The Chicken Dance

Alyssa's school had a dance festival on Friday. Each of the grades had the opportunity to perform a dance that they have been working on for the past month. The kindergarteners got to do the chicken dance. Their costumes consisted of a bird hat made out of paper, ribbon streamers connected to each hand, and a tail made out of the same ribbons pinned onto their bottoms. Alyssa was so excited to do her dance. She was also excited to be able to go to school in the afternoon(I did not enjoy that part of it. I am so glad that she has morning Kindergarten). Here are a couple of pictures of her with some of the kids in her class.

I tried to post a video of the dance, but it won't upload. You'll have to come and visit us in order to see her do it in person. :)

Swim Lessons

Alyssa has been through maybe 4 sessions of swim lessons, but we have never signed Ashley up for them. Since Ashley is showing more potential for being able to learn how to swim than Alyssa right now, we decided it was time to have Ashley take swim lessons. She just completed the first level and did great. Here she is with her class on the last day.  

 The teacher switched halfway through the two week session because the first teacher came down with strep throat. The hardest thing for Ashley was putting her head back in the water. The teacher managed to get her to do it. 

She will do the next level during the first two weeks of Feb. My goal is to get her swimming before summer gets here since we have season passes to the water park. We'll see if the swim lessons are successful in teaching her how to swim.

Happy Birthday Ashley!!

We celebrated Ashley's birthday a week and a half ago. We decided to celebrate it on Sunday because Danny almost always gets home late on Tuesdays, and Ashley's birthday fell on a Tuesday this year. We invited Gawbie and Grandpa (Danny's parents), Aunt Shannon, and the Roe Family over to celebrate with us. We enjoyed dinner together before presents and cake. Ashley was so excited to open presents again since Christmas was still fresh in her mind. 

She ended up having a lot of little presents rather than a few big ones. That made her happy because it meant more presents to open.

She requested a ladybug cake for her birthday. I agreed because I figured it wouldn't be too difficult(a lot easier than the Princess Castle requested by Alyssa a year ago). Ashley is really into bugs right now, especially grasshoppers and ladybugs. I ended up baking the cake in a Pyrex bowl to give it the dome shape and then used oreos for the spots and the black head. My only regret is that I didn't look at the food coloring before Sunday and therefore didn't realize that the red was empty. I would have liked for the ladybug to look more red than pink. Other than that I was pretty pleased with the result.

 Celebrating the birthday early caused a little bit of confusion in that little 4 yr old head. On Sunday she woke up excited to be four. We had to explain to her that she wouldn't be 4 until Tuesday and that we were just celebrating her birthday on that day. Then on Tuesday she woke up excited to be 4 and then asked for her presents. We had to explain to her that she already opened her presents and that there weren't any more. After having her ask all morning for them, I finally wrapped up something that I had meant to give both girls for Christmas but then forgot. It worked and she stopped asking for presents.

That night we celebrated by going to Red Robin as a family. Ashley got a huge chocolate ice cream cake dessert from them and a balloon. She and Mommy enjoyed the dessert together since Daddy and Alyssa didn't want anything to do with it. Afterwards we went into the mall to let the girls ride the train. Unfortunately, it had just closed so they had to settle for the Merry-go-round.

We love our little Ashley. She has so much energy and can be a little bit defiant sometimes, but she is so much fun to be around and she gets so tickled over the littlest things-which makes us smile. She can also say the funniest things, like most kids. She is not shy at all and will start up conversations with complete strangers everywhere we go. She is a little bit of a tom boy, but that is just fine with us. She is 42 lbs, about 44 inches tall, and she still has really light blond, curly hair. Our family wouldn't be complete without her.

December Fun

Now that we are a week into January, I thought I would post the highlights of December. I can't seem to stay caught up on our blog lately. December was a busy month. I had a week or two in there that I didn't have a spare hour of any day. During that week or two, here are some of the things that kept us busy:

• Gingerbread house making(I made the gingerbread from scratch and then we let them use the leftover halloween candy to decorate them. It was kind of a last minute decision, hence the homemade part of it. However, I was very pleased with the outcome and will probably make them from scratch again next year and save us $10 a house)

•  A birthday party and birthday for our little princess. She insisted on having a friend party and wanted to invite every girl from her kindergarten class(fortunately there are only 7 girls in the class). Then she wanted to invite a few friends from Church too. A few friends turned out to be another 8 friends. I figured since the party was a week before Christmas, there would be a lot of kids that wouldn't be able to come, especially when I had only gotten 1 reply as of the Wednesday before the party. I was wrong. There were only 3 of the invites that didn't come. It made for a hectic couple of hours, but the girls had a blast. It was a princess theme, if you couldn't tell.

The pinata was a last minute find and ended up requiring a last minute scramble to find a place to do it and a way to fit it into the schedule of planned games. We ended up having to omit the necklace making in order to do it, but the girls had a lot of fun.

She has been requesting an angel food cake for her birthday since last Feb. when I made one for Danny's birthday. She then wanted me to turn it into a volcano cake. I just filled the middle with strawberries and called it good.

• We also had Christmas. We had 9:00am church so we let them open stocking presents and had breakfast. They wanted to keep opening presents before church and we told them that if we were all ready for church and still had time then we would let them open some presents. We were all ready by 8:30. 

The most wanted items this year were this white puppy for Ashley and...

this easy bake oven for Alyssa.

• On the day after Christmas, we took a short trip down to Henderson, Nevada, to visit my family. I got to see the families of two of my brothers and my sister(who bravely opened up her house to the mob of people - Thanks, Christy!) My parents were also there. It was a lot of fun to see everyone, eat good food, play games, and let our kids be entertained by cousins. We even got to go play tennis both mornings that we were there, which got me itching to play some more. We had a low-key New Years Eve with Danny's sister - we were all in bed before midnight. Now we are getting readjusted to our daily routines of school and work.

Merry Christmas

The holiday season is always busy, but ours seemed to be even busier this year. I don't know why. In all of the holiday rush, we failed to get Christmas Cards out this year. We decided that since we didn't have a nice picture to send out anyways, it wasn't worth the stress and the cost of stamps. So here is our Christmas Card for 2011.

If you have been following our blog regularly, then you already know what has happened in the Life(lives) of the Wheelers this year. But here is a quick summary in case you forgot.

We started off the year in O'Fallon, MO, anticipating our move to Utah. We had found out the previous month that we would be transferring for a job and that the move would most likely happen in March or April. The first months of the year were spent waiting, and waiting, and waiting. We also answered many a question with "I don't know" as people were curious to know when we were leaving and if we had found a home. Needless to say it was a pretty frustrating time. We took a trip out to Utah to find a home in March, and the move finally happened during the last week of April.

We got to Utah just in time for me to enjoy two days of Women's Conference at BYU with my mom and sisters. While I was relaxing and having fun, Danny was overseeing the movers as our stuff arrived at the new home. By the time I got done with Women's Conference, a good part of the unpacking had already been done. He mostly left the kitchen boxes for me to do, which I finished in a couple of days of hard work.

Due to our new location, we had quite a few visitors come and stay with us this year. There were also a couple that didn't stay, but we still got to see them. We absolutely love living somewhere where we can see family and friends so much more often. I even enjoyed being the shuttle service to the airport for my two nieces at BYU.

Danny spent a good amount of time traveling this year. It seemed that he was taking nearly 1 trip every month from the time we moved in until Thanksgiving. We were fortunate to be able to join him on some of these trips. We went to Phoenix in July and Florida in September. We did three days in a row of amusement parks while we were in Florida which pretty much wiped us out. The girls had a blast which made it all worth it.

In the quieter months, we enjoyed time at home and time exploring our surroundings. In August, we took a day trip up to Lagoon, an amusement park north of Salt Lake City. The girls enjoyed doing that too, even if though there were quite a few rides that they were too short to go on. Alyssa started Kindergarten this year and I have been able to go and help out in her classroom once a week, which I love. She loves school and all of the new friends she has made. Ashley does a neighborhood preschool one day a week that rotates from house to house. I teach it about once every two months and she gets to go to preschool with all of her friends from Nursery. We are all looking forward to the new year and finally having her out of nursery(she towers over most of the kids in there). We hosted Thanksgiving dinner here at our house and we are enjoying a quiet Christmas at home. We hope that this post finds you all well.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

Visitors

 On the evening before Alyssa's Kindergarten Devotional, our friends from Missouri got into a town. They will be moving here shortly after Christmas so the trip was made so that they could find a home to live in when they move. It was so fun to see them again. It was especially fun to see these three together again.

 They didn't waste any time returning to their old habits. Within a day, they were acting like siblings again(loving each other one minute and then fighting the next).

Since we have moved, they have had an addition to their family. Alyssa loved having a baby around. 

We had so much fun with them during their visit and we can't wait to have them living close by again.

Alyssa's Kindergarten Devotional

At Alyssa's school, each of the grades has the opportunity to present a devotional. The Kindergarteners get to do the Devotional in December. They sang songs, recited scriptures, and took turns saying their parts in the microphone-telling the Christmas Story. It was so cute to see those little kids up there, and they did such a great job with all of their parts. The spirit was so strong in that room as they talked about the birth of Jesus Christ and the true meaning of Christmas. I was glad that Alyssa got to be a part of it and that we got to watch it. Here is a picture of Alyssa with her class right before the program started. She is on the front row on the very left side.

As part of the program they sang a song about angels that came down from heaven and played their different instruments instead of singing. The kids were all tested to see which ones had the rhythm and abilities to be able to play. Alyssa was chosen to play the drum. It was a duet with one other boy. I've been trying to post the video of it all week, but it isn't working. She really got into her drum playing.  It's funny because I had heard her drumming around the house to the phrase "strawberries and whipped cream" for the past couple of months, but I didn't realize why she was doing it. I even heard her trying to teach Ashley how to do it. After hearing her play the drum to that song, I finally understood because the beat fit exactly.

Here are a couple more pictures of her durning the program. She has really bad red eye in all of the pictures that I took.

Pumpkins in December?

I feel like I have really neglected my blog lately. I just haven't really pulled out the camera, even though we have done some camera worthy things. I finally decided that since it is December it is probably time to move on past the Halloween posts. So I took all of the pictures I had on my camera and am turning them into the post that you are seeing today.

We had a really nice Thanksgiving. We hosted it here at our new home for some of Danny's family. We had his parents and his grandparents over. We also got to have my niece Brigitte here with us for a few days since she is going to BYU and her family lives in Connecticut. I took pictures before people arrived for dinner, but I didn't pull out the camera much after that. I was pleased with how the table turned out.

 And here is the kids table(just Alyssa and Ashley).

 After dinner, we each got to put three feathers on the turkey for the things that we are most thankful for. Alyssa got to glue and place them on the turkey.

 Great Grandpa's birthday happened to fall on Thanksgiving this year, so we got to celebrate that after dinner with cake, pie, presents, and a game about Great Grandpa.

 On the Friday after Thanksgiving, we pulled out all of our Christmas decorations and decorated our house. We were glad to have Brigitte around to help us. That night, we headed up to Salt Lake to go to the Tree Lighting Ceremony at the Grand America Hotel. They had a little scavenger hunt for the kids which won them each a cookie in the end. They also had pictures with Santa, but we didn't want to pay for them or wait in the line, so we got a picture with this fake Santa instead.

 Alyssa liked those little cupcake/candycane things so she wanted a picture with them. They were right next to a candy shop.

After the Grand America, we rode the tracks over to Temple Square. Unfortunately before we made it there, the cold temperatures made it hard for one of the little ones to delay going potty and she had an accident. We tried to find a store that could sell us a change of clothing close by, but we were unsuccessful. We took the tracks back to our car with the promise of returning to see the lights on another night.