Benson Thomas is here!

This is a little late, but we've ALL been sick and of course I've been recovering from childbirth which apparently is less and less fun each time!


Benson Thomas was born last Sunday afternoon, after a very short and eventful labor! He was 7lbs. even and 19 inches long. He has light brown hair and bright blue eyes and looks VERY much like his older brother Warner. Warner and Charlotte seem to be enjoying their younger brother very much, Warner is very gentle but of course Charlotte the wild woman is who we have too look out for!

Benson Thomas was named for Ezra Taft Benson and Thomas after my father. President Benson testified of the truthfullness of the Book of Mormon, helped open new parts of the world to missionary work through his connections as Secretary of Agriculture under Dwight D. Eisenhower, throughout his life he spoke of the importance of freedom and how it relates to Heavenly Father's plan. While my own father does not share our religious beliefs, he is a wonderful man with a strong moral compass- he instilled in me very important values, taught me to be strong and self reliant and from a very young age he stressed what the role of government should be.


and here are the pictures!

Just what I needed to hear today

I saw this on my cute friend Whitney's blog. I heard it a few years ago when this talk was first given, but I obviously really needed to hear it again! The last year has been an incredibly challenging one, even before considering what new challenges this pregnancy has brought. As I'm sitting here with a horrible headache, hoping my kids will sleep a little longer this morning it sure helps bring things into perspective!!!

When Roosters Attack...

Today while Chad was out feeding the animals he looked behind him to see that the brown rooster had knocked down Charlotte and was standing on her back scratching her and pecking at her, then the white rooster came over to help. Charlotte is okay, but traumatized- and we realized it's time to "cull the flock." We watch a lot of Food Network and we remembered an episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown makes Coq Au Vin, we decided this would be a good use of the rooster. Fortunately, Chad had killed chickens on his mission so he had some experience in this area. I held the legs while Chad cut the head off, totally normal husband/ wife thing to do on Saturday night while your wife is 39 weeks pregnant right?! We had to look up directions on how to actually clean the chicken and it turns out we got some bad advice. 15 minutes is unfortunately too long to boil the chicken for in order to get the feathers off. 1 minute would have been plenty... So when it came time to disembowel the chicken we realized it had already been cooked. So we field dressed the rooster anyways (Emergency Preparedness!) just for practice, holy cow was that disgusting! Chad and I discovered we are going to need much sharper knives if we ever plan to butcher another animal! We ended up using frozen chicken breasts for our Coq Au Vin, and it's currently marinating overnight.

Like pigs to the slaughter....

Today was the day for Pancetta and Prosciutto, slaughter day that is! Chad's dad came out to help him load the pigs into the trailer and take them to the slaughterhouse and I came out to watch and to call 911 if necessary. The back of the pig pen backs up to our neighbors yard, and they run an at home daycare- so at about 10 this morning when all the little kids were playing outside they got to see Chad dragging our 200 pound pigs by their back legs into the trailer. It was actually pretty frightening, the pigs screamed bloody murder and all the kids froze and just stared! Hopefully they aren't too traumatized! It kind of reminded me of this scence from Napoleon Dynamite!

Dancing with Toddlers

Warner and Charlotte really love Dancing with The Stars and they dance right along with the show, here's a cute picture from tonight. I can't wait until their old enough to do Ballroom Dancing lessons, they'll make such a cute little pair!

Halloween!

Technically it's not Halloween yet, but we've already carved pumpkins and our ward Halloween Party was tonight. Warner dressed up as a cowboy and Charlotte wore the pumpkin costume I made for Warner's first Halloween, and it actually felt like Fall as it was in the 40's tonight! YAY!

Super Saturday was really SUPER!!

If you zoom in you can see the little crystals, this one turned out great!!

magnet board

I've never been in a ward that has done a Super Saturday, so I was SO EXCITED when sign ups went around a couple of months ago. I can't remember the last time I went somewhere by myself for a couple hours that wasn't institute, the dentist or the grocery store so it was really fun to get out of the house and visit with the sisters in my ward. I'm even more excited about the projects, especially the Stocking Hanger. When we lived in a split level I hung them on the bannister, last year I used those 3M removable stick on hooks and tied a ribbon around them.... but it wasn't very cute. And best of all, all this stuff was SO CHEAP!