Ayres Insanity

  My beautiful daughter is now 8 months old, and every time I've taken her to the doctors office, without fail the nurse comes out and calls for "Kaylee Ires" aaaaaaaah! Could anything be more annoying? As I'm sure I've mentioned before, KALEI is the traditional Hawaiian spelling of her name but since we don't live in Hawaii and white people won't take the time to figure it out, this has been extremely problematic. I could just picture every teacher she ever has doing exactly the same thing as the doctor's office. Now there's nothing I can do about the mispronunciation of our last name, but I'll not stand for it when it comes to her first name. About 2 weeks ago I was really feeling bothered about the situation so I went to Russ with my concern and expressed my desire to change the spelling of her name. At first he just assumed that I was having one of those premenstrual crazy moments and told me to get over it, but after a fair amount of per

  I enjoy most holidays, and Easter is no exception. On Saturday we went to the egg hunt at Thanksgiving Point, which by the way was total chaos, but for the most part, the kids enjoyed it.   On Sunday the "Easter Bunny" brought enormous eggs stuffed with toys rather than baskets, he had tied yarn to a couple of little Easter eggs and the boys had to follow the yarn all through the house to find their big eggs. Watching them try to figure it out was great! After that was over, we had our Easter morning "Jesus breakfast". I started this tradition a couple of years ago in an effort to teach my children that Easter isn't just about colorful eggs and giant rabbits. It usually consists of hard rolls or pita bread, with cheese, grapes and a few other miscellaneous items that Jesus might have eaten while he was on the earth. It's not the best tasting breakfast ever, but I guess that's not the point. Anyway, we talked about the Resurrection and then it w

  I love General Conference! We lovingly refer to it in our house as "pajama church". We stay in our pj's and eat cinnamon rolls while watching. This weekend however, I decided to paint the living room, so we had our cinnamon rolls, I turned on conference on the radio and got to work.   The painting took both days and it looks fabulous! The focal point of this post however, is not my painted living room, but my favorite conference talk. It came on as I was just finishing up my project on Sunday afternoon, I didn't recognize the speaker but his words caught my attention, so much that I stopped what I was doing and turned on the TV so that I could watch the remainder of the talk. The speaker was a member of the seventy, Elder Lynn G. Robbins and he spoke about parenting and what kind of parent to be. The quote that really grabbed me was when he was talking about challenging children being a blessing and a way to become more Godlike, and said "could it be possible

  Ryler is getting older now so I've started giving him a bit more freedom.     Yesterday afternoon I let him go outside to play with Taevin while I peeked out the window every few minutes to check on him. I had gone into the kitchen to start dinner when Taevin came running into the house yelling "MOM, RYLER TOOK HIS PANTS OFF!" I hurried outside to find that sure enough, Ryler had stripped off not just his pants, but his shirt, underwear, and shoes as well and was running around the playground laughing. Oh, and just a side note, it was only about 30 degrees yesterday. Shocked and appalled, I yelled at him to get inside as I grabbed his clothes and ran in after him hoping that nobody had seen this horrific act of lewdness. Needless to say, he was inside for the remainder of the day. You've got to be kidding me!