It is Official

Our house is up for sale!














So.......Anyone interested?!? :)

Chocolate Yumminess

Where are the words to describe this cake?

Yumminess. Decadent. Divine.

Perfection!

We made this cake together. The center is homemade-from-scratch-no-kidding-honest-to-goodness-yumminess chocolate mousse. That we made ourselves. With no help. All by ourselves. (OK, so we watched a youtube clip showing us how, but we did it!) The frosting is the essence of perfection. It is the BEST chocolate frosting ever. And this is coming from people who don't like frosting, but this is no mere frosting. In fact, we should probably just call it "whipped essence of angels." In fact, that is what we will call it. So, our Whipped Essence of Angels Mousse cake is the greatest thing ever.

Too bad all of you only get to see a picture of it and didn't get to eat any!

He wasn't crying

I had the following conversation a couple of days ago.



Me: Matthew, why is Ethan crying?

Matthew: ..........

Me: Matthew, why is Ethan crying?

Matthew: .........................Well......................... I was standing on the counter...

.....and when I got off I slipped and fell...............and I was crying...............

Me: ???

Matthew:...............................So I punched him in the face.

Me: WHAT?!?!

Matthew: He wasn't crying!



Apparently Ethan wasn't showing enough sympathy, so Matthew decided to give him something to cry about.

Drum Roll, Please...

We have an announcement...




(Are you ready for it?)





(Make sure you are sitting down)





(Don't pass out now)





(OK, here is our big news)

WE'RE UPDATING OUR BLOG!

(cool, huh?)

(oh, and we had a baby)

That's right, we now have five kids! Introducing Benjamin Jay Johnson, (or as Ethan calls him, "Ben-men"). The following is an actual conversation we have with almost everyone whenever we are out with just Benjamin:

Stranger: "Oh, how cute! Is this your first?"

Us: "Actually, he's our fifth."

Stranger (looking like they've just seen an alien): "Whoa!"

At that point they stop talking to us because they are obviously not used to talking to crazy people. So, they just kind of go away.

But we are so excited to have Benjamin in our family! We love him (and we even had him on purpose!). Sherrie is recovering nicely from her fifth C-section, and the older kids adore him.

Benjamin Jay Johnson
April 24th, 2009
9:59 am
8 lbs 7.5 oz
19 inches short

And he's way cute!

So you know how people are always asking, "Is that a boy or a girl?" Well, we came up with an innovative way of making sure everyone knew our baby was a boy. We dyed his entire body blue!

Actually, Benjamin was pretty jaundiced when he came home from the hospital. A week after he was born his bilirubin (which is a cool word) levels had gotten pretty high and he had lost about 13% of his birth weight, so the doctor insisted that we check him into the hospital. They took our then very yellow baby (which is one of those colors that could be for a boy or a girl) and put him under blue lights (very masculine) and he came out pink (which is not masculine at all!).

He does look awesome with those sunglasses velcroed to his face, though!



So there you have it! We updated our blog, and it even had some no-kidding news in it!

The 100th day of school

Yesterday was the 100th day of school, known to us only because Jayden came home with a paper crown on his head that read "Happy 100th Day of School."

We hope you enjoy the answers he gave to the questions that were given during the "100th Day Olympics!"

The Candy-Dispensing Toilet

We have been potty training Ethan for the past couple of weeks. By that, of course, we mean we tried a couple of weeks ago, he did pretty good for a couple of days, and then suddenly decided he wanted nothing to do with the potty. In fact, the mere mention of the "p" word would be answered with a resounding, "NO WAAAAAANT!!!!" (Picture a mouth opened very wide while screaming inches from your face.) So, we decided to not push the issue at all. One thing we've learned with potty training, you cannot force it. It's on their time or not at all.

So recently we decided to give it another go. We decided the time was right. Well, actually, we totally ran out of pull-ups. That realization was a horrifying moment; we pictured our house flooded in urine, because that was how it had been for a couple of days during the "NO WAAAAAANT!!!!" period. Lots of pee. Lots of cleaning. Lots of soaked Transformers and Superheros (not even cool underwear was free of his urinating wrath).

When we realized that we were without pull-ups, we had no choice but to clad his loins in Superheros (hoping they would intervene with their super powers, of course). Four soaked-Superheros later Sherrie had the stroke of genius--inspiration really--to offer him candy simply to sit on the potty (not much, but enough to peak his interest). We normally would not condone giving candy without first producing, well, pee, but we were desperate. And Ethan loved it! He caught on very quickly that sitting on the potty equals candy-dispenser (eww!!! our toilet is a candy-dispenser!), which he loved.

The second time we bribed him to the candy-dispensing toilet, a miracle happened: Ethan peed while on the candy-dispenser (er, toilet)! Of course, we made a big fuss and gave him a big piece of candy. He was so proud of himself! Since then he's had a couple of accidents (we're still working on the poop, which is so much grosser than cleaning pee, but doesn't leave his underwear and get all over the couch, floor, chairs, his bed, or everything else--thank goodness, by the way, for our Bissel Green Machine!), but he has been really good about using the candy-dispenser toilet to go pee.

Now, rather than us saying, "Ethan, do you want to go potty?" and being answered with the "NO WAAAAAANT!!!!" he tells us without any prompting, "Need potty!" Those might possibly be the two greatest words ever uttered! Of course, Jay was so happy to hear them approximately 312 times within 10 minutes, all for the sake of getting more candy from the candy-dispenser. But on the 313th time, GOLDEN (literally, you know, yellow pee and all).

So, we are very excited!

About a month late

We carved pumpkins last month and our kids thought it was pretty great. They loved their pumpkins and we had a lot of fun. Although we learned that Ethan doesn't want to help anyone, he wants to do it all by himself like everyone else. We'll be better prepared next year.




The finished products. The artwork of Mikayla, Jayden and Matthew.

Jay and I worked on this one. FYI, not such an easy thing to be carving at the same time on the same pumpkin.


I know this is way late, but I am trying to get out of being tagged, and it was agreed upon that updating the blog would suffice, so here you go Brandi! :)

We will be blogging about our great trip to Texas, so you can get super excited about that one. Except those of you that have already heard about our trip, I suppose you can just look at the cool pics that we'll post with it. Too bad we didn't take more!