Time Warp: Skip to Present

Hi World,

here a brief summary of what happened in the last six months: a lot. Hence we are (temporarily) skipping it to bring us up to the current place in time.

We just had one week's vacation and spent a few days of that by going to Bavaria and Austria. We stayed in a hut in the mountains, and had a great time. We also touristed and also saw the Neuschwanstein Castle. It was fun.

Saying Good Bye

It's always fun to go back to Texas since I have so many family and friends there. Actually having grown up there my whole life (that I can remember) it seems more like they are almost all family. These pictures don't do justice to all the people I saw, talked to, and said good bye to, but it shows a little. And you have to have a couple pictures of some cute pregnant bellies! No, I'm not pregnant, I'm just a bit chubby from all the fattening foods I ate on the trip that I can't get in Germany.
Sisters, Sisters! There were never such devoted sisters. Sorry Calli, we wish you could have been there too but I don't think your mission president would have been to happy if you had flown out! We missed you!
Friends together one last time for a while!

Gran's dresses

I think I mentioned this earlier but Gran made dresses for all the grandbaby girls. Here is a few of my favorites... I left out the cute wiggly ones because there were too many.
All three actually facing forward and almost holding still! I got one and only one!
This was easier to do but still not quite successful. Love the bows!
Dancing in circles.


Twirling!
Cute Jo!
Moriah and Jo before we could get Marie up there for long enough to get a picture
and finally the only semi picture in purple dresses with Marie trying to escape.

Update!

Sam's foot is looking so good! I thought I'd take pictures of what it looks like 4 days after the bee sting since I didn't get any right after. His foot looks 200% better than it did when we took him into the hospital and he's finally walking on it again and only complains about it mildly instead of constantly! Yea!
So I know it's not obvious but the bottom of his foot is still a little purple in this one and only in a much smaller area.Here you can see some of the strangeness of what happened to the front of his foot and part of the red area. It basically made 90% of his foot red and swollen.And finally a funny picture of the little guy after a shorter trip into Frankfurt today. They both crashed this afternoon but Marie fell asleep on me and Sam pulled a cousin Jo.

Things to do before I turn 3...

I'm beginning to think Sam has a list of things to check off before he turns 3. Seriously. The last few days have been crazy and since he turns 3 soon I think he's trying to check off the list. As long as he makes it to 3 and 10 times that I'll be super happy! Anyway, here is why I'm interrupting my slow catch up from Feb.

No he didn't break his foot and I hope he doesn't! However, Thursday evening he decided to step on his second bee in about a year. Last time he had a bit of a reaction to it but it took a while to swell and turn red. This time, what took 5-10 hours to do last time, happened in 5-10 min. It has continued to swell and get more red but the cream they gave us to put on it after his first reaction seem to GREATLY slow the process! So his whole foot is very red and swollen.
Now for why there is a big blue bandage on his foot. Today we went to the store to get groceries and such and since he didn't want to sit in the stroller (because his foot has been really hurting and ichy) and the cart we had didn't have a child's seat he decided to sit on the handlebar. It was about 3-4 inches wide and had another metal bar behind it so since I didn't want him climbing all over the cart and falling off I agreed to let him stay there as long as he was careful. I figured that was safer.

Part way through the trip he decided to launch himself off and split his chin open. He was screaming like a maniac and I thought it was just another "I'm miserable!" scream since Arnold and I checked him and didn't see anything wrong. However about 1 min later he looked up at me and I noticed blood everywhere. The first time I checked it I thought, "that doesn't look to bad" but the second glance I got of it when some of the blood got wiped off on his shirt told me otherwise. I knew he needed stitches.

So Arnold went to clean him up a bit and I got the groceries. (we'll leave out all the stuff about me not coping with it all very well because my sleep hasn't been very good the last 2 nights, I've been stressed out about his poor badly swollen foot, tired from holding an exhaustingly needy, bee stung , heavy almost 3 year old for a day etc.) Basically I was all shaky and hoping I wouldn't pass out while they rang up the groceries.

So then we headed to the hospital and everything was great! They were friendly and kind. Oh, and we didn't even have to wait. I guess there weren't a lot of people getting hurt today. At first the Doctor thought his chin would be fine taped, but when he went to do that he said it definitely was deeper than he thought and he needed 2 stitches. While they got that ready they looked at his foot and decided it definitely needed some help too, so that's why he got the cool blue bandage. I think I'm glad that he has his 3 year check up on Wednesday! I just hope he doesn't break a leg before then. We can wait a VERY long time before he tries to check that one off his list if it's up to me.

Boy cousin photo shoot

Ok so this is just a warning. I had a ton of pictures and there were a lot of funny ones but not really any amazing ones so I didn't have just one to post so here are most of the pictures that I took. This is a photo dumping so skim it and Enjoy!

Oh and just a note. Sam woke up from his nap moments before this. He seemed happy at first and very willing but as you can see that changed. First the zoned out look from Sam and randomness from Alex.











At this point Sam got tired of being asked to smile and suddenly made a move for me.

Oh so tired.
The Alex photo shoot.




And then the girls came to join and give hugs. I think Alex enjoyed it.



We tried again with Sam thinking the all amazing Grandad might be able to cheer him up but it didn't work and instead we got the saddest face in the world.

The Jones Cousins

This is all the non baby Jones cousins all together in one spot in February. That has now been added to by 3 more. Well, Klara was already around for a few months but she was not able to be there for the insanity. As you can see they all did pretty good except mine... Oh well, I'm posting all the half decent pictures so you can watch the fun. I think this photo shoot took at most a min to finish.

Enjoy!

Oh the funny thing is we got all the kids on the couch and in the time it took to get the camera on you can see what my son was already doing. And yes there were several attempts to fix the little wiggle worms wiggliness.