Birthday Party

We went down to Logan yesterday for Kevin's birthday party. Drew and Owen had been looking forward to it since last Saturday. All week long they would exclaim things like, "We goin' to Kevin's on 'Sataday'!" and "We got a 'berfday' present for Kevin!" and "We makin' a cake for Kevin!"

The party was really fun. I only took a few pictures--I wish I'd gotten more, but oh well. We spent most of the time outside playing on the trampoline (I was jazzed to discover I can still do back flips!), playing basketball and letting our cake digest.

Left: Westley and Owen had a ton of fun jumping on the trampoline. Right: It took Drew a little while to get used to jumping.

Marcus thinks baked potatoes are best enjoyed when eaten like an apple!

I had a lot of fun making Kevin's birthday cake. I sort of borrowed the idea from familyfun.com, and I altered it to fit the occasion. I also altered it to fit my supplies; I had made some cupcakes just for fun a few days earlier, and there was leftover batter--not enough to fill a cupcake pan, so I put it in a bread pan and made a small cake. I decided it was just the right size for a bus, so with a few mini-cupcakes and a lot of frosting, that's what I made.

I originally colored the main part of the cake orange. It was a bit too much. I ended up frosting over it, making the cake extra sugary (and therefore extra delicious). But I was really pleased with how the school bus turned out.

The nickle at the bottom of the picture is for scale.

I wanted to put little stand-up figurines of everyone in our family on the cake. For some reason they don't sell them in stores, so I spent a long time drawing the little bodies, scanning them, tweaking them on the computer, scanning and cropping pictures of everyone, making the faces the right size, printing, cutting, gluing heads onto bodies, and coloring outfits. It probably took a total of five or six hours to do, and one crazy night I stayed up til 3 a.m. But it was a ton of fun to do.

I call this cake "Kevin's Perfect Day." It represents Kevin arriving home from school (which he loves), being greeted by everyone in the family. He loves being surrounded by the entire family (if we have a get-together and not everyone can come, Kevin spends most of the time talking about whoever isn't there). And of course, the cake part represents the perfect food to have at a family gathering.

The final product turned out pretty nicely. Green frosting went much better with the school bus than the rotten salmon color I had on there before. I wish I had planned the layout of the people and the writing a little better, though. Between the people and the bus I wrote "happy 21st birthday," then on the bottom I wrote "we love you." I left plenty of room for all the people, but didn't think I'd have room for anything else so I wrote Kevin's name on the roof of the bus. Turns out after I put the people on there was just enough room for candles (not 21 of them, though; we didn't want to light the people on fire), which I was thinking we might have to skip or put in the ice cream or something. I had so much fun making this cake. I'm already on the quest for cake ideas for Samantha's first birthday, which is only two weeks away!

21? Really?

My baby brother turned 21 today! Hard to believe. I remember arriving home from kindergarten on the bus the same day he came home from the hospital. There was a big sign in front of our house that proclaimed, "It's a boy!" My bus driver, an old man who liked to make what he considered to be funny jokes, asked me, "What's a boy?" I just rolled my eyes at him and said in my most exasperated voice, "My new baby brother is a boy!" Then I hopped off the bus and ran as fast as I could to go meet little Kevin.
Kevin has been such a blessing for our family. We've learned so much from him and the example he sets with all his challenges--he deals with Autism, seizures and diabetes, yet he's almost always happy and always concerned about the well-being of others.

This is the closest I have to a baby picture of Kevin. He was such a cute baby!

Kevin and me, sometime in the '90s, shooting Roz with a water gun as she took our picture.

Kevin, age 9 or 10.

I can't, for the life of me, remember when Kevin graduated; but it was a couple or a few years ago...

Kevin loves to run track with Special Olympics. He also enjoys bowling and basketball.

Kevin is a fantastic uncle; Drew and Owen are always talking about playing cars with Kevin. (That's Kevin holding Samantha the day she was born, and Kevin playing with Drew and the Exersaucer.)

Happy Birthday, Kevin! I love you!

Camping and Four Wheeling

David unexpectedly got two extra days off last week; a costly error in our cell phone service caused him to miss his call to work. He was ticked to put it mildly. We decided to try to make the most of the time off, so we went camping. David's sister and her boyfriend were in town and they had decided to go camping with my in-laws, who go every weekend from late April to mid-September. We just tagged along.

It turned out to be a lot of fun. David and the boys went four-wheeling with the in-laws and "Ezra" (this is what Owen started calling David's sister's boyfriend, even though it sounds nothing like his real name).

Owen and Drew get geared up to go.

David gets geared up to go four-wheeling.

Samantha and I stayed at the camper with David's sister and did as little as possible.

Samantha happily eating Cheetos.

After a long exciting ride (they saw trains, a river, an old restored cabin with old artifacts in it, cows, and horses), everyone came back to camp filthy and happy.

Owen and Grandpa arrive back at camp.

Drew, covered in dirt after his ride.

Owen goes to give Grandma back her cell phone and Walkie Talkie

Drew and Owen spent the rest of the afternoon happily playing with pails and dirt.

The in-laws know just about everyone at the campsite (since they've been going there every weekend of every summer for the last few years). On Saturday nights, they have a potluck. Since they don't really plan anything, we ended up with lots of food to choose from: two large pans of lasagna, steaks, hot dogs, home-grown corn on the cob, two different versions of green salad, and garlic toast. I had some of everything. And of course we had S'mores for dessert.

We sat around the campfire for a while, then I got the boys and Samantha ready for bed and we said goodnight to everyone. Drew was walking around saying goodnight to Grandma and Grandpa. He got too close to the fire pit and burned his hand on it. I whisked him up and took him to the faucet to run cold water on his hand. It didn't look too bad, and he didn't complain about it, but now, two days later, I see that it's a pretty bad burn (second degree), so we've been putting Vitamin E on it.

We put a tent up outside the camper and slept in it. It was a rough night. Samantha had to sleep in her car seat, which was really uncomfortable for her, because she prefers to sleep on her tummy and it just doesn't work in a car seat. So she woke up at 1 a.m. Her crying woke up Drew and Owen, and they decided they wanted to sleep between David and me, so I ended up sleeping on the ground between two air mattresses.

Finally, I decided to move up to the other air mattress (it was one of the tall mattresses, but it wasn't as comfortable as our low-to-the-ground one), but in doing so I woke Samantha. I grabbed her out of her seat and let her sleep next to me on the air mattress. I really dislike sleeping next to kids and babies. I'm always afraid of squishing them. So every time Samantha snuggled up to me I backed up until eventually I was on the very edge of the mattress smooshed up against the side of the tent with all kinds of cold air coming in and chilling me. It was a long night.

Drew and Owen woke up early. As soon as it got a little bit light, they were up and wanting to play in the tent. They woke Samantha up. She was still tired and therefore a little grumpy, but she didn't want to go back to sleep because Drew and Owen actually wanted to play with her. So after a lot of kids' squawking and parents' grumbling, we decided to just get up. We went into the in-laws' camper, where the heater was going full blast and the cocoa was steaming.

We got everybody dressed and headed to town for breakfast. We went to a little place called Amy Lou's Steakhouse. The gal that runs the joint, Amy Lou, is older, maybe in her late sixties. She was there by herself when we first got there, and one of the customers was taking orders and serving water to people who came in. Finally the real waitress arrived and the customer was able to sit and enjoy her own breakfast (hopefully she didn't have to pay for it).

When we got back to camp it was time to pack up and head home. It was a fun trip and I was glad we were able to go, even though the circumstances of why we were able to go were much less than ideal. Hopefully we'll get to go camping more than once next summer!

Bribes, Threats and Apples

It feels like Fall. I even had to put a jacket on yesterday! It's making me a little sad, 'cause Fall leads to Winter. Another thing about Fall that makes me sad is all the apples that fall off our tree. We spend a long time every fall, cleaning them up. Yesterday we tried to get a jump start on it, to get the apples raked, then mow the lawn under the tree, then rake some more... If the apples were any good it might be worth all the work, but the apples aren't very tasty and they're full of worms. They'll make great snacks for my dad's sheep and donkeys, though!

We made the boys help us pick up all the apples yesterday. They were glad to help for the first few minutes, but 30 gallons of wormy apples (that we kept telling them not to eat) is a lot of work. We told them that once we were all finished cleaning up apples, we'd all have some ice cream. That kept them going for a few more minutes, but they were soon sidetracked again. We reminded them of their ice cream reward, but they didn't care. So we told them if they didn't resume cleaning, they could go to their rooms and go to bed. That got them going again, but the rest of the time cleaning apples sounded something like this:

Me: Drew! Get that apple out of your mouth! Owen! Do you want ice cream or do you want to go to your room?

Owen: I don't have to go to my room.

David: Then start cleaning.

Drew: I want ice cream.

Me: Then put these apples in the bag. Get that out of your mouth!

[Scene repeats over and over, ad lib]

The boys were sort of confused as to why we were being so demanding; after all, they hadn't made the mess. When they get older we might explain to them that we just want them to be responsible, hard workers. But I think it might go over their two-year-old little heads, so for now we continue in our overbearing ways, getting our yard cleaned through child labor.

A Picture Post

I have a container of coins sitting on the table in our entryway. One day I noticed it was feeling a little light. I figured Drew and Owen had done something with all that spare change, but it wasn't until a few days later that I figured out what.

I went out to get the mail and when I came back I noticed Owen looking through this little hole in our window screen (see the little circle around his left eye? That's the hole) that the cat started and the boys made worse. (This is a reenactment; it's not like I take my camera with me to get the mail.)

Suddenly the idea came to me to look down. There, on the ground below the window was all the change that had gone missing, along with some headphones, a marker and a few other random items.

David had been hounding me for a while to get some pictures of the kids to send to grandparents (I've been hounding him for a while to get a family photo, but he insists that the grandparents don't want to see us, just our kids). Here are some of the results from the photo shoot:

I got this cute picture of Samantha, but I wanted to see if I could get an even better one. I guess I was being greedy and she wasn't having it. She'd rather eat wormy apples off the ground than sit and smile.*

Drew sat really well for me and even smiled when I asked him to. Though, at first it was hard to get him to smile a more natural smile rather than the crazy grin that accompanies saying "cheese." Drew had seen Owen's photo shoot and wanted to do some silly shots as well.

Owen gave me more silly shots than non-silly, but I was able to get this really good one of him just smiling nicely. I had to tuck his hair behind his ears; I need to just cut it, but don't really have the courage or patience to deal with all the screaming.

*The phrase "sit and smile" gives me the giggles. Here's why:
This was my favorite brand of toilet paper in Thailand. Not that it was incredibly soft--it was about average, but just the name of it made me smile.

Wild Weekend

I've been busy, busy, busy! (I'm on break right now.)

Friday evening I flew from Pocatello to Boise to help my sister-in-law move. She got a new job in Philadelphia and didn't want to haul all her stuff across the country (it would have cost a lot, so she opted to just get new furniture and things when she got there). After an extra long layover* in Salt Lake (which isn't even on the way to Boise, but whatever...), my sister-in-law picked me up at the Boise airport and we went back to her apartment to finish some packing and clean her apartment. We didn't get a whole lot done because it was almost midnight and we were both super tired.

Saturday morning we drove to the rental truck place where my dad was waiting to help us; I didn't want to drive a 16-foot truck around Boise (it's such a big city! Well, compared to Pocatello, it is). It didn't take long to pack the truck and get the bathroom cleaned (I left the rest for her to do), then my dad and I drove home. With the help of our neighbors, we got the truck unloaded and I've spent the remainder of my time up to now unpacking the boxes figuring our where to put things and what to give to Goodwill.

My house is a huge mess (not that it's usually very tidy, but it's worse than usual now), so I'm looking forward to this evening when it'll be cool enough to really tackle all the stuff. For now I'm trying to do as much as I can in our basement where it's cool--mostly just folding laundry and boring stuff like that.

*About ten minutes before our plane was supposed to begin boarding, one of the airline personnel got on the PA and announced that the plane was to be delayed. It had flown in from Mexico and required extra cleaning and screening. Twenty minutes went by before someone announced that a passenger had flushed something large down the toilet, which was by this time sitting in the Jetway. Because it was the lavatory for the first class passengers, it had to be fixed (you know if it was in coach they would've told the passengers to "hold it" for the hour long flight to Boise). Our plane ended up taking off about 45 minutes late. Luckily, I had a good book.

Reading Rainbow

Last week a thunderstorm passed over our little town. It didn't last very long; just enough to cool things down and water the grass a bit. As the storm passed, I noticed a really pretty rainbow above our neighbor's house. I called the boys over to look at it with me. Drew thought it was so cool that for the next few days he would tell David and me, "We saw a reading rainbow!" I'm starting to think they watch too much TV.

We could see the entire rainbow arching over my neighbors' houses. And there was another more faint rainbow above it.

Shortly after I finished taking pictures of the rainbow, the sun set on the other side of our house. My favorite thing about Idaho is the gorgeous sunsets.

Wha' Heard?

Drew is by far my most inquisitive kid. He always has been; when he was about a year old, his favorite things to say were "Dhis!" (which I took to mean, "What is this?") and "Dhah!" (which I decided meant "What is that?") He would point to things with his whole hand, too. It was very funny. When he got better at speaking, he would always be asking me, "W'is that?"

It's so much fun now that he understands my answers better. The other day he was playing in the bathroom sink while I was putting on my makeup. He noticed the little overflow holes in the top of the basin and asked me what they were for. I gave him a pretty detailed answer, most of which he seemed to understand, about how if the sink gets too full the water will spill into those holes so the sink doesn't overflow onto the floor. Then he got this twinkle in his eye, looked at me and said, "I wanna try!" So we got a cup and poured water into the holes in our sink.

Later that day, as Drew was flushing the toilet, he yelled goodbye to the water as usual then asked me, "Where's it goes?" So I pointed out to him that the water snakes around through the bottom of the toilet and into a pipe that goes out of the house into the septic tank (I had learned all about this at the science museum in Seattle and was excited to share my knowledge with someone). I asked Drew if he could say "septic tank." He called it the "Celtic tank," which would probably be considered pretty blasphemous by certain members of our household, so I just acted like that part of the conversation never happened. Now every time we flush the toilet Drew explains it to whoever will listen: "It goes down here and in the pipes."

Drew is also very interested in sounds. He recognises the different types of trucks that drive by our house. Whenever a big truck goes by, he'll yell, "Wha' heard?" (in English that translates as "what did you hear?") and run out to the deck to see what is going by. Lately, he's gotten good at identifying the truck without seeing it. He can tell the difference between the garbage trucks and the dump trucks. He knows cars, too: the Corvette engine makes a different noise than the Camaro engine, and Drew's generally happy to demonstrate.

Tonight we were walking around the neighborhood and we heard some crickets chirping around. Drew of course yelled, "Wha' heard?" We told him they were crickets (he already knew this from a few weeks ago when we heard one in our apple tree, but sometimes he'd rather ask what something is than identify it for us). The rest of the evening Drew was telling David (who was actually with us so he already knew) that "we heard trickets." And as we were getting ready for bed, Drew asked, "Where's the trickets?" Owen, who had been quiet all evening (he was sulking a bit 'cause he got in trouble for taking his diaper off at nap time), piped in and told us, "It's in the apple tree."

I'm always amazed at how different my boys are. Drew learns by inquiring and doing, and Owen learns by listening and watching (and practicing when he thinks no one else is watching). But I can tell he absorbs a lot of what is going on.

Some Randomness For Your Tuesday

When I sat down at the computer to check my email about 15 minutes ago, Drew freaked out. He started yelling incoherently something about going upstairs and not using the computer. Then Owen turned on the TV and asked to watch Wubbzy. I told him no, because I was planning on checking my email, paying a bill or two and going back upstairs to clean some more. The TV just happened to be on PBS, and Teletubbies just happened to be the program on air. My boys have never seen it before, and I don't really care for it (it just seems like a strange, pointless little show), but I appreciate that it bought me about a half hour to do whatever I want while they just sit enthralled, giggling at the TV. But the laughing sun? The one that's a baby's face? Kooky!

Here's my good news minute for the day: We're going to Detroit in April (Kadee, let's go to dinner or something)! A few months ago, David entered a drawing of sorts for NCAA Final Four tickets--basically, everyone who wanted tickets paid for them up front, then their name was entered into a drawing. If their name wasn't drawn, their money was refunded. We sort of forgot about it, but yesterday we got a letter from the NCAA Final Four people. David's name was drawn! Hooray! I'm not a humongous basketball fan, but when does anyone get a chance like this? (Well, obviously about 74,000 people get a chance like this, but I never thought I'd be one of them.) I'm actually not sure if I'll go to the games; David's dad sort of wants to go, and if he goes I'll have lots of time to bum around and shop and stuff. Either way, it's gonna be so fun!

Feelin' Lazy

I caught a little bit of Olympic Fever this year! I've been watching the swimming and gymnastics, and today I hope to catch the diving. The boys have had fun watching with me, too. Drew even came up with his own little chant: "Oo ess aay! Oo ess aay! Ess ess aay! Oo ess aay!"

Watching the Olympics has been a fantastic relief from watching The Brave Little Toaster (or The Gravy Little Toaster as Owen calls it), but it's making me wax a bit nostalgic about my own days of athletic prowess. Well, maybe prowess is too strong a word. But I was a pretty good athlete in high school. As with most of my high school career, though, I probably could have been a lot better if I'd tried harder. I think it drove my coaches crazy that I settled for "pretty good" when I could have been "very good" or even "great." My main agenda back then was to have fun, though. And I had plenty, so mission accomplished!

Watching the Olympics is also making me feel a bit lazy. Here I am watching all this TV when I could be out running or playing or something (at least I could be cleaning the house!). So I guess that's what I'm gonna go do now.

Left: Me, as a Sophomore, doing a back dive at State. Right: Laura Wilkinson shows what the Pike position should really look like.

Now That Summer Is Almost Gone

We finally got ourselves out on the water today! Not on the boat, but at least we were in the water. We were secretly hoping to run into anyone we know at the reservoir today, in hopes that we could jump on their boat. But alas, the only person we saw that we know doesn't have a boat. She does, however, play on our soccer team from time to time and since Fall Soccer is starting soon, it was good to see her and get her on our team before anyone else gets her.

We had a lot of fun playing in the water. Drew and Owen were "so excited," as they told us over and over on the way to American Falls, to go to the beach. On our way there we stopped at the sporting goods store to get a floatie and some water shoes for me (I don't know when I became such a wimp--maybe it's repercussions from last year's excursion--but I can't stand going in the water with bare feet these days), then off to the beach we went.

Talking it up turned out to be a lot more fun than the actual beach itself--at least for the first little while. Drew and Owen were all kinds of excited to get down to the water, but the second it touched their toes, they were crying and running away. Samantha, normally quite fond of water, screamed and tucked her little feet up as high as she could when I tried to get her to stand in the water. I was just glad the water wasn't as filthy as it was last year and with my new water shoes I had no qualms about wading around (didn't really get into it though because I actually styled my hair today, not thinking we were going to go swimming, and I didn't want to get it wet--apparently I'm a prissy wimp, not just a wimp).

We blew up the floatie we purchased, thinking the boys would like to ride it. With some reservation they waded out in the ankle-deep water and let us load them onto it but as I went to grab my camera the floatie tipped over, causing much screaming on Drew and Owen's part and much laughter on mine and David's part. I hopped on the floatie and convinced Owen to join me, but he only sat on it for a few seconds before begging to be let off. We never did convince Drew to get back on it.

Left: Owen crying after the floatie tipped over. Right: Drew finally relaxing and splashing around with David

Above: Owen and me on the floatie. Nice tan line I have, eh? And if you look closely at my leg

you can see the massive bruise I still have from crashing on my bike the other day.

The boys played around on the shore for a while, throwing sand and rocks into the water. I sat with Samantha who preferred to not sit on the beach blanket we brought, but rather wanted to crawl around in the sand and put tiny rocks and large handfuls of sand into her mouth.

Above: Samantha with a sunflower seed shell in her mouth; she just dug it out of the sand and popped it in her mouth!

We hadn't been at the beach long when the weather started to turn a bit. We heard thunder and looked up to see that the clouds were suddenly really dark. We decided to sit on the sand and build sandcastles while we waited to see what the weather would do. After a few minutes, the clouds floated right past us, letting the sun shine (quite forcefully) upon us once more.

Above: Lovely Fluffy clouds, meet Menacing Dark clouds.

By this point the boys were getting more and more brave and consented to wading out into the water and splashing around in it. Samantha finally stopped eating sand long enough to take a bottle and fall asleep, so David and I were able to have a lot of fun with the boys in the water. Turned out to be a great day.

Above: The majority of today's fun was had throwing rocks into the water.

For My Thai Friends

I taught Owen how to say สวัสดี ("hello" in Thai). He doesn't know what it means, but he had fun saying it (at least the first few times--he got tired of me asking him to say it after a while).

So Much To Think About

Last Wednesday was the season finale of The Baby Borrowers. Yesterday they aired an episode entitled, "The Baby Borrowers: Lessons Learned." They recapped the season, asking the teens about their experience (none of the teens want to be parents any time soon, but don't feel like they'll never be parents. Incidentally, all of the teen couples have broken up since the show ended, too).

A portion of the Lessons Learned episode focused on the messages that young people are facing these days; so many beautiful, young, unmarried girls announcing to the celebrity magazines, "It's true! I'm pregnant!" and sounding so thrilled about it. Getting pregnant and earning a GED all at once must seem like the cool thing to do. One of the panelists on the show mentioned that today's teens are more savvy than we give them credit for and view celebrities like Jamie Lynn Spears not as a role model, but as someone to learn from. Still, Hollywood moms get so much publicity: for example, why is does this poll even exist, and why is it on the Teen Hollywood website??

I find it really interesting (and somewhat refreshing like chugging a nice cold glass of milk after ingesting a dozen chocolate chip cookies worth of dough--I was thinking of making cookies tonight, so it's sort of on the brain...) that amongst all this I've come across these articles:

How To Raise A Geek, And Why You Should

Raising a Well-Rounded Kid The option to listen to the show is above the article. It's about 45 minutes long--I didn't get a chance to listen to the whole thing, but I like the premise of "regulating and controlling some of the influences of pop culture so that it's our values that are driving our decisions for our children, and not just what everyone else is doing or what the media is telling our children what they should be doing to be happy." Not that parents should make every decision for their kids by any means. Part of raising a well-rounded kid involves letting children be a bit self-reliant when appropriate. Thus, it's really important for them to know where their parents stand and that they stand firmly.

I feel like there's still a lot to think about on this subject, but I'd rather go to bed for now. So I might just mull this over some more and address it some other time...

To Be Continued?...

Some Video

Still not much going on around here. Just hangin' out, listening to David yell at the TV (He's yelling things like, "Why on Earth would Brett Favre go to the Jets? They're a horrible team," his voice getting more and more exasperated-sounding with each comment). Since I don't really have any opinions about it other than Favre should have just stayed retired--gone out with his dignity in tact, et cetera--I figure I should just keep quiet about it. Rather than get involved in all the sports talk, I opted to organize the pictures on our computer (exciting, I know). I found a few videos I thought I'd post.

Here's Owen "racing" in the back yard. He runs back and forth, back and forth like this and sometimes invites me to race with him. I just like the way kids his age run. There's a reason they're called "toddlers."

We set up the sprinkler for Drew and Owen to run through. They didn't really do much running through it, so we had to trick them. After all, what fun is playing in the sprinkler if you don't get wet?

Ouch!

I went for a bike ride with David last night. The trail we rode was on the same hill as the one we went on for our anniversary a couple months ago, but this one was a lot more narrow and had a lot of sharp turns. It was so much fun. Until I crashed.

I had been cruising along at a good pace when suddenly the trail curved sharply to the right. I put on the brakes, but all it did was make me fish-tail (I had all kinds of dirt on my wheels from the dusty trail, which rendered my brakes slightly ineffective), sending my bike up onto the hill on my left (better than sending it down the hill on my right). My front tire came to a sudden stop, but the back of my bike kept going (good ol' laws of motion). I got my foot down in time to stop myself from going completely over the handlebars, but just barely. My left thigh hit the handlebars and my bike seat hit me on the back of my left shoulder. Then I fell to a stop onto a juniper bush.

The damage wasn't much. My thigh has a big dark bruise on it from the handlebars and my arms and legs have all kinds of scratches on them, but mostly just my pride was injured. But I would totally do it again (the bike ride, hopefully without the crash).