and only teaching the AM class so there was another sub until they could find a more permanent 4th teacher to finish out the year. Thank you Mrs. Kaeding, Mrs. Barnum, Mrs. Beckstead and Mrs. Holdaway!!!

Tucker did a really GREAT job in Kindergarten. He came out of preschool being able to read about 20 sight words and has really taken off with reading. He does a really really good job. We've kept up with it this summer so hopefully he didn't lose too much over the summer. I'm always impressed with different things he still tries out: counting syllables to different words, naming the correct 3-d name for objects (cylinder, cone, etc.), rhyming, counting everything in sight. We're still working on telling time with a clock...digital he's all good, but otherwise he struggles. He has got all our family names down pat...first, middle and last and knows our address and phone numbers. We've been trying to teach him as we drive around the city, state thing. He gets confused still, but tries hard. He loves to show us how smart he is and eats up all the praise he gets for being such a smart boy! I'm so glad. He had his struggles...the attention span is a bit short, but is that so hard to believe for a 6-yr old boy? He also is a very social boy (takes after his mama) and was very talkative during class. He had lots of friends. His best friend from Kindergarten is Dalton and he still plays with him...they throw their arms around each other any time we see him in the grocery store or anywhere around town. It's so cute! I asked him who his good friends were and straight from his mouth, "Dalton, Owen, Brooklyn (which hardly talks to me...but he thinks is cute), Kamree and kinda Piper."

They had a little program at the school where the kids all filed in and sang us a bunch of uber-cute songs. It was such a surprise because normally Tucker sings at home too, but he hadn't sang ANY of the songs they had practiced at school. It was the first time we'd heard them and they all did such a good job! Then they got their little diplomas and we headed home for the day! Lots of the kids had really dressed up for the occasion, so I felt like Tucker was a little under-dressed but uh...what do you do once you're already at the school! It made a memory! LOL!

First Grade and Mrs. Neilson...here comes Tucker!

Change of Pace

Alright...I know I said yesterday that I was going from oldest to newest but some dang funny stuff happened yesterday that I don't want to forget. Yates and I had signed up to run a 5k at the Bryce Canyon Half Marathon and 5k this weekend and were going to coincide a camping trip right along with it. Some crazy things happened this week and we ended up having everyone that was going to come camping with us back out. Yvonne has moved in with her brother in Newcastle and so we were without anyone to watch our 3 kids while we raced. We decided that it was worth it to forfeit the registration fees instead of finding someone to watch our kids here at home, drive the couple hours it takes to get there to run for 35 minutes and turn right around and have to get home to the kids. We decided to have a fun family weekend together instead and went to Mesquite last night for All-You-Can-Eat-Till-Yates-Sweats-Butter Crab Night! The kids were all really good and loved it!

However, McKinlee decided she had to go to the bathroom TWICE while we were there! The first time...in and out. No biggie! The second time...laughs all around! As we get into the bathroom and close the stall she immediately starts gabbing away and here is the story of our bathroom experience. Keep in mind my children don't have very good inside voices.

Kinlee: "Mom, I gotta go poop BAD!" (as face goes red and she grunts while speaking). All of a sudden her face relaxes and she starts talking a mile a minute. "Do people talk in the bathroom?"
Mom: "No, not usually." (HOPING that there is nobody else in the bathroom)
Kinlee: "Why?"
Mom: "Cuz they usually are trying to just get done and get out."
Kinlee: "What's that?" (pointing to the hinge on the bathroom stall)
Mom: "A hinge."
Kinlee: (hysterically laughing) "Hinge...that's a funny name. (stops laughing) Mom, my poop won't come out."
Mom: "Ok, please try to hurry. Daddy's waiting for us. He's ready to go."
Kinlee: "What's waiting mean?"
Mom: "It means that he is sitting at the table until we get back."
Kinlee: (laughing again) "Dad's silly. Waiting is a silly word."
Mom: "Will you please hurry?!"
Kinlee: "I AM hurrying to go poop."
A few minutes later full of mindless chit-chat...Kinlee: "Mom my poop's coming out now. Just little poops and one big poop."
Mom: "Good girl! Are you all done?"
Kinlee: "Yup, I'm done going poop and pee. Gotta wipe though."
We finish up and go to wash hands full of Kinlee chatter the entire time. There is a nice older lady that keeps stealing glances at us and smiling. She finally says, "That's a cute little voice she has." I said, "Yes, thank you. I was hoping nobody would hear that conversation, but she's always good for some laughs." She said, "Enjoy it...they get big fast!" We booked it outta there on the double.

Then...on the way back home, we drop off the hill into Hurricane where you can see a hilltop that is named "Molly's Nipple". If it weren't for that and the "H" hill I don't think Tucker would ever find his way home. LOL! As a sidenote, there's also a "Molly's Nipple" in Kanab. I don't know who this "Molly" is but she sure got around. :) Anyhoo, we were coming into Hurricane and Tucker blurts out, "Look, there's Mom's Nipple." Ahem...excuse me? You better get the name right if you're going to be blurting things like THAT out. We laughed really hard for a few minutes and he couldn't figure out what was so funny and then we figured we better drop the issue to avoid having him think it was "funny" to make the same mistake in the future.

We'll be back to oldest to newest tomorrow. :) Have a good night!

Um...hello? Anyone still Reading?

Alright, I'm tired of all the whining that is going on about my neglect of the blog. I KNOW I'm behind! I KNOW people are missing the fun stuff our family does and especially pictures of the kids! At this point I am so far behind it's almost worth bagging and starting over from this point forward (sort of like tithing sometimes LOL). I also have been tired of hearing on the other end of the coin that I am "always on the computer"!!! So there! It was my point to tick both ends of the coin off (only kidding). Instead of pleasing just one group of people, everyone must suffer needlessly. Alas, I will suck it up and get everyone caught up to date with where we are. It's mostly for our sake anyway, since I have planned on using this as our little family journal.

Yates gives me a hard time about doing one big long post to get caught up because then I don't write enough to really explain what happened. Well folks, I have a plan. I'm going to try to post ONE NEW topic each day (or every other day at least) from oldest to most recent until I'm caught up. I also have a temporary reward for everyone! I'm TEMPORARILY removing the "private" status until I get caught up. There's lots of people who've stopped checking in since it's been so long and I want them to get the notification that there's finally NEW STUFF! :) One less step for the next few weeks!

Without any further delay, Post #1. This is a fabulous "first" post because it shows our great parenting skills. LOL! This beauty happened on 5/8/09 just a couple days after our last post. Tucker was trying to be the best big brother ever and show McKinlee how to ride his "big boy" bike. She was riding it and he wasn't the best set of training wheels ever because he sort of let her tip right over next to our water fountain out back. Her head, as you can see, received the worst of the damage while the fountain got away without a single scratch to call its own. I think the pictures sort of look like mug shots of a domestic violence victim, so it's a good thing I told the story first. :) It's also a good thing that Yates took pictures of it right away because the lump ended up going away really fast (this all happened while I was at work and there was no lump by time I got home that afternoon). So there you have it folks! 1st post after a long leave of absence! See you tomorrow!