Quite the Week.....

..... filled with a surprise visit from my younger brother Jacob, my very first (albeit very very minor) and hopefully very last ever car accident (complete with the other driver telling our insurance companies a completely different version of what actually happened), and lovely weather allowing for some bike riding in the culdesac and exploration of our crazy cool backyard.

Yamcakes

Every morning for the past couple of weeks Kiari will wake up (and she's always the first, usually about 7) and say, "I wanna eat pancakes." And pancakes are great, don't get me wrong, but it's not like there's a vast amount of nutritional value in them! Not wanting to deprive my children of something that they're actually willing to eat I decided I better vamp them up a little bit to try and make them at least somewhat good for them. So yesterday I pulled out a can of yams that I had left over from Thanksgiving, mashed them up, and mixed them in with the pancake batter. They turned out great and the kids ate them up as though there was no difference. Of course I didn't tell them that there was a difference, otherwise chances are that they would have come to their own conclusion before even trying them!
So Yamcakes are a new hit at the VanderSloot house!
I think I'll be trying banana pancakes next.

Our Peanut

Very early on Enoch has loved to stand up straight. He has really strong legs, even the nurse commented on the girth of his thighs right after he was born!
So here they are.....

his cute chubby thighs!!!



These are the last few pictures that I took at our first place down here in Denver.
When we first moved to Denver we didn't have a placed to live lined up. So when we had help finding the townhouse we ended up renting, we felt extremely blessed.
About September we started house hunting. I think we walked through 30 some odd homes. We found one that we loved but it didn't have the square footage that we were hoping for. We found another one, the same floor plan as the first one we loved but more square footage. Only we really didn't care for the area that it was in.
The following week we walked through 6 homes and both felt really good about the 5th one. It was a Ranch style, 5 bedroom, 2 bathrooms, at the end of a culdesac. The seller had bought it in March and flipped it, so no one had lived in it since the remodel was done. Not only did we really like it, but we felt really good about it. The next day we found out that it was in the same ward that we'd been attending.... which made us like it all the more!
So we put in an offer, went back and forth in negotiations a couple of times, and on December 23rd went under contract for this particular house. Then, on January 21st we closed on our very first house!!
So all of the following pictures were taken here, at our first place.






A view of our crazy (crazy cool) backyard from the kitchen window.





And here's our cute little house!!
I promise I'll try to post more pictures of the inside but we're not completely out of boxes yet.
The move went so well! We had soooo much help from so many wonderful ward members! It went so fast. The day after we moved the majority of our stuff over to the new house I had so many sisters from the ward come over to help me clean the townhouse. We have felt so overwhelmingly taken care ever since we moved into this ward. It's really a special ward and we feel so grateful to have found a house in the ward boundaries.
We are loving having our own place and feel very blessed to have found it, to have gotten it for the price that we did, to have had so much help moving, and so much more! We just feel so blessed!

January 2011

Our weather last month was all over the place. We had days when it was 60+ degrees and the kids were playing outside and others when it just wouldn't stop snowing.
This is the tree outside the kitchen window at the townhouse.

We loved having a wood burning fireplace at the townhouse. Hooray for roasted marshmellows!
Kiari took a late nap one afternoon and ended up being awake until nearly 2. So we kept the fire going and watched and old school Rainbow Brite movie that was available on our instant Netflix.
Wide awake.


Trent with our little Peanut.



Like I said, this little girl loooooves to dress up.
She kept turning away from me when I tried to take her picture. I was lucky to get the one above this!
For awhile there Ethan would wear his Super Why mask everyday.

A super sweet couple in our ward offered to lend us their baby swing and it was so great to have!
I'm pretty sure this was right before the string of drool nearly hit Trent in the face.