**This just in...Dana's foster daughters aren't supposed to have their pictures up in public places, so sadly I had to take them down from this post.  But trust me when I tell you that they are sooo cute and I took some really great pictures of them.  If/when the adoption happens I will gladly post hundreds of pictures of those cuties.**
So MAYBE this post is slow in coming. And MAYBE it happened like a month and a half ago. And MAYBE I'm a total slacker. But MAYBE we just had too much excitement in our lives in February and I didn't want to overload you with it all at once. I'm spoon feeding you to prevent convulsions of happiness.

You're welcome. (This is Jantzen and Alexis, who I will tell you about in a minute. Just hold your horses.)

So someone (and I won't mention any names) that we call mom/grandma turned the ripe old age of 60! Oh, heck. That's not ripe. That's down right rotten!

I'm totally cracking myself up here.

Anyways, (almost) all of us kids/grand kids met in Portland to go to a Globetrotters game together to celebrate the occasion.
I've always wanted to go to a Globetrotters game and I was pretty excited about it. But when we got there we discovered that the real show was watching the kids playing together and sharing treats with each other. They all got along so well and were just so stinking sweet!

 Clearly, Grandma was in heaven with one toddler on each leg. If only she had one more leg, she could fit them all on her lap at once. My kids have been around for 14, 10 and 6 years now. Then grandma had a little dry spell and didn't get any more grand kids for awhile. But (almost) two years ago, Jena and Nick contributed Jace to grandma's happy land. That was nice, because it took a little pressure off of me. (Thanks guys!) Then last summer Dana was given two sweet foster daughters, Aubrie (on grandma's lap)and Alexis (pictured at top). Now grandma's land is super happy and all the pressure is off of me. I'm loving it. We're crossing our fingers SUPER hard that these girls will be able to stay in our family forever. They are so darling! Dana is an awesome mommy and such a natural at it. Plus, she bought a minivan and I'm pretty sure all sales are final. tee hee
Chris is no dummy. He knows that the way to a toddler's heart is through food. He showed up with a couple of bags of popcorn and all was right with the toddler world.

 Do you think they like each other? Yeah, me neither.

Family pictures, baby!

We had these pictures taken a couple of weeks ago by our friend Shara, and I think she did a great job! It was fun to capture some candid shots of the kids goofing off and showing their normal everyday turkey liver goof ball behavior. We were terrible subjects and if I had it to do over again I would definitely change some things like:

1. Making sure the kids don't have gum in their mouths

2. Making sure my boys don't wear the same color (I realized one of them had grabbed the wrong shirt when we were in the car on the way there!)

3. Making sure the kids don't have writing on their hands

4. Making sure the kids don't have stamps on their hands

5. Losing 10 pounds

6. Leaving my sweet little poochy woochy at home

Despite all of these mistakes we made, Shara managed to pull off some great pictures.

Amazing!

Thanks Shara!

The best things...

For Christmas Keaton had a grand idea. He said, "You know how they say that the best things in life are free? Well, I'm gonna give you one of those kinds of gifts for Christmas." And he was pretty tickled with himself because he inherited the "frugal" gene from me and he was pretty excited about all the money he was gonna save. I was pretty excited because I think Keaton knows me pretty well and what I really needed was this:

YES! YES! YES!

My day was wonderful. I watched some shows that I had been trying to get around to watching for awhile. I took a nap. I read a WHOLE book. And when Jantzen came whining to me about this or that I said, "Go tell your mom." Keaton was wonderful. He took care of all sibling arguments, helped Chris with dinner and read stories at bedtime. It was like Mother's Day in January. Thank you Keaton! You're awesome!

In case you're wondering what the fine print at the bottom says, here it is:

This coupon is not valid in Washington, California and Maine. This offer excludes massages, being ordered around and the authority to eat downstairs.

Keaton-you're not just awesome, you're funny too.

It's kind of hard to feel like you have anything exciting to say after you've blogged about such exciting things as jungle zip lines, surfing and deep sea fishing. But I thought I'd make an attempt at SOMETHING. But beware this may be kind of gross and a tad bit on the mundane side.
Wednesday was the day that we planned on going to my sister, Dana's house for Thanksgiving. Tuesday night was the night when my children started puking. Last time we tried to go to Vancouver (only a month ago!) they did the same. Do you think there's some sort of conspiracy here? Luckily, it turned out to be a very short lived illness and by Wednesday afternoon we decided that we were well enough to hit the road. But first we had to hit McDonald's because we were hungry. And to be sure that Carson would have plenty of food in his stomach to hurl in the back of the car as soon as we were stuck in Portland traffic. Aahhh, good times. Good times. But those McDonald's cups did come in handy at that blessed moment of upchucking. He and Daniel happened to be sitting in the third seat of our car, which is approximately 3 miles from where I was sitting in the front seat. So I could do nothing except pass cups, napkins and water bottles to our nurse, er, Daniel. I bet when he decided to come to America he didn't envision holding McDonald's cups for a puking child, did he? But he was great and luckily he isn't a sympathetic puker. That could have been bad. After it was all over, he put the lid on and passed the cups up front. Eeeew! Something about the warmth of those cups still haunts me.
End of story. You can all breathe a sigh of relief now. You survived the gross. Now it's time for the mundane.
You know how you sometimes write about the funny things your kids do? Well, I'm gonna do that now. Except it's about my husband. (Hi honey! Please don't kill me.)
So I got a little behind on the laundry and Chris found himself with no -uhem- underclothes to wear yesterday. So we gathered up some laundry and put it in the washer. But we decided not to start it yet because we were all trying to shower for church. Later on, he put the clothes in the dryer and then took what he needed to wear when they were done. Last night we decided to fold our Everest of Laundry, and when we were almost done I noticed a sock with a little bit of food stuck to the bottom of it. So I started to inspect all the other clothes and guess what...We had just folded a bunch of clothes that had been dried, but not washed. Doh!
Another fine example of the craziness that takes place behind these four walls. Sometimes I wonder why God thought I could handle three kids.

Random ramblings

OK, so it's been awhile. I've been busy. Let's start by going back to last week. On Sunday (Mother's Day) Chris had to leave for Portland for a haz mat class. On Wednesday morning, Keaton left for his field trip to the coast. After school that day, Carson, Jantzen and I packed up and headed down to Portland to enjoy the free hotel. It worked out perfectly, because there happened to be a crazy heat wave while we were there, and the pool just happened to be outside. We met up with Dana and Jennifer to experience IKEA for the very first time. That was fun, but one hour of child care is NOT ENOUGH TIME to go through that store. The kids found that they could fit inside the lockers and I was tempted to lock them in so I could finish my shopping. But no. When it came right down to it, I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Cousin Cole came to the hotel to swim with us after IKEA. I'm not sure why the kids chose the hot tub over the pool when it was 95 degrees outside, but whatever.

While in Portland we also BOUGHT A CAR!

On Friday afternoon, we met Keaton's bus in Troutdale, put him in the car and headed to Springfield to see our new nephew/cousin, Jace.

On Sunday was his blessing, and like the angel that he is, he slept through the whole thing. On Monday we packed up and came home. Gas prices are so crazy high that I don't know when we'll ever get to leave the house again. We spent so much money on gas, I can't even bring myself to total it up.

In other news...

We had a spider day on Wednesday. I think it began when Chris picked his shorts up off the floor and put them on, just like he does every morning. It didn't take too long for him to feel a little tickle "down there". Needless to say, all clothes were off and the spider was dead in about two seconds flat! (I'm sure he loves that I'm sharing this.)

Then, when Carson was leaving for school he discovered something in the garage. You see, back in the fall I found this most amazing and huge spider that I had ever seen. So I did what any good mother would do. I captured it in the kids' bug catcher thingy. This spider was so fat, that it looked like its abdomen would burst. Carson took it to school for show and tell. Other teachers were asking to show it in their classrooms. It was quite a big deal at the school. And even for a while after, teachers would ask how she was doing. Not too long later, she made a nest inside the bug catcher then died. We set the cage on a shelf in the garage and promptly forgot about it. Until Wednesday. We had a scene that brought back memories of the movie "Arachnophobia". There were webs all around the cage and the shelves that it was sitting on. And suspended in those webs were hundreds of tiny little spiders. EEWWWWW!!!!! We had a spider holocaust with the bug spray.

On Thursday I had a body composition test. While I won't share the results, I am relieved to know that I am within normal range for my age. I'd still like to lose some weight, but maybe I'm not as fat as I think. I'll have another test done right before I run the half-marathon in October to see what all the running is doing for me.

Well, that about covers it for the last couple of weeks. I'll be back in a month or so. haha

Spring Break

I know it's kind of delayed, but I still need to post about our trip to Utah for Spring Break. We stayed with Grandpa Tom and Grandma Fay in Heber City. It was so much fun, and a much needed break from work for Chris. We arrived there on Friday evening and immediately enjoyed some of Tom and Fay's home cookin' and barbecuin'. That's always good. On Saturday we went to Costco in Provo to get some discount lift tickets and even had a Marie Osmond sighting! Then we went back and shoveled snow enough for the kids to ski down the little hill at the park next door.








Sunday was Easter. We went to church in the morning, then came home and cooked and cooked and cooked for the 20 or so guests that were coming for dinner. After dinner everyone under the age of 40 piled into the van to drive up the hill behind Grandma and Grandpa's house. This is prime territory for longboarding.** We took a couple of trips down with no problems or injuries. Then one of Uncle Robbie's friends from Wyoming went. It didn't take too long for him to get going way too fast and wipe out. His shirt was torn up and so were a few patches of skin. It was pretty ugly. Chris had to whip out his paramedic skills. We would have taken him to the ER for stitches, but as Chris put it, "There's no skin left to stitch." Gross.
**I realize that this was not an acceptable Sabbath Day activity, but being closer to 40 than most of the other participants, I didn't want to be the party pooper. Consider the lesson learned!**

This is our victim before. (In the Midtown shirt) He does have a bit of a scared look on his face, don't you think? Maybe deep down he knew what was coming.

This is our victim after. He was pretty much hating life. He almost ended up "driving the porcelain bus."

Monday we went skiing at Deer Valley. It was way too crowded, but the weather was gorgeous. We all came home with at least a portion of our faces sunburned. I think we were the only ones on the mountain who brought a sack lunch. We got a few weird looks, but oh well! We saved ourselves tons of money by brown-bagging it.

The rest of the week consisted of skiing at The Canyons and hanging out with the fam. The men and boys had a day of snowmobiling which they loved.

One day Chris and Spencer went skiing with no women or children so that they could do whatever boys do on a mountain. I think they almost died.

Fay and I took the kids to Utah Olympic Park where they just happened to be having the U.S. Championships going on for the aerials. That was way cool. We also checked out the ski museums there and the kids got to hold the olympic torch.

On Saturday, our last day, we went to Temple Square. We watched the Joseph Smith movie, which I was afraid the kids would be bored with, but they loved it. It was way good. We didn't have time to walk around the grounds which was a total bummer, but it was fun anyways.


We then went to BYU where Chris' cousin from Canada, Jasmine, had a harp concert. We don't get much culture in this hick town where we live, so I was really excited to experience this. I wasn't disappointed. These girls (and one boy) were so amazing! They even made a hokey song like "Yankee Doodle" sound sublime. There were a few soloists who were phenomenal, Elizabeth Smart being one of them. (Remember her? Kidnapped, missing for a long time, then found in Utah) The boys were bored after a bit, but held it together. Jantzen was mesmerized, and informed us that she wants a harp for her birthday. ($30,000 anyone?) Jasmine was awesome to let Jantzen try to play her harp after the concert was over. She was in heaven.





Sunday morning we woke up to about 6 inches of new snow, which we had hoped for all week but never got. But alas, we had to leave for home. So we packed it all up in the snow and took off.
Buggers!


It was a week of sun, snow, fun and way too much good food. (Four pounds worth!) But all good things must come to an end.