Tis the season

I've been so excited to set up my nativity set and I haven't even posted a picture yet. Thank you Aunt Vicky for sending me this nativity, I still can't believe it!!! I've been waiting all year to be able to put it up so the day after Thanksgiving we went out and got a tree and I did all of the decorating. Every time I pass by my piano I see my nativity and smile!!! I love it!

It's A ...

I've been wrestling back and forth trying to decide whether or not to find out if wea re having a boy or a girl. Zane said he was fine either way so it was up to me to decide. My ultrasound was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and I invited my mom to come with Zane and I. She didn't have an ultrasound with my brother and I and I thought she would enjoy seeing the little one. I can honestly say that she's been more excited about this pregnancy than anyone, including me. I think I'm still trying to get over the shock... I'm not quite there yet. Anyway we were sitting in the office waiting to be called back and I still didn't know if I was going to find out. Well, it didn't really matter whether or not I wanted to know. We walked in, the tech. put all that gross goo on my belly and instantly asked me if we wanted to know what we were having. Without thinking about it Zane and I looked up at the monitor and knew without a doubt, as my little kicker mooned the camera, that we are having another Boy. Yep, there he was for all the world to see, flashing the camera. Not one of my babies have had any decency or felt shy at all when it came to the ultra sound. Every single one has "mooned the camera" almost instantly. Well there you have it. There will be more boys than girls in my house soon. Like I've said before. I may be outnumbered but I'm never outmaned! Here are the first pictures of the little rascal.

One of life's little milestones

My little girl is not so little anymore. A few weeks ago Ciara lost her first tooth. She was pretty proud of herself! It actually happened really fast. Sunday morning she woke up and said that her tooth was loose. She kept wiggling it all day and Monday morning it just came out while she was eating her cereal. Here's a pic. of the "toothless wonder"

Christmas time is here again... almost

Our Christmas tree last year

I don't know about all of you but I am dying for Thanksgiving to get here so that afterwards I can set up my new nativity set and buy our Christmas tree. I still can't believe my aunt sent me the entire Willow Tree nativity set. I had a friend buy me the creche, so now I have everything and I'm dying to set it up and take pics!!! I remember every year when I was a kid it would be a family quest to find the perfect tree. It was always like a treasure hunt to find the tallest one that would fit in our house, one with no "holes" and that was full and fluffy. After we got it home mom would huff and puff to get it off the car, trimmed, and hauled into the house. Matt and I somehow always dissapeared during that point, haha. Then we would decorate the tree... and after Matt and I went to bed I'm sure mom would re-decorate the tree so it looked decent. Zane's memory of buying a tree is slightly different. His birthday is the 1st of December and he said they always bought a tree on his birthday, which wasn't his favorite birthday tradition I guess. Every year I try to get him excited about "the perfect tree" but it doesn't seem to be working. I have to admit, he has great patients with the kids as they "help" decorate the tree. We actually have a fake tree that we put downstairs with colored lights and whatever ornaments the kids want to put on the tree. This way I can have my white and gold tree upstairs! I just love this season. I love trying to find gifts for everyone that they will love. I have more fun watching other people open gifts and the giving part of the season than I do getting my own gifts. It's so fun to watch the kids' excitement over all of the packages under the tree. I'm trying to teach the kids that Christmas is about Jesus and about giving. I hope that it's slowly sinking in. I like to take Ciara out and have here help me find gifts so she can be excited too to see others open their gifts! I also can't wait for the all Christmas carole radio stations! Can't the Christmas season get here any faster?!

Letting the cat out of the bag...

I figured it was time to let every one know our big knews. Most of you already know so I guess it isn't too big of news. Zane and I are expecting our third little bundle. My due date is March 29th, so I have a ways to go. That puts me at 18 weeks on Monday. I don't know what we are having yet, my ultrasound isn't scheduled till the 24th of Nov. I haven't decided if I want to find out yet or not. What do you think??? And no to those of you out there wondering, it's not twins. I just look like I'm having twins, haha.

I laughed so hard I hurt

I had to watch this SEVERAL times, it is HILARIOUS!!!!

A fun weekend in Utah

We were able to sneak away to UT this weekend and it was great fun. On our way down we took a detour to Logan and stopped to see Zane and my grandparents. Zane said he really enjoyed the visit with his grandparents and I did too. Zane's grandpa isn't doing very well and Zane enjoyed the time he was able to spend with him. We left Logan at 5:15... and do to bumper to bumper traffic from Brigham City to Provo we didn't get to Rich and Ronda's till 9:00, uuugggghhh! Josh and Jeni were in town for a football game and stayed the weekend so Ciara had fun playing with all of her cousins. Dalin had fun playing with all of Grandma's toys. On Saturday we took a trip to SLC to see all of the baby animals at the Zoo. The whole family went except Travis and Ryan. Ryan was in Wyoming, helping his parents remodel and Travis was at a hockey game. He didn't get to play due to an injury (hope you get better Trav!!!)
Anyway, the Zoo was great. The weather was perfect and ALL of the animals were awake and moving. I can't think of one animal that was asleep and we coudn't see. There were baby tigers, a baby snowleapard, giraffe, and elephant. Here are some pics from our trip.

Simply Beautiful

Simply Beautiful, this video reminded me that I knew my Savior once and I can know him again. And when I truly know him, then I will truly know myself. I will have a glimpse of the daughter I was before coming to this earth. I may feel weak and inadequate but I was once strong and immovable. When I search for him in humble prayer and supplication and trust in him with a perfect faith I will be strong and immovable again.

CAN'T WAIT

The Twilight Saga: New Moon Trailer in HD

The First Day

Ciara had her first day of school today. She was so excited to put on her outfit and have her hair done. I was able to go with her and spend the day with her. It was a shortened day and the kindergartners only stayed till 10:30. It was sort of just an introduction day with the teacher. Here of some pics of the big Kindergartner!

Work... Finally

George and Zane just got the final go ahead from the bank on a job they've been working on, for quite some time, out in Hardin. It's a commercial business and will be work for quite a few months so that's good to know that we've got work for a while. There are also one or two people working with George on starting a house. George has been talking about staying in Hardin for the week and then coming home on the weekends. While I'm not thrilled with the idea of being home without Zane all week I'm grateful for the work. If we can get a house or two started then Zane would stay here and manage the business stuff here. That's what I'm praying for!! So...... if anyone is looking to build a house let me know, I can reference you to a great builder;)

Family Pictures

I've posted a slide show of our family pictures that we took out at my mom's house this last week. We had fun but Dalin didn't last to long as little ones usually don't! Hope you enjoy. Also scroll down for more pics and info. on what we've been up to these last few months.

Playing Catch up

I'm way behind on all of my bloggin' so I'm playing catch up today. scroll down for all of our happenings over the last month or two!

The Antics of my Son

Dalin has really been on the war path over the last few months, if it's not one thing it's another. A few weeks ago I found him in my craft room with my ink pad smearing it on the table, the white bed spread, and, of course, himself. The only thing I could do is throw him in the tub and scrub him down. Thankfully the ink came out of my bedspread. Mom was over visiting a while ago and Dalin thought it was hilarious that mom was stuffing plastic bowling pins up his shirt. He'd get mad if they fell out so we took some pictures of him and his "muscles"

And last but not least this morning I was downstairs doing Ciara's hair and Dalin was upstairs standing on a chair watching Daddy mow the lawn outside. I thought he would be fine and stay at the window since Zane was outside but of course I was wrong. As I was doing Ciara's hair I began to hear something that sounded like water running. I ran upstairs just in time to see Dalin dumping the last of the box of Trix onto the table and floor and then proceed to eat it by the handful... man this kid is such a boy!!

Family Reunion Fun

At the end of June we had the opportunity to head down to Whitehall for a Briggs family reunion (that's Zane's mom's family) We all had so much fun at Grandpa's ranch. It rained almost all day on Saturday but we still had fun. Zane spent a lot of the day trying to keep Dalin out of the mud puddles and most of the kids had AT LEAST one bath that day. After the reunion Travis, Jared, Zane, and I headed down to St. Anthony for some dirt biking at the dunes. It was tons of fun. Travis ran out of gas out on the dunes... twice... once each day we were there and he broke of his kick start so he had a few issues but other than that we did good. No serious injuries. The girly men didn't want to camp out so we rented a motel room in which the tradition of the pastry throwing was upheld (you can ask Zane or Travis about that one, hahahahaha too funny, mad did that muffin explode on impact!!) I woke up early to get my scripture reading done... and I was to keyed up to go riding to sleep any longer. This is what the boys were doing...

Fourth of July Fun

We were down in UT for the fourth and had a blast. Theresa and Randy, Zane's aunt and uncle, invited us to meet them at Yuba lake and hang out for the day. They had there jet ski's and some friends of theirs were there with their boat as well. It was all Zane and I could do to get Ciara and Dalin off of the "wavy boats" as Ciara called them. She had so much fun and was a pretty good little driver. Dalin squealed and giggled the whole time, he'd throw a fit when we pull into shore. We also went out on the boat with the kids. Randy took us out and Zane, Ciara, and I went out on the tube. It was a double seat tube so Ciara sat with Zane and I was next to them. Randy went pretty easy on us at first but gradually he was popping us up higher and higher, it was a blast. We had a great day out on the lake and the kids loved it!!!

Car Update

Well, I thought I'd better do an update on the car since it's been a while since I did the last one. Zane had an old street bike that he sold to further fund his "baby" He recently purchased shocks and wheels and has most of the framing all done. He is still currently looking for racing seats. He was pretty disappointed a week or so ago. He found a set of them for sale on Craig's list up in Bozeman. He said they looked practically brand new and the owner was only asking $50. If any of you out there know about these things that's like getting them for free. Usually a set of two nice ones like these ones you'd be looking at around $300. Anyway, Zane called immediately on them and the guy had sold them like, 5 minutes before he called... thus the search continues. I've posted a picture of Dalin Modeling the car and also a picture of what it will look like when it's done. Keep in mind that the picture of the completed car is really all Zane has used to know how to build it. All of the designs are of his one make and model. He has drawn up the specs on AutoCAD and hasn't looked at a single "blue print" that wasn't of his own make. It still boggles my mind that he can do that and in the end the car will go... and go fast at that!

P.S. Zane said that any donations to the car fund are welcome and in exchange we offer a complamentary ride in the car when it's done! (Zane says large donations may earn you the privlidge of driving the car, after a check of your driving record of course ;)

Laugh out Loud

I just recieved an email from my sister-in-law and, along with forwarding it to family and friends, I had to post it to my blog. I checked the story on snopes and it said it was undertmined. Real or not it made me laugh so hard I had to wipe a tear away. If ever you're having a bad day, whether at work or with your kids at home just remember this little story!

Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana.He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 FM in Ft. Wayne , Indiana , who was sponsoring a worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won.

Hi Sue, Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it's not so bad after all. But before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wet suit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wet suit. This floods my whole suit with warm water... It's like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch.. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. With in a few seconds my butt started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut. So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt. Now repeat to yourself, 'I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.' Now whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad day? May you NEVER have a jellyfish bad day!!!!

I've had my share of bad days but I've never had a jellyfish bad day.

MOAB

While in UT Zane and I were able to sneak away for a few days and take a mini vacation to Moab. The first thing we noticed about the town was that it's not just Moab, it's MOAB. Every sign we passed Moab was all in CAPS and the other towns on the sign (mileage signs) were not. Moab is one of the most gorgeous places I've ever seen. It was so wonderful to spend time with Zane alone and to be lazy and just do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. On our way into town we stopped to do some dirt biking. Ryan, our brother-in-law, suggested a great sand trail and it was so much fun! we made a huge loop around some mountains and ended up at a massive slick rock platform that we hiked up to see the view. After riding we checked into the hotel, got cleaned up and headed to dinner. We ate at a great pizza place and lucky for us they had the hockey game playing and we were able to watch quite a bit of it. After dinner we just wandered around town checking out the different shops and basically being tourists.


The next day we drove up to Arches National Park and did some hiking up the slick rock trails. It was so amazing, I can't even describe how beautiful it was. One of the hikes we did wasn't really a hike, it was only about a football field length. It was so such a cool walk though. We walked through a small "alley way" between two massive slick rock cliffs and as we reached the end there was a tree growing out of the red sand. It was probably the only time of day that the sun was shining down into this opening in the rock formation illuminating the tree. I couldn't believe how amazing it was. We also hiked up to delicate arch and the view from there was breath taking. I wish some day we could go and spend a week there and just blow a ridiculous amount of money hiking, riding, rafting, jeeping, and all the other wonderful things there is to do there. If you ever get the chance to go to MOAB, I suggest you take it!!

These flowers were just growing in the middle of these rocks

Our view from one side of Delicate Arch

Our view from the other side (the pics don't do it justice)

Delicate Arch

You can't tell from this picture but we are quite a ways away from the Arch

This is the "ally way"

This reminded me of Moses and the burning bush

p.s. keep scrolling down to see all of our other ventures in UT

Our Walk-about in UT

I know this is late but I wanted to post some pics from UT. It was so nice to visit Zane's family for a while in April . We were able to do a lot of fun things while we were there! One night we went to a place called Jump on It. Basically, it was a huge warehouse with wall to wall gymnastic size trampolines all next to each other with the poles covered. There were even tramps leaning at 45 degree angles on the walls and platforms to jump off of. There was also a sectioned off area for little kids to jump. We were able to go the the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point, the Zoo in SLC, the Life Science Museum at BYU, and we caught a few movies while there too.

The life science Museum was so fun for the kids. They had a stuffed elephant that Ciara loved. While we were there we got to see a presentation of reptiles and Ciara got to hold a huge snake skin. She was a little scared of the live snake though and wouldn't touch that. Dalin had fun just trying to touch ANYTHING... that he wasn't supposed to. Daddy spent a long time chasing him around.

The kids and I went to the Zoo in SLC one day and had sooo much fun. I rented a wagon to pull Dalin around and ended up putting him in and out in and out in and out. Of course Ciara's favorite part was the elephants and the elephant ride on the carousel. We waited in line to ride on the carousel and by the time we got to the front both of the elephants were taken so.... of course we had to wait for the next round so we could snag on of them. We were able to stay and watch the Elephant show but it really freaked Dalin out. He was trying to climb up me and hold me as tight as possible. He kept looking over his shoulder every 10 seconds to make sure that the elephants weren't coming to get him.

We grabbed a map of the zoo as we were walking in and Dalin took a liking to it. I snapped the cutest pictures of him checking it out... I better treasure these pictures because soon he'll be to much of a man to look at a map or ask for directions.

Hmmm...

Are you sure we're in the right place

Let me check....

WE ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE

We had a lot of fun while in UT. I miss all of the family oriented things to do in UT. Ciara had so much fun playing with her cousins and with all of the other kids in the neighborhood. It's nice to be back in our own home and have all of our own stuff but I miss being able to take the kids out and have lots of different things available to do. I missed my family while we were there and I miss Zane's family now that we are home. It's always a double edged blade isn't it?!

The Birthday Girl

My little girl isn't so little anymore. This last Tuesday, May 5th, we celebrated Ciara's 5th birthday. I can't believe she's already 5 years old. This year for her birthday she requested a unicorn cake, a pink unicorn cake. Since funds are a little low I couldn't purchase a cake so I had to get creative with the cake making. I've posted some pictures below of my creation, against my better judgement mind you, along with pictures of the birthday girl and her "loot"

putting the pieces together, it took 2 round cakes and 1 square to construct this

the finished product, the birthday girl approved

All the loot

Dalin got a little present too but he wasn't so sure about the goggles

Opening presents

We had a lot of fun at the party. We are still in UT so I think it was fun for Zane's family to be able to celebrate with us. Ciara is excited that we get to have another party in MT with Grandma Julie and my family. We opened presents and played outside till it was dark and then came in for cake and ice cream. We didn't even get through the entire birthday song before Ciara blew out the candles. And, of course, the day ended in true birthday style with a birthday melt down because our little girl was over tired (it was 11:00 at this point) and wanted to stay up and play with all her new things.