I Scream, You Scream!!

Here are a few Rocky Roaders! Silas is quite a messy ice cream eater... We made Elias and Isaac put chocolate on their lips to make Silas feel better. This morning Silas woke up and tried to convince me that his Daddy said he could have ice cream for breakfast. This is his usual method (using the absent parents' permission with the present one). Needless to say I didn't fall for it.

We are 2 weeks and 1 or 2 days away from my induction date. I'm getting very tired of being pregnant! A friend of mine reminded me that we have to get miserable enough to be willing to go through child birth. She hit that one right on. People keep asking how the kids will react to Jude. Elias will be great I'm sure. He loves and helps with Silas so I think a new brother won't effect him. Isaac wants a pet so bad he can't stand it so a baby will be a good substitute (I'm hoping). Silas thinks he's excited but I don't expect his enthusiasm to last long. He may like him eventually but I'm guessing the competition will bug him. We're just really hoping he doesn't regress with his potty training. He's been in underwear for 3 weeks now and doing great. I guess that means the Grandma's are off the hook. I had a friend who told me it was the Grandma's job to potty train all the Grand kids. I was really planning on making this a family tradition for us too. Well, I guess they will still have Jude to train!! HAHAHA

On a different note... On Sunday I was walking in the hall during Sunday school to go take Silas to the potty. I happened to walk by Isaac's primary class where the Primary President was kindly lecturing the kids on keeping all four legs of their chairs on the floor at ALL times. After church we asked Isaac if he was part of the tipping crew and he innocently admitted that he was. So... he and Caleb made chocolate chip cookies and he had to go to his teachers' houses and apologize. We're hoping we humiliated him enough so that he won't want to follow the crowd in that way again.

Speaking of cookies... Last Saturday Isaac had a play date with a friend where the Mom helped the boys make chocolate chip cookies from "scratch". I HATE making cookies because it's so time consuming so we just buy the tub of cookie dough from Costco and make a few for dessert whenever we want them. Isaac was SO impressed with the whole process. He was quite jealous that he's been missing out on the complete cookie making experience. He asked his friends Mom for the recipe so that maybe I could make some from scratch too.... FAT CHANCE!!

History

We had a very interesting conversation with Elias yesterday. We were driving home from somewhere and we told all the kids to roll the windows up. After a few minutes of thinking, Elias told us that he knows why we call it "roll" the windows up. He had ridden in a vehicle that you had to roll the windows up with a handle. It kind of made us think that we are getting older. We don't really know what records and eight tracks are. The boys won't know what cassettes and video tapes are. We finally got rid of our VCR and threw out all of our old tapes. I finally have all of my old songs from CD's on my cell phone now so that I can listen to all of my favorite songs on my phone. We can also e-mail, talk, go to Mapquest and Google maps and do all other sorts of exciting and pointless things on our phones. So now I have been trying to figure out what we will substitute in the place of "roll" for the windows. Touch, push, button and toggle don't really go with "your window up." I guess we will just yell at them and tell them to put their window up.

I usually go back and read everything I have written before I submit it. After reading the above paragraph, it sounds really weird but I am going to post it anyway.

Silas in his big boy underwear with his (short lived) remote control jeep. He is obsessed with trailers btw so he hooked up a little horse trailer behind the jeep and towed it around.

SUCCESS!! - Knock on Wood

I believe the Poo Poo Party was a success. The party was 8 days ago and we've only had 4 accidents since. We've had to make some adjustments however... Silas really liked the party idea so every time he used the bathroom for 3 days after we had to light candles for him to blow out. After the first day, the cake we made was trashed with candle holes so I transitioned him to a scented candle. After, 3 good days he finally earned his remote control jeep which he LOVED and after one day of use tried to "ride" and broke. He started to have some regression on the poo aspect of the training so we turned the Poo Poo Party into Poo Poo Presents. Isaac and I gathered up 6 gifts (new crayons, coloring books, etc.) and wrapped them and told Silas that every time he pooped he could get a present... By 6pm of day one he was out of presents. Silas quickly learned how to force himself to poop in order to earn presents. It was a little hard to reward when he only produced a pea size product but I guess the concept was there. For the next few days we were going through 6-7 poo poo presents a day. He realized that poo in the potty was like GOLD!! We were getting worried that he was causing hemorrhoids... but yesterday he only produced 3 presents which was a nice adjustment. This little stinker is smarter than we know.

Today is officially the last day of summer vacation!!! Oh sorry, did I sound too excited there? Caleb asked me the other day if my life was really so bad that I would be this excited for the boys to go back to school.... Um no, my life is not that bad. However, I'm 9 months pregnant and ever since June the temp. has been in the upper 90's so we've spent a lot of time indoors going a little crazy. We could all use a little time apart each day. Caleb should know that when he's home for an extended period of time with nothing to do that he drives us all a little crazy!!

That's about all of our excitement here...countdown to baby is 4 weeks from tomorrow (hopefully)!

Like Mother Like Son

I have been gone for a few weeks with only a day or two at home between trips. I know that Tami has been a little bit stressed lately because she is raising the boys by herself. I really thought she was doing a great job. They will probably turn out better that way.

I was a little bit shocked on Sunday morning though. We were getting ready for church and had our door locked. Silas started beating on the door and before we could get to the door he yelled, "Open the dang door". It was then that I realized, I better be home once in awhile so that Tami doesn't get driven to swearing. I told her that I was just happy that he said "dang". There are a lot of other words that could have come out of his mouth.

Poo Poo Party

So this is the kind of excitement we are having! I tried to edit the photo to keep you from barfing!! We decided that maybe the trick to potty training Silas would be to have a poo poo party. We made a cake, sang a lovely poo poo congratulations song, blew out candles and let him open presents (which were his own toys that he helped me pick out and wrap up). He's thinking this is a great idea... I'll let you know in 3 days if we were successful or not. He's had a brand new, remote control jeep sitting on top of the fridge for almost 2 months now that he can have once he's a REAL BIG BOY. So far that hasn't been motivation enough. I REALLY need him out of diapers before Jude is born. Wish us luck!

Wild Week

I tried to include pictures of the boys in their element. Isaac is always climbing on anything he can get enough grip on. Silas is always into something and extremely mischievous. Elias is vain and likes to look at himself in the mirror and take pictures of himself. He is kind of mad at me for writing that, but not mad enough that he doesn't want it out there for everyone to see.

This was one of the many wild weeks that we have planned in August. I flew up to Spokane and then went to Bonners Ferry for my grandmas funeral. It seems kind of strange that a complete generation of the Zimmerman family is gone. It was the best funeral I have ever been to. Not that I am frequent attender of funerals but this was a good one. She was an amazing lady and everyone recognized her for that. She wasn't the least bit scared of dying and probably looked forward to it so that she could move on and get started on the next stage of progression.

It was great to be able to see aunts and uncles, cousins and friends. Every time I go to North Idaho, I realize what a beautiful place it is and I am ready to move back. Then reality sets and I realize that I wouldn't have a job up there. We do really enjoy Denver and I love my job so we will go wherever we need to and have a great time doing it.

Tami and the boys picked me up at the airport yesterday at 5:30 after visiting her sister. We have about 24 hours together before I fly out for Phoenix today at 5:30. Then I will fly back in on Friday at 6:30 so that we can leave by 7:30 to go to Utah for Maggie and John's wedding. After the wedding we are going to visit Tami's grandparents and then take a tour through beautiful Rock Springs, Wyoming (it really isn't that bad), Vernal, Utah and Rifle, Colorado.

Enough of the travel log. We are finally getting to eat peaches from our tree. They seem to have little bruises about the size of Isaac's fingers. He makes sure he squeezes them to see if they are ready to eat. As long as he can make an indent, he considers them ready. Tami is going to have a busy week picking black berries, green beans and peaches. What a great week to be gone.