Friday, July 18, 2008

New Baby!

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Yes, we're having a baby girl!

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

It's My Party and I'll Cry if I Want To!




So, yesterday was my birthday. My thirtieth birthday. I don't know what it is with that number, but something about it just doesn't sit well with me. I used to make fun of those ladies that would say they were "29" even though you could obviously tell that they weren't! Now I'm starting to see why they say that. I can no longer say, "I'm in my twenties." Now it's, "I'm in my thirties", which you might as well say, "I'm almost forty." Sorry if I've offended anyone here and a lot of you are probably saying, "Thirty Shmirty, boo hoo! Get over it!" Sure, it was a great day. My husband took the day off and I had a fun, relaxing birthday with my family, but that "thirty" word was still lurking over me the whole day! Maybe those of you who are thirty and over could give me an idea of why thirty is so great. One of my friends calls it "the zone", whatever that means!! I almost grimaced when the waitress at Jakers asked me for my driver's license to prove it was, in fact, my birthday so I could get my meal for half off. Maybe she would look at it and find out my secret... that I wasn't 29, but indeed, I was the dreaded THIRTY!

Camping Adventures Part 2

For some reason, I couldn't put the words with my pics. So, here are the words that go with the pics. The first pic is where we ended up camping the first night. Here's the explanation...
Well, we decided to go camping last weekend. We always wait until the last minute to really go. I don't know if it's because we know how much work it's going to be, if we're just not the planning type, or a combination of the two. We've also been wanting to go to Bear Lake, so we thought this would be the weekend. It takes about 3 hours to get there, so we wanted to leave around 2pm to get there and set everything up. We didn't end up leaving until 6pm! We got to the campground around 9pm and it wasn't quite the campground we were looking for. So we went to another one, but the spots were all taken. We went to the next one, and the camp host said they were all reserved or taken for the night. What happened to the days when you could just roll into a campground and find any spot you wanted without caring about making a reservation? Anyway, so we ended up driving back to Montpelier to find a hotel. They were all booked as well. They blamed their busy-ness on a baseball game that night and a wedding!! I couldn't believe it was so booked! It's just a little town. Well, we tried looking for other campsites and couldn't find one. We ended up camping by the side of the road, just outside of the campground. By then it was close to midnight and the kids were all asleep. In the morning, people from inside the campground would drive by us and I felt like such an outcast! How embarrassing! It did get better though. We packed up all of our stuff and headed into the campground and found a perfect spot with shade everywhere, a little stream nearby, and flushable toilets and running water. The kids had fun exploring, throwing wood into the fire, and throwing rocks into the stream. We went to the beach at Bear Lake that afternoon, and then to the Minnetonka Caves. It was a pretty good time, after we found a camping spot. Note to self, don't go camping unless you have a reservation! Lesson learned. p.s. Sorry about all the pics. I'm a little snap happy! :)

Camping Adventures

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Monday, July 14, 2008

Little Entrepreneur





Ethan has decided that he really, really wants a PSP or Nintendo DS. Since his birthday and Christmas is quite far away, I told him that he could buy it himself if he earned enough money. He gets to do chores around the house and gets a weekly allowance, but I guess that wasn't makin' the money fast enough. He was picking the strawberries the other day and decided that he would sell them to earn some extra money. He came into the house with a bucket full of strawberries and told me his plan. He wanted to sell the strawberries for $1.00 each. I said that noone would buy a strawberry for a buck. He was wanting to rack up his money quickly! Anyway, he had me make some signs and he decided to sell lemonade also. He set up the table and chairs outside, taped his signs up, and waited for the customers to come. Pretty soon, I was making 2 and 3 more pitchers of lemonade and he had to call his neighbor friends to come help pick more strawberries. They were selling like hot cakes! At the end of about 2 hours, he had made a little over 10 dollars! I think we should go into business together! After it was all gone, he said, all excitedly, "Tomorow we're going to sell popsicles!" I think we'll take a break from peddling our wares for now!

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Comb-over







I finally figured it was about time to cut the little one's comb-over off. It would stick straight up in the wind and he seriously looked like an old man. Poor guy. Well, he looks a lot better now, and he actually sat pretty still through it all. He only almost fell out of the chair twice! What a handsome little guy!

Happy 4th of July!






Well, here is what we did for Independence Day. We were able to go to the Idaho Falls parade in the morning. We try and go every year for the kids. I don't know if we'll go anymore! It was so hot, the kids weren't really interested, and it seems like it's getting more and more political and commercial. We'll probably keep going since it has become somewhat of a tradition. After the parade, we had a BBQ at our house. I didn't get any pictures of that for some reason. Too busy I guess. After that, we went to Mike's parents' house and lit off our fireworks. We usually go down to the river to see the big fireworks show, but we didn't feel like braving the crowds and the traffic this year. The kids just wanted to light their own anyway, little pyro maniacs! We had fun and the kids had fun. Good times!

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Happy Flood er I mean Canada Day!






We went up to Lethbridge to celebrate Canada Day, July 1st. We went to the parade in Raymond and then we had a BBQ at my sister Cynthia's house. It was going just great, until about 2pm when the rain started. I don't think I've seen a rain like this in Lethbridge EVER! It downpoured for at least 2 hours. Houses were flooded, streets were impassible, and some bridges had to be closed because of flooding. Crazy. Once the rain had subsided, we decided to go out and see what fun Canada Day festivities we could partake in. Turns out, the city had declared an emergency and was advising people to not go out or even drive anywhere. Since my sister didn't have any flooding at her house, we assumed everything was ok everywhere else. I guess we should've watched the news or something! Needless to say, the fireworks were cancelled and no more activitied for the day. Bummer!

It was THIS BIG!







A few weeks ago, we took the kids fishing to this free fishing day at a local plant nursery. They do this every year, I guess, and stock their pond with trout. We get there and there are tons of people there, all along the lake. We picked a spot and started fishing. All of a sudden, these people beside had caught a fish, then another, and another, and the people to our other side had caught one, and another! We still didn't have even a nibble. We have taken our kids fishing about 5 or 6 times in the last couple of years and haven't ever caught a thing! Today was going to be a new day! The people beside us started to feel sorry for us because we told them we had never caught a fish before and they were reeling them in left and right! One of the ladies got a fish on her line and let Ethan reel it in! It was so nice of her! It was just a sucker fish, though, so we threw it back. Those people left and decided to leave us with the bait they were using. We tried their bait and low and behold, the fish started biting! It was so exciting! Finally we had caught a fish!
We fried them up on the BBQ the next day! Yummy!

Honduras Adventures




Well, the end of May, Mike and I went on a vacation to Honduras. We went with a friend of ours that went on a mission there 10 years ago. We thought it would be the trip of a lifetime! Well, it certainly was. After flying all day to get there, we were surprised to find out that our rental car had been given away and "the only one they had left" was an SUV that cost 3 times as much. Of course. Then, we drove 3 hours to our hotel in a very scary city that, little did we know, was having the carnival of the century. They gave away our hotel room since we were a couple hours late. Since the carnival of the century was going on, there were no other hotel rooms available. By that time it was close to 3am and we were dead tired. Anyway, we ended up sleeping in our car in the 80 degree, humid, sticky, nasty, scary place by the side of the road. The next morning we took a very bumpy ferry boat to an island where we were going to scuba dive. The ferry made me chuck ALL OVER! It sucked! The island was very nice and the beaches were ok. I did get a very nice tan! Long story short, we will not be going back to mainland Honduras EVER! We did get some nice pictures of some stuff though.

Catch-up Time!


Well, my internet is finally working somewhat good enough to post a few things that happened, it seems like, a million years ago! I took some cute pictures and couldn't resist posting them, even though you might think they're lame! Here's Jacob's first bike ride experience way back in May. He was so cute, just looking around at everything, even though Daddy's big butt is in his face the whole time! He would say, "Oooooooo" at everything; birds chirping, dogs barking, etc. So cute.