Tonight's activities.

lilly and I just decided to wonder out on our own tonight. I heard about this truck or treat thing the town put on so we decided to go. WE had no idea how huge it was. there were tons of people there. The shuttled us to the spot it was at. This local park was just crazy. bounce houses, booths of vendors, food, candy, you just name it. We decided it will be a good tradition for the day before halloween. the line got so long we didn't even go thru to see the decorate trunks of the cars. We took a couple pictures from the side. A couple of them were nice and handed lilly candy even thoguth she didn't wait in line. It was an hour long line. I didn't even know that many people lived in queen creek. lol.

a few of my favorites

We went to the local farm for their festival. This thing was very family friendly. They had all kinds of cute fall things to do. We pedal a family cart thru a spooky forest, Picked a pumpkin in a patch, did all kinds of rides, petting zoo, and brought home a homemade pie. yummy.

my helper..

Mirya did you notice her outfit. I love it! thank you again.

more halloween videos

Lilly keyes pumpkin

Lilly gave me a pumpkin today. She has been practicing suprising people. lol She says close your eyes and sometimes she will say hold out your hands. Don't know where she learned that one from ...haha.

lilly singing

more pics

WE are getting ready to head out to the pumpkin and chili thing at the fall festival place here in town. I thought i might take some pics tere too but i had to get all the random ones off my camera first so here is a sample the rest are on our photsite. the link is a few posts down.

He is outta here..

Yep toby is gone. I can't do it. We were excited about him and now we are going to give him away too. He will not stop pooping and peeing everywhere. I hate that worse than shedding. I got an older dog so that he would be housebroken. I would say a normal day he goes one out every 4 times outside. THis dog is not housebroken and he is old enough to be set in his ways. Allan has had enough and so have I. he is realy sweet with the girls and pretty cute but i don't have the patience to be cleaning up dog poop all over the house and if i'm going to it will be because we got an adorable little puppy. Getting an older dog sounded in theory like the right idea but it is not working out at all. He runs and hides under the bed like a cat at any loud noise. We think he was pretty abused where ever he was. We never did get the shot records. And he keeps allan up barking all day if me and the kids leave. I mean he will bark for hours and the other day he tunnneled out of our back yard. So after all of this... HE IS OUTTA HERE!!! We will try again. We do want to have a dog but this is not the one for us afater all. I'm pretty sure won't ever go with anything but a puppy again though. Maybe christmas time we could have a puppy in a present under the tree. lol. who knows but it won't be this dog. Good bye toby 2 there is only room for one toby in our extended family.

zoo pics

First Trip to the Zoo..

Yes today we finally made it to the zoo. We have been talking about going since we got here. Emma, Lilly, and I met up with Jennifer( emma's mom) and we all went today. It was fun. I always feel a little bad when it's me, emma, and jenn because i find myself naturally correcting emma even if her mom is already correcting her. I guess i shouldn't really feel bad about it. It just comes naturally to do this and i would do it with lilly so i do it with emma. Of course i don't need to when her mom is there but I guess i get use to doing it when it's just me and emma so it rolls over even when her own mother is there. lol.. sorry jenn.
Anyway we did have a good trip. It was a very kid freindly zoo i thought. Lilly didn't do so bad either. She had to do anything and everything that emma did though. She copycats emma all day long. Emma is very tolerant as long as it doesn't hold her back too much. Both kids got plain tuckered out and fell asleep on the way home but i think that says that it was a good zoo trip. :-)you can check out our pictures here..
http://allanandsarah7.shutterfly.com/
just copy that link and put it into your browser. Should come up fine.

okay jenn this is for you..

Jenn wrote on her blog about what her day is really like and challenged all of us to do it also with out sugar coating it. Here is my normal day
I wake up generally around 8ish but sometimes i try to sleep in because i can't sleep at all most nights lately. If i do sleep in i mean to around 9. It's never later than that. Lilly won't allow me to sleep in any later than whatever time she decides is good to get up. Lilly and I head downstairs so that allan can finish sleeping during the day because half the time he is on night shifts which i hate but really hopefully it won't be forever. Which i try to remind myself when i see him still sleeping there and I'm taking lilly downstairs wondering how i'm goign to keep a two year old quite all day. We take toby out to pee which he hasn't been waiting for us to get to the door lately and peeing on the floor. So first thing I'm cleaning up dog pee. Lovely huh? I'm also cussing the lady in my head that sold me this dog because she swore he had never had one accident in the house and now i'm wondering if that is why she sold him to us because he wouldn't stop peeing in the house. HE is a really good gentel dog other than he pees where he shouldn't which is a bit of a problem because he is not a puppy and that's why we got an older dog. Anyway back to my day.. i dig something for lilly to eat for breakfast. Most days she would like a bagel with cream cheese. Yes my two year old would rather have a bagel with cream cheese than a donut. Doesn't even matter if it's a sprinkled with candy donut. Weird huh? other days we have cereal or fruit. If allan is home we either make a real breakfast or go out to breakfast at the local spot we found. I usually check the messages i have on my phone because for some reason it is always blinking when i wake up. This morning i saw that i had an order delivery from schwans confirmation. Yes apparently I had ordered 80 dollars worth of schwans food in the night and it was being delivered to Liz and Nolan's old address in casper wy. Fantastic since i did not order any of it. So i tried to log in and cancel. I then sent the people who live in that house and email about it and they said they had ordered a bunch yesterday but weren't sure why i had gotten an email about it all. Funny story. So apparently everytime they order i'm goign to get to see all the yummy things they order. Well until they tell the guy they are not me. So yes the first hour or two is spent doing random chores and keeping lilly quite with cartoons or playing. Then we fight to get clothes on the girl because lilly would be perfectly fine with leaving her hair unbrushed in her eyes and wearing her pj's all day or going naked. So I try to catch her or wrestle her down and throw an outfit on her. Then we usually head out of the house because she can only stay quite for so long. Sometimes we walk to the park or go on a bike ride. The other night we went at dark and i am now covered in bug bites. I'm serious i have about 20 horribly itchy bites from the knees down on my legs. Even one between my big toe.( this is what kept me up last night) i put all kinds of bugbite treatment on them and nothing kept me from waking myself up scratching. Horrible!!! Anyway, We do the park or go visit friends or run errands like grocery store, mail, bank, bills, etc till around 5ish and come home in time to see allan off for work if we are lucky. Then we hang out for a while and color or watch tv. Make dinner of some sort which usually is something very easy because there is only two of us. Sandwiches, frozen pizza, burritos, soup, top ramen, all the easy things. Then we head upstairs for bath time. Sometimes i just give lilly a bath and sometimes she comes in my big bath tub with me and we havea big huge bubbly mess which makes her really happy and defeats any chances of me getting relax time. We take the dog out to potty again if we can get him to go. Then we head upstairs and she usually starts out in her bed with toby sleeping with her and a movie on. But she will wait till she hears me come back up from playing on the computer or blogging or watching tv then she runs into my room. Sometimes i put her back in her bed but if allan isn't home i mostly honestly let her sleep with me. She doesn't even usually come in when allan is here but if it's just me i think we both just like sleeping together. I lock all the doors in the house including the bedroom door, check the gun( yes I do have a gun in the bedroom) and crawl in the bed. So that is my normal day. We of course have great days of going out and exploring the new places and fun date nights and fun outings with friends adn then there is always homework and church and other things that fill some days. But that's it in a nutshell.

manic mondays

It's not actually that manic around here. Today lilly emma and i went to our friends house in chandler. I was trying to keep them out of the house so that allan could sleep cause he is working nights. We stayed over there and had lunch and played most of the day. Kayley (emma's friend) came home with us tonight for a sleep over. They played really well and are now watching movies upstairs. Lilly is trying to hold out and fight sleep like a big girl too. I'm sitting outside in shorts and a t shirt and it's oct. I have to say it's pretty nice out now. I listened to emma and kayley in the car on the way home tonight. It was funny to hear kids talk their age. Their conversation went like this: emma- do you like blue? kayley- light blue emma-how about green? kayley- yeah emma- do you like horses? kayley- kinda Then they sang and dnaced the rest of the way home. In my mind i thought.. " wow what it would be like to be able to go back and be able to ask a friend what colors she liked and be instant friends" I'm lucky to have some good friends already here but it would be alot easier if you could just ask someone what their faorite colors were and then trust them forever. haha.
We plan on washing the cars tomorrow and taking kayley home sometime after that. I guess i'm starting some more classes on wed. That should be tons of fun. Not! Actually it's not that bad and i thought we could use the extra cash for the holidays coming up. Extra cash is never a bad thing. Allan is getting ready to finish his calss and he starts his next one on nov 3rd. He only has three more to go so he is getting them done. The guy has like a 99.3 % in precalculus right now. Just doesn't seem fair that he is so smart. haha. Anyway i'm going to go get lilly cause it looks like the big girls are asleep and she should be too. Good night.

another new church

Today we decided to go to church for the first time out here where we live. we had a paper that had all the local listings for church in it and I had seen one that i thought might be a match so we decided to go to mountain view family church. It is a non denominational church. We liked their worship service and the pastor gave a sermon on job and spiritual warfare. It was pretty good. they also have a charter school attached to them that goes up to 10th grade which we found interesting. It really isn't that far from us. emma went into a class and lilly went to the nursery. I asked emma what she learned about afterwards and she said " about faithfulness and how faith is believing in something even when you can't see it" good lesson. i asked lilly what she learned and she gave her standard answer of a shoulder shrug and a " idunnoknow" which is expected i guess. lol
We will probably go back. It looks like they are trying to build. they have three services at 8 10 and 1130. they have prayer meetings and groups too. They are also having a womens dinner for christmas. It sounds like they are big but t really wasn't a big church. Nothing is really big out where we live except the highschool. After church we came home and had lunch. i took the girls on a bike ride around the neighborhood. Lilly is getting really good on her tricylce. She can fly now with minimal accidents. After the bike ride the girls still wanted to go to the park so we loaded up the wagon and emma pulled lilly and a big bouncy ball down to the park and we played kickball and swang on the swings. It was alot of fun except there are always little brats at the park right before dark. yes i used the word brats. They were all dressed in black with black long hair and i could here them cussing and saying inappropraite things to each other about body parts. The girls didn't seem to notice cause i kept them a good distance away from the older kids. These weren't teens they were young. Makes me sad and mad all at once. Anyway I'm off to watch some tv and go to bed. good night everyone.

Morning activities at the keyes household

This morning we decided to go to the local pancake breakfast and see what our new town was up to. It was free fun. The kids had fun. They had some crafts to do out there and a firetruck and little toys at each booth to give away. here are some pictures of that.

date night

Tonight me and allan had date night. We have been on a budget of sorts but we still had enough to have a fun date and pay a sitter. yes we found a sitter out here. i'm really pretty pleased with her. she is 18 knows cpr just graduated and is awaiting going into the airforce. the girls really liked her too. she made tents with them and french braided lillys hair and painted emma's nails with her own polish that she brought. they were all playing upstairs wide awake when we got home. They were in their jammies but had on costumes over them. it was good to see them so happy playing.
allan and i had a cheap fun date. We went to fatburger which brought back memories of san diego fun times at the beach. then we went and watched the social network movie which is all about the creation of facebook. It was decent. Not an action movie which we normally go see. Our babysitter rides her bike over here. apparently it's a 3 minute ride she says cause i offered to take her home cause it was dark but she rode her bike home and we made more plans to have her come bak at the end of the month for a night out with anna and jeff to go to a haunted house. Anyway we have some other plans for the week and i'll try to get some pictures of the girls up doing the fun things in the week ahead.
good night!

I truly love this little girl named lilly. She brightens up my whole day. This morning she woke up and was excited to see " a sunny day" which I find cute every morning. She followed me to the bathroom and then much to my suprise clapped and told me what a "good girl" I was for doing my business in the toilet. Haha. And when she says " I love you too mama" in her cute litttle voice it melts my heart. I'm thankful for my beautiful little lady today.

Monday Monday..

It's monday. How is everyones monday going? Lilly and I are up already and we have a few things to get done today. We have to go turn in our apartment keys today and do a walk thru with them. We also have to call a storage place and check out prices. We still have a huge storage place but we only need a small one and we need it closer to our house. So we are going to scout some out and get some prices. I'm tired today but i'm going to try not to take any naps with lilly cause i took one yesterday and then i could not sleep again last night. I was up till 2am i think and now i'm back up at 7.
We are getting thru the week, allan is working days but at least he will be home at night. I like it better when he is home at night. On friday we are meeting up with jennifer to pick up emma for her fall break. Allan actually gets 4 days off during the time she will be here. That willbe good cause the last time she came he only got to see her for like 15 minutes cause he was working nights. She went home the day he got off. So we are planning on going to schnepps farm. It's downt he road from us and it was voted one of the top fall things to do in phoenix. They have a big pumpkin patch and apparently a huge corn maze and rides and a petting zoo. all kinds of stuff. We haven't been to check it out yet but we want to so we are going to when emma is here. Since we don't get her for halloween i think this is our way of doing something.
We may also go to the zoo with jennifer on a day that allan is trying to sleep. I have been trying to get to the zoo since we got here but our plans have fallen thru every time. So maybe this time i'll make it there. It's actually going to in the 80s i think next week so that should be a perfect time to go to the zoo. anyway I'm off to do some chores. Merry monday to you all. ! ;-)

some photos from today

Here are a few of the pictures that i have taken over the last few days. Lilly trying on bits of her costume, eating a corndog (which seems to be her favorite since lala introduced her to them), and we made a halloween tree and filled it with tootsie rolls in the bottom for her daycare. They were very happy to have it. They had a few decorations but we thought we could spiff up the place even more. We are still thinking about what to donate for the fall festival. They are doing different baskets for a silent auction. It's their only fund raising event. Lillys room got a "parents night out" basket theme. I guess things like movie tickets or restaraunt gift cards are needed. Oh and a picture of lilly enjoying my big bathtub. It seems to be her favorite thing to do is take a bath in mine. I can't say i blame her it's alittle like a swimming pool for her. haha. Plus it's the only time i give her bubblebath. Since emma can't handle any bubbles really I'm always worried that lilly may be that way too but I haven't had any problems with that yet but she gets very few bubble baths. Anyway hope you liked all the pictures i've been posting and sending out. ;-)

Our 4th anniversary

Yesterday was our 4th anniversary. It's ok if you didn't remember. Dont feel bad cause i didn't remember either till my sweet husbnad came home from working all night long with flowers. Yep he brought me flowers and a magazine and a card even thoguh he was exhasuted and wanting to go to bed. I think I got a good man. i didn't know why he had brought me flowers.. haha. He didn't care. I think he liked the fact that i was the one that forgot and not him. I'm usually very good about remembering these kind of things but i just haven't been myself lately. Oh well. Anyway Thank you allan for being the sweetest man I've ever met. I love you dearly for taking your time to care about me.

friends came over last week.

Our freinds came over last week. Lilly had a great time playing with the bigger girls and taking things away from the baby. For some reason she will not let the baby have anything. we had a good time with everyone. Daniel the one holding toby in the first picture decided to shave his head and allan let him use his shaver.. apparently toby our dog inspired him to cut his hair ... so yes he got a mohawk.. so what if it wasn't totally straight. haha. We had wonderful food too. I tried mirya and dougs buffalo chicken dip and man that stuff was delicious. Everyone said how good it was and there was not much left over at all. We also had little smokies, pink stuff, apple pie, stuffed pasta shells, brownies, cheese sticks. All kinds of good junk food for the sunday football games.

lilly's baby

lilly helping mommy in the kitchen with the fruit salad.

Lilly in the tent in the backyard with her friends.

She was very happy to get to help. This kid loves to clean and help do any chores. So does emma actually unless it's something that stinks to her then she gags.. lol. Yes she doesn't feel very fondly of lilly's diaper trash.

cuddle up on the couch..

Very long story behind this doll but to make it shorter. This doll cost me 34 dollars and it was on clearance. Yeah.. Llilly tricked me and she just loved this doll and had to have it and cired and cried when i tried to put it back. i read the red tag on the shelf that said10 bucks(which i thought was too much for yet another baby) Well i got to the line after shopping and i couldn't believe how much i was spending. my basket was not full i couldn't figure out where the money had gone. Well after i got home opened the doll for lilly i decided to look at the reciept yeah that baby had been marked down to 34 dollars. I looked at the box to see and sure enough there was a red tag on there that said 34 dollars too. i guess it had been in the wrong place on the shelf. Oh and it can say like 34 different things. All of which must cost a dollar each. ... So lesson learned when lilly throws things in the cart check them closely and don't let her fool me.

prayer request.

so i need to ask everyone to just pray for me over the next month or two. ive been going thru some hard things lately and i havent wanted to talk about them or stress about them but i could really use some extra prayers if you have any to spare. im going to be fine in the end im sure its just getting to the end of this long drawn out battle thats the hard part. im still not really ready to talk about whats going on so please dont post or call with a million qustions. i promise im finejust need some extra prayers and you can pray in anyway you feel lead cause god knows what each and everyone of us is going thru every moment of the day and im finding that comforting. thank you all for your support and prayers. ill post about it when i can.

Our doggie is settling in.

If you look at this top picture you can see that lilly has a bit of a bad habit. She has taken to pulling toby's tail. I think cause it is fluffy and easy to catch. Anyway he doesn't seem to mind because he never nips or even barks at her or well he doesn't really seem to mind at all because he doesn't act like he is in distress over it at all. Lilly likes for toby to sleep with her now. She will climb into her bed and say "doggie sleep with me" so i put him in her bed. The first night hejumped down and followed me out of the room.He follows me everywhere. But i put him back up there two or three times then he stayed. Last night I put him up there and he went straight to her and cuddled up to her side and yawned a doggie yawn. lol. So anyway it seem that he likes cuddling with her and knows that is where he is suppose to be. Lilly was asleep on the couch and toby had been upstairs with me cause i was afraid he would wake her up. Well i went to look for him and i found him curled up with her on the couch. SHe is fast asleep in the picture but still has a tight grip on her balloon. haha it was too cute so i thought i would share it. Whenever she is laying down he will come cuddle or sit right by her. Vicious little protector guard dog. HAHA.