Birthday Time

The main news this past week is that Claire celebrated her Birthday! On Saturday we invited friends over and there were 12 kids that showed up! Claire is constantly asking when we can go to a friends house or when we can invite someone over, so I thought this was a meaningful gift for her. We moved the couch to make plenty of room. The slide from Grandma Hebdon was the centerpiece of the party. I made cake cones for the first time; they were perfect for little kids. On her actual birthday, on Sunday, we opened mom and dad gifts and Grandma Quinn watched her open her gifts via video. Thanks for all of your birthday wishes!

 A new dress and necklace. Her first tea set. I love that it's metal, like the Rice Krispie plates we used to play with at Grandma Arave's house.

 I couldn't resist buying this giant Lisa Frank coloring book! And these are her first set of markers.

 A doctor tool kit. Her first patient was her new toy bird that records what you say and repeats it back.

 A whole box of band aids to herself. She and a friend burned through them in one sitting. Her baby doll looked like it was in a body cast!

 Yes, she opened this present one little piece of ripped paper at a time.

 Frozen marshmallow cereal! The breakfast of a toddler.

 Dad demonstrating how to play a harmonica. The kazoo has been her favorite, and Todd has taken to the shaker egg.

 Someone didn't set the bowl far enough away...I turned back from helping Claire and saw this.

 A friend gave us this castle tent. It's quite the set up sliding down a pink slide into a pink and purple castle!

 Todd is getting better at reaching and getting around!

 We had a sensory table for the older kids at the party. There were lentils everywhere by the end! Thankfully it's easy to vacuum up and it matches the color of our carpet!

 The after picture.

 This was the only "good" during the party picture I had.

 Sea shell wands.

 These mini beach balls were what we used instead of balloons.

 Before the party.

 Playing with the elements. This is the first time I let him sit on his own without spotting him. He sits up on his own all of the time now.

 This was a tea party we went to at a friend's house. There were all age groups in attendance. Of course we loved it.

 When Todd is content he'll just roll around and suck on his fingers.

 We have a rose bush outside of our house and Claire loved that I put one in this tea cup.

 Fun at the park. I used to make these at recess time when I was little.

What we do

Claire often likes to fix her bike. Most days when Todd and Claire are both content they hang out in the family room like this.

These next couple of pictures are taken in the process of doing laundry. I love being able to do laundry at home-no quarters required!

 We love having a backyard and the spring weather.

 This was before Todd started rolling and rotating all over the place. I used to let him nap with me.

 These are pictures from the medieval fair. This year Skyler came with us. I tried Irish food and enjoyed watching some jousting. It was a beautiful day and we got a little sun burnt. There were a lot of animals and fun booths to see. Skyler and Claire shared some "fair food." In preparation for it, I made a flower crown for Claire and several magic wands since there are several fairy-themed booths.

 Can you spy Claire and Skyler?

Jousting-the "war horses" are massive

Sibling Love

 I love the diversity of things that we love on our fridge right now: sea shells, Jesus Christ, farms and unicorns! We invited an older lady from our ward over for family night. She let Claire glue shells from her collection onto magnets and emphasized that they are God's creations and that they are naturally beautiful.

 This little boy is teething. He's getting the top two teeth in that are next to the big, front teeth.

 I found these two hanging out under the coffee table.

 Often, I ask Claire to get Todd a toy that he can play with.

 This is our newest furniture purchase. I'm so excited to have a table for my sewing machine!

Claire ready to go! xo Hebdons

Easter

Celebrate everyone! I finally sat down and created a blog post! No more guilt or putting it off, I love my family and I've been robbing you of some cute pictures and stories. I hope everyone enjoyed their Easter as well as conference.

 Don't you love that face? Grandma Quinn sent some Easter gifts in the mail.

 Claire loved dying, and eating eggs this year.

 Skyler had fun experimenting (what's new) with dipping one egg into several colors to get different colored stripes. It was cool until he overdid it. Oh well, better luck next year.

 I thought it was cute that Claire was letting Skyler pull her hair back into a pony tail.

 Saturday we went to the park as a family and Claire found some Easter eggs.

 Skyler thought that the flowers in the grass made it harder to spot the eggs. I thought I hid eleven, but we only found ten. Claire explains that we couldn't find the last one because the Easter bunny took it.

 The first Monday of every month is a free day at the Museum of Natural History. Claire liked this dinosaur egg that she could open, "like an Easter egg!"

Todd enjoyed playing with this water bottle most of the time at the museum. What a cutie! He's getting more hair, has his two bottom teeth, and is rolling all over the floor now!

Why did the road runner cross the road?

Because church was over! That's right. Today as we were walking out to the car we saw some of our friends trying to scare a road runner out from their vehicle. It didn't want to be shoo'ed away but it was eventually convinced not to stay in the parking lot.

In other news about animals this week, Claire ate a mouse. It was delicious. It was essentially a funny shaped Oreo bonbon/cake ball with almond sliver ears. We celebrated spring break by going out to one of our favorite restaurants in the middle of the week. How crazy is that! Going out in the middle of the week.

Todd now has two teeth, but they seem to be camera shy. We've started him on some solids which he has really enjoyed. He has also perfected rolling over and has learned that he can be semi-mobile by rolling around. He also likes to sing. Today at church he seemed to want to add a new verse to every song we sang. He added especially vigorous singing during just about every prayer. 

Snowy morning

Seasons in Oklahoma are very confused. Each season is supposed to take it's turn over the months, but here they jump back and forth every few days. Last week we had summer sun. We had soup on the menu, but the weather said ice-cream. Cold cereal was the plan for this morning, but the ice on the ground says hot-cocoa. School was delayed, so I worked from home for a few hours this morning. It was fun to see Claire and Lisa interacting through their morning routine. 

Here are a few pictures of what I saw:

It may be too small to see, but Claire has a pen and a highlighter in front of her where Lisa has her weights.

I caught Lisa yawning in this one. Woops.

 Now Claire is getting serious with a spice bottle and small milk jug for her weights.

A New Home

We recently found an opportunity to move into a new place. All we knew for sure was that it had an extra bedroom, and the kitchen and bathroom couldn't possibly be any smaller than what we had been in for the past year and a half. Lisa had been packing everything we owned into boxes for a week and on the day of the move it took only an hour and a half to get everything out of our old place and into the new one. And it is Huge!

We are very happy to have a place that finally feels like a home for our family to be in. We've become used to having our family stuffed into a dorm room sized place, but now even as we have all our stuff spread out in boxes on the floor we still feel like we have tons of room to move around.

Lisa and Claire have been making good use of our little slab of cement that serves as a patio in our back yard. It is completely filled with chalk drawings. Here are a few pictures of the kids enjoying the new family room.

Todd and Claire are growing and learning new things. Today Claire lead us in a dance party on the rug as we listened to InsideOut. 

Our doctor recommended that we take Todd to a specialist because of the asymmetry of his skull and because he was worried about a trend in Todds growth. He started out pretty average for height and head circumference and a little skinny. Over the next few weeks he went to nearly off the charts for head circumference, 85th percentile for height and 25th percentile for weight. He's our little lollipop. 

The specialist ended up measuring Todd's head and didn't see any problems with the trend, except that maybe someone had measured incorrectly, making the trend look worse. She then measured everybody in the family to compare. Claire's head is almost as large as Lisa's already! We've heard that your head reaches full size early, but it was a surprise to see just how close Claire is already.

We are going to have Todd scanned to make sure that his skull still has room to grow and to see if we need to give him a helmet to straighten him out.