It's official...

Need I say more?

Maddie's new dress

My Maddie girl hasn't had any spring/summer dresses for church. All of her dresses has been long sleeve winter dresses. A few weeks ago I was able to pick up 1 spaghetti strap dress that she can wear a white shirt underneath. She has been wearing this dress for a few weeks now and is tired of it. I can't blame her. Who wants to wear the same dress to church every week over and over. As one her birthday presents I wanted to get her a new dress. I've been everywhere over the past 2 weeks and I can NOT find a church dress with sleeves. Not being able to find one I decided I'd have to make her one. So I went through my fabric drawer, her new shirts I was saving for this coming school year and came up with this. The picture does not do it justice. She was quite pleased with her new dress.

Look who's "6"

This past friday was Maddie's 6th birthday. As with tradition for our family we had pancakes for breakfast. Maddie got to blow out candles and eat 6 whole pancakes! We had 2 of our dearest family friends come over for dinner and cake to help Maddie celebrate this big day.

"Littlest Pet Shop" birthday cake. The birthday girl was quite pleased. I got a big hug and a kiss for this cake. I'm glad she liked it. It was one of the most easiest cakes I've done and took less than an hour. I must be finally getting the hang of this cake decorating business.

She's not excited at all to open her gifts.

Her favorite gift was the "Littlest Pet Shop" house. These houses are $40-50 bucks. After Christmas my friend called from Sam's Club telling me they had this house on clearance for $20. This was still a little much for my pocketbook. Lucky for me my friend is great at negotiating deals and due to a much damaged/torn/ripped box she was able to get it for $15. Needless to say Madelyn was thrilled with such a gift.

Maddie had a wonderful birthday. We love you sweet heart!

Rumor has it....

It's true!! We are moving. This move is going to be bitter sweet. The kids rooms are stripped down to the bare necessities.

I have a pile of boxed items that has steadily been growing.

We moved to Prescott Valley in Jan. of 2003. We came because Kory had been accepted to Embry Riddle Aeronautics. Our plan then was to live in Prescott Valley for the 2-3 years it would take Kory to graduate. We'd possibly stay for another year to build up his hours or move if he was one of the "lucky" ones who got hired right out of school. Seven years later we are still here. Once our children started arriving Kory's priorities changed. He dropped out of flight school, worked for someone else for a year and then we began our 1st business Wood Designs by Heaton Taylor.

After almost 2 years into the business our partners came to us wantingto move closer to family. We seperated and soon became Cave Man Cabinets. It seems over the past 4 years we have come to many "forks in the road" and have had to make some tough decisions. At each fork we have chosen to remain in Prescott Vally and continue to work for ourselves.

Like most with the economy we struggle month to month to stay afloat. We have decided that we need to make some big changes if our company is to survive in this current economic crisis that in our personal opinions won't be letting up any time soon.

And so this is the reason for our upcoming move. My parents built an awsome home about 4 years ago. Knowing tough times were ahead they were prepared and built a basement apartment into their home. All of us kids have known that we would be welcomed if need be. After much fasting, prayer and consideration of different options we have chosen to move home. The best part about this apartment is that it truly is an apartment. We will have our own kitchen, our own entrance, our own bathroom and bedrooms. We will be living downstairs from my parents but it will be our own place for the next year. We will continue to live our own lives.

We are moving to a place that our business's overhead will be quite less than what we have available to us here in Prescott Valley. We hope that our business will thrive with these changes. We will be keeping our AZ license and getting a UT license so that we can work in both states. We feel good, scared, anxious but good about these upcoming changes for our family.

Kory has work here in PV that will probably keep him here until sometime in Aug. Being school starts in Aug. I don't want to uproot the kids to a new school after just 2-3 weeks of school starting again. The kids and I plan on moving the end of next month so that they can get settled in a new home, get to know the neighborhood kids and make new friends in Primary. I want them to have familiar faces when school begins. We hope to have some of Kory's siblings come soon after to help load up the shop and move it to Utah.

This move is bitter/sweet. I have loved living in Prescott Valley but have always wanted to move closer to home. I miss not being close enough to participate in some of the family gatherings/ special occasions. When we lived in Utah we were present for each baby blessing, every baptism,extended family home evenings that my in-laws would put on, etc. Since we have moved to AZ we have missed more of these special occasions than I can count. We chose to bless 3 of our 4 children in our parent's wards to make it easier on our families to be able to attend. I am excited to be able to attend some of these special events. The year Hunter was born he had 7 other cousins born. Starting the end of this July all these cousins turn 8. The baptisms will soon begin with Hunter's nearing the end this next April. How fun to be able to attend all these upcoming baptisms becuase we will be living closer to family.

I will miss Prescott Valley. We moved here just after our 1 st anniversary. Our married life has been built here. This is what we know. I will miss our friends, our best friends that live across the street, our ward. Despite moving numerous times over the past couple of years we could never seem to get out of our ward boundaries. We've been in the same ward since we moved here. We are on our 4th Bishopric. We know EVERYONE in our ward. Between Kory and I we could name everbody and probably have a little story about each family in our ward. We love the weather here. We get a little of each season without the extremes. Our family has grown here. I will deeply miss Prescott Valley and our life we have had here. But it is time to move on and start a new chapter to our life.

Kory is doing a job in Utah tommorrow. Being the trailor will not be full with cabinets we decided to fill it as much as possible with items we won't NEED over the next few weeks. I've kept a small box of toys and things for the kids to do over the next few weeks that we are still here but have packed everything else. Kory is taking our 1st load to our new home. Ready or not here we come.

Happy Father's Day

For Father's Day this year we did something a little different. We created (seeing it done by someone else on their blog) a recycled gift for our dad. Being we never buy IBC Rootbeer or Cream Soda and especially not in packaging like this the kiddo's were thrilled. Over a couple of days the kids were able to drink it all without our daddy knowing it. I rinsed and dried the bottles and then allowed the kids to fill them with some of our daddy's favorite treats.

Kory does NOT have a big sweet tooth so we filled the bottles with Pistachio's, Cashew's, Corn Nuts and his favorite sweet treat, Reeses Pieces. My kids insisted that daddy would like the licorice too but I think that was more for them. I let the kids pick pictures that best describes their Dad to help decorate the front of the bottles.
They did good! This really was a fun gift to make and it came from the kids. I allowed them to do most of it. They chose the treats, the scrapbook paper, the clip art and even got to help cut everything out using my paper slicers.
Good Job Kiddo's. What are we going to do next year?

Emily's Owie

This past saturday several families in our ward got together for a barbeque at a local park. We had great food, great company and the kids had a blast playing kickball. After the kickball game Miss Em' took a great fall off the platform of the swingset. I'm still unsure how she got so badly scraped but she sure did a great job. Even her belly and sides were scraped up. She cried and cried and cried. She was crying for Grandma and Grandpa, she was crying "I just can't do this!" (brought a smile to my face as I myself hasve said this about 4 times in my life. All of which have been said right before I was given an epidural.)

When we got home Kory had her lay on his lap so that I could put some Peroxide on her and a bandaid. Bandaids make everything better at our house. This tragedy was no exception.
Obviously a little ol' bandaid wasn't going to cut it this time. Her wound wasn't bleeding heavily but it was oozing. (I was suprised to disvocer how much smeared blood I had on myself when I changed that night.) I love my husband, he's such a quick thinker! Knowing we didn't have a bandaid that was going to work he suggested using a panty liner. It worked! I taped the panty liner to her back and she immediately calmed down and went to sleep. Today, 2 days later, up and down her spine is turning black and blue but her wound is healing. As long as she doesn't get tapped, hit, pushed, hugged, rubbed or back ups to a wall she doesn't complain. We went swimming today and I thought the cholorine might pose an issue but she didn't complain. Tommorrow morning she has Gymanstics. The past few classes they have been using big cushy items that the kids lie on their back and then do back flips over. Hopefully her excitement of another gymnastics class will be enough to keep her mind elsewhere when it's time to do these. I really think today's issues with her back was caused from being scared that it would possibly hurt. There is nothing WORSE then your child getting hurt and not being able to do alot for them. I would have traded places with her in a heart beat if I could have.

Great Coupon Week

The last couple of days I have been able to get some AWSOME deals using coupons.

One of our grocery stores is having a GREAT sale on Post cereals making them $1.00 a box.

Using the sale and 2 coupons I was able to pick up each box for $.50 a piece. My family LOVES these cereals. Even without a coupon a $1.00 a box is a pretty good deal. I just may have to go back and get some more. I don't paticularly care for Wal Mart and I try really hard to avoid that store as much as possible. I could name several reasons why but I won't get into that right now. However, I was pretty excited to see them advertising these wipes for $1.89 and knowing that I had 2 $2.00 off coupons in my coupon pouch. In the end I got these for FREE!!! (even though I had to explain to the cashier several times why I shouldn't be charged for them and ended up having to get a manager involved)

Look at all that toilet paper! Did you count them? Well what are you waiting for?

15

I got these for FREE too!

I love couponing! It can be VERY time consuming, annoying at times, tedious work cutting all those coupons but it is so worth it! I spent $2.00 on everything pictured above when regular prices would have been close to $50.00.

I love couponing!