Christmas Day

Christmas was a lot of fun this year as the kids get older and understand things more. Kairingtin was the first up so I got her feed and ready until Reighlyn woke up around 7:30 then she waited as patiently as she could for Keegan to wake up. They were biting at the bit waiting for dad to go down and see if Santa came. After opening their presents from Santa, Kairington went to sleep and mom made breakfast while they played with their Santa toys. Then after breakfast was done and cleaned up we opened the other gifts one by one. It actually worked pretty good and it made Christmas morning last a lot longer. I don't think we finished opening presents until 10:30. Then I made nachos while Mike got everyone ready to go and get things cleaned up. We headed over to the Gleisbergs around 12:30 so we could have some lunch/snacks with them while we waited for Garth to call. We thought he was calling around 1 or 2 but didn't end up calling until 3. Once he called and gave us the number, we had to call him back, it took a couple of tries since he is in a village in Africa, then we had to connect to my dad and sister, Melia in Iowa. Then we had to call Tasha on a cell and had her conference in and have Thayne via text. There was a bad snow storm in Iowa and everyone was snowed in, so not everyone could make it to my dad's, so we got creative to get everyone together to talk to Garth. It was a good talk and we are all looking forward to him coming home in a couple of months! Then we cleaned up the toys that all the kids got out while we were on the phone and headed home. Mike and the kids played Gator Golf, a new game they got for Christmas, while I feed Kairington and got dinner made, then we ate and the kids were in bed by 6:30. They were very tired...it had been a long day and once again Keegan didn't get a nap so they were ready. Then Mike, Kairington, and I sat down to watch a movie and we were all asleep on the couch by 8:30 so we finally headed up to bed at 9:30. I guess we were all tired from a fun Christmas day.
Today we are just going to chill as a family since yesterday was a lot busier than we thought. So we are going to play games together that we got for Christmas, go build a snowman, watch movies, etc. I will post pictures later of the snowman we build.




Reiglyn and her new doll

Keegan's new train....his favorite toy

This is how excited Keegan was about his new train

Reighlyn & Keegan opening the present together

Dad being silly... walking around with Reighlyn's new tent on his head

Reighlyn & Keegan playing in her new tent

Reighlyn & Keegan sporting their new slippers from Santa

Christmas morning before the kids got up... gifts from Santa

Christmas morning with the Christmas lights on

Christmas tree on Christmas morning

Christmas Eve Photos

Reighlyn and Kairington with their matching p.j.s

Kairington sporting the coolest p.j.'s

Family picture with the matching p.j.'s

Keegan getting ready to take Reighlyn's cookie dough

Keegan cutting out cookies

Reighlyn all smiles while she rolls out cookies

Mom & Reighlyn

Dad & the kids making cookies


The finished project for Santa

Christmas Eve Fun

Christmas Eve was full of fun for our family. Reighlyn, Kairington, and I started out the morning around 6:30 while the boys slept. We got up and made jello for jello salad we would be having later. Then we put cinnamon rolls in the oven. While those cooked, Reighlyn helped mom bring all of the presents up from the basement to put under the tree. We opted to not put the presents under the tree any sooner, since both Reighlyn and Keegan open any present they see. Later that day, the Gleisbergs came over for our annual Christmas Eve dinner together. Usually it is done at night and over candle light, but this year we had a lunch because Jonathan had to work from 2-10. Therefore we didn't have candle light since it was in the middle of the day, but that's ok because last year the girls all cried when we turned off the lights and the candles almost got knocked over. So we will probably stick with none candle light dinners for a couple of years, until we know we can get through a dinner without crying and starting a fire. Then we opened gifts that the two families got each other. Amazingly all the girls got dress-up shoes and dress-up skirts, Aiden got soft blocks, and Keegan got cars. Kairington was sleeping so she didn't open anything. Jonathan and Mike gave each other movies.
Our next fun adventure was a first for our family. Mike and I decided to start a tradition of taking our family to a movie on Christmas Eve. So we loaded up our very excited 3 year old, our very tired 2 year old (no nap!) and our screaming 7 week old up and headed to a 3 0'clock showing of "The Princess and The Frog". It actually went great for a while....Kairington slept the whole time after screaming the whole way there, Reighlyn loved the show but was a little concerned about all of the people behind us watching the movie. She actually thought that anyone that had to little girls were Addison and Kileigh. Keegan did great until the popcorn and m&m's were gone, then he decided he was sick of sitting and watching a movie, so Mike ended up standing up by the door the rest of the movie with him. But I would say all in all, it went pretty good. Some good tips we learned though were, take the baby car seat in with you so you don't have to hold the baby the whole time, bring more food, and don't bring a 2 year old without a nap!
Our last adventure of the day was opening our matching p.j.'s that I made for the family for the first time and making cookies for Santa. Thankfully the p.j.'s fit everyone ok and we got some cute pictures together in them. Making cookies was fun to do as a family...even though some of the cookies turned out looking quite funny.... they were made with love and I am sure Santa loved them anyways! Reighlyn helped dad leave 3 cookies and a glass a milk out for Santa before heading to bed. Mike decided to eat 2 1/2 of the cookies and drink the milk around 8:30 so he wouldn't forget....well Reighlyn decided to wake up at 9 and check to see if Santa had been there yet and so was shocked when the cookies and milk were gone, but there were no presents yet and mom and dad were still awake. So thinking on our feet we had to tell her Santa came and checked to see if she was sleeping and ate the cookies and would be back later to see if she was still sleeping and if she was then he would leave the presents....Good thing she is only 3 and she was ok with that answer. Needless to say Santa learned no eating cookies until right before bed or early in the morning before everyone else wakes up!

Grandpa Wright with Kairington on her blessing day


Reighlyn & Kairington on her blessing day

Keegan & Kairington

Reighlyn & Kairington

The Ashton clan

Kairington's blessing day


Mike & Keegan

Kj & Reighlyn

Reighlyn & Keegan

Reighlyn and Keegan dressed up for Halloween


Mom and Reighlyn with our pumpkin

Dad and Keegan with their pumpkin

Dad and Reighlyn on the train at the American Heritage Center

Mom, Keegan, and Reighlyn posing for a quick picture at the American Heritage Center

2009 Ashton Family Catch-up Blog


Ok, well now that it has been almost a whole year to the day since I have posted anything, I thought I would write a blog....a crazy thought, I know. But as a gift to Mike's parents a started a family blog and I thought hopefully that will help inspire me to update our blog more often then yearly.. the goal would be at least monthly....we will see how that goes.
Life for the Ashton's has had a lot of changes in the year 2009. We started the year out buying our first house together in February, also for all you who don't know our family has grown since last year. We now have three children....Reighlyn who is 3, Keegan who will be 2 in January and Kairington who was born in November. Life with three children has been an adjustment, but we are now in the groove of things I think. It was a hard start with a new one because we came home to sick kids and a sick daddy and we all took turns being sick for the first couple of weeks of Kairington's life. Luckily though Kairington never really got sick. Kairington is now 6 weeks old and has started smiling. We have yet to get a picture though...she just started a couple of days ago and it only lasts for a couple of seconds. She is a spitting image of Reighlyn when she was a baby though...so it's kind of weird to see Reighlyn holding a mini her...crazy. We had a bit of a scare with Kairington a couple of weeks ago because she was throwing up so much that we took her in and after 2 ultrasounds, we found out she has the beginnings of a blockage in her stomach that if it continues to grow will have to be fixed surgically, but as of right now she is medicated with some medication for acid reflux and it has been working great. So cross your fingers we will get by without any surgery. She was the smallest baby of the three so she has taken a little bit longer to sleep through the night, but we now have 2 nights of 8 straight hours of sleep....so mom is loving life right now.
Reighlyn is defiantly a 3 year old through and through. When we are in a store and she is deciding to tell mom what is up, someone will look and say you must be 3 and I just have to laugh and agree. She is a VERY talkative little girl and a lot of the time she talks as though she is 10, not 3. I am sure my dad would laugh and say like mother like daughter. Reighlyn's favorite things right now is anything princess. She loves to dress up like a princess( hence her choice for Halloween), she loves to watch them, and seems to think she needs anything that has a princess on it. Reighlyn started preschool this fall and loves it. I called around and found a preschool that would take her in September even though she was still 2 since she was potty trained. She goes 2 days a week, Tuesday and Thursday from 8:30 to 11:30. It is a great thing all around, she gets to go have fun and learn and mom gets a little break and time to spend one on one time with Keegan more. In the new year, I will hopefully use that time to start doing learning time now that I am finally getting sleep.
Keegan has hit the terrible 2's quite early it seems. He seems to be into everything if you give him half a seconds chance. He has decorated our house with some colorful crayons, washed his hands with toilet water, climbed onto the table to eat anything left, and decided that our couches are best when you climb on top and jump off the back. He is quite the dare devil and has hit his head so much I am amazed that we have not had to visit the ER for stitches or broken bones yet. I am sure it will just get worse as he gets older, the life of a boy I guess.
Mike has recently started a new job. He was working for the local radio station selling advertising and decided to change things up a bit and now sells radio advertising for a Internet radio station called yourldsradio.com. The new job brought more that just a new employer...it also meant his new office was our basement office. It was hard adjustment at first, going from getting up and leaving the house to go to work to not leaving your house sometime for a couple of days at a time. Also learning to deal with the daily noise level that happens when you have 3 children 3 years and under. I think that we all have adjusted pretty well. I am still trying to adjust to being booted out of the basement from 8-5 everyday, but have learned to just check my email in the evenings. I am really trying to talk Mike into buying me a laptop, so I can have Internet access during the day too! We will see how that goes. Mike also we recently called to serve as the Elders Quorum president in our ward. He loves his calling and seems to be getting things all organized in the Quorum.
I am of course sometimes running around with my head cut off it seems since I have 3 very young children, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. Along with being a busy mom, cook, house cleaner, taxi driver, and counselor I have found somethings to keep me sane. Back in May or so I started sewing skirts fora local lady who owns her own business. It is the best thing in the world. About once a week or so I go and pick up a load of fabric and the instructions for the skirts I am to make for the week. It is a great stress reliever for me. During the day I can just put the gate up blocking my sewing room and sew while the kids playing the other room and Kairington is either sleeping or hanging out in her swing with me while I sew. My other outlet is I go into Mike's old job, the local radio station, once a week and file paper work, etc for one of the guys that works there. It is great no one is there, so for an hour or so once a week I go and work in complete silence! Church wise I am currently on the enrichment activities committee which is a great calling. We meet once every couple of months and plan things, and then I help set up for the activities. It's great because it gets me involved in things with the ladies at church. Plus its a calling that lets me go to all of my Sunday meetings. I was in nursery from the time we moved into the ward at the beginning of the year until I had Kairington. It was fun at first, but it got old the bigger I got pregnancy wise, so it was good to be done with that calling.
Well that is kind of the short version of what has been happening in our lives this past year. I will post some pictures of the kids to update everyone what they all look like now. Happy Holidays!

Happy late Easter to everyone. I hope everyone had a wonderful day and remember to keep the Savior in mind. Easter was good for our family. We decided to celebrate the whole candy, eggs, and bunny on Saturday so Sunday was just about the Savior. Saturday was a pretty nice day but still not summer, so we had Grandma and Grandpa Ashton come with us to a park and we did a picnic and a small Easter egg hunt with the kids. Ok, well Keegan just slept in Grandma's arms while Reighlyn found the eggs. Now you must all understand that the attention span of a one year old isn't very long, so I only hind about 5 or so eggs and they were all around one big tree at the park. Reighlyn knew there was candy in the eggs, so the first egg she found she tired eating all the candy inside before going to the next egg. By the second egg though she caught on and found it fun to get the eggs and put them in the basket. Since it was getting a little chilly we decided to wrap things up. We headed home. Now let me tell you it was very weird to come home and not have a huge list of things that had to be done. This might be new news to some I don't know, but we are moving! We have had our house up for sale about 2 weeks now. That's the reason we didn't have tons to do...I have been working my butt off the last couple of weeks going through and packing things up we don't use to make the home cleaner, staging the house, and deep cleaning. So on Saturday there was nothing to do really. We should have done some yard work probably, but it was nice to just relax. We did go get the car washed, but that was pretty much the only things we did that afternoon/evening.
Easter day was very relaxing for us. We had a little FHE in the morning and then went to church. We only went to sacrament meeting because we went to have a late lunch with Ana and Jonathan, along with Mike's parents. Its a good thing we only stayed at church for an hour because Mike was ready to kill Reighlyn. She didn't get a long enough nap, so she was cross. She was throwing crayons, fruit snacks, and pretty much anything else and when you took it away from her she would scream. That is the bad thing about 1 o'clock church with a child who usually takes a nap from 12-2. Luckily we have started sending her to nursery a little early, I know, but it makes church much better for everyone. So after the first hour of church it is usually easy sailing, except 2 weeks ago she started going through this mommy stage where I can't be 5 feet away from her without hearing, "mama, mama, mama" It was cute at first, but now its getting old. She won't even let dad give her a bath and put her to bed, so most nights I get to bath and put to bed both kids, not Mike's fault. But luckily both kids put themselves to sleep, so it really isn't that bad. And once there a sleep around 7:30 they sleep most of the night. Reighlyn sleeps until 6 or 7 in the morning, Keegan sleeps 6-8 hours gets up and eats and then goes back to bed....oh wonderful.
Reighlyn has decided that she loves to be outside. When we were cleaning out the garage Saturday morning, she was running around screaming like it was the funnest thing in the world. Needless to say when it was time to come in, she was not happy at all. It is just another reason why we are so excited that we are building our new house now. The new house should be done at the end of June/beginning of July, so still plenty of summer left for Reighlyn to play in our new fenced yard. Also the neighborhood we are building in has its own playground so that will be so nice to just walk there instead of packing them up in the car and driving to find a not so busy park somewhere. The playground in the neighborhood is only for those that live in the gated neighborhood, so that will be nice. The new house will also bring a new ward. We love the people of our ward, but they are not our age at all, so it will be nice to go to church and not have our kids be the only ones that make a noise. The neighborhood also has a 2 mile walkway they are putting in that goes along the river, so no more taking walks on a busy street.
So house stuff has been taking up a lot of time. With having to go in and pick out colors or paint, cupboards, carpet, flooring, etc. I never knew it was so time consuming to pick everything out,but when you have to go through and make sure every outlet is where you want it and that all the colors flow well...it takes a lot of time. But luckily we have finished all of that and they should start building in the next week or so. It will be exciting once it gets started and starts looking like a house. Mike and I will have to be out there a lot to make sure everything is going like it should and where it should. Really it will be more Mike than me since I have the kids. Ok, well we will update more later and I will try to get some pictures up also.

Audrey and Reighlyn playing on Grandpa Wright's stairs

Me, Dad, and Garth outside of the Winter Quarters Temple

Elder Wright with Reighlyn and Keegan

Keegan showing a half smile

Coming home from the hospital...He is already a BYU fan like his dad

Reighlyn sitting in the fridge..her new favorite thing to do

I know its mean I took a picture first, but she pulled the drawer out and tried sitting on it like she does the fridge and she fell in. I helped her out right after I took to picture, I promise.

Our first family photo with 4 of us

Keegan on his blessing day. My wonderful sister made his blessing outfit.
He even has a white tie on even though you can't see it

Night before I had Keegan

Keegan's 1st bath..Look at the curls!

Just a cute picture of my baby

Reighlyn holding Keegan,,,he looks worried!

Reighlyn playing with her blocks from Grandpa Wright

Ok, ok I know it has really been FOREVER since I updated this, but it seems like everyday I plan on doing it or even have a thought to do it, other things come up and before you know it the day is gone, well for that matter it seems the month is gone.

So I will try my best to catch you all up on the last 6 months of our lives since that is really the last time I blogged anything. First thing would be Reighlyn’s first trip to Iowa. That happened at the end of September when Reighlyn and I went on a road trip with Ana and her girls so she could go to a wedding. I am not going to lie…it was a very long trip. Mostly because Reighlyn couldn’t sleep with any other noise and she hates her car seat, so when you have to have her strapped into a car seat for 12 hours with her two cousins in the back right by her, it made for a long trip. It was good to go see my dad and everyone though. Reighlyn is getting more grown up though everyday I think. We had her 1^st birthday in November and it went great. We just had family and a couple of friends over and had some pizza and cake. It was very low key, but I think Reighlyn got enough presents that she didn’t know what to do with them all. It was nice to get her some bigger kid toys though, so she wasn’t playing with the infant toys anymore. The only bad thing about older toys is they are usually musical and annoying. Luckily most of them have shut off buttons. Christmas was quiet but went well. On Christmas Eve we had Ana and Jonathan over for our traditional candle light dinner. It was very nice to have a nice dinner, but it was snowing so bad that day and night, I wasn’t even sure if we would be able to have it, but no worries it went great. All I can say it is nice to play Santa when your kid goes to bed at 7pm. Mike and I had everything out and we were in bed around 9pm. Also the good thing about young children is that they don’t wake up at any crazy early hours. I think we got up and did the Santa gifts around 8 and then had breakfast and then opened the rest of the gifts. Reighlyn’s gift from Santa was a play kitchen which she loved along with a ball and a book.

Well for all those that know how big I get when I am pregnant you understand how uncomfortable I was around Christmas being pregnant with Keegan. It was so bad that I could no longer walk normal without very painful pains, so I was taking some wonderful drugs to help with the pain, Loratab. Well after taking this, it made Keegan very tired in the womb so the doctor decided to take mercy on me and take me 2 weeks and 1 day early. A planed c-section is a lot different than trying to go natural and then having to have a c-section. We checked in the hospital at 8am on the 2^nd of January, were I was monitored for an hour or so while they gave me fluids for the upcoming c-section. Then when it was time, I walked down to the OR carrying my own IV bag, climbed myself up on the table. Then I got my spinal block and then lay down to have my baby. I had some issues with the spinal block…yes it did numb me, but it numbed me way to high and I started having a lot of problems breathing to the point were I couldn’t talk at all because I couldn’t catch my breath and they had to put me on oxygen. Then since I couldn’t breathe I couldn’t swallow so I started to gag and choke on my spit, so they had to suction my mouth out. It was scary, but in the middle of all of that Keegan Michael was born at 10:24am.

Having Keegan has changed our lives, but for good that’s for sure. Everyone asks me if it is so hard to have two children now, if I feel like I am just running around with my head cut off. My answer is always no. I was watching my sister’s kids before Keegan was born, so I was watching a 2 year old and two almost 1 year old, so having just one 1 year old and a new born is pretty easy to handle. Especially since Keegan sleeps a lot still. We have had quite a busy last two months though since Keegan was born. Keegan was born just a couple of days before spring semester started for Mike and I. I had registered for two classes and thought I could handle it and was for a while, but I felt I was unable to give all of the time I wanted to to the kids, so I dropped the classes and decided to be done with school for awhile, at least till the kids are older. Mike is currently registered for 4 classes this semester, but it finding out how hard it is to work a full time job, go to school full time and have two children. We are very blessed to have Mike working were he is though. After my c-section I had a lot of issues with healing. First my stomach took longer than excepted to heal, but that wasn’t the worst part. It was the migraines that I started having everyday when I quit taking my pain medication. They had no idea what was wrong and my doctor thought it could be a blood clot in my brain or leaking spinal fluid from my spinal block, so I had to go to the ER when I spiked a temperature of 103.5 to have an MRI and other tests ran. They didn’t find anything with a blood clot, but I was dehydrated, had low blood count, had a bladder infection, and an infection from breastfeeding. So they treated all of that, but I was still having bad migraines to the point were someone had to be here with me at all times to help with the kids because a lot of the time I was in bed with the lights off and a blanket over my head. Luckily we have great family, when Mike couldn’t be here my sister, mother-in-law, and Lauren helped out. There will never be enough we can do to thank them all for what they did. Well after a trip to a Neurologist, he decided my headaches were due to a sudden change in hormones since I had my baby via c-section when my body wasn’t at all in labor. So they gave me some drugs that helped my get through life until my hormones stabilized. Needless to say things are back to normal and things are great now.

One new piece of news that happened to us is we sold my car in January. Now we did this for one main purpose, my transmission was going out and that is not something we wanted to deal with. So while Mike was on his way home from work one night he just stopped to look at cars and ended up test driving one home that evening. Well needless to say I never saw my car again. We ended up trading in my car for a 2003 Ford Expedition Eddie Bower SUV. It is a very nice car and has taken me a while to get use to it, but I drive it like a pro now. We had always said we would get an SUV when we got rid of my car, so that’s what we did and have been very happy with the decision ever since. We will just plan on driving that to Colorado for our Wright Family Reunion now instead of renting a car. The thing I love about it is that it seats 8 people, which means it has a full third row, so we will be able to grow into that car, but not for a while.

When Keegan was a month old, we blessed him in our home, just like we did with Reighlyn. Now I know some think you should or have to bless your babies in church on a fast Sunday, but you don’t. You just need your bishop’s permission and one of the members of the bishopric to be present when you do it. Mike and I decided to bless Reighlyn at home for a couple of reasons. First was we blessed her on Thanksgiving Day when all of my family was here, so then they could stand in the circle and such. Also Mike and I feel that a baby blessing is a very personal thing, it is that child’s first father’s blessing and that is not something we want to do in sacrament meeting. We make it very personal by doing it in our home. We have a testimony meeting first to make sure the spirit is there and then we have the blessing. My dad and little brother flew out for the blessing which we did on February 3^rd, which happens to be Ana’s birthday and also Super bowl Sunday with year, so we had the blessing and then had a super bowl party and then a birthday party all wrapped up into one exciting, wonderful, eventful evening.

Our next big adventure was making a trip to Iowa for Garth, my little brother, to go through the temple and have his mission farewell. We flew out on Valentines evening and got into Iowa about 11pm. We thought it would be perfect to fly out at 7:30 because that’s Reighlyn’s bedtime, so she would just sleep the whole way…NEGATIVE. First of all Mike and I couldn’t sit by each other because it was a small plane and they only have one extra oxygen mask per row, so we had to sit in front of each other. Well Mike had Reighlyn and I had Keegan. Keegan slept the whole time and Reighlyn was really good until she got tired and then she couldn’t get comfortable to get to sleep so she just screamed most of the time. I think I finally got her to sleep the last 10 minutes of the flight. The trip to Iowa went well and it was nice to see everyone and for everyone in my family to get to meet Keegan before he got big. Thayne brought Audrey over a lot so the girls were able to play together a lot. Audrey is 8 months older than Reighlyn, but they are the same height and weight. They also both communicate on the same level, so they would have their own conversations that were normally couldn’t understand. Garth’s farewell went well. He spoke and played a song he wrote on the piano and then Natasha and I say a song called Praise the Man. Then my dad bore his testimony. It was very nice, and then we went home, had a quick meal and we were off to the air port to fly home. Luckily the flight home went a lot better and they both slept the whole way. Garth got called to the Ghana Cope Coast Africa mission. He flew out to Africa on February 20th were he will be attending the MTC in Ghana until March 12^th, which is today, then he will be off serving the people of Ghana Africa.

I can’t believe that Keegan is already 2 months old. Things have been going pretty good with him. I must say that you learn things from your first to your second child. With Reighlyn we put her to sleep every night and it was very hard to keep her to sleep. That is not the case with Keegan, we have just laid him down, and so he has learned to put himself to sleep which is a great thing when you have two kids. The thing with Keegan is that he just loves to sleep. Right from the moment he was born he was pretty much sleeping through the night. During the day he didn’t do the normal new born schedule of eating every 2 hours, he would go every 4 hours. Then at night he would go about 6 hours. Well now I usually feed him around 7 and then go lay him down and he sleeps through the night and will wake up about 5 or so to eat and then goes back to sleep until 9. Reighlyn is also putting herself to sleep around 7 or 7:30 and then she sleeps until 6 or so, then wakes up, so she usually has a little milk and then goes back to sleep until 8:30 or so. We really are blessed to have children who sleep and are easy to put to sleep. Keegan did go through a stage were he didn’t want to be put down, but do you blame him, he has a big sister who just tries to love him too much. She loves to give kisses and hugs and really thinks she should hold him all the time. Oh and when he is cry she will force him to take his pacifier whether he wants it or not, but she means well, she hates it when he is crying himself to sleep, she stands at the bedroom door and repeats over and over, “Brother, brother”. Keegan now loves to watch Einstein with Reighlyn in his saucer. He just loves to be in the upright position and since he has been holding his head up since a week old, it works to leave him the saucer. Ok well I think that is enough updating for one day, I will update soon…I promise.

Keegan Michael Ashton
January 2, 2008 10:24 am
8lbs 13 oz 20 1/2 inches