Often I wonder why we have bedrooms.  Like last night.  Julie and I went to sleep about 11:00.  We had been in our room for a while and when we went to turn off the light, there was Soren, laying on the floor right outside our room.  Then, about 2:00 am I wake up because I’m almost falling off our bed.  This is a king-sized bed mind you, and I’m sleeping on about 6 inches.  Turns out that Logan and Eden had come in at some point and wedged themselves down between Julie and I.  I think there might have been a small warehouse in there and some garden tools and a set of encyclopedias too.  I’m not sure, I just know there was NO ROOM.  Of course they didn’t bother to wake us up and let us know they planned to move in.  So I knew nothing until I was virtually falling off the bed.  This happens often and each time I go through the same mental discussion:

“Should I put them back into their beds?  I could do that, but then they’d probably be right back here in an hour and I would be falling off the bed again.  Plus I’d probably expend so much energy carrying them back to their rooms that my body might decide to just slip into morning mode, and I’d never fall back asleep anyway.”

One of the most important lessons you learn as a parent is to pick your battles.  So last night I decided it wasn’t worth the effort and went downstairs to the guest room to sleep.  But it made me think.  What’s the point of having bedrooms, let alone beds?  If they’re not in our bed, half the time in the mornings we’ll find one or more of the kids out in the family room on the LoveSac, fast asleep.  Or on the floor.  Even on the stairs.  A couple of times, I’ve found Soren outside the bathroom door in the morning, like he’d had enough energy to make it to the toilet when awakened in the middle of the night, but getting back to his room after he relieved himself was just too darn hard.

I think we could have saved ourselves a ton of money if, when we built our house, we had just built Julie’s and my room, just like it is, but the rest of the upstairs we’d left a huge room with LoveSacs lining the floor.  The kids would still come into our room though.  Plus we’ve got two more who are stuck in their cribs still, unable to get out.  Once they’re in a bed and able to get out on their own – look out.  So better yet, maybe an amusement park.  We could have a little roller coaster and jungle gym up there.  The kids would be happy as could be.  The amusement park would be a lot more expensive and the calliope music and constant cotton candy smell would get kind of annoying – but I’ll bet the kids would play themselves into sheer exhaustion every night, so they’d just crash right there under the tilt-a-whirl unable to move until morning.  Hmm, I wonder if KSL Classifieds has any Merry-Go-Rounds for sale…

It finally happened!  263 nights after the twins were born, both of them slept through the night for the first time, with Roman waking up at about 6:00 am this morning.  It was the first time Julie and I have been able to both have a full-night’s sleep in almost 9 months.  So nice!!!

I think this is probably my favorite book ever. Actually all 4 books of the series are I guess. And I haven’t even read a page of them. Julie tried to read to me from one of them but I made her stop after “…Edward’s velvet voice…”. That kind of made me want throw up in my mouth a little bit. But nonetheless, this just may be my favorite book series ever. Why? Because Julie LOVES to snuggle when she’s reading these books. It’s strange because a friend warned me a year or so ago that if Julie ever read this series she would fall in love with Edward and compare me to him. So I was a bit nervous when she started reading these a month or so ago. But I have to say he was dead wrong and I’ve quite enjoyed this series. It’s lunchtime and Julie just called me to tell me she wished I was home because she’d been reading Breaking Dawn. What I’m bummed about is she also told me she finished it. No more books to read. So either Stephenie Meyer REALLY needs to start a daily serialized story on her website, or I’ve got to convince Julie that she really needs to go back and re-read them to catch the things she missed the first time around.

OK, so I have been absolutely slammed at work the last few weeks, working on a bunch of projects which include in no particular order:

• Sally Hansen Natural Beauty (a cosmetics company back east — woohoo!)
• GM
• Purina Mighty Dog
• American Airlines
• Microsoft Dynamics accounting software
• Liberty Fillmore, Cart Whisperer phases II AND III for VeriSign

I’m trying to get all that done so I can take a week and a half off starting Thursday when both Julie’s and my family have tons going on including Katie and Tagg getting married. So with all that, I haven’t had a chance to write but I do now as I sit on the train on the way to work. The new FrontRunner train is very nice. I can sit at a table, plug in my laptop and have wireless connectivity so I can work — or blog. So anyway, there’s a bunch of updates. The biggest is that we’re FINALLY getting our yard done!

The kids enjoying the tramp pit settling

The kids watching the basketball pad construction

Three weeks ago we got the trampoline pit completed. I laid a bed of gravel, leveled it out pretty well, then laid 128 cinder blocks in a ring 3 feet high and 13 feet wide. To get things settled I filled the pit with water and walked around on the blocks a bunch, to push the blocks and gravel into the nice muddy ground. The boys especially loved that part. We got all our concrete done 2 weeks ago – the back patio, side basketball court, and steps going down the east side of our house from the driveway to the back patio.

The new back patio

Last week the fence got started. All the posts are in and the concrete had to cure for about a week. But today they got started putting up the actual fence. We went to Julie’s Uncle Kimo’s house on Sunday and they had just redone their yard. They had done the Trex fence in exact same color and style as we’re doing so it was nice to see it “in vivo” so to speak instead of just in pictures. I LOVED it and can’t wait until ours is done. It should be done by tomorrow. Once that’s done, we’ll hydroseed! Then we have to stay off the yard for about 6 weeks, but it will be SO NICE to have that done.

Other random updates:

Logan must have been REALLY tired right after his bath a couple weeks ago. I snapped these pictures so you could see it from my point of view as I walked into the bathroom:

The twins are doing great. They’re both sitting up on their own, and rolling over a little bit. Roman LOVES to play with his feet:

And Maren LOVES to play with Roman:

And the other kids are having fun with summer break here. The other day, the boys decided to play prisoner with Eden, 2 laundry baskets and 3 soccer socks:

Grandma with the twins

I’m WAY late writing about the twins’ blessing so I apologize. Sunday, May 18th was a great day. The babies looked adorable in their little white outfits. Roman was a little fussy during his blessing which was kind of funny considering I think I mentioned something about him being such a happy little guy. And he normally is. But even though they had both eaten right before, Little Tank had to have some more I guess. (Actually, it’s kind of funny – if you look at the pictures, Roman is fussy and eating in about half of them – sometimes that kid never can get enough!) We had a bunch of family come and enjoy the day with us and that was great.

Gramps and the shotgun with Tagg

Perhaps the highlight of the “after-party”, though, was when Tagg got the shotgun treatment from my Dad. When I was setting up the table Sunday morning, I saw my shotgun in the closet where we keep the table leaves and thought how great it would have been for my Dad to have used it the day before when Tagg met my parents for the first time. My Dad decided he could still use it, however, so he kept it in their room awaiting the appropriate moment. Since Katie and Tagg had both slept at our house Saturday night, it was a great setup for the shotgun to be used, just to “remind” Tagg that he and Katie aren’t married YET. Megan had her boyfriend (and quasi-future-fiance?) Richard at the house and I’m not sure if she was amused or mortified, but everyone else enjoyed it, even Tagg.

Here are the rest of the blessing day photos.

Okay so I have never posted anything on this blog so we shall see if this works. I just wanted to wish my husband a very happy birthday. 33 years old today! Whoo! Hoo! Thanks for being a great father to six rambunctious kids and a wonderful friend to me. I hope you have a great day. And we are all looking forward to the annual 7 layer (?) chocolate cake from Costco. It is a must now for Derek. Happy Birthday Scucione!

I took a couple hours today and met Soren at the zoo. Of course winter never is going to end so it was FREEZING and rainy (but hey, I guess it wasn’t snowing at least), but we still had a good time. The animals were pretty active so the kids really liked that. Of course soren’s favorite part was watching the giraffes pee. WOW!!!

Last night Julie and all the kids met me at Costco in Bountiful on my way home from work. When we walked out of the frozen foods aisle, I looked across to the books section and was surprised to see President Uchtdorf and his wife, pushing a shopping cart. President Uchtdorf looked very casual in khaki pants and a black and white aloha shirt. He turned into the main aisle and started heading towards the front. It was kind of weird because no one was talking to him. It looked like he was able to shop in relative peace. Oh well, not anymore! I grabbed Peyton and Soren (Julie, Eden, and Logan were in a different aisle with their cart) and pushed our cart with the twins in it to chase him down from behind. I called “President!” and it took a little bit for him to turn around. Maybe, he’s still getting used to that title? But he turned around and was very friendly. He shook our hands and asked Peyton and Soren their names and how old they were. Meanwhile, his wife had gone around to the cart and was oohing and aahing over the twins. She called her husband over and they both played with the twins for a bit. He said they have twin grandsons who are 18 years old. It was kind of funny because while we were talking to him, this lady was walking by talking on her cell phone and got all flustered. “Oh my gosh, uhh, hi, uhh, umm, elder, no, umm, president…ooohh…” and he shook her hand and she walked off.

On the way home, Soren rode in the truck with me. He was in charge of the Family Home Evening lesson last night so I figured we better take advantage of the situation and we planned a little lesson about having prophets on the earth and how cool it was that we got to shake a prophet’s hand. For the lesson we pulled out the conference Ensign and the boys got excited when they saw him in there and could easily pick him out as the man they had met earlier. Peyton and Soren each shared how good they felt inside when they shook his hand and we talked about the spirit. It was a great experience. I’m kicking myself though. I just got this new phone that does EVERYTHING (PDA, Phone, GPS, camera, etc, etc). The phone I’ve had for a while doesn’t have a camera and I’m not in that mode at all. So I missed out on a great photo op. President Uchtdorf in an aloha shirt with Peyton and Soren – that would have been classic!

I’ve taken the next 2 days off from work so I can stay home while Julie goes to Women’s Conference down at BYU. She gets to go and enjoy a couple days listening to great speakers and hanging out with her mom and sisters. Well, actually only ONE day with her sisters because the other husbands were too afraid to spend 2 DAYS home alone taking care of their kids (c’mon, guys, MAN UP! ). So I’m here with the 6 kids. This will definitely be the longest I’ve ever been in charge of that many kids. Hopefully we’ll be able to do something fun in addition to just keeping my head above water. I wanted to take the kids over to the park later. But as I sit here looking out the window at the SWIRLING SNOW IN FREAKING MAY I guess that’s not going to be possible. Oh, when will it end??? I just have to remind myself that (supposedly) summer really is coming and McCann announced their quasi-annual 4 free Fridays yesterday. Apparently most years they give you 4 additional Fridays that you can take off between Memorial Day and Labor Day that don’t count against your paid time off. Woohoo! That’ll be nice. I just hope it stops snowing in time for me to use them. Well, I’d write more, but Eden just started screaming, Roman just woke up, and I need to work on a book report with Soren . . . so more later!

So I missed blogging for the last couple weeks, but a bunch has happened.

Easter was fun. Saturday, we went to the South Jordan city easter egg hunt which was supposed to start at 10:00. Well, it actually started accidentally at 9:57 and was over by 9:58. Pretty crazy. After, we had the Sorensen breakfast of crepes, eggs, and sausage and it was all excellent. Sunday morning we did the usual easter egg and basket hunt. Soren won the search for the “Gross Brown Egg”, a yearly tradition where we make the last egg as gross looking as possible by dipping it repeatedly in every color. The kids got new clothes for Easter and all looked really nice.

We celebrated Soren’s birthday last weekend. HAPPY 6th BIRTHDAY, SOREN! His birthday is on April Fools Day but he wanted to have a sleepover with his cousins Friday night instead, so we did that and watched Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Man’s Chest. All of our kids were OUT before the movie ended at midnight but Nate and Jentz were wide-awake and hyper. So I put on Star Wars but evidently it’s been scratched up quite a bit. So eventually I turned it off and Nate and Jentz reluctantly went to sleep. In the morning I made waffles with berries and cream on them per Soren’s request. One of Soren’s gifts was a digital camera from Grammy and Gramps. It’s better than mine! And he loves it and is taking all sorts of pictures. It is nice that he is so into it because he gets lots of pictures of things that Julie and I don’t even think of photographing. I haven’t yet shown him how to download his pics to the computer so we can put them on Flickr, so there’s none of his photos to show yet.

The twins are both starting to sleep better at night which has been SOOOO NICE. Maren actually sleeps consistently 10 and even 12 HOURS a night. Crazy! Roman, however, is obviously starving (as you can see from this photo) and needs to still eat at least once or twice during the night. But overall, MUCH BETTER!

And finally, CONGRATS TO KATIE AND TAGG!!! It’s finally OFFICIAL, even though we’ve all known this was happening for a couple weeks. Well, really, I talked to Tagg about this over a month ago when I informed him that I’d made a bet with Katie regarding how quickly they would be engaged. I’m glad it’s official now and we all look forward to having Tagg in the family. He’s a great guy. Here’s a photo of him with Logan.