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!!!

I had to take a picture of my most recent fillup of the Suburban. This actually wasn’t the final tally either. The pump caps your purchase at 100 bucks. So after that I reset it and put in another 10 bucks before the tank was filled. OUCH. 

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!

After months of going back and forth over who I’m going to vote for in the presidential election this fall, I think I’ve finally made up my mind. I’m voting for Peyton. Who cares if he’s TECHNICALLY not old enough? Who cares if he hasn’t even finished 2nd grade? He has a GREAT platform that I’d like to share with everyone. Apparently this was a writing assignment where they practiced brainstorming ideas and then turning those ideas into a paper. So I’ve posted the rough draft and final versions below. I was just going to post the final version, but his rough draft has some pretty classic tidbits in it. So here they are:

Rough Draft

Final Version

So that does it for me. Any president who would make a store called Get Coins and ensure that ALL robbers are caught has got to be good. Heck, at least as good as any of the current choices. So forget that whole “35 years old” rule!

Vote Peyt in ’08!

We had an award show at work to highlight the best work done by the agency over the last year. The award they give out is a salt shaker on a glass base and is called a Salty. Apparently this title is simply because we are the Salt Lake agency of McCann Worldgroup, therefore Salty’s. The salt shakers are completely random, ranging from the Pillsbury Dough Boy, to a mermaid, to a cow, to this gold prospector. My trophy above is for the Cart Whisperer website. From a programming perspective, this one was fun because it was completely my baby. Much of agency website programming is done as a team, and that’s great, but it’s fun to have a project now and then that is completely your own, from architecture on through completion, especially when the project has a bunch of fun functionality like this one did, with the photos, movies, poems, and wallpapers. The whole campaign consisted of many different aspects, of which the website was just one part, and as a whole, the campaign took home a bunch of awards for one thing or another and was nominated for quite a few that it didn’t win. Additionally, various parts of the campaign are being considered for national marketing association awards of different types. It was definitely a fun project to be a part of and ended up being a VERY successful viral marketing campaign, perhaps McCann SLC’s best ever. We wanted to follow it up, keep Liberty’s momentum (and carts) rolling, with commercials, a blog, etc, etc, but VeriSign doesn’t have it in their marketing budget. So if you don’t know who Liberty Fillmore is yet, GIT ON OVER TO THE SITE!!!

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.

Julie and I decided to be brave and take all 6 kids to Costco on Saturday. They have those nice big carts, so I put both twins car seats on the back of one cart. Julie had another cart with Logan and Eden in it and we headed in the store. Soren has this “thing” where everytime you get to the very back of a Costco, he has to pee. Of course he can never tell us on the way in, it has to be at the back. Well he didn’t fail us this time, either, so I took my cart with Peyton and Soren back to the front of the store to use the bathroom.

I was waiting outside the door for the boys to get done when an older gentleman walked up and, upon seeing the twins, came over and oohed and aahed over them. Then he said, “we have a set of twin grandkids back east born a couple years ago.” That was cool, but then he started telling me his daughter’s whole history of trying to get pregnant, not being able to, having IVF with 8 eggs and a couple of failed attempts and then finally 2 eggs took so she had the twins, then a third egg took and so now she has 3 kids. Quite a story but more than I really wanted to know. He asked if ours were natural or a fertility treatment result and I said, “oh they’re natural, no fertility treatments needed by us for sure”. Well, finally he went into the bathroom. Soren and Peyton then came out so I told them to watch the babies while I went. There were 3 urinals and the older man I was talking to a minute earlier was at the middle one, so I pulled in at one next to him and started doing my business.

Urinal conversations are always weird.

“Yeah”, he said, “if those earlier eggs had taken, my daughter would have had 6 kids under 8 years old. Can you imagine that? ha ha ha…”.

“Umm, actually I can imagine that” I replied. “That’s what we have”

His eyes got big and he started a “whoa” when the air was punctuated by a drawled exclamation from the other end of the bathroom in a toilet stall. “WOW! 6 under 8! I’m impressed.”

It was about all I could do to not laugh. Who jumps in to a conversation with people they can’t even see and don’t know, while seated on a toilet??? Apparently, the unseen cowboy in the toilet stall had no qualms about doing it.

So me and my 2 new friends, one unseen, the other just met, had a little conversation there in the bathroom about how crazy life with 6 kids under 8 is. After I washed my hands, I left. I never did see my toilet stall friend. I wonder how he’s doing?

I found this cool game today that tests your knowledge of European geography. Can you beat my score? Comment with your score.