Beautiful Babes

Three sweet babies at our reunion for my spring class. I forgot to take a picture at our last class reunion! I need to have one more reunion in a couple of months for the class I am finishing up. I am done until a few months after our baby arrives. I love teaching classes so much but we need the time!

Summer/ Autumn 2008

So here are photos of some of the fun things we got to do the last several months. Zach trying to play with his cousin - Baby Skylar, and some family at a picnic after Skylar's blessing. Many 4th of July and 24th activities including Zach very excited about seeing smoky the bear floating over our house. We followed him around the park by our house for a while. We went to the Zoo. Me and the girls at our girl cousin party in August, lots of pics of Zach, my prize heirloom tomato from my garden this year (keep your eyes open for that!) We had a beautiful late September trip to Colorado with the Jordan fam. And their is the occasional appearance of Andy or me. Oh Yeah and the pictures are not in chronological order...

My Sheepish Return...

To anyone I haven't seen since September I would like to deeply apologize for not letting you know our news....

We are Having a Baby GIRL at the end of March 2009! We are excited and terrified to have another little Aston running around.
I felt sick 24 hours a day for well beyond the first trimester and I am still tired and lazy. So that is my excuse for not blogging.

More to come soon in the form of yet another slide show of the fun things we still managed to do the last few months.

Zach is a Happy Dude

We have had a great summer so far, busy but fun. I got a season pass to Seven Peaks Water park and take Zach once or twice a week with our friends, Sherry , Baby Hay and Baby C.C. We have had some fun times with the kids in the neighborhood too. Zach started preschool too! Some of the moms in our neighborhood organized a little home school preschool rotation. Zach loves it.

Here are some pics of Zach having fun with some of our neighborhood friends. Syd, Sarah, Max and Caleb had a great time in the kiddie pool while the parents had a chance to chat.





Another mess by Zach: He loves to put on my makeup. I found Zach looking in a very dirty mirror with makeup all over his body. He was happy to pose and he Kept saying into the mirror "Cute!" "Zach Cute!"

Pioneer trek Pics, finally

Here are some of our pics from Pioneer trek with the youth in our stake. The first picture is us with our eight children. Andy was a very good looking, if scruffy, Pa I must say. We didn't have the camera out very much because the weather was so very wet. So we have pictures of the driest day we had and our "family" playing pioneer games and a picture of the snow we woke up to the last morning. It kept snowing for quite a while after we took the picture. The rest of the day we had all kinds of fun weather. Sleet, hail, wind, sun and more rain. It turned out to be an amazing experience. Despite the very cold, very wet weather we had all of the youth said they wouldn't have changed it because they gained so much faith from the difficult conditions. We are so glad we had the opportunity, even though it was A LOT of work!

Memorial Day Pics

Over memorial weekend we had a great walk down the street from my parents house, feeding horses and enjoying the beautiful view. Saturday was a beautiful day to take the canoe out to cutler marsh. The Wellsville Mnts. looked so pretty that day. Zach had a great time with his buddy grandma throwing rocks in the water and hanging out with the aunts and uncles. We went to visit my Grandma and Grandpa Benson as usual on memorial day for a BBQ and to visit the cemetery but it was pouring rain so we never made it to the cemetery. The battery was dead on our camera so we didn't get any pics of the extended fam! Next time...

Wow, is it June?

So I missed a month of posting! It has been crazy busy around here. I have been YW president in our ward for 2 years now and this time of years is always crazy with youth conference and girls camp. Youth conference was Pioneer Trek this year and Andy and I were given a stake assignment to be a Ma and Pa. That was last week so we were busy getting ready for that. I sewed a bonnet, 2 skirts and apron and some bloomers and helped 4 of my young women work on their skirts, bloomers and aprons. I was still helping them last minute. One young woman's mom called me at 11:00 the night before we left and told me her daughter changed her mind because she didn't have everything on the equipment list and could I go through the list with her... It was a wonderful experience but wow we are glad to be home. I will put pictures and a post up about the actual trek after I get the pics off the camera. For now here are some random photos from the last month! In no particular order: pics of Zach and some playgroup friends at the Provo Temple, The first jar of spaghetti sauce I bought in 9 months (since I bottled sauce from our garden last year) Me so proud of myself in my bonnet for Trek, Zach being silly in dad's biking gear, and some lovely pics of 3 of the 4 couples from my last Bradley class with their gorgeous girls.

Mc a Don-oh's, Pajamas, and Zach Loves to be Naked.

This is Zach's friend Caleb. Zach loves Caleb. Sometime he looks out our front door and says, "Cabee. Cabee play! Cabee coming!" one day I took them to McDonald's (pronounced mi-ca-don-ohs.)

It was so cute to see them sitting in the wagon checking out their sweet Happy meal toys.


Did I mention I had to climb up all of the tunnels and put Zach down the slide? He would not get near a slide for about two weeks and he was not about to go down that big long slide at McDonald's by himself.

Zach can cry on demand. He is such a talented kid.

Pajama Party!

We just started a little date night exchange with Lincoln and Daniel's parents. Zach has so much fun playing with these two fun boys. He was excited to hear they were coming over and even more excited to know they could have a pajama party. They sat here for about 10 minutes just being silly in their pajamas...

Zach loves to be naked...


...really loves to be naked. I mean I'm sure most kids do but I am just grateful he can't remove all of his clothes himself yet or he would be naked 90% of the time. The other 10% he would be wearing jammies.


In this picture he is being a naked puppy, wearing daddy's "fi- lops"

Zach thinks he is naked in this picture

He wanted to run around naked when he got out of the bathtub but as soon as he walked out of the steamy bathroom he said he was cold and wanted to wrap up. Since he couldn't keep his towel around him and use his arms he pulled the tie from my robe out and had me tie him up.


Zach was standing in front of our front door- NAKED- watching passerby when I got out of the shower the other day.



That was after I walked through our kitchen.

I also couldn't find his wipes and a couple other items. I searched the house for them from top to bottom and found them that evening in my portable file box when I was teaching my class. Amazing what can happen when you hop in the shower for 5 min.

Friends!


Zach had a great time at his friend Macy's birthday party. Zach is always excited to see Macy, Macy's house, anyone in Macy's family and has fun playing with her. He and Caleb practiced singing the birthday song for her.

Lawns, Limbs and Laughter

I haven't updated for a while but this has been a particularly crazy week. We have also missed Andy so much this week! He has been at a conference in Cedar city since Tuesday. Zach got to tag along with me all week. He came to the Youth activity, and two different stake meetings, and to the Chiropractor. Zachary loves to go to the Chiropractor. He likes to take things to Trisha, the receptionist and loves to chase Dr. Gurney down the hall. They are good sports. We put together a bag for Z to carry so he would stay busy during the Stake Auxiliary training and I don't know what I was thinking. I should have picked out some quieter toys. A firetruck, a train, some other little cars and a book. Seems harmless enough I know but Zach has lots of great sound effects and trains and firetrucks are loud!

Here are some pictures we took out in the yard the last nice weekend we had. Zach loves to help out as you can see. It was so nice to have a day to work in the yard. We got a lot done and I was able to turn the soil and the flower beds and get them ready for some annuals!





We have been meaning to take this dying tree out of our front yard but as you can see all it needed was a strong chica like myself to pull half of it out of the ground. I was actually really surprised when it did come out. It was definitely dead.




Here are a couple of random photos we took of Zach. He was wearing Andy's coat around and thought it was so funny to fall down in it.


I came home from a baby shower one day and Andy and Zach were sitting next to our neighbors fence. Zach was sitting next to this frog that our neighbor gave him and I had to take a picture. I wonder what that frog said to make Zach laugh so hard?




I had to include these last photos because Zach loves jammies. He refuses to take them off in the morning and always says he wants to wear "jammie clothes" whenever we are going somewhere. He especially loves this hand-me-down bulldozer top which he calls his tractor jammies. He loves to push strollers around and lovingly buckled up his albino monkey so they could go for a walk.

Spring

After several beautiful days, it snowed today. Zach had a fever and slept for 3 hours and I pouted being cooped up in the house. I know that is just the way spring weather is and I will probably be complaining again when it is a hundred degrees outside but I am ready for the warm weather to stay.





It made me feel a little better to look at these photos taken a little over a year ago. Those tulips across the street are going to bloom again soon, right?

So that is how Zachary learned the color blue!

We told you about Zach's arm and the adventure it was for the whole fam. Here are the pictures we took way back in February.



A week after Zach broke his arm we took him to his pediatrician to have a hard cast put on. His "boo" (blue) cast



One week later we went in for another blue cast. The first one slid half way off his arm. Zach called the 2nd cast his "new" cast. He wanted to wear the old cast on his other arm.





One week after that he wiggled out of his new blue cast. The next cast went all the way up his arm.







One week after that, I couldn't see his fingers because that cast was sliding down his arm. Luckily it was time for the cast to come off for good. Zach got another X-ray to make sure the arm had healed correctly, everything looked okay.

I think we were all pleased when the cast came off for good! Three casts in 3 weeks was enough for all of us.