Five Years Old

As usual, we celebrated Alyssa's Birthday on the evening of Christmas. She wasn't feeling that great and I tried to talk her into postponing it one more day, but she insisted on doing it that night. A couple of months ago Alyssa and I were watching a show called "The Cake Boss" together. It happened to be an episode where Buddy, aka the cake boss, was at Walt Disney World for some food show and brought his family along. His daughter was celebrating her 6th birthday during that trip and requested a princess cake from her dad. Pictured below is an example of what the cake looked like (I couldn't find the exact cake, but this gives the idea).

Alyssa saw that cake and decided that she also wanted a princess castle cake for her birthday, also. So that is what I spent the afternoon of Christmas Day doing. I don't pretend to be a cake artist, but I did the best I could for my little 5 year old princess.

Her favorite princesses are Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. That is why they are on the cake. Here is Alyssa with her loot. She was very happy with all of the birthday gifts that she got. They were things that she had been eying at the store and had asked for. She didn't feel like eating any of her birthday cake, but it made her happy to see the pink and purple princess castle that she had requested.
We are so grateful to have Alyssa as part of our family. She is a very sweet and thoughtful little girl. She can also be very stubborn, which probably comes from me. Some of her favorite things are her family, her blanket, and anything girly (dresses, headbands, purple, pink, nail polish, lipstick, blush, and SHOES). She loves going to preschool and is so excited to go to Kindergarten in the fall. She loves music(playing and singing) and dance. She loves to draw, color, paint, and do anything else artsy. We love our Alyssa girl! Happy Birthday Sweetheart!

Merry Christmas!

We had a nice Christmas. The girls woke up Christmas morning, so excited for all of the presents that Santa brought. Alyssa was thrilled that Santa brought her so many of the toys that she had requested from him (in a letter full of pictures). I was happy with how their matching nightgowns turned out. The only down side to our Christmas was sickness. Alyssa went into the doctor on the morning of Christmas Eve and had a double ear infection. We were grateful for the doctors that work on the holidays to take care of people like us, who always seem to get sick on Christmas (this was Alyssa's second Christmas spent being sick). She absolutely hates to take medicine so we always dread it when she has to go on an antibiotic. I woke up on Christmas morning with a runny nose that gradually got worse, and Danny started to feel it that night after I had gone to bed (at 8pm). Ashley's favorite gift was her very own puppy that was given to her by Alyssa. Now Alyssa can play with her puppy without too much heartbreak from Ashley.

Alyssa got her much requested Princess Kitchen but was disappointed that she couldn't play with it because it was defective (or maybe it was just me that was disappointed since she moved right on to other toys when we told her we had to take it back to the store). She did love all of the new girly clothes that she got. Here was her first choice when getting dressed that day. She loves those black sprarkly shoes! We are fortunately all feeling better today and hope to be rid of this sickness very soon. Even though she was sick, Alyssa still enjoyed the opening of presents and spent a good amount of time playing with all of the new toys before she decided she needed to lie down. We hope you all had a nice Christmas!

This Week at the Wheeler Home

Have you ever had one of those weeks that you just wish you could do over? That was how my week has been. As Danny was at his important meeting in Utah County last week, I was bringing Alyssa home from preschool and did this to her newly decorated gingerbread(actually graham cracker) house. In my defense, I was a little sick that day and not completely with it. Alyssa was devastated that her creation was ruined. I felt terrible and promised to help her make one another day with her. That wasn't good enough for her so I picked all of the candy off of the old house(and the floor), made some frosting and constructed a new house out of graham crackers. I so thought I was getting off the hook for gingerbread house making this year. No such luck. Here is the new house.

She was trying to make the sprinkles look like grass. I didn't realize it would take half of the bottle. After this fiasco, we were all happy to have Danny come home that night.

On Thursday, Alyssa was supposed to be honored at preschool for her birthday and we were to provide a birthday snack. There is a girl in her class who is allergic to eggs and Alyssa wanted to make something without eggs that the little girl could eat, so we made rice crispy treats in the shape of gingerbread men. Well, we got a little bit of ice Wednesday night which resulted in school being cancelled on Thursday. Unfortunately, I didn't realize this until we got to the preschool. Alyssa was heartbroken and we had two batches of rice crispy treats to eat.

We spent all week changing Ashley's very stinky diapers as she was sick with some kind of stomach bug. On the tail end of the stomach bug, she must have caught something else because she spent all day Monday laying on the couch. That is very unusual for Ashley, by the way. I took her into the doctor that afternoon after she complained about her ear hurting. She had a pretty bad ear infection. She was kind enough to pass that illness onto Alyssa who woke up Tuesday morning with a fever that lasted for over 24 hours. It was awful timing since she had a pre-surgery physical (we are still in the process of getting her cavities filled that we discovered back in September) with her doctor that morning and then a preschool Christmas Party and program that afternoon. She failed her physical, if you can call it that, and the cavity-filling surgery has been postponed. We couldn't bear to make her stay home from the preschool festivities since she has been talking about this Christmas program for over a month. Here she is looking pretty miserable, in my opinion, during the Christmas program. They sang 9 songs and used some props and actions with some of the songs. After looking at the picture I realized that none of the kids look very happy.
Fortunately, both kids are feeling better this afternoon and will hopefully be back to normal for Christmas and Alyssa's birthday.

On a happier note, here are some of the highlights from the not-so-fun week. Alyssa having a snack with her preschool class at their Christmas party.

Getting to meet Santa and Mrs. Claus at the party. She even has a smile on her face.
She had a dance recital on Saturday and did really well. She loves dance and performing.

This was her favorite dance and costume. It was a rag doll dance and she loved the part in the middle where she got to dance with a partner.

Here are the two girls after the dance recital. Ashley sat really well for the whole thing. Although my back full of snacks probably helped.

I would have included a video too, but for some reason I can't get them off of my camera. I'll see if Danny can figure that out and we'll post them later.

We hope you all have a Merry Christmas!!

Our Roots

This is half of a scrapbook page of a hike up Y mountain from nearly eight years ago when Danny and I met at BYU in Provo. I moved into his apartment complex 5 days after I returned home from my mission in Brazil and he spotted me that first Sunday at church. He pursued me and I went with the flow (after much prayer and one of the strongest promptings from the Holy Ghost that I have ever recieved. I didn't want to be one of those returned missionaries, after all, but the Lord had a different plan for me.)

Why do I tell you this? Well, because I consider Provo a wonderful place. It is where we met, fell in love, and began our lives together.

Why is this important today? Because in a little over three months, Provo will again be our home. We found out this week that Danny's company has been chosen to run the new Provo Convention Center and they have chosen Danny as the General Manager. Although we will miss the friends we have made here and the normal routines we have fallen into, we are so excited to move west again and be close to our family. We also look forward to the career opportunity this will give Danny to oversee the completion of the Convention Center, hire all of his staff, and run his own building.

Ashley the Photographer

We had a slow week of picture taking last week, so I thought I would do a post with Ashley's attempts at photography like I did for Alyssa. I thought these were pretty good considering Ashley is never still. Her favorite game.

The girls pictures on our wall.
Her feet... or maybe she was actually trying to take a picture of that stuffed bunny. Who knows.

This one makes me laugh every time I see it. It reminds me of Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter in the new "Alice in Wonderland," although not quite as scary looking.

I love this little girl.

Pictures and Thanksgiving

A friend of ours offered to take some pictures of our girls last week. Here are some of our favorite shots.

Alyssa did great and there were a lot of really cute pictures of her. Ashley is not much of a smiler on demand, so it was a little bit harder to find a good happy picture of her.

Here are some of the two girls together. It was a challenge to get the two of them to sit without having my friend's little boy want to sit in the shot with them. And whenever I would try to distract the little boy, Alyssa and Ashley would get distracted too.

We are doing well. We had a nice Thanksgiving. We invited three other families with smaller children over to share the day with us. We didn't take any pictures, but it was nice to have friends to help with the food and to keep us company as our family is so far from us.

Little Musician

We finally recorded Alyssa's recent accomplishments on the piano. Enjoy!

Brown paper packages tied up with strings...

On Thursday, We got two packages and two letters. The girls were so excited, especially since most of it was for them. They were excited about these new clothes that they got from Gawbie and Grandpa and had to put them on right away.

Shortly after the picture above was taken, the two girls stood up in that chair and tipped it over before I could stop them. Alyssa cried from fear and Ashley stood right up and continued playing (even though she was the one that ended up on the bottom of the pile when they fell - She has no fear). As soon as Alyssa calmed down, she wanted to take a few more pictures with her new clothes. Ashley had moved on. That puppy that she is holding is the prize possession in our house. It is Alyssa's, but Ashley constantly asks to play with it.

The other things that we got that day were the following: Alyssa got piano music from Grandma Bev, both girls got ice cream money from Great Grandma and Grandpa Ginos, and I got a new food processor(a gift that Danny and I chose from his companys catalog for hitting his 5 year mark with them). Thanks to all who sent the gifts.

I turned Alyssa loose in the house with our old camera the other day and she filled up the memory card with all kinds of pictures(99 picutes to be exact). Most of them were not worth keeping (pictures of walls, the floor, the TV, etc), but here are a few that I did keep. Ashley was the subject in a lot of the pictures. Why won't she pose like this for Danny and I?

I love her feet in this one.

She took like 5 pictures of Ashley's wet diaper trash can. I don't know why she thought it was so interesting.

This one is for Aunt Shannon :)

It just made me laugh to see some of the things that she thought should be photographed. I started reading a photography book the other day and the intoduction of it talked about how two people may be standing right next to each other and see totally different things worth photographing.

Bath Time

The girls have really been enjoying bath time lately. Danny took these pictures the other night while they were in the bath. I picked the most decent of the ones he took. Sometimes they will want to stay in there for almost an hour. They especially like it at night cause Danny will turn off the lights for short periods of time and move something in the room. They call it the Ghost game, in honor of Halloween. They love it.

Happy Halloween

We had quite the week of Halloween festivities. Alyssa got to dress up for her Library storytime on Wednesday. Then she got to have a Halloween Party at Preschool on Thursday. On Friday, we headed over to downtown St. Charles for trick or treating. The little shops on Main Street gave out candy from 3-5pm. Here are the kids dressed and excited to go get candy.

I was very grateful that Danny got away from work early to join us since it was a lot more crowded than we expected and parking was hard to find. He ended up dropping us off so we could get started. Ashley also got tired of walking about halfway through so Danny and I ended up taking turns holding Ashley until we decided we had had enough.

You can't tell from the picture above, but we ended up having to wait in quite a few lines just to get a piece of candy because it was so crowded. The kids found this bench during one of the waits which gave me the opportunity to snap a couple of pictures.

On Saturday we had our Ward Trunk or Treat. There were games inside the church for the first 30 minutes and then the trick or treating after that. This was the night we saved for getting Alyssa fully dressed. Here is our pretty princess.

She loved being able to wear lipstick and blush so much that she asked for it before church on Sunday. The black hairspray worked okay, but we had second thoughts later that night when we started washing it out. I don't think I would do it again inside of the house, because almost every surface in our bathroom was covered in black dust by the time the night was over and Danny had to wash Alyssa's hair like 5 times before it was back to normal (that is quite a task for a girl who cries if water goes near her eyes or ears). We found the M&M costume for Ashley and thought it was perfect for her because she is a little chocoholic.

The girls enjoyed the trunk or treat and were so excited to get more candy and see all of their friends. Here they are at the end of the night.

On Sunday, we decided to invite a few families over for our own Halloween celebration in order to keep our girls from being sad about not trick or treating like all of the neighborhood kids. We had dinner and then had some kid games. First was potato sack races. They loved this and wanted to do it numerous times.

The second game was Halloween Picture Bingo, but I was the caller, so I didn't get any pictures of it. The third game was Bobbin for Donuts. It was a lot harder than it looks. Alyssa tried really hard to do it without using her hands. I helped her a bit after she couldn't get close to getting a bite. Finally she figured out how to go from underneath and had a little more success.
Ashley just dug in.

After the games, we let the kids play upstairs so that the adults could visit. We found these two in the toybox and all of the toys outside on the floor.

It was a fun and busy week. We sent Danny off to Philidelphia around 6:30 this morning after a late night for the kids which will make for two, make that three, grumpy girls here at home today. We will look forward to seeing him on Wednesday.