Family Portraits 2010 & some NEWS

These are my favorite 5 family photos, taken by my Aunt Marilyn. She's such a talented photographer. My favorite photos she took of each of my kids are on my sidebar.

After church, we went to a freightyard where animal feed is loaded onto train cars. I really like this URBAN look! We have a similar freightyard in Central Point, where fertilizer is loaded onto trains!

This cute shot includes our daughter, Diana Marta Gomez-Revilla Mancilla. Mancilla is her mom's maiden name, so when Diana marries, she'll add a new last name and drop Mancilla. She's been with us for a few months and will leave us in 2. We'll miss her terribly!

I prefer the b&w one of this picture, since Ben's white socks stand out SOOO much, in the color version! I'll post some pics of Josh's LACK of socks LATER. My boys have a fashion sense all their own. Just so you know, I helped them both PACK dark socks for the trip!

At the end of the shoot, Ben was really in a bad mood, so he's cranky here, but I still like the picture! If you've read this far, you will now know the NEWS:

I will be getting released as YW President next week because today Damian was called as the Bishop of our ward. If you look at my kids ages, you'll see that they'll all be in their teen years while their Daddy is Bishop, pretty much! That should help discourage them from any morality/substance problems, don't you think?

All about Emma

I've written about Emma a lot lately! She's worth a million posts, at least! She's adorable. It's hard to look at that grown-up young woman and remember her as a new baby!

Today, she was being sassy in the car on the way to school (we drive a few of her friends and having them really brings out her sassy side!) We were arguing "nicely" about how she "owes" me more respect because of all the things I've done for her. She figured after 9 months of kindness (because of her 9 months in vitro), that was enough. I frankly brought up feeding her from my breast for 1 year, every 2 hours and then wiping her poopy bottom for 4 years. That pretty much stopped the argument! Mostly because she and her friends were so grossed out they just wanted to turn the stereo up. Oh, and her friends were agreeing with me. It was fun. What else have I done for her that I can I bring up tomorrow and embarrass her with?

We went to Idaho to visit my grandparents two weeks ago. My grandparents live with Marilyn, my youngest aunt (she's only 9 years older than me.) Marilyn has 6 kids that my kids ADORE! We haven't seen them for about 4 years, since Emma was 9. Marilyn's teen boys, Spencer (17) and Benson (15) knew we were bringing our 16 year old foreign exhange student, Diana, on our visit. When Benson saw Emma, he didn't recognize her and he whispered to his mom, "Wow, Diana is really BEAUTIFUL!" Then, Marilyn informed him that he was looking at his cousin, Emma!

Emma had SOOO much fun with her boy cousins. They were so good to her. They invited her to a stake youth service project, parties with their friends, their Sunday School class and spent the whole weekend we were in Idaho with Emma. She met all their friends, fell in love with a few and hopes to visit them again ASAP.

I was proud of Emma, she stepped up to the plate and treated her younger cousins just as good as her older cousins have always treated her. This is Emma with cousin, Annie Richardson and Katrina.

Emma flirted with her little cousin Alan, who is the same age as Katrina. He tried not to die of embarrassment with all her attention!

Emma has always idolized Jessica, Marilyn's oldest. Jess is competing in the Miss Idaho pageant next month and she's beautiful inside and out. She's the sweetest girl I've ever met. She spent a lot of time loving Emma, too. I'm grateful for the people that love Emma and help her feel special and important. She needs as much of that as possible, right now!

Ben's 6th Birthday!

Ben really wanted to go to the "Family Fun Center" for his 6th Bday. It's sort of like Chuck-E-Cheese, without the scary, dirty looking rat character and the creepy auto matron figures "dancing" while you eat. Oh, also . . . our "Family" Fun Center is mostly full of juvenile delinquents and interesting middle-age, tatooed people on the Dance Dance Revolution Game. So I'm not sure which venue is better. But the kids LOVE it there and Ben had a great party.

I love that kids can entertain themselves here and I can sit and do church work on my blackberry, while I watch the door to make sure no scary-mini adults try to kidnap the kids. For a mere $1o per child, the kids were fed, entertained and won prizes, while I texted the YW.

I'm such a sucker for this kid! I love his cute face. He gives me this look when I'm trying to discipline him. . . and while stroking my cheek and saying in a patronizing voice, "Shhh Mommy, it's OK. Just relax, it's going to be OK."

We ate pizza, drank soda, played token games, collected prizes, played in the jungle gym structure, ate cake/ice cream, opened presents and had a BLAST!

Ben and I went earlier in the day to buy a cake for the party. I used to spend hours making fancy cakes, but for $8 we got a COOL motorcross cake and I had a lot more time to create exciting party bags for Ben's friends!

This year, the twins mom asked Ben what she should buy him. He said, "An ipod!" She laughed and laughed. I explained to him later that when people ask him what he'd like, as a gift, he's supposed to say something SMALLER. He looked at me like I was stupid and said, "THERE IS NOTHING SMALLER THAN AN iPOD!" I then explained, "Well, by smaller I mean, something CHEAPER!" Again, the stupid look, "Mom, How am I supposed to know how much things cost? I'm a kid!"

I'm pretty sure this was Ben's first big party with his buddies and he was so thrilled about all the presents (and never complained once about a lack of an ipod gift!) His friends were generous and he's been having a great time with all his LOOT! I didn't even buy him a gift this year and he hasn't seemed to notice. He's just a happy kid that enjoys whatever he's got (except, he still wants that ipod!) Thanks to all the fun boys that came to his party and made it a success!

Emma's Party @ the Coast

My Goodness! There are so many candles on her cake! She recieved ALL the Twilight Stuff I could get my hands on: Books, DVD's, Graphic Novels, Journals, Candies, etc. She proceded to read the first 3 books in the following week!

We experienced a lot of rain on this trip, so everyone played lots of games, watched movies and ran outside, as soon as there was a break in the clouds!

More games, More fun! This game is coming to an end, see the sun shining through?

Family Scripture Study before bed. . .

After the 13th birthday party, Emma and Lainey snuggled up and slept in as long as a house full of babies would let them (about 6:30am!)

Spring Break @ the OR Coast

We 24 Idiarts (Nadaulds) spent a long Spring Break weekend in March, at the beach. It was so much fun to all be together and Grandma and Grandpa came over from their mission to stay, too!
This is my cute family and although Emma is a 1/2 in. taller than me, she's standing on her tippy-toes in this picture! She's 13, Josh is 11, Rachel is 9, Katrina is 7 and Ben is ALMOST 6.
This is an even cuter picture and includes our foreign exhange student, Diana Marta Gomez-Revilla Mancilla and Emma's Buddy, Lainey. So we had a total of 26 people crammed in our rental house. We really did have a fun time!
Best Buddies: Josh and Ash Idiart.

Beach Beauty: Em Idiart on her 13th Birthday, soaking in the rays.

Josh was smart enough to borrow a wet suit for himself and went out in the FREEZING Oregon Surf.

Rachel is so adorable without her braces, isn't she?

Katrina is every little cousin's favorite friend. She's here with Lucienne.

These are ALL the grandsons: Ash, Ben, Josh, Noah & Marcus.

Here are the cute Grandgirls: Rachel, Elise, Katrina, Annie, Mary, Eliza & Luci. (Not Pictured: Emma)

CP2 Volleyball

This year, our Ward Volleyball Team split into two teams, with 5 coaches and 1 cheerleader (ME!) We had 20 girls that played and 6 of those were non-LDS friends! We are missing a lot of our girls in the Team Pic, but you can see Emma on the front left and Diana, my exchange student, on the back, 4th from right.

I really tried hard to take some pictures, but this was the only one that sort of turned out. Emma is on the left, she's a goof!

This was the picture I put on the front of the girls shirts. . . on the back, they each had a TOUGH name that I tried to yell out at them, during the game. I was pretty much the only person there at all the games, yelling my head off. I think I scared people. Here are the girls names, if you want to see how crazy I am:

Explosive Emma
Death by Diana
Jess the Jawbreaker
Sophie Spiker
Rowdy Rylee
Sam LaSlam
Hot Lava Lainey
Shandi VonSlayer
Krista the Killer
Mighty Michelle
Breanna LaBoom
Demolition Desta
Ginny VonGutsy
Alden Annihilator
Dana McDamage
Lil'Bruiser Brie
Maple Mayhem
Kati Kneivel
Aven Assault