HOA's and other stuff

Bryce went to our HOA meeting last night. When I asked him how it was, he said that it was basically "a bitch fest." There were a lot of people interrupting to say, "What about this?" And "what about that?" Things that they'd get to on the list if they would have patience and just wait. And then it was discussed to possibly contact a lawyer to see if we could put pressure on the city to do something about our swells (the dip in the parking strip instead of storm drains...yeah, nice mosquito breeding grounds and potentially hazardous to small children). 10 minutes and another topic later, someone says, "How about if we see if we can start some Class Action Suit against the city about the swells?" Bryce said it took an hour to get to the point of the meeting, which was to get people to sign up to be on committees, such as the welcoming committee, legal committee, etc. So he signed up and then left rather than waiting around to see if they'd start re-hashing everything that people were complaining about earlier. I think I'm glad I sent him instead of going myself.

Daniel turned 4 months old this week. It's crazy how fast the time is going. He's a lot like Alex and starts to giggle when I put him on the changing table. Can't have anything to do with the fact that he gets tickled a lot when he's on there and is starting to anticipate it.

We're thinking that there's something in Strawberry Quik that affects Chris. He threw up in the van on Wednesday after drinking strawberry milk the day before and that morning. And it seems as though when he's thrown up at different times in the past, strawberry milk is usually involved. So the poor kid doesn't get to have strawberry milk anymore. But he can still have the chocolate milk (maybe not the Nesquik on that one, either though).

Alex is energetic as ever. He's really enjoying his preschool and is always excited to go. He seems to think it's pretty cool that he gets to have his own class. I think he's starting to miss his brother Ben, since he starts to get a bit wound up when Ben comes home from school.

Speaking of Ben, he's now gone two weeks in a row without losing any of his beans. Way to go Ben! He seems to enjoy going to school, but I do think that the bus ride is still his favorite part.

General Conference and stuff

Well, General Conference was this past weekend. I really enjoyed it. It's just really cool to be able to listen to the prophets speak. I think of all the people in the world who don't know that we have prophets on the earth today and I'm sad for them. One of the talks fit a bit with this coming Sunday's Gospel Doctrine Lesson. It's on Acts 21-28, where Paul goes to Jerusalem and is arrested at the temple and ultimately ends up testifying to King Agrippa. King Agrippa tells him, "Almost thou persuadest me to become a christian." (I may be off on the wording a wee bit.) Sometimes people don't accept the gospel because they think it would be too hard, giving up some friends and some habits, even though they can see the good of the message. Are there times when we are "almost" persuaded to do what's right? Like the talk in Conference, are we sometimes choosing the good over the better or the best? Sometimes that's easy to do. It's not always easy to choose the best over the good. So that's just one thing that I got out of Conference. If you so desire, feel free to add comments to this post and tell me what you got out of it.

And for those who may be wondering, Ben has been doing really well at school lately. Most days he either keeps all his beans or only loses one. He did have one day last week where he lost them all, but the day before and the day after (he only had school 3 days last week) he kept them all. So it looks like our efforts at giving him more attention and giving him something to work towards at school are working. He wants to be good, so the beans at school are a good reminder for him.

Alex is really enjoying his preschool. He runs to the houses when we get there and doesn't care if I'm keeping up with him. He doesn't seem to mind when he gets to go home though, but he talks about his preschool a lot. This week will be the first time it's at our house, so we'll see how he likes it then.

Chris is doing better in nursery than he used to. He doesn't need Bryce to be in there with him anymore and doesn't seem like he's quite so shy when he's there. I think he'll be excited when his cousin gets to join him in there in the next few months.

Daniel is still growing up a storm. He's reaching for objects and seems to like to roll over onto his side these days. Before we know it, he'll be rolling all over the place. We do have to be careful when we put him down on the floor, however. His brothers don't always pay attention to where they're walking and end up tripping on him. For some reason Daniel doesn't like it when that happens.

I was going to post a video on this of me practicing the song we're singing with our ward choir. I was practicing and wanted to hear how I sounded, since I'm doing the solo parts in the song. But since the video would go into processing and then disappear, I think you're saved and don't have to hear or see it. Lucky you. I guess if you're a glutton for punishment and if you really would like to, you can always ask me and I can see if I can email it to you. I'm not sure why you'd want to though. A couple parts really didn't sound very good, but that wasn't always my fault. Sometimes it was the microphone on my webcam. And no, I'm not just being modest. I cringed a couple of times. But only a couple of times isn't too bad, right?

A New TV

The TV in our family room was having problems. After we had the bulb in it changed, the screen went all warped and soon there was a big, bright, yellow circle in the midle of the screen. We waited until the beginning of this month and then finally called Best Buy to fix it (we had the extended warranty and were very glad we got it after we had to have the light engine replaced last year, which was a $1400 part). They contacted the repair place and Wes from the repair place called us and said that he'd send it back in to Best Buy to have them do the buy back thing, since he was pretty sure it was probably the light engine again and he said they don't fix that anymore. So we waited to hear back from Best Buy and finally on Thursday we got a call that said to take our TV in to the store and they'll exchange it. They gave us a confirmation and told us to take in our receipt and stuff too. So when Bryce came home from work that night, he took the tv and went to Best Buy. He came back with a 50" dlp TV and an adapter for our computer to make it go from DVI to HDMI, since the new TV didn't have the DVI port (It had a VGA port, but our VGA output on our computer hadn't been working). He said that at first they tried to get him to take a 46" TV and he asked how it works, if they just trade for comparable models (although our old TV had more ports and they actually didn't have anything there with a DVI port) or what. So they figured out that the TV we had would cost $1200 now, so they were looking at TV's in that range (the 46" one cost $900). Anyway, Bryce set up the 50" TV and we couldn't get the computer to work right with it, so the next day, Bryce took it back and just got a gift card for the cost, since he thought maybe I'd want to help him pick something out. They actually gave him the full amount that we originally paid for our TV with taxes and everything, so just over $1900.
I told Bryce I didn't care what he got, so he could just go back, which he did after we got the boys in bed that night. He kept calling me to see if we wanted 2 46" TV's, a 50" and a 46", or a 65". I told him it was up to him. He decided to get the 65". But they only had the floor model left at the Nampa store and there wasn't enough time to get out to the Boise store before it closed, so they held one for him at the Boise store. Since I had an Enrichment Activity when he was supposed to be out there, he took Ben, Alex, and Chris with him and I had Daniel with me. I got home from the EA at about 12. At 1, Bryce got home and asked if I could keep the boys with me, he was going to go to the Nampa store. He had argued with the people at the Boise store because they wanted to charge him $1999 for the TV when he was going to get it for $1699 at the Nampa store. So he went to the Nampa store and got it for the $1699 price, which had been kind of a mistake in the first place because the manager hadn't switched the tag to say $1999, but since he had told Bryce they would give it to him for that price, they were keeping it there. And since he was taking the floor model, they gave him another 10% off. And Bryce managed to talk them into not charging him sales tax because of the hassle. And the manager who the night before had told Bryce he'd give it to him for that price wasn't there, so they had to call him to make sure Bryce was telling them the truth. So after buying the TV and another extended warranty with it (we figured that it was probably a good idea with a TV this expensive and it really came in handy last time), he ended up with about $28 left on the gift card. So he got a 65" TV that is typically worth $2000 or so for a really good price, feeling like he spent a lot of money, although he hadn't actually spent anything) And if he had taken the one they were originally trying to give him, we'd have ended up with a TV worth $900. I'm pretty glad I sent Bryce to go do the TV stuff. I probably would have just taken the $900 one. And now we have a HUGE TV in our family room that works with the computer (it also didn't have the DVI port, but the HDMI port was supposed to work better with computers). It took a bit to get the computer to work with it and in the end, the VGA output actually started working, and the DVI still wasn't working with the new TV, so we're using the VGA port. Which is actually kind of funny. To sum up, it was a lot of hassle, but we ended up getting a pretty good deal out of it. We went from 44" to 65" and didn't have to pay anything.

Temple trip

We went to the temple for Family Home Evening last night and the boys loved it. They had a good time exploring the grounds and talking about some of the things that happen in the temple. We also had our family scripture study at the temple, and they seemed to like that. They all kept saying that they wanted to stay there and wanted to go back soon. We've told them that maybe the next time we're down visiting family, we'll take them to see the Salt Lake Temple and maybe the Bountiful Temple so they can see the place where we got married. They're excited to be able to see more. It's so fun to see them excited about things like that.

Here are some pictures I took of them at the temple:

3 months old now

I just thought I'd post a few pictures I took of Daniel on his 3 month birthday. He's funny and won't smile for the camera even though he's pretty smiley in between the shots.
The marble and beans system we've been doing with Ben and Ben's teacher seems to be working so far. On Thursday he didn't get to keep any of his beans, so he didn't get to put a marble in the jar at home, but he was very happy coming off the bus on Friday because he had been able to keep 3 of his beans, which meant he got to put a marble (3, actually) in the jar at home. I'm sure his teacher appreciated that he was being better in class. (For those of you who haven't heard about this part, Ben's teacher called on Wednesday to discuss concerns she was having with him. Basically he's been defiant and will do the exact opposite of what she tells him to do, he blows in the other kids' faces to the point where they don't like to stand by him, he yelled at another teacher that she wasn't the boss of him, things like that.)







I thought I'd add this cute one of Chris, too.