Road Trip - Cali to Utah!!

Around here we ride in style...notice the earphones for the DVD player (how I wish we had that when growing up), uncombed hair and lots of your favorite stuffed animals and dolls.

Our favorite shark toothed kid. Two rows on the bottom, that fits the criteria. At least for a while.


Welcome to Utah...


Dads dream, to visit the Bonneville Salt Flats International Speedway. He wants to race a car here someday.


It is not a racing picture without the car in the picture...


On the salt...Daddy's Dream...maybe for real someday...

Sculptures in the middle of the desert...it always strikes me as a little odd, but I always look for it.

Just too cute not to share...
Dad loves to Drive...

Family on the Fourth...

The fourth of July with Family in Pictures...I just love being with family!!!

Katie with her cousins Jenna and Heather playing hide and seek...
Silly Katie, walking around with her goggles on for a little while...
Pulling more faces...
Christian loving being with another boy...
My Mom, my Aunt Jean, and my Dad...

Melissa, Brother Aaron and niece Lindsey...

Cousin Jose and close enough to be "Aunt" Lynn.

We loved being with all of you!

Early Birthday Present

Early Birthday presents are always welcome, aren't they? We started our vacation by going to the American Girl Store in Los Angeles. It was not planned until the morning we left and my sister invited us to stay the night at her house. Her place just happens to be 6 miles from the store and I thought, what a great way to get a birthday present for Katie. She decided about a month ago that she was willing to put all of her birthday money towards "Ruthie" one of the American Girl dolls. She has been reading a ton of the books and has fallen in love with the idea of a doll. Her birthday was a month and a half away, but you can't really buy a doll on the road and then not let her play with it. It was a blast. We were there for over an hour and had no idea that the time had flown by. Well, maybe Christian did. It was so fun to watch Katie as she picked her stuff out and then just wanted to buy it and get out. We forced her to take some time and enjoy it and then got her to stop being shy long enough to take some pictures before we left. The movie just came out with the Kit Kittredge and her friend Ruthie so there was the house in the outdoor mall and stuff all over the store with them. It was a lot of fun.

Here is a picture of a brother being a boy in a doll store. :)

Oh, What do you do in the Summertime...

We have been trying to keep ourselves busy enough so that we do not get bored, but not so busy that we are worn out and are not getting the "break" that we need so badly from a strict routine. It has been (mostly) a fun challenge. At the beginning of the summer we may have had too much on our plate. Now we are looking forward to some time away from home for a little change of pace.

The beginning of the summer brought swimming and diving lessons. The kids are getting better at diving. Here is Katie attempting a front flip for the first time. Not bad!

Here is Christian getting ready to make his approach on the board...Katie has just gotten out.

Here is Katie doing a back dive...

And here is Christian just being happy as he is getting out of the pool.

They had a lot of fun. Katie wasn't sure she liked how much her body got smacked as it entered the water. But she thinks it might be worth the price to dive. We will see when we try again next year. Christian loved it, but isn't really getting it quite yet. But he is definitely not afraid of swimming in 11-13 foot deep water. He thought it was funny to swim across the dive tank when his swim class (not diving) was supposed to just be getting comfortable with the idea of being on the edge. (Picture, class on one side, Christian swimming to the other. :) Christian is a ham, so is still lovingly tolerated by his teacher. I stepped in to help and told Christian in front of his teacher that he can get thrown out of class if he didn't listen. He stopped.

We have had a lot of people over to swim in the pool and have invited many more. (Open invitation, if you haven't already received one). And that has kept us very busy and given Katie and Christian a lot of people to play with.

The reading program has been really good as it has helped us stay on track with having minimal reading at the very least. We seem to go in spurts depending on how much time in the pool we have had and probably how much time on the computer has been eaten up by their new webkinz. Luckily we already had time limits for "screen time" otherwise it might have been even rougher than it has been to kick them off. I have had to help them out "earning" kinzcash for their pets too. It has been fun. :). All sorts of ways to bond.

Hope your summer is fun. If you are too hot, come on over.

Happy 6th Birthday, Christian!

Today is Christian's 6th Birthday which is almost too hard to believe. As the kids grow and we need to get new shoes or new clothes because they just don't fit anymore, I will tease them and say "If I have told you once, I have told you a thousand times, you are not allowed to grow. Do I need to give you another time-out?". They always chuckle, "Mooom, we can't stop growing. That's how God made us." It is too cute. So, apparently I do not have the time-out power on growing up. So, onto a few Birthday facts about Christian.

• Christian's number one form of play is "imagining". He does not need any toys to do this. You can hear him in his room bouncing off of his bed and his walls as he "flies" around his room. He won't even tell me what he is imagining. Sometimes I wonder why I even buy toys and then all of the sudden he will haul all of them out and play with them too.


• He loves Robots and spacemen, particularly Buzz Lightyear. This year he got the mid-sized Robosapien for his birthday. He received a less expensive model this last year at Mike's work party and just loved it. Sometimes when he is imagining it will be sitting in the middle of the floor as he runs around it while it flashes its lights and warns of enemy attack. When he saw the Robosapien (and it was on sale, yeah!) he said, that is all I want mom. I asked him what else he wanted as there was still some money left in the budget. He kept looking at that box and saying, "That is all I want mom, the robot, that's all.". Very cute. Luckily I got a few ideas before we found the Robosapien. (Here he is with his new Robot since we celebrated on Saturday.)

• Christian just graduated from Kindergarten and is going into first grade this next year! Yeah. He is an emerging reader and speller. The other day he found his name tag from school and decided to write "big boss" on it. He thought it was a great joke.


• Christian loves Lego's. Or, at least the Lego.com website that we have found games on.


• Which means he also really loves the computer and the games we find on the Internet. Yes, his mom is to cheap and/or to wary of being able to control the usage of a Wii. I have password on the computer, so when computer time is up, so goes the password too.


• Christian loves theme parks. What kid doesn't. Living closer to Disneyland has been fun. He has learned about LegoLand too, and we are hoping to go soon. He loves to be outside and loved going to Philmont with the family last year. Here is a picture of him on Western Night trying to rope a "calf".

• Christian has a very infectious laugh. When he watches movies he will just get the biggest belly laugh. It makes you laugh just watching him.


• Christian has lived in three states already in his young life. Oregon, Idaho and Arizona.


• He is a force to be reckoned with on a scooter. He prefers it to a bike, although we are working on the whole bike thing too. We don't want to buy another one with training wheels.


• He is a little fish in our pool. It only took a few times in the pool to start diving and swimming across the pool. (Diving lessons this year and bottom is treading water in our pool.)

• He loves his Daddy and is very excited to play with him when he gets home. (But, he is really a momma's boy, don't tell his dad. I am enjoying it while I can.)

Happy 6th Birthday, Big Boss, Christian!

Here is Christian at the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game we went to for part of his birthday. We had free tickets we shared with our friends the Ostlers. At this point, he really just wanted to be at home. He is hoping that the meditation will take him there.

Celebrating the end of school...

To celebrate the end of the school year we went and got grossed out at the Arizona Science Museum. The kids had a blast. We got to shoot things into noses, sniff and guess where the smell came from (way too real), slide down stomachs and generally learn about some "gross" things our bodies do. They also learned about some gross animal "stuff". The have a brand new planetarium too. To be honest, I never saw a planetarium show before. This was really cool though. The kids and us parents had a really fun time!

Christian got a chance to feel what it was like to become poop.

He got to race a dung ball up the hill...

We ended the day at Chuckee Cheese and got to let our brains pretty much melt there for awhile. This video is really funny. Notice Christian up at the front dancing his heart out at first to "earn" more tickets. He doesn't even know Chuckee throws the tickets. Katie is there to grab them up.

Okay, this is not from the Grossology exhibit. It is just too cute not to post. Katie is quite the dresser. Black shirt with her camouflage capri's, ruby slippers and hot pink underskirt (supposed to go under another skirt for dance). I love her. She is my kind of girl. She is loving the freedom of summer.