I never knew how crazy life with 3 kids is! Reed is almost 3 months old, and I can't say that we have adjusted all the way yet. Just when I think that the girls are behaving normal again, one of them will do something that is totally crazy like, hit the baby, or have some major uncontrollable tantrum and I know that we aren't out of the tunnel yet. Other than the occasional fit, I would say we are doing pretty well. Alyssa starts soccer again the last week in August, and then she has her birthday, and then she starts Kindergarten on Sept. 1st. She is excited, but I think she will be missed! (by more than just Cassie) I dont know what I think about her growing up! :( Anyway, Chris got switched to the day shift at work, so we are both so glad that he can have a normal life again! He works 4 on and 4 off, so now that he will be awake on his days off, we can go have some awesome family time. Reed, is just the cutest baby boy ever, he is so happy all the time, and he hardly cry's. I must be blessed with perfect babies, because all of our kids have been so easy as babies. And he is the chubbiest of our babies too :) He's getting rolls under his chin and his legs are pretty chubby too! So, here's some pics of what we've been up to lately. These are all in random order. But lets see, Cassie turned two, and we had a little birthday party for her, she got a bike :) We went as a family to Twin Falls to an awesome water fall and had a picnic a while ago, and it was really fun. We got to visit with some of our family we hadn't seen for over a year, and that was a blast! We have gone to the Water Park few times, and the girls love that. We have spent lots of time in Blackfoot, playing at the lake. We also blessed Reed the first week in August with our family in Utah. We did a double blessing with my brother's new baby they had! It turned out great, and we got to visit with them as well for a couple of days. We got to go camping with our friends and their family just last week, and it was awesome! Alyssa learned how to ride her bike with out her training wheels!!! The rest of our time is spent having lots of BBQ's and playing outside in the sprinkler. Summer is great!

R

e

I totally should not be writing on my blog, I have way to much stuff to do. But I just wanted to take a second and let everyone know that we had our baby boy and named him Reed Douglas Barker!! We had him on May 25th at 7:15 am. He was 7 pounds 8 ounces and 21 inches. He is adorable =) and everyone loves him SOOOO much! We are slowly adjusting to a life with 3 kids, it is definitely a big change but we are getting the hang of it. My house may not be the cleanest, and my dishes are never done lately but the kids are happy and thats all that matters to me at this point. So, since we haven't recovered our pictures that were on our computer, if you want to see a picture of him, you'll have to look at my facebook page. Anyway, we are so excited for summer! It's finally getting warmer outside, and we have a lot of fun things planned. I'll update more with pictures when our computer gets fixed all the way. (we had a virus) See ya later-

Time for an update

Okay, so this might get a little long. But I am excited to have some time to write a little about whats been happening in our awesome lives! My last post was forever ago, so forever ago that I don't even know what it was about, on my old blog. But, that's okay. I'm just going to start fresh. This week has been great. It started out lame, because the girls and I got food poisoning Monday night, and were sick all day Tuesday. But it was just a 24 hour thing, so we woke up Wednesday feeling great! After we cleaned up the house from a whole day of doing absolutely nothing we rented some movies and had fun watching them. We have been car searching for a while now, almost 2 months, but more seriously these last few weeks, and on Thursday we bought a new used car! Yeah! We got a nice Dodge Caravan, with low miles, and lots of room. It is actually pretty fun driving it around, and the best thing according to Alyssa, is that you can stand up in the van and walk around, so its So so so cool. I like it, because it is roomy, everything can fit, I don't have to bend over to buckle any kids in, and we can fit extra people now :-) No more having to take two cars, you can just hop in with us! Lately Alyssa has been singing so cute when she plays by herself. She constantly gets the Rapunzel song stuck in her head when she sings, "and then I'll brush and brush and brush and brush my hair" but that is the only part of the song she knows, and she'll sing it for at least 15 minutes. And what is cuter, is that she keeps on taking out my sheets from the linen cupboard and hangs them from her head to make super long hair, and then she'll hang it up on the top of her bunk bed and try and slide down like Rapunzel. Makes me laugh. Since we are talking about Alyssa, I would like to mention that we had a big talk today on the way home from returning our library books. It is usual that Alyssa asks a lot of questions, but recently after I answer her questions, she disagrees with me. For example, in the car today she said, "Mom, do Kaylee and Aftyn live over here?" I say, "yes they do" She says, "No they don't." And I am thinking to myself, why does she even care to ask, if she already knows, or think she knows, if shes just going to disagree with me anyway? It's been happening ALL the time, and I feel like I'm always arguing with her trying to get her to believe me, its ridiculous! So, we had a big talk in the car about telling the truth and lying. How I will never lie to her, and I will always tell her the truth, so she needs to stop "thinking she knows everything" (i didn't say it in those words) and just trust me when I answer her, because mommies don't lie to their kids. ect. We didn't have anymore conflicts the rest of today, so hopefully it sticks.
Some fun activities we have done the last month include visiting with some friends who live in Salt Lake. Hunter, Chris' friend from high school, and his wife Katie, and their two girls Keelia and Hadlee. They came up to visit us one weekend, and then we went down there to visit them another weekend. We had a blast with them both times, and it was really great to visit with them. And, Alyssa and Keelia are BFF's seriously. They get along so well, it was amazing to watch them play, and play and play and not fight ONCE! We spent conference weekend with my sisty and her hubsy in bountiful. Chris had to work all weekend, so the girls and I caught a ride down with my dad, and then we all visited together. It was fun, like a mini family reunion. Only Half the sibs were there, so that was a bummer, but still a good weekend.(Lindsey, Travis, Rachel, Chuck and Scotty were missing)
We signed Alyssa up for Kindergarten this Fall! I just can't believe she is ready for school, and old enough! Our whole life is going to change, I don't know how we will adjust, but hopefully we do! I know we will all miss her while she is gone, she is a big help, and everything seems to revolve around what she is doing. Maybe there will be less messes to clean up?? Probably not :-) But we are excited for her, and she is extremely excited for herself as well. Alyssa also started soccer this spring. She seems to have a natural knack for it, so that is exciting. I enjoy watching her play, the teams are so cute and young. Alyssa scores a lot though, and seems to always be right in the action. It seems like I talk a lot about Alyssa. Lets get a Cassidee update in here. Cassie is busting out of her little body with words. This girl has so much sass and attitude, she is taking right after her sister. She plays with Alyssa, and misses her terribly when she's gone at preschool. Cassie is in that fun stage where everything they do is just adorable and cute, and funny. We just love having her! Lately she has been giving everyone big hugs for no reason, just randomly she will say, "hugs!" and open her arms up, and wait for someone to give her a hug. She is a very picky eater, but slowly getting better. She went through a phase where everything she put in her mouth, she chewed it up, but never swallowed it. So she just spit it out all the time. (except for cheese, and hot dogs) She always does what i want her to do, as long as I tell Alyssa to do it first...make sense?? Cassie is competitive, and if I tell Alyssa to come here, or pick that up, Cassie will try and do it first. Half the time, it ends up fine, and the other half, they end up fighting. Cassie has seemed to overcome her addiction to eating crayons. Finally. She tries to ride the Trike, but still can't reach the pedals. She loves to be carried up the stairs in the laundry basket, on top of the laundry :-) Oh, and she is a great helper, loading the dishes, and the dryer, pretty much whatever I am doing, she helps me, and loves it. A couple of times this week, she woke up crying for a cookie, I guess we know what she dreams about! She LOVES her Daddy, and asks about him constantly. If Chris is home and he is sleeping, she always makes the shushing noise with her finger over her lips.
We were able to meet up with Gramps and Gramms on Monday and have lunch. Then we took the girls to a park to play. It was a lot of fun!
I have only 5 weeks left of this pregnancy, and am so looking forward to being done! Not just to not be huge anymore, but because we can't wait to have a boy in the family! We have his room all ready, and painted it green and blue with a white stripe in the middle. Got some used furniture from a family in our ward, and now we just have to get some more clothes, we don't have much, and TONS of diapers. We don't have any, and newborns just fly through diapers.
We are really hoping that Chris gets switched to the day shift once they hire this new guy. Night shift is fine, it just takes a while for him to adjust back to being awake in the day when he is home. So day shift would be better, and we would have more awake time with him! We'll keep our fingers crossed.
Alright, I can't think of anything else to ramble about, so I'll post some pictures.

Yep! She is potty trained! (jk! soon hopefully though!)

Cassie just being cute!

Keelia and Alyssa in Salt Lake playing dress up.

Getting ready to jump!

Stuck like glue =D

The big frog. I wonder how many pics we have of this play area, we come here a lot. But Cassie loves that frog!

Making funny faces!

Cassie, making her funny face, she just wasn't fast enough to get in the picture with the big girls.

Fun stuff, arent they just so cute!

Okay, so I swear I have a picture of me exactly like this. And if it's not of my then its of one of my sisters, and I just think its me since I've seen it so much. haha. But we put Alyssa back into pull-ups for the time being, and Cassie is so jealous, and wants to wear them too. So, she has a pull-up on top of her diaper.

And, she is posing for the camera! Diaper/Pull-up and Blankie with Boots combo!

Chris painting the baby room! yay!! We are so excited!!

Alyssa with her purple potatoes that Chris brought home from work a while ago. They were so fun! Crazy purple. We used them for our baked potato night, and they were amazing!

A new blog!

Welcome to our new blog! More posts to come :-)