4th of July, Utah, Nevada

Remember how I said we needed a break, well, Disneyland was fun, but we also had plans to head to Utah and visit family. Those plans were almost broken because a few days before we were to head there a massive fire started and evacuated my in-law's town. Thankfully no homes were destroyed, and they were let back into their homes. This fire however was the largest forest fire in Utah history. So sad. Anyway, we were going to head to Utah on a Friday, but we needed new brake pads and the ones we needed were a special order, so we didn't leave until Saturday night. We had a great time. Mostly we just relaxed while we were up there. We did some fun things like hang out with all the family that was able to make it (we missed you guys Riki and Dan!). We went and shot some fun guns. The best one we shot was probably the AK. Someday Ty wants to own one of those. Ty's little sister also brough her new compound bow down and we got to shoot that. I loved it! I had so much fun shooting that. And all things considered, I wasn't too bad. On the fourth, went to the parade and the Demolition Derby (I didn't get a lot of pictures at that because my phone camera was dying). Then we stayed for the fireworks. The fireworks show in Delta is probably 4 times longer than the one in Ridgecrest. It was amazing. Every time they would start shooting a bunch of fireworks off I expected that to be the end. But nope. It was cool. Thursday the girls all went shopping. So that was Roxanne, Annie, Jordan and I. I think the best part was having Jordan try outfits on forever. We went to Crazy 8 and she had a blast shopping. Saturday night Liam got stung by a wasp twice in the eyelid. Poor little kid. By Sunday morning, he was done with me taking pictures of him to document it. A little shop-a-holic in the making. Monday, we left Utah and went and stayed the night in Ely, Nevada. There while playing at the park, Jordan fell off some monkey bar thing and split her lip open. She still flips out when she does anything that makes her mouth bleed. She started screaming thinking she had lost her tooth again. Anyway, then we came home. We were gone that time about 10 days. Not bad. We are all refreshed now and shouldn't need to travel again for a while.
I love this picture of Father and Son's footprints!

Kid Quotes

My kids have been saying some funny things lately. I have added one to Jordan's list and started one for Liam's. Check them periodically because you never know what they will say. If you read Liam's quote, I want to explain it a little bit more. The family was in the car, driving, I don't remember where around town. Jordan was doing something to annoy Liam, and since they were both buckled, this was his response to her, "You're grounded. Go to your room. Is that fun? Huh?" (Or it was something similar... whatever is posted on the side there.) It was hilarious because he said it in his serious, disciplinarian voice. Funny kids...

Disneyland!!

So we have needed a vacation! Seriously. Well, we had some plans that got cancelled so I decided we would go to Disneyland instead. We were going to go down on a Tuesday, and come home Thursday night. We would get the three day passes and just have a ball. Well... things didn't go as planned. We ended up leaving about an hour after we wanted to. We still would have had enough time to play all afternoon though, so we weren't worried. We took the slightly longer route down so we would avoid Highway 395 which scares the beejeebers out of me. People constantly pass on double yellow lines because it is only a two lane major highway. I know for a long time it was one of the most deadly highways in America. Anyway, so we went the longer way (by like 10 minutes). Well, we were almost 2 hours into our drive when traffic halted. I mean, it took us 2 hours to go 5 miles. It was ridculous! I finally googled what was going on, and it turns out that a few miles in front of us was a 19 car accident involving all three lanes on our side of the freeway and 2 on the other side. It happened about an hour before we got to that point, so we were grateful that we didn't leave on time, as we may very well have been in that accident. So anyway, I took some pictures of some stuff on the freeway that made me laugh while we were stuck there. Here is one. I asked where exactly the yard sale was since I didn't see it anywhere. Remember though, that we had been sitting there forever with both kids getting cranky. I had to laugh at something.
A couple of different spots the barbed wire fence along the freeway was down so the cars would pull off and go through. Here is the last car going through this spot. Why might you ask? Because he got stuck in the sand. And then kept trying to get himself out and only made it worse. His wheels were half under sand before we inched out way past him.
We finally pulled off near a famous rock formation called Vasquez Rock. We stopped for lunch at a little diner. I remember it was a friendly place who brought fruit out to the kids right away (not that they ate it). They also had these lamps by each table that looked like a revolver and had a pull string to turn the lights on and off. Liam loved pulling that chain. Then we had to make him stop because the lady told us they break easily. Also, there was the coolest sign:
After lunch, since we were right there anyway and didn't know when we would actually stop to see it again, we stopped to get out at Vazquez Rock.



Please ignor my hair flying everywhere in the next two pictures. Liam and I were sitting on the edge of one of the rocks and it was pretty windy.


We finally made it to Disneyland. What was supposed to be around a three hour trip ended up being over 7 hours. That pretty much shot our first day there. The only way we figured we would go that first day was if we ended up getting annual passes again. We had them a few years ago. Well, we finally decided to get them. (So if anyone wants company at Disneyland, let us know.) We rode about two or three rides that day, the kids favorite being Pirates. We stayed in Disneyland that day. I don't even remember what else we did. Once we finally made it back to the hotel, the kids crashed. I just took the picture because the kids were sleeping in the exact same way. Their arms were laid out the same, they were each holding their lovie thing. I don't know, it just melted my heart, so I grabbed the picture.
I didn't get a whole lot of other pictures... Ty might have. I will have to see. Here are some though that I got. The kids trying to pull the sword from the stone. Liam was not happy that he couldn't get it. He had tried soooo hard.We got to watch these drummers perform. It was sort of like a drumline thing where they were dancing with it. Anyway, it brought back some fun memories from doing drumline as a kid. Then that made me miss being in music period and playing my French Horn. Maybe someday I will get it back out and play again....

So there you have it. Our fun trip to Disneyland in a nutshell. Next time we go I will try to be better about pictures.

Cute kids

Here are just some cute pictures of my kids.
He was so proud of himself for getting two pairs of glasses on!
The kids working together to build a tunnel for their balls outside to roll under.
Walking home from the church one day; they were airplanes trying not to crash into each other.
Sitting together eating ice cream cones.

House work

Over the past two months, our house has undergone a lot of changes. We have rearranged our house so we no longer have a living and a family room, but now just have a living room with the toys hidden. What was the family room is now a larger dining room so we don't feel cramped anymore. We had our table crammed into our kitchen area to make it an eat in kitchen, but it was feeling too cramped. All the nasty popcorn stuff is scraped off the ceiling in those rooms as well as down the hall. All the old seriously disgusting carpet and linoleum has been taken up and tiled. We had two doors replaced and we painted. I think that is about it. And it is a lot. We borrowed our friends truck to go to Lancaster (about 90 miles away) to pick up the tile from Lowe's. We got around 700 sq ft of tile. We had two guys from the store load it into the truck, again, since Ty was recovering from surgery, he couldn't unload the truck. So, it took me several hours, but I unloaded all 300+ boxes of tile.
Once that part was done, we finally ripped the carpet up. When we did that, we found out that the floor was cracked down the middle and severely not level. I mean, it was almost an inch and a half off level in one spot. So first, Rick (the guy who was doing all this work) broke up the cement around the large crack and recemented it so the crack isn't there anymore. Then we had to get several bags of Level Quik to level half of our living room. It took several more days than was planned, but it turned out nice. Here is a picture of the tile just after it was mostly laid, but not grouted.
AFter that we moved onto what is now the dining room and thankfully found no major cracks, and a few unlevel spots that could be leveled with the thin set. I don't have those pictures downloaded yet but will put them on when I have them.

Al in all, I love it. Our ceiling looks SSSSOOOOOOO much better! Our house is cooler. The nasty, stained, gross, germ infested carpet is gone. In it's place it nice tile that is easy to clean. We haven't yet had any major injuries from the tile to the kids, and hopefully we can get a nice area rug in the living room to prevent that. The funny thing is that I posted some pictures as we were going along on Facebook and the next Sunday at church, I had about 5 people come up to ask me if we were moving. Nope, we just want our house nicer. And it is.

Memorial Day

Since Ty was still recovering from surgery way back at Memorial Day, we just hung out most of the day. We really wished we had been in Utah that weekend, but just couldn't make it. We went to the pancake breakfast that our ward does every year, then went home to sleep a little before we headed to a friends house for swimming and a bbq. Here are the few pictures I took.
Jordan's first little sand castle she made:
Liam eating his pancake:
We thought we would get out without getting a kid burried in the sand, but a few minutes before we left, Liam really, really wanted Joey to bury him.