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.

Dinosaurs Galore

Whenever we are in UT we love to go to the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point. I took the kids the other day and Uncle Jared went with to help chase the little ones. We had a lot of fun. The museum as several interactive areas for the kids to play in and Ciara LOVES that. It was Dalin's first visit to the museum and he was more interested in getting out of his stroller and pushing it himself than he was in looking at the dinos. One of the areas the kids can play in is a water/sand play area. The room has a circular trough at just the right height for the kids and it's filled with large granular sand, water, and plastic trees and dinos. The idea is that the kids can build damns, rivers, lakes, etc. Ciara had a blast, as always, but Dalin wasn't thrilled with the mess it created on his hands. He'd touch it then shake his hands to get it off. The other play area is at the end of the museum. It's a pretend dinosaur dig area. there are two areas that have a buried dino skeleton and there are brushes for the kids to use to dig up the bones. Of course it usually ends up that the kids bury each other instead of digging up the bones. Ciara, again, loved it but Dalin didn't like the feel of the sand. I put him in it and he just stood there and wouldn't move. He would climb in and out not sure whether he wanted to play in it or not. Below are some shots that we took while we were there.

Happy Easter... A little late

so this is a little late but we've been distracted. We left for Utah at the beginning of the month to do some work for Zane's parents and we're still here in UT. The projects have taken longer than expected, which is ok, since we weren't able to do any work in MT. We've enjoyed the time with Zane's family so much but I'm starting to wonder if Rich and Ronda are starting to get sick of us! Dalin had a fun easter. He had the coveted toy of the day. You can kind of see it in the picture. It's the two cars, they are sitting on a little track and you push a button and they shoot off. Zander, Dalin's little cousin was a little envious of that toy. Ciara, unfortunately was sick on easter and didn't even want to get out of bed to hunt for eggs. As the day wore on I became sick as well, I ached from my head to my toes, literally!

New Give-away

Head over to allthingsribbon.blogspot.com. They are having an awesome giveaway for a dress and matching bow, check it out!!

http://allthingsribbon.blogspot.com

It can be done, we have the technology

The other day Dalin was in quite a pickle. He had two binkies, one for each hand, but only one mouth. So what is a little man to do??? He did what all men do when they need help, he went to his mommy. This attests to the fact that Dalin has a big enough mouth to not only do the following but also the lung capacity to back up that mouth and voice his opinion that he wants both binkies in his mouth. We all had quite a laugh at him. He didn't start smiling till he saw Zane come at him with the Camera. He LOVES smiling for the camera! My little ham.

Eternal Blessings from a Loving Father

I was so blessed this last weekend to be able to attend Mom and George's sealing in the temple. I know that they were meant to do this together. The quickness in getting it the paperwork submitted and approved was uncharacteristically fast according to everyone involved in the process. I think Heavenly Father was just as excited to have Mom and George sealed as they were. It was amazing to sit next to mom in the sealing room just as she sat next to me when I was sealed to my love. Not many daughters get that opportunity and I will never forget it. I have said it before and I will continue to say it, if I can be even half the woman my mom it then I will be twice the woman I am now!! :) I love you mom. Thank you George for loving my mom and for taking care of her. I know I don't have to ever worry about her, even though I do anyway, because you have love and concern for her. I am grateful for everything you have done for our family. I love you as a Father and I look to you as one. Thank you.