Thanksgiving in Seattle

We went to Ariane's house in Spanaway, WA for Thanksgiving this year. The kids had a whole week off school and Dale and I got the time off work. We had fun seeing Ariane, Matt, Jonas, and Hazel. Friday we all headed to Seattle to go to the Pacific Science Center, the Children's Museum, and check out the city.

This is the view from our hotel room; isn't it beautiful?! We got a great deal at the Red Lion and it was right downtown.
Here's the famous 'gum wall' at the Pike Place fish market. The entire wall behind us is covered in gum. People come by and add to it, sculpt with it, and write messages in it. (GROSS!)

We found this weird-looking broccoli at Pike Place. I just had to take a picture.

The first day we were in Seattle, it was a beautiful, clear day; unfortunately, the next day was cold and cloudy.

We had fun walking around the city, riding the bus and the monorail (that was actually the kids' favorite part), going to Pacific Science Center and the Children's Museum, and looking around at Olympic Park. We all decided that we didn't have enough time (or good enough weather) in Seattle, so we're going to have to go back in the summer. Thanks Ariane and Matt for letting us stay with you and for showing us around the town. We miss you all and wish we lived closer!

Halloween

I'm finally getting around to posting about Halloween. Elias was so cute as a skeleton, Elora was a mermaid with pink sparkly hair (no surprise!), Kydee stuck with her creative streak and went as a book worm, and Dalan was Indiana Jones (and was quite upset that most people thought he was a cowboy; his favorite video game is Lego Indiana Jones). The kids had lots of fun walking around our neighborhood; there was even a haunted backyard. They got over 10 lbs (!!) of candy, so they're still working on eating it (I only let them have two pieces/day). We had a Halloween party at our house the night before and it was so much fun that we might make it a tradition. Thanks to everybody who came!

A little rant about the forgotten holiday...THANKSGIVING!!!

I love Thanksgiving--the food, the family, the relatively stress-free day of sitting around eating and talking, and most of all, taking time to think about all that I have to be thankful for.
What I hate about Thanksgiving is that the rest of the world seems to have forgotten it. Halloween and Christmas have completely eclipsed my favorite holiday! (Gasp, did she just say that she had a favorite holiday other than Christmas?! Isn't that against the law or something?!)

I challenge all you readers to take a stand and actually CELEBRATE Thanksgiving this year. I'm not talking about gorging yourselves in a few weeks (that's fine to do, btw); I mean really celebrate being grateful for everything that you and I have.

In our family, every day in November at dinner, we each say something that we're thankful for (no repeats allowed) and we write it on a construction-paper leaf. The leaves are then taped onto our "Thankfulness Tree" (a piece of posterboard with a bare tree drawn on it). On Thanksgiving Day, we read all the leaves. I think it's a great way to really think of all our blessings--having the rule of no repeats makes for creative answers, and I think it helps the kids be happier with what they have, instead of focused on the interminable lists that so many write out for Santa. They also seem to say 'thank you' more often during this time of year and spend time thinking about how to help those in need.

If anyone else has any ideas on great Thanksgiving traditions, or how to help our families be more thankful, please share!

Our new bathroom

A long time ago I mentioned that we were adding a bathroom in the basement and someday I would post some pictures. Well, you lucky readers, someday has finally arrived!!!

Here's my dad taking down the wall under the stairs that would become the doorway. Yay for my dad! He's the hero of this project. He removed the wall, put up a wall, built the shower stall and did the plumbing and electrical work. Thanks, dad!
Oh, we also have a really great friend, Ben, who helped A TON with the taping and texturing of the sheetrock. Thanks, Ben!


This is the before picture of the bathroom area.

And this is the after picture. I think it looks wonderful! I bought some dark pink accessories to go in there and it looks awesome. I'm going to hang black and white pictures in there someday, but for now, we're just glad to have a bathroom downstairs.

Irish Family Reunion

These are pictures of our Irish family reunion. (My mom's brothers and sisters.) We had lots of fun swimming in the Virgin River, down by Zion's National Park.

Micah's Wedding

Well, my internet connection is finally working, so I'm going to catch up on blogging. (I really should be working on finishing the basement bathroom, but oh well!)

Micah, my brother, got married in June in Moab. Here's some pics.

Here's Micah and Kaylee after the wedding. It's a pretty dang good picture, if I do say so myself.

Here's all my parents grandkids. They're going to have two more by springtime.

(No, we're not having one of them.)

Kaylee's brothers found a huge toad and showed it to Kaylee. It looks like she really appreciated that, huh?!

"You may kiss the bride!"

Here they are at the start of the ceremony.

Congratulations, Micah. I love you and I'm so glad that you found such a good woman to be your wife and mother of your children. My kids are so excited to have Kaydance as a cousin and look forward to the next one!

Moab

The day after Micah's wedding, we decided to go to one of our favorite places near Moab--Honeycomb Rock (or as my family likes to call it, Fraggle Rock). It's a giant rock (it's actually several rocks) with lots of caves in it. When we were kids, we imagined that it was Fraggle Rock because of the caves and the sparkly rocks.

There was a stream of sunlight coming in from a crack in the top of this cave and it looked really cool.
The kids were trying to bury the light. They thought it was coming up from the ground. It was really funny to watch.
Here we are at the top the Indian ladder (Another fun place my family likes to go at Moab). The crack in the rock on the right side of this picture is where the ladder is located. Dale, my cousin Todd, and I are on the top.
Here's me and Tasha climbing down the ladder.

Fourth of July

We went river rafting on the 4th with some friends. We all had lots of fun except Elias, who cried and whined the whole time.

Here's everyone that went...Dalan is behind Elora's head; other than that, I think it turned out pretty good for just holding it in front of me.

It turned out that the reason Elias was crying the whole time wasn't because he was scared of the water like we thought, but because he had a broken leg. :(

We had to hike down a really steep hill to get down to the river. Dale was holding Elias, slipped, and fell on Elias' leg. He checked Elias, didn't see any scrapes or bruises, so he thought he was alright. OOPS! He's got a cast now and walks all over the place (he got tired of crawling everywhere after about a week). Except for nighttime when he can't find a comfortable position to sleep, he acts just like any other 21-month-old.

Here's a picture of Elias with his blue cast, which came off (long story). He had to get another one. Elora picked out a glow-in-the-dark cast for him, so the kids think that's pretty cool.

Barbee Reunion

We hosted the Carl and Jenetta Barbee family reunion this year and had a ton-o-fun! I wasn't sure how things would go with that many people, but it went really well. We went geocaching, tie-dyed shirts, had a photo scavenger hunt (pics below), and a treasure hunt throughout Idaho Falls. We were glad to be able to visit with everyone and have so much fun together. We were sad that Charles' family and Jason & Jeannie couldn't make it.

Here's some pictures from the photo scavenger hunt.

Summer update

I just realized how long ago my last post was, so here's a few picture updates of early summer.

One day, Elias found one of the kids' bike helmets, put in on, went outside and rode his bike. He was so cute, so I just had to take a picture. The funny thing was that he never keeps hats/helmets on for more than 10 seconds and he'd never rode a bike before. He rode his bike with the helmet on for about 45 minutes.
Kydee was in a contest at school to see who could read for the most minutes in two months. She read over 4,000 minutes and won the contest, so she got to ride to school in a fire truck. They took her for a 30 minute ride around town first; she got to turn on the siren and she loved it, of course! (Dalan won the prize for reading the most in kindergarten, so he got a $5 gift card to Barnes & Noble; too bad that's not enough to actually buy a book there!)

Elora loves to help me in the kitchen and she always pretends that she's the chef and I'm the slave that has to help her. (I have no clue where she got that idea!) Here's a picture of her making bread.

We helped my parents with their cotton candy booth in Moab, UT and while there, Kydee and Dalan got to ride this trampoline-bungee thingy. They had a lot of fun.

Remodeling

Well, you know me...it's been too long since I've had a project, so I decided to do three at once! (Actually, it's more like 5, now that I think about it.)

1. I asked my dad to help us finish the bathroom in the basement when he was here for Kydee's baptism (it had the drains in the floor, that's it). He got the walls up, did all the plumbing, and most of the sheetrock. We have to finish the mudding/taping, paint, and tile the shower.
2. I decided that I wanted to tile my bathroom floor while I was doing the shower surround downstairs. I also decided that I needed to paint and refinish the cabinets in my bathroom before I tiled. (I've got the painting and refinishing done, still need to do the tile.)
3. I figured while I was refinishing the bathroom cabinets, why not do the kitchen ones, too? Oh, and I might as well add a microhood. (I actually finished all that and I'm pretty darn proud of myself for wiring an outlet and cutting down some cabinets so the microwave would fit!) (I have more ideas for the kitchen, but they require ripping out the hardwood floor, moving around a few cabinets, laying new flooring, adding more cabinets, taking out a door, adding a window, tearing down a wall, etc...I think I'll wait on that.)
4. I'm in the process of redoing my storage room, since the bathroom addition changed the size and shape of it...I've gotten things organized, but I would like to build more shelves sometime.
5. After losing some storage space downstairs, I decided I needed more in the garage, which would mean rearranging everything out there to build the shelving unit I want. I have the lumber for that and started to move things. That's as far as we've got on that one.
6. Oh, yeah! One more...While shopping for trim to go around the door in the new bathroom, I found some crown molding for my bedroom at a screaming deal (I paid $12 for all of it at the Habitat for Humanity Restore!--it's a construction thrift store where they have new and used construction items that have been donated). I do not know how to do crown molding; I've never even done trim, but I am hoping I can figure it out! (So far, I just have the molding for this one; in fact, I don't even know if I have enough, as I haven't even measured the room yet!--I just got all the matching crown molding that they had. I hope it's enough; if not, I hope that Home Depot or Lowes has the same kind.)

Well, I think that's it for my projects...at least for now. I still have some in mind (expanding my bathroom and adding a window, putting in new windows because ours are like trailerhouse ones; pouring a walkway and patio in the backyard, adding a new laundry/craft room upstairs in the attic; yes, that would require ripping part of the roof off and building a new one...), but I haven't actually started those yet. I'm only counting ones that are in process.

OH...I remembered one more thing. My wonderful friends the Young's came and tilled up a little spot of earth (yes, that's from the Secret Garden) for our garden, so I've got to plant something. I better wait a week...wouldn't want it to freeze! (Remember last spring; it snowed in June!)

So, after that list, you're probably all wondering, "If she has that much to do, why is she writing such a long blog?" Well, I'm wondering the same thing, so I better go do something! (By the way, I'm still in my robe and it's almost...11:30!? Crap! I've got to take Dalan to school in 10 minutes and then I'm supposed to volunteer at the school for and hour and a half! I better get going! When am I ever going to get this list done?!

Kydee's baptism

Well, I'm finally posting about Kydee's baptism. She has chosen to become a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and we're so proud of her. We know that she wants to follow Jesus and make great things of her life and this is just one of the many steps she will take. Thanks to all of you who came. We were glad you could share this important moment in our lives.

Update on me and my life...

Well, I really don't have anything interesting to say. Life is pretty much the 'same ol, same ol' but that's good because theres SO many things about life that's great!
I've been learning about the settings on my camera and I'm going to try shooting most of my pictures (gulp!) on manual mode. I'm very nervous, so wish me luck. I still don't really understand apertures, ISO, light meters, zooming, and all that, but I'm experimenting with all of them and trying to figure out the best combos for different effects/situations. I read a book from the library that was over my head a lot of the time, but it really opened my eyes to the possibilities of photography. So, check back with me in a couple of months....I should be a pro by then, right?!
Um...what else? Kydee is still our little reader; in the past two weeks alone she's read The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, another one that I can't remember, and she started Eragon two days ago. Dalan also loves to read, but Calvin & Hobbes, The Adventures of Captain Underpants, and Junie B. Jones are more to his liking. He gets to go to 1st grade for math and he likes that quite a bit, but he's still getting used to having homework almost every night. Elora is still our girly-girl; she wears dresses or skirts almost every day and loves to play Barbie's and babydolls. Elias is growing so fast; he has definitely hit 18 months and throws temper tantrums to prove it. He also has discovered how to climb (and has the owies to prove it!) and he loves to make messes by getting into anything and everything. Dale passed one of four portions of his CPA exam, so the good news is he passed one! The bad news is he has to study more to pass the other three that he failed. Luckily, he only failed by a little bit, so he doesn't have too much farther to go, compared to the past 6 months when he studied 3 hours a day. Well, hope everything is wonderful for all of you out in cyberspace! Bye for now...

Amos' wedding

Well, I'm a little late blogging about this, but oh well. Amos, my brother, got married last month to a lovely girl named Tasha. Here's some pictures of their reception.

Here's Ariane's cute little girl, Hazel.

Kydee and Grandpa dancing.

Elora and her soon to be cousin, Kaydence, had a lot of fun dancing together. (Micah is engaged to Kaylee, Kaydence's mom. They're going to get married in June.)

A day in the life of a Barbee...

Here's pictures of some fun moments from the past few weeks at our house.

Kydee's best funny face

The kids found a dead lady bug and insisted on having a memorial service, complete with the following plaque. (For those who can't read the small writing, it says, "In memory of Princess Ladybug. Died in 2009 when she was two. 2007-2009") How they decided how old the lady bug was, I'm not sure. I thought it was so cute that I had to take a picture. They did it all by themselves; in fact, I didn't know about it until after the 'service' when I saw this in Kydee's room.

Here's the kids watching a movie with popcorn.

My cute little punk rocker! (It's kind of hard to see, but he has a faux-hawk.)

The girls dressed up Dalan and Elias like little girls.

Elias was less than thrilled, but Dalan didn't seem to mind!

Here's what Elora looks like every time she bends over.

I can't find a pair of pants that fit her waist.

Elora did my hair for me one day. Isn't it lovely?

Elora wanted to take pictures of us making silly faces.

I hope everyone who sees this first, realizes we're not all crazy, and second, remembers to have fun with life and enjoy the silly little moments!