Westover Family

We love weekends. But, who doesn't really?

This weekend we did lots of fun things.

Friday we went out for lunch to a pizza buffet. We (okay, mostly me...) love buffets, and we love pizza, so this works out really well for us! :)

Then after the boys naps we took them to a movie at the dollar theater (The Princess and The Frog). Andy took Avery to a movie for the first time this past summer, but we'd never taken Jack. I'm not really a fan of taking kids to movies. But they did all right. And since it was a kid movie, the theater was packed with other kids, so that at least lessened my fear/stress about our kid screaming the whole time!
Anyway...they both did really well. Jack was squirmy for a bit in the middle, but calmed down towards the end. Not something we'll do regularly, but it was a fun special family date!The boys also spent quite a long time playing with some small pieces of trash and the vent in the kitchen. They were fascinated that the air from the vent made the trash float. Yeah, we let our kids play with garbage. :P Jack eats random leftover snacks he finds on the floor too. They're gross.Then today we met our friends at a new Nicklecade in town, it was a lot of fun. Avery had a blast running from game to game, and collecting tickets, and then picking prizes with his tickets. Andy and I have been to the old Nicklecade many times for dates, so I'm happy to learn Avery loves it too. Jack liked it, but it was a little crazy to let him run around, so most of the time he was in the stroller.



And I crafted. :)
It's been a fun relaxing weekend. We hope to have many more.

The boys like to cuddle with each other, especially after not napping. They sure are cute though, even if that particular day they a little grumpy from not having proper naps.
Jack can't be left out when Avery works on school stuff. The crayon spends more time in his mouth than on the paper.
Andy and Avery splitting their attention between the ipod and Star Wars stuff. Andy is proud of Avery's love for both. He especially likes it when Avery starts to hum the Star Wars theme song. He's a proud Daddy. :)
Avery's better at navigating Andy's ipod than I am. He loves playing games on it, and will do almost anything for me if I tell him he can play the ipod...a Mom's gotta do whatever it takes to get things done! :)
Have I mentioned nap times haven't been great at our house this week? Ugh. Today was thankfully much better! Here's Jack being a baby and Avery gladly holding him. When asked what a baby says Jack will readily offer the answer "waah" in a pathetic sounding voice. Cute.
Nothing especially exciting has been going on for us, Andy goes to work and School. The boys and I keep hoping for warmer weather so we can get out of the house and enjoy the sun.

Avery learns new annoying phrases every day. (The phrases are annoying, not Avery...most of the time! :) ) Like..."It's not fair, Mom!" But it's hard to be upset with him when he walks up and says nice, sweet things like "You're my best friend, Mom" and "Thanks so much for letting me throw the {enter random piece of trash} away, Mom"

Jack's just busy being crazy and copying all of us, he says a new word every day it seems, it's awesome. But he does randomly throw things at people, and time out doesn't seem to phase him...

I love those boys. They drive me crazy and keep me sane all at the same time.

I'm quite pleased with myself for coming up with a month's worth of menu items. I was having a hard time narrowing down my list and figuring out what to do on what days. It was a little overwhelming. Then Andy had a brilliant idea! He suggested we assign certain types of meals to the days of the week. That helped SO much!So, we decided on Mon-breakfast, Tue-Pasta, Wed-Crock pot, Th-Chicken, Fri-Pizza, Saturday is leftovers and Sunday will be the other meat meals, and traditional "Sunday Dinner" type recipes.

That seriously made it easier to narrow it down. I also have one new recipe to try each week in the different categories. So I'm excited to have several new recipes to try out in the coming month. One really nice thing will be that we won't be repeating any recipes for a month!

I'm also hoping this will help our kids become more open to different types of food. They're kind of picky.I saw a cute recipe/menu organizer on a blog and decided to try and make my own. Theirs was for sale with a whole menu system. So I jsut looked at the picture and made up my own. It gives me a cute place to store the recipes for each week and the corresponding shopping list, now they won't be floating around on the counters.I'm excited to have it all organized and to not have to think about coming up with dinner at the last minute, for at least a month! It's probably not as exciting to anyone else, but I'm pretty happy about it!

I found this recipe website the other day (read about it somewhere) and I love it already. you just enter in all the ingredients that you have (I entered all the normal thing we have in the fridge and pantry) and it brings up recipes that you can make with what you have. With all the food items/ingredients I entered this morning it came up with over 2000 recipes I can make right now without having to buy anything! Awesome.

We seem to get stuck in recipe ruts. We make the same 20 meals over and over again. So I'm excited to find this. I plan on trying out some of the recipes.

The website is Supercook.com. I'm sure there are other sites like this, and maybe I'm the last person to know about it....oh well.

So, today is Valentines Day, and as with all other holidays (real, imagined, or ridiculous) in our home, we like to celebrate. You can look here for one of Kizzie's awesome decorations. She also made a Valentines Day advent calendar using her mad-Cricut skills. I think she is more of a machine than the Cricut... a machine of awesome-ness.
Anywho... I digress. Earlier this week, Avery helped us out with making some sugar cookies. I enjoy sugar cookies.
Also, this should be no surprise that both my boys also enjoyed them.

A few days later, Kizzie got her gift. (She told me she likes lilies... she got lilies.)
On the big day, Kizzie made us pink pancakes in the morning, with the obligatory Mickey Mouse shaped ones for the boys (there would have been heart-shaped ones.... but I broke the rubber heart pancake mold a few weeks ago. It was not as strong as I thought it was.) Kizzie also made us a tasty roast beef dinner and the bad-boys shown below (and that's right... that's milk chocolate with white chocolate swirls!).

After our nice long drive up Provo Canyon, Kizzie had a mysterious (to the boys, at least) trip around the block she had to make. Oddly enough, after she was gone for about a minute, there was a knock on the door. I asked Avery to go open it only to find that no one was waiting outside. There were some treats though. Woohoo! We always need more treats! Strangely again was that Kizzie returned home only minutes after she left.


On a side note, this is a picture of Avery (wearing a paper/yarn heart necklace he made in primary today) playing my new iPod touch I got last month after my former iPod kicked the proverbial bucket. This kid will do just about anything for an opportunity to play with it. He's pretty cute sitting there playing the games, so we allow it.

On another side note... my last day of classes ever is 2 months from yesterday. I think that is reason for additional excitement and/or gifts.

On a third side note, and one that I'm pretty sure no one reading this will care about, we watched the NBA Slam Dunk contest and some of the other All-Star festivities last night. It was about as lame as I've ever seen. Maybe some day they'll get actual good players that people like to be in that contest again. Oh well.

"No more casting spells at people!"
Avery loves Harry Potter. And he loves shouting gibberish and pointing a finger, or "wand", at you. I had to make Harry Potter spells off limits. Is it working? No.

You might think it sounds funny, but when it's happening every 3 minutes (or less) it has to be stopped. MUST. STOP.

I never thought that would be something I'd be saying. "No more spells". Oh brother.

Jack likes his socks floppy, try not to gag!

Anyone know what the Child Labor Laws are these days?!
Little do they know this is just the beginning...! :)
Also, in other exciting news these were sent out in the mail today! (first batch of resumes, fyi). Thanks to Avery for picking out the stamps for Daddy's Special Mail! :)
Wish us luck!