Sleeping

Sometimes D asks if he can sleep in the bed with Jack & I. This is why the answer is ALWAYS no...

Chickens

Here is the coop with planting boxes on top for our garden...



Here are the chickens...

And our first egg...the small one.

The first egg was so little..it was odd. We now get normal sized eggs pretty much every day.

Happy St Patrick's Day

I know it is a little late to be blogging about St Patty's Day but I couldn't resist. After putting D to bed on March 16th, I started experimenting for his green lunch. Just so you know, green food coloring does not turn apple sauce green...you have to us blue. Who knew??? So I came up with green apple sauce, green cream cheese (even though it looks yellow in the picture) for his bagel, green jello (I am sure school loved that one..."no sugary snacks allowed"), green apple fruit snack, and a green cup for the day. When I picked him up at the end of the day, I asked him about his lunch. He immediately giggled, "It was green!!!" Too cute!!

Advent Calander

We put our Christmas tree up the day after Thanksgiving. As soon as we put it up, D started asking EVERY day if that day was Christmas. My solution was an Advent calendar. I figured it would give him a visional of how many more days until Christmas. This is what I came up with...

I had seen one like this on a blog and thought it was pretty cute. It was more work then I thought but it was fun to make and I think it turned out pretty cute. Oh, and it really solved the "How many more days until Christmas?" problem. He was excited every morning to see what was inside the little jar for the day. I just put candy in it this year but next year I think I will try to be a little more creative and find little toys onlong with candy for the jars.

Christmas Eve and Christmas morning

We had a quiet Christmas Eve and Day at home. We had a nice but simple dinner of ham and potatoes. I used the china since it was Christmas dinner. D was very excited to use the "fancy" dishes. I on the other hand was a little nervous letting a six year old boy use the "fancy" dishes...but he did really good. After dinner, we opened up our one Christmas Eve presents...jammies for all!!



Then of course, we had to get a plate of goodies ready for Santa and his reindeer.



Christmas morning was fun. Santa brought D his own parrot!! He informed me about 2 weeks before Christmas that we need to get a real parrot because every pirate needs a parrot. The stuffed parrot seemed to do the trick. He was SO excited about it.

Jack and D both got Nerf guns...that to was a big hit. We have enough guns and ammo for all of us. Pretty fun!!

We spent that day eating left overs from our Christmas dinner, playing w/ the new toys, and napping. Overall, it was great day.

Midnight visitor

So a while back we had a midnight visitor...

Ugly little thing it was!!

One night, after going to bed VERY late, I was laying in bed trying to fall asleep when I heard Milo making a weird scraping noise outside so I got up to see what the problem was and found him very patiently trying to get at the opossum that was sitting on the top of the fence post. I think Milo had enough sense to know that barking would scare the thing away. It was pretty funny!! The opossum just sat there for the longest time while Milo & I watched it. I even had time to go get D out of bed so that he could see it. He, of course, being the animal loving boy that he is thought it was the coolest thing ever to see a wild opossum in the back yard.

Utah part 2---very late

So I have been a total blogging slacker. Although, I was having some computer issues so I do have a little bit of an excuse. Here are a bunch of pictures from our vacation to Moab...


Our caravan to Moab.




D on our first morning of 4-wheeling. We didn't get into Moab until about midnight and I think he fell asleep about an hour before we got there so he was not happy to be woke up at 6 am so that we could get out on the trail.





One of our many stops on the trail. Several people, including ourselves, had mechanical issues. Ours didn't survive for a 2nd day of wheeling. Better luck next year.



My sister-in-law, Jill and I took a sunrise hike to Delicate Arch in Arches National Park. It was a beautiful morning for a hike. We both got some awesome pictures.

Here we are at the end of our hike. You can barely see the arch behind us.

Later on after our hike, Jill & I went back to Arches with 2 of the kids and explored some more of the archer. Here is Joelle & Kenalee pretending to be falling off of the rock.

Silly girls!!

One of the many rock formations in Arches National Park...Balance Rock. The park was so awesome. I can't wait to go back and explore the areas that we weren't able to see.

We were all tired at the end of each day so much so that D fell half way out of bed and didn't even wake up.

When D was outside watching the guys load up the trucks on our last day, he found this Preying Mantis. It spent probably an hour crawling all over him. It especially liked D's hat.

On the second day of wheeling, Jack got invited to ride w/ one of the guys from Off Road Design. He had a blast!!