Quiet Christmas Eve

This Christmas has been a special one for me for sure.  Of course they are always special when you have your family around you and get to spend Christmas morning with your kids, but this year has been unique for me with the arrival of Christopher.  The shock of his gender was a crazy this to get used to, but I know that him being a boy is no mistake for sure.  I'm sure the many reasons will manifest themselves in years to come, but for right now it is just offering me a powerful reminder of the meaning of Christmas.  I have so enjoyed the (rare) quiet nights in our house when all the kids are sleeping when I could just sit in the living room by the light of the Christmas tree, holding my newborn infant son and contemplating Mary's feelings of holding her newborn infant son on the first Christmas.  Thinking about his place in our family and what his life will bring and how much I love him and wondering of the sacrifice that His mother would be making some day.  Did she know what his life would be like as she held him in her arms?  Possibly knowing how his life would end and hoping his short life would not go by so fast, just as our own children's lives fly by before our eyes?  Did she hold him tight hoping to make time stand still and just enjoy those quiet moments?  I can't imagine having to suffer any of my children to the fate she had to, she is a far better woman than I will ever be.  I hope I never forget these feelings as I will never have a Christmas like this again.

My little Christmas miracle, in the stocking he came to me in the hospital in, under the Christmas tree.

My sweet little Christmas baby

Darling Baby

I just can't help but take pictures of my little boy all the time!  He's so cute!  Plus I know that my future self will never be sad that I have so many, I'm not sad about the quantity of pictures I have with my other kids except that there aren't enough!

Sleeping

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and in this case I know it's true.  I think these pictures bear testimony to the eternal exhaustion that is parenthood.

I hesitated to put this picture on seeing as it is completely flattering with my double chins and all, but it shows that apparently we are all feeling the effects of having a new baby in the house.  On a side note, Madelynn was the one who brought the chip bag in.  Not that I didn't help myself, but I usually don't fall asleep with food on my.  Usually.

I just think this picture is so sweet!  I couldn't help but share it with the world!   Ben is also incredibly tired these days seeing as this super dad gets up at night with the baby as well, so I can (maybe) get some sleep too.  I'm spoiled!

Gingerbread House

I knew that we were having our baby soon so I picked up a gingerbread house from Costco to assemble for a quick family home evening project.  It worked out great since it was pre assembled so I didn't have to put it together because I'm incredibly exhausted on my first day home with Christopher.  Although into family activities, decorating gingerbread houses is really more my thing than Ben's so he held the baby and took pictures while I applied frosting and helped the kids put candy on it.  We had a really fun time and the kids are already dying to break it apart and eat it, hope they can wait a few weeks!

Madelynn was more into eating the decorations than anything

Our motley crew. Alex, Nicholas, me, Madelynn, and Daniel.

Welcome Christopher!!

This morning at 11:31 we welcomed Christopher Marlon Kent to our Family!!  He was 8 pounds, 6 ounces, and 20 inches long.  We were not expecting a little boy, be we are so glad to have him!  I'm still processing the fact that he's a boy.  It's not a bad thing, just a surprise.  The doctor knew we didn't know what he was, so when he came out, he covered him up with a towel so we could have a grand revealing.  When he pulled that towel off, I almost fell off the table in shock!  I just keep telling myself, "it's a boy.  It's a boy.  Really a boy?  Wow, a boy!  Holy cow, a boy!" over and over again.  I'll get used to it in a little bit, I'm sure, but I've never been this shocked since... well... never!  He's so cute though, I just love him!!  I was worried the kids would be in for a shock as well since they all wanted a sister, but they have accepted him as one of their own already and can't get enough of holding him.  I love to see them hold and love their new brother!

Skin on skin time with mommy.  It's my favorite!!

Sleepy boy

Sweet little boy with his eyes open

Snuggling with mommy.

I also want to mention, just for memory's sake, that this morning was a lunar eclipse.  Kind of a cool thing that happened the morning of our little boy's birth.

Last Pregnant picture!!

This is officially the last picture that will ever be taken of me during this pregnancy!!  Baby, here you come!!

Christmas Skull

Okay, back story:  Once upon a time, Ben and Jamie were young teenagers who were in love.  Jamie would often hang out at Ben's house and they spent all their free time together.  One day, as Ben and Jamie drove up to Ben's house, Ben voiced his dislove of a cow skull his father had put in the front yard as a decoration.  This got Jamie thinking.  Being the selfless giver that she was, she decided to do a favor for Ben so one night, when she was leaving his house, she hauled the ugly (heavy!!) cow head to the trunk of her car and drove away.  The next day, an excited Jamie and Ben hung out.  Again.  As usual.  She pulled him to her car and popped the trunk to reveal to him her surprise and Ben laughed and laughed about it.  Jamie thought she had done a good thing.  It wasn't long before Ben's dad discovered his cow skull was gone and was very sad about it.  Ben started to feel guilty.  Jamie felt bad.  One day while Jamie was at Ben's house, Ben decided he needed to give the cow skull back to his dad, but instead of just getting it out of Jamie's trunk and giving it back, Ben took his dad to Jamie's car and popped the trunk to reveal the skull.  Ben's dad was not happy with Jamie and Jamie felt stupid about what she had done.  Ever since then, Ben and Jamie still think the cow head is kind of silly, but realize Ben's dad loves it so they leave it alone and just talk about it sometimes.  The end.  Fast forward to the present.  The other day, Angie was at our house and the story of the cow skull came up.  Can't remember why.  And then we talked about the skull.  I made a comment about how if the cow skull was going to be out there, we should dress it up for holidays since Ben' parents don't really decorate for any holidays but Christmas.  We all agreed that this was a great idea.  So on her way home, Angie picked up a Santa hat for the skull.  The next day while we were at Ben's parent's house, she gave it to me and I proceeded to adorn the skull with the hat.   Everyone thought it was pretty funny!  I'm hoping to remember this and dress it up as more holidays come around.  I think it may need bunny ears and a Halloween mask or something later.

A close up of the Christmas cow skull.  He needs a name, any ideas?

Merry Christmas from the Kents!  There, I just found their next Christmas card!

Funny Faces

Can I just give a shout out for my wonderful hubby?  Seriously the best dad ever.  He is so patient and reads to the kids and is a total goof ball with them.  Anyway, I just think he's great and I love this picture of him with some of the kids.  That's all.

Ben reading to Nicholas, Madelynn, and Daniel and making funny faces

Gammon Family Christmas Party

It's time for the annual Gammon Family Christmas party!  Something I, for one, really look forward to every year.  This year it was held at Shirley's ward building instead of mom's, but the festivities were all the same starting with lunch and the family talent show (no one in my family wanted to share anything this year, although I wanted to go up and show everyone my belly.  It's a talent I suppose...) followed by the kids all acting out the nativity.  This year Daniel was an angel (not quite sure which kind yet), and Alex was a wise man (more like a wise guy).  I told everyone I wanted to be Mary, being 8 1/2 months pregnant, but unfortunately they already picked a little girl to be Mary and it would have made her cry to take her spot.  Nicholas wanted to be a wise man, but three boys were already wise men at that point and he thought there could only be three so he pouted back to Ben and I and cried.  By that time, all was lost.  Nicholas doesn't recover from something like that easily. I told him him there could be more than three and we just said there was three because there were three gifts given.  He shot back that he wouldn't have a gift to hold so he couldn't be in the nativity.I told him maybe he could give Baby Jesus the gift of pizza (we had pizza for lunch) so he wouldn't be hungry (SO not funny mom, and maybe a little blasphemous).  Needless to say, Nicholas was too sad to be in the nativity this year.  Madelynn slept through it.  Oh well.

Daniel the angel

Madelynn sleeping through the party

Next we got a visit from Santa and got to hit the pinatas, which is really just a distraction so Santa doesn't have kids following him out the door.  Of course Daniel butted in the front of the line and saw Santa before I could get a picture.  The other two boys are a little more patient.

Nicholas.  I think he's asking for an easy bake oven

Alex and Santa

After the pinata, it was fun to sit around and talk for a bit until time to clean up.  While gabbing, Kira and I noticed that the two little girls had discovered some open candy on the floor from the pinatas that was unclaimed and all over the floor.  Being the great mothers we are, we decided to just let them go at it and take pictures of them instead.  Mother of the year sitting right here.

Teah and Madelynn "cleaning" up the floor

I love the Christmas party and will be sad when it's no longer a tradition anymore.

Chuck E. Cheese

For Brylee's birthday, she had a party at Chuck E. Cheese with some of her cousins.  Madelynn got to go and she had so much fun!  Brylee's other cousin was there and that's who she spent the most time with, but Madelynn was okay with it because she loved playing on the rides by herself, hence the reason I have no pictures of Madelynn with the birthday girl.  That and being so huge, I didn't want to get up to take pictures very much.  I'm a bad mom like that. :)

Riding on the trolley

the monster truck ride

On the way home, she crashed.  I love how kids fall asleep in the oddest positions!

35 Weeks

The end is coming!!  The end is in sight and I'm so excited I'm so close to meeting the little person who makes me so uncomfortable!!  And big!

Cousins

First of all, can I just tell you how much I love having Kira living close to me?  I love spending time with her and her family!  Second, I love that she had a little girl.  I'm not sure what our baby is going to be, still thinking it's a girl, but Madelynn will always have Teah to play and with and be a girl with on the Carbine side.  I love that!

Teah and Madelynn reading a book

Happy Halloween!!

Halloween at our house has become a day of great chaos in our family.  I enjoy the quiet of the day while the kids are in school and then once they come in the door... BAM!  It's on account of us having so much family we need to visit and me never wanting to turn anyone down.  But we are fortunate to have so much family around to be with and I chose this so it's all good, just busy.  It starts out with me taking the kids to Ben's work for trick-or-treating, a tradition that the kids love and look forward to and gets us a lot of good candy.  One of Ben's bosses dressed up as Grover this year and stood around in a hot costume greeting all the kids.  He sounded just like Grover and was so cute to take time with the kids!  My kids (sadly) don't really know who Grover is since they thrive on Disney, but I loved it!  Next we rushed off to Becky's house to visit with Becky.  Halloween is her favorite holiday so she always goes all out and makes all the nieces and nephews HUGE treat bags with stickers and tattoos and scary stuff in it.  The kids love this!  This year she even set out cookies and punch and stuff for them too.  It was really neat!

Becky, Nicholas the storm trooper, Daniel the tiger, Alex the black ninja, Madelynn the duck, and Ben

Then it's off to visit grandmas and friends who live near by while we are in the van.  This year we hit up Dan and Shandi which was fun, they are really great friends and awesome to our kids!  Then home to trick-or-treat around the neighborhood.  Living in Old Lehi, we have yet to adopt the trunk-or-treat, which is both good and bad.  I love the old tradition of going door to door, but trunk-or-treating is so fast, you get to see a lot of people, it's safer, and pregnant mom doesn't have to walk very far.  Then we head to Grandma Larsen's house for chili, mummy dogs, spider web seven layer dip, and lots of good food.  Something healthy for a change on Halloween!!  Anyway, it's a lot of fun and we love spending holidays as a family with our family!

My Grandma The Witch

My grandma is a witch.  Did you know?  Every Halloween she transforms into a witch.  When we were little, we literally believed this to be true.  Anyway, since then, we have decided to embrace it and just accept that we have a long line of proud witch heritage and embrace being witches ourselves.  My grandma is a witch, my mom is a witch (ask any of her kids when we were teenagers, no truer words were spoken!), I'm a witch (my kids will testify this to be true), and Madelynn is a small witch in training (I can already tell the force is strong in this one).  Every year at our giant Gammon Halloween party, grandma takes the spotlight making witches brew (rootbeer) for the kids.  It's one of my favorite traditions and I thought I finally needed to document it since I know that unfortunately this isn't a tradition my posterity will always get to enjoy.

Bubble, bubble toil and trouble...

Carving Pumpkins

Tonight for family night, we decided we needed to get our pumpkins done before Halloween.  We gave the option of carving or painting this year which we anticipated would be a stressful mess (for me) but had no idea how "stressful mess" would blossom into "unbearable chaos" (for me).  Ben is better natured about it, probably because he isn't pregnant.  I need to learn to let go and just enjoy the moment and ignore the mess.  It's hard.  Anyway, we ended up having a fun time and made some interesting pumpkins.

Nicholas was the one child who wanted to carve a traditional pumpkin.  That's my boy!

I'm not quite sure why Madelynn is shirtless, but she is.

Getting the pumpkin ready and apparently stabbing it in the face 

BYU Game

Grandpa went out of town this weekend so he gave us his BYU football tickets and Ben and I took Nicholas with us to the game.  Nicholas was too shy to do much at first, but toward the end we got him to do some cheers and get into the game with us.  BYU killed Idaho, so toward the end when Nicholas got bored, it was no big deal to leave a little early.  Of course I got no pictures of the three of us, but we did get a picture of Nicholas riding the cougar outside of the stadium.  It was fun to spend some one on one time with one of our kids,  I hope he liked it as much as I did!

Nicholas riding the cougar outside of the stadium.

30 Weeks

So here we are at 30 weeks along.  I've probably said it before, but I have no idea where this baby is going to go!  I already look/feel so big!  Here's hoping the next ten weeks fly by! 

Disneyland!!

All of the overtime Ben had to work finally came to an end and we finally got to go to Disneyland!!  We had such a great time!  We left on Sunday which was Daniel's birthday and drove as far and Primm where we spent the night after a stop in St. George to let the kids run around and see the temple.  The next morning we woke up bright and early and were off the Anaheim.  We made a quick stop at a Disney outlet store to let the kids get their souvenirs and then made it to our hotel.  Since it was about lunch time, we decided not to go right to the park since we couldn't spend the whole day there and instead went to the beach for a few hours to have lunch and play in the ocean.  At first it was cloudy and cold, but soon the sun came out and the kids and Ben had a fun time playing in the sand and in the water.  I forgot my swim suit so I mostly just sat on a towel in the sun and watched.  Oh well.

Madelynn playing in the sand at the beach

 The next three days we spent between Disneyland and California Adventure. 

Mickey Pumpkin!!

One of the first things we did on the first day in Disneyland was Ben took the three boys on Splash Mountain (they really really really wanted to go!).  After the ride was over, a traumatized Alex and Nicholas decided they would never ride that again, but Daniel decided it was his favorite ride.  They then decided they wanted to go on Indiana Jones.  Daniel was too short so he went with me back to the hotel to start getting lunch ready while the others rode the ride.  Once again, traumatizing.  After that combo, the two older boys wouldn't go on any rides unless Madelynn and I were riding it.  Finally on the last day just hours before we had to leave the park, Nicholas tried a few bigger rides and saw that all rides are not scary and ended loving them.  We never did get Alex on anything bigger than Small World again though.  Guess he'll never trust us again.

Ben, Alex, Daniel, and Nicholas on Splash Mountain

 Since I'm mostly using pictures from my hone for this, I'm sad that I don't have better pictures to share, but the Splash Mountain picture is pretty priceless so at least I have that.  Anyway, Friday quickly came and it was time to go home.  We had to drive straight home since Ben had to go to work on Saturday morning.  About 40 minutes into our drive home, Daniel started throwing up.  All the way home.  I lost count how many times he threw up after about half a dozen times, all I know is that it was awful!  Unfortunately I had forgotten my wallet so that meant I also forgot my driver's license.  Ben kept offering to drop me off at the nearest airport with a couple of the kids, but since I had no I.D... :(  Needless to say, the drive home was very long and we were so happy to finally get home!  Not the way we wanted to end the trip, but at least we had fun before the ride home! 

A Trip to the Park

With the two older boys at school now during the day, poor Daniel especially gets bored at the house.  I don't know why I never think to go to the park, but I never do.  Today I remembered that it existed and the three of us headed out for a while to get some energy out before lunch.  It's amazing how well Daniel and Madelynn can get along sometimes (when they want to).  They held hands and walked the whole way there together.

Daniel and Madelynn holding hands on the way to the park

 Once there, they both played together and had a fun time.  I love it when my kids decide to get along with each other!  Madelynn keeps up pretty well with Daniel and they play on the swings and slides and things.

Daniel and Madelynn on the swings.  They both love to go really high!

One time while Madelynn was climbing around on her own, I had another mom comment to me about how brave my daughter was.  She really is fearless!  I guess three older brothers will do that to a girl!  Not so great when I find her on top of a seven foot ladder, but fun when we go to the park and stuff!

My Little Daredevil playing on the playground

Slippers

I just mostly wanted to post this because I think it's funny that Madelynn was wearing the boys' dinosaur slippers, but mostly mostly because I love her face in this picture.  What a funny girl!

Madelynn found the boys' dinosaur slippers this morning

Happy Birthday Ben and Madelynn!!

Today we celebrated Ben and Madelynn's birthday!!  There's actually not a lot to say after that.  Ben got some scriptures and things and Madelynn got some toys including her little kitchen and most importantly her new bike.  She loves that thing and can now stop riding Daniel's bike all the time, which causes a lot of controversy.  We had the family over and had cake and ice cream and had a really fun evening.

The birthday kids blowing out the candles

Opening presents from Grandma and Grandpa Kent in her new dress she got from Ben and Courtney

Liberty Park

Today we decided to play at Liberty Park with Grandma and Grandpa Carbine, Katie, Jake, Ashley, and Teah.  It was a lot of fun, even though Ben had to work and couldn't come with us, not even on his birthday.  :(  We started out feeding the ducks and geese.  The kids loved that but sometimes the birds would get too close and that was a little scary!

Grandpa Carbine, Madelynn, Daniel, and Nicholas feeding the ducks

Sometimes the geese get too close and it's a little scary!

 Then we headed over to the playground for a little while.  The boys started out on the toys and swings and things but ultimately ended up playing in the fountains to cool off. 

Nicholas and Madelynn

Daniel posing in front of a toy he was playing with.  We're still working on a more natural smile, but he's cute anyway!

Unfortunately this dark picture is the only one I got with Alex in it.  Apparently he's getting to the age where he's to old to humor his mother by posing in pictures for her :)

Teah, Nicholas, and Madelynn playing in the sandbox

After the park, we were all starving so we took the kids to Arctic Circle to eat (and do more playing) and Grandma and Grandpa went to a place (Neil's) to get all the adults fish and chips for lunch (which we ate at Arctic Circle, shhhh, don't tell!).  Yummy!!

Dinosaur Museum

Today was $2 Tuesday at the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point.  Kira, Teah and Tyson went with us.  It was really crowded, apparently everyone had the same idea as us, but we had fun and it was nice to get out of the house and do something fun for a change!  The kids loved seeing all the dinosaurs and playing in the sand and doing all the activities they have there.  We definitely need to get out and do more fun stuff like this more often!

Alex putting a tail on a big "build your own dinosaur"

Alright, she looks a little evil, but Madelynn liked playing in the dress ups

Madelynn

Daniel!  Watch out for that shark!!

Digging up Dinosaur bones

After the museum, we found out we could get 25 cent ice cream cones somewhere else at Thanksgiving Point so we went and all got ice cream!