August 2013 Trip (part two)

Continuing our adventures while out west. We went swimming twice, once with aunts and uncles.

Princess with her Uncle

Princess and Little Guy with the newlyweds

The weather is very different out west, and you actually feel cold out of the water if its below 90 degrees. Here in Texas, you are sweating and humid when not swimming, so it was quite an adjustment for the kids to be somewhere where the water evaporates off of you quickly and it gets kind of cool at night.

We also got to attend the wedding of Fixitman's oldest nephew. It was pretty fun to see family and have fun at the wedding, the couple was obviously deeply in love, her face just lit up when she saw him.

The happy couple and his family (minus a brother on a mission)

Yep, we didn't put dress clothes on our kids who were just outside the temple. Felt like slackers a bit!

Big hugs for grandpa at the reception!

Princess and her cousin who also has gorgeous red hair

Fixitman and his oldest brother

More pictures of work on my brother's future media room.

Toward the beginning of the project, clearing out the old materials.

The new step from the rest of the house, much better than the immediate drop on concrete stairs.

Standing at the door from the rest of the house, you can see the new larger window on the left, a new wall, and where the mudroom area is on the right. The stairs down to the mudroom and a half wall were not completed.

Future mudroom area. Preserving tile that was there previously was smart!

View from the outside when we had to leave. A long narrow window is planned on the left side of the door but exactly what kind wasn't decided on yet.

The other thing I have pictures of from our trip is pictures. Fixitman's mom found some old family photos and we were looking at them with her. Unfortunately they don't own a scanner anymore, so we attempted to take photos of some of them to have a copy. I won't share all of them now because it would take forever, but here are two fun ones of Fixitman's parents when they were younger.

We had a fairly uneventful drive home. We did stop and visit my Uncle & Aunt in Colorado, but I don't have any pictures. My favorite thing there was seeing their hail screens to protect the garden and how the plants without it were stunted. Gardening know-how is definitely location specific!

August 2013 Trip (part 1)

August 1st we were on the road and headed north west! It has been 20 months since we last visited our western family and it was time to see them again. It is a long drive up but we decided to try and do the whole thing in one shot.

Pretending to be asleep

Little Guy is pretty fun in the van. He plays happily most of the time as long as you feed him on demand and well, the ability to watch movies in the van has definitely contributed to easy trips with toddlers.

Cheese!

Backseat boys

It turned out driving all in one trip was not the best choice for me, when we were almost there, I looked down at my right foot and noticed that I had lost my ankle. My foot was swollen! We had been stopping every three hours for me to walk around but it turned out I needed to elevate my foot more also. So we decided the drive home would have to be over two days instead. This is nice because it meant we would definitely visit my awesome Aunt & Uncle in Colorado but annoying because the trip takes so much longer!

When we arrived in Utah we stayed with my brother for a while. He has one guest bedroom and instead of having us all crammed in there or putting the boys in the living room, he suggested camping for the older boys! So they got to camp out in the back yard most nights. This brought its own adventures, including when the sprinklers were supposed to be turned off, but oops, one set went off and woke them up early in the morning! Overall I think they enjoyed the independence.

 We had lots of fun visiting my siblings who all live near each other right now. Here are some pictures having fun at the park with my baby sister.

This is my baby sister with her boyfriend who is now her fiance!

 Princess decided she had to try sleeping in the tent and it went alright one night and another night resulted in a lot of screaming apparently. I say apparently because I didn't hear it but heard about it so nicely the next day from my brothers' room mate. I felt so bad!

 Fixitman was helping my brother with a remodeling project while we were there and built a raised floor, added lots of insulation and widened a window in an old garage conversion that was not working out as a very usable space for my brother so he had a plan to make it into a media room. We were unable to finish the project before we had to head home, but did help him make significant progress.

This next picture is Little guy when we went to the movies and he wanted to sit by himself. He is getting big! We really enjoyed Despicable Me 2. I really was surprised by the strong family theme in the movie. I actually would recommend it, which is rare for me with movies.

Soon it was time to go visit more family farther north in Idaho! Luckily Grandma has great toys.

 Of course one time I came out to the living room and found them all watching their Dad play an electronic game.

Of course Princess enjoyed time with lots of girl cousins. 

Being silly with cousins

One of my nieces likes to put foam letters on people. Hence, Fixitman and the letter "Q"

Great smile from my niece

His sweet smile with the crooked glasses. How can you not love it? 

Okay that is enough for now. I will finish this up with another post later.

Lego Temples

At April General Conference time, I made a binder for each kid with activities for when each of the apostles and the prophet spoke. It didn't work exactly as planned but it was fun and we enjoyed the many activities. The boys' favorite (I think) was making a lego temple.

There are two of Trainboy because I love the comparison of glasses to no glasses with him.

Playhouse

Fixitman built a 2 story playhouse for his brother while we were in Idaho. Of course the camera ate most of the pictures. But it has a overhanging balcony, flat shed roof, a window on each side and a ladder on the side. The exit on the front of the balcony is for a fire pole. As soon as it was partially built, it was hard to keep kids out of it, they kept coming out to play in their play house. We have heard that after it was finished and we left, the kids slept out in it every night for a week.

Dismantling chairs

We had a yard sale in May to clean out the garage of random stuff. One thing that didn't sell were the two backless chairs. Not even for a dollar. Fixitman put the boys to work dismantling them into wood pieces for other random uses. They had a blast.

And where was Munchkin during this? When she found out she couldn't go outside, she did the next best thing I guess.

This & that

Munchkin just loves to play outside. She asks to go out whenever anyone goes near the door. She likes to walk on the trampoline and swing for short periods of time but also loves to drive her little cars, play in the little house and just wander around the yard. So we've been playing outside a lot lately. The weather has been quite pleasant.

Dinoguy read a chapter book from cover to cover one morning this week. It was called The Dragon in the Sock Drawer. He picked it out at the library. Trainboy is reading several words by sight and asking what things say and then repeating them like he's memorizing.

Trainboy and Dinoguy build lovely intricate lego things every day.

Munchkin can pull out a chair at the table and climb on top of the table in about 10 seconds. She has demonstrated this ability many times. This morning she climbed up and unscrewed the lid of the syrup on the table and dumped on herself and everywhere else. She was quite pleased.

Trainboy and Dinoguy collect sticks whenever we walk around the block for their stick collection. There is some sort of game involved as well, probably a battle.

So Spring is almost here, we have one last freeze this weekend and then hopefully warm temperatures! We're ready to grow our garden and a sunflower play house.

Bridge building

An activity we did in September was trying out different structures and shapes for basic bridge building. Trainboy really enjoyed this activity and loves his new arch blocks we made out of salt clay.

Home Depot Safety Month

October is Safety month at the local Home Depot kids building projects which means police helicopters, fire engines, a bounce house, and more along with the building project (a firehouse bank).

Fixitman had a meeting all day so I got to take all three kids myself and help build two banks at once. I only messed up a little and was able to fix it luckily. (I am so bad with these projects, I have learned more than the kids have I think.) Luckily Munchkin was happy to sit in the sling and watch and wasn't too grabby b/c I don't know how we would have done it otherwise.