Birthday Boys

:: Warning :: Excessive bragging ahead ::


This is always a busy week at our house. We have 2 birthdays to celebrate. First is Parker's.
I can't believe he turned 7 this year! How did my baby boy get so grown up? I have to say that I absolutely love this age. Parker is the greatest kid. He's always willing to help with whatever you ask, does his homework before you can even check to see if he even has any, and he is so smart! He's one of the top readers in his class and is breezing through the math they are learning. He is always coming home to tell me something they started learning at school and wants to know why everyone doesn't already know it. It seems most the stuff they go over he's already figured out on his own. Right now we're trying to decide if we should move him to a different school, like a charter school, so that he can be challenged a little bit more. But in the meantime he is loving feeling like he's at the top. He likes to tell me all the time that he's the smartest kid in his class, I'm sure there are a lot of others just as smart, but I'm glad he thinks highly of himself :)
One of the best things about Parker is that he is so thoughtful and sensitive. He's not sensitive in the way that he gets offended easily or cried a lot, but if I'm having a hard day he can pick up on it and will do little random secret things all day to help. I've found my bed made several times with a little paper heart on top. He even changed the laundry load for me once, including folding the clothes from the dryer and putting them all away! And I didn't even know he was doing it until I came upstairs to and he was just waiting for me to help put in the soap for the new load and turn everything on. What 7 year old kid does that?! So he's awesome and I wouldn't trade him for any other kid in the whole world.

Parker and KC have chore charts they have to do everyday and Parker's figured out that the "reward" for doing all their jobs is not really that great and negotiated himself a better deal. They each ahve about 8-12 jobs a day, some are really simple like brushing teeth and getting dressed, those are mostly to help KC remember what he needs to do. But some are harder like doing dishes, taking out the trash, and cleaning bathrooms. It is so nice to have kid getting big enough to really help! So anyway they get a sticker for every job they do adn when tehy get 100, which takes a few weeks, they can pick out a toy at the dollar store. Well since those toys usually break within the first hour they have them Parker wanted to know if he could just have the dollar instead so he can save it for a better toy. So he's building up a nice little stash of money and likes to count it everyday to see how much closer he is. He has a picture up on his bedroom wall of the toy he wants, a fancy Star Wars lego ship.

Our other birthday boy is Aaron. He took the day off work today so he could go to the family history library and do some scanning and research. Sometimes I think family history is a weird hobby for someone his age, but he sure loves it, and it could be worse right? He could be glued to the computer or video games all day. And it's fun to see how excited he gets when he connects with someone new to share info or comes across just the thing he's been searching for.

I'm glad he's out enjoying himself today, he's had so much going on at work lately, then some health issues - brought on by all the recent stress I'm sure, and a pretty pathetic pregnant wife who spends most the day sitting around and sleeping while the house just gets messier and messier. So he's spending a lot of time taking care of everyone else and doesn't get a lot of free time.

Aaron was born 13 weeks premature. He wasn't supposed to be born until April. Can you imagine having a baby at only 27 weeks? It's scary to think about now let alone 31 years ago when they didn't have nearly as much of the medical technology that we have today. Aaron really was a miracle baby to have survived, and I'm so glad that he did. I don't know what we would do without him. He's my very best friend and such a wonderful husband and father. These sweet boys of our absolutely adore him. And so do I. He works so hard to do what he believes is right and to make us all happy.

Happy Birthday to 2 of my favorite boys. I can't imagine life without you. Thanks for all that you do and for being you!

Flash

Last weekend a neighbor gave us some tickets to see the Utah Flash, a local NBA development team. We took the boys but weren't really sure they'd enjoy it but since it was free we figured we'd at least give it a try.

Well the boys LOVED it! They had so much fun, even Clayton was pretty good and we didn't have to chase him around, although I think he picked up a million gross germs crawling around on the dirty floor.

We stayed until just after the 3rd quarter when the late hour finally got to Clayton and he needed to go home to his bed. It was cute to see how excited the kids got, especially Parker. He was cheering with the crowd and clapping every time they scored. They can't wait to go again. KC was getting a little confused and kept cheering B-Y-U!! Maybe sometime we'll take him to a BYU game so he'll be cheering for the right team.




o

Are you using Swagbucks yet?

Whats swagbucks? It's a FREE search engine that gives you points for using it. You can trade those points in for free gift cards and other stuff. I use it everyday, just this week I got over 400 points already!

Ya it takes a little time, and you have to actually use it to get the points, but it's free and you get free money essentially for using it that you can get fun stuff with. I trade most my points in for Amazon gift cards.

Some of you have been wondering how I get so many swagbucks, it takes a few tricks, but overall it's pretty easy and you don't have to spend hours online.

Here are some of the ways I get points

1 swagbuck --

First I downloaded the toolbar, that way I have a swagbucks search box right at the top of my screen so I can always use it for my search engine, plus you get 1 swagbuck everyday just for having it.

3 swagbucks -

Do the daily poll, it only takes a second, then click on the surveys, you don't actually have to do any, but you get 1 point just for clicking, and the NOSO's, same thing, just click through it all, takes just a minute and then you get a point.

With the surveys there are also profile questions you can do for points, then it helps send you surveys that you actually quailify for. I still rarely find a survey to take, but when you do they are usually pretty good points.

Coupons

Easy! Do you go grocery shopping? These are the same coupons as coupons.com, you can print them and take them to the grocery store. When they go through, takes a month or 2, you get 10 points for each one. Just this week I got 50 points for coupons I used back in december. Plus I know I used about 8 more after that so there are more points coming. I'm not a big couponer, but even I find a few on here to use for my regular groceries.

searches

ALWAYS uae the swagbucks search tool when you go to websites. This is when the toolbar comes in really handy so you don't ahve to keep going back to the main page. I don't use my bookmarks anymore, to get to facebook I put it in the search bar, same for my email and other regular sites. I've found that I can almost always get points when I search "KSL" to look at the news. I make sure to do that at least once a day because it's almost guaranteed points. I can usually get 10-20 points a day with searches, sometimes even more.

Referrels!

This is where you come in my friends. Add swagbucks and help me earn more points!:) Try to get a few people signed up from your own referral link. This helps a lot. I had aaron sign up and now I use his account to search from. Why? Because every time one of your referrals gets points from searching you get the points too! So I use aarons and we earn double points that way. Easy Easy! Then if you can get a few other people, even if they use it once it a while it still adds up.

Special offers

These I don't really do a lot of, but sometimes you find one that gives really high points just for signing up for a free trial of something. You sign up, then you can go in and cancel the trial and get the points! Some trials are more picky and you have to use whatever it is first so make sure you read the rules before you do this. And sometimes they have offers for things you buy. Like spend %40 at a store and get 300 points, I do this if it's something I was planning to get anyway, like I love it when they do it for old navy and stuff like that and I can get kids clothes.

Overall I think the searches pay off the most, and it's always fun to have the points come up when you don't expect it. After awhile you'll find there are certain things you search for that tend to give points more often and you can do those more. And sometimes on the swagbucks facebook page they announce free codes to get more points.

So what are you waiting for? It's free, and pretty easy. Takes a little time sometimes but your earning points that you can trade in for lots of different things, my favs are the Amazon gift cards. I started using the site in october and was able to get $70 in gift cards to use towards this last christmas. So if you haven't signed up already click here :

http://www.swagbucks.com/refer/karibryan

and get started :)

So you have lots of money and you don't care about free stuff? Then use it just to help me out :) Every time you win search points I can win them too. That means more points for me = more free gift cards = more saving for me when I need to get things.

Not so good at this blogging thing

So now that 3 more months have past without a post I think I'm about ready to give up on the blog. So many of you are so good at posting every few days with cute pics of your kids or stories about what's going on in your life. I'm afraid that's just not me. I rarely know where my camera is to even take pictures, and our day to day life is just not that exciting. Kids go to school, Clayton and I play and take naps, kids come home, we eat dinner and do chores. The end.
But while I try to decide if I want to try to make time to keep this updated or not here are a few pictures I did take over the last few months.
The boys are growing fast! Clayton is going to be 2 in just a few months, Parker will be 7 in a few weeks and KC seems bigger everyday. And in less than 2 months we'll add Baby Jack to the mix. Life with all these boys is non stop, but it's so much fun and we can't wait for our next little guy to be here.

Preschool Program