Mary Sunshine turns 4!

These are some of my cute Nieces and Nephews: Mary Nadauld, Marcus and Annie Idiart and Noah Nadauld at Mary's 4th BDay party, on the day her uncle Damian was called to be Bishop of her ward. My nephew Ashton said, "Uncle Damian, what is the POINT of you being our Bishop? Our other Bishop was still good!" It made me laugh. Ben's card to Mary also made me laugh:

Translation: Ben. Mary. I hope you have a nice Birthday. Love, Ben

Pretty fun day! I love my sweet niece Mary. It is a joy to live next door to her. My kids love playing with her everyday and I enjoy the banter she has with Damian. Last night at dinner she snuck over. She had already eaten, but sat and talked with us. I asked her why she used to hardly ever come over and she said, "I used to be scared of Uncle Damian, but now I'm not even afraid of him anymore!" Too cute. We were enjoying her company until her dad found where she'd snuck off to and made her go home.

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!)