Buzz Lightyear vs. Iron Man

So if you want to know why Zach got a Iron Man toy for Christmas, you'll have to call Em for that story. He wouldn't have gotten one, if it was up to us. But after he opened it, I began to wonder. Who would win? Buzz Lightyear or Iron Man? As you can see from the picture, Buzz has a good inch on him, and when you're only 5 inches tall, that's a pretty big deal. Anyhoo, what do you think?

Best Toilet Seat Ever!

I'd much rather be reading about, and looking at pictures of, our friends most recent trip to Disneyland, but as they have not yet posted anything on their blog (hint hint), you'll all just have to read about toilet seats instead. :-)

On Wednesday I was bathing our kids, when while sitting on the toilet seat, I leaned over into the tub to get something, and cracked the hinge of the toilet seat. The next day, we went to Home Depot and found the coolest seat ever!



Sure it looks like a normal seat from the outside.



And it looks almost like a normal seat from the inside, but if you notice on the lid, there is a smaller seat hidden inside!



Pull it down, and you have an instant training seat! No more nasty training seats! Sure it can't go wherever you go, but who wants to pack a training seat anyway.

The nice thing is the training seat is magnetically attached to the lid, so you don't have to lift up 2 seats to get to the adult sized one.

Anyhoo, one of the more random posts, but we think its pretty cool.

Happy Birthday to our little one!

We had a fun day today. A few weeks ago, Em saw some crazy cupcakes online, and decided to give them a try for Liz's B-day. They turned out pretty good. They tasted really good too.

Click here to see some more fun ideas.

Our Little Super Heroes

After we found out that we ate dinner at 3:30, instead of 4:30, because we hadn't set our car clock back yet, we were left with a long evening, with nothing to do. We came up with 2 options, go to a museum of art, or make super hero costumes. I bet you can guess who came up with what idea. So, here are our little super heroes in action.




Can you guess what super hero they are trying to be? See if you can figure it out. :-)

So what should we do with all this room?

As most of you know, our bedroom is awkwardly large. We have ideas on how to fill the space in a neat clean manner, but of course, it's going to take time an money. So, what do you do with all the space in the meantime? Well, I know what we can do!!!!

Sadly, it's only temporary. I have to take it down right after I click publish. :-(

Toddler Soccer

Our city sponsors a toddler soccer program for the younger kids to try out the sport. They have a practice once a week and a game once a week. The best part is that it is all about learning the basics. So if your child kicks a goal into the wrong goal, thats okay, everyone cheers, because at least they kicked it into the net. It has been fun to watch them learn and play. Zach and his buddy Ethan are doing a great job! We are so proud of both of them.

Here comes Thing #3

We are expecting our third, and the doc. says it is a girl!

The Fly Swatter

Mom: "You are looking for the fly swatter huh?"

Zach: "Yep, the fly slaughter."

Good luck Bud. :)

My Wonderful Wife.

So if any of you know me well. You know that I get pretty good migraines on occasion. Well one night, my wife made me this.

It's a cold/hot pack that fits very well around my neck. How did she do it? Well, like anything else she does, she gets an idea, figures out the details via the internet, and then makes it.

Oh, and no, I haven't needed it yet from this weekends activities. However, I wouldn't recommend operating a backhoe for 10 hours, then running a 5k the next day. (At least don't do it without a good helping of Ibuprofen.:-)

Thanks babe!!

Backhoe today, tomorrow a 5k!!

We had quite the weekend! It started with renting a backhoe, to push all the dirt around that we've been receiving. That took all day Friday. Then Saturday started with returning the backhoe bright and early, then driving to Salt Lake to run a 5k that was part of my work party. Then we spent the rest of the morning riding trains, touring a pioneer village, riding horses, etc... It was tons of fun!!!

Happy Anniversary Babe!

Love you!

Concrete + Water + Running = ....

He's learning what an Ice pack is for. Don't worry, he's fine. :-)

Who Knew?

picture from: http://www.yourkitchenandme.com/id2.html*

In case some of you don't know my family, I will start with the fact that I have a few picky eaters. The other day I received a list of approved food from my four year old. Including things like plain noodles, chicken nuggets, pizza, etc.

Well tonight I made something that I have loved to eat, fully expecting snubbed noses. I was shocked, I didn't get a single one! They all ate until their plates were empty; even my pickiest.

We will be doing Jambalaya again.

*Note: I made ours with just smoked sausage. I think if I added shrimp I would be the only one eating, then again, maybe I should.

Officially Not A Poor College Student :-) (Knock on wood)

We did something that we would have never done the last 6 years. We went to Walmart planning on getting a laundry sorting basket, and came home with a new toy. It's pretty fun. :-)

Cool Shot

We were driving home one night, and took this picture. It's a little fuzzy, but it's pretty cool lighting.

Spider Man!

We went out to eat with some good friends, and got balloon animals, it was lots of fun!

PG Carnival

Shortly after we moved in, we got wind of a carnival. We all had lots of fun. Zach really enjoyed the roller coaster, and Liz loved the merry go round.... (kinda) :-) We even got suckered into paying five bucks for a little stuffed monkey!! Got to love carnivals!!

Update on our yard

So what have we done with our yard so far?

We learned that with all the rain we got this spring, our natural landscaping really took off...so the first thing we did, was rent a field mower. Little did we know that it was going to be a torrential downpour during our rental time. Oh well! At least it still worked. :-)





Next we learned that our fence had to be 48 feet back from the road. (Lame, but I'm over it) So, in order to have our fence at the same grade as the road, we needed a lot of dirt. Luckily, Devin and Julie had the hook up, so we've been able to get +30 truck loads of dirt for free!!! They even brought their front loader to push the dirt around for us.

Thank you!!!





It's been quite the adventure.

Recommendations Requested

Now that we officially have a house, and we're almost ready to move in. Our attention is moving to the outside of the house. We have ~1 acre of weeds. Any recommendations?

'Thats too OX Blood'

If you don't recognize the quote, you'll have to go educate yourselves. Watch Oceans 12.

So we bought this house, and the previous owners said the white paint they used was 'Arizona White.' So we bought a whole bunch to paint the master bedroom, and at the end of the second coat, Em came and analyzed the color, and pointed out the fact that this 'white' was much more canary than the rest of the white in the house. So two more coats later, and we have 'white' in our bedroom.
(Thank you Peter - Em)



By the way, I wouldn't recommend spraying w/out a hat. After 4 sprays, over a whole day, it was pretty difficult to get the paint out of my hair. My little jumpsuit came with a hood, but it was way to hot to wear it. (it makes a good color gel)





:-)

Nerdhoodum

Here I am in all my glory. The glasses are fake, everything else is 100% me! ESD SMOCK, Wrist strap and Masters Thesis. :-)

My Lovely Family

Some people might think we're weird. I don't know what they're talking about.

V1 - Nerdhood Strikes Again!

So if you know me well, if it wasn't for my family and church, my life would revolve around trains and fountains. Well, I've hit a financial wall with my train effort, so I've moved onto some fountain efforts. I've created my first revision (there will be more) of a Laminar flow nozzle. What's that? In basic terms, it's a nozzle that when the water gets launched into the air, it is as clear as glass. (This idea, of course, came from the leap frog fountains at EPCOT). Over the years I've learned a bit on how they did it, what laminar flow is, and how to repeat it. I've found 2 companies that make these nozzles for the general public, but they want ~$1k for one. I made this first revision for about $40. Slightly more affordable.



Oh, just so you get an idea of what I want to do with this some day, go to http://www.wetdesign.com, enjoy their web site, but eventually wonder to Experiences then The DUBAI fountain. That's my favorite. I have 1 acre to start with, they used 53. I have a long way to go.

Yes we are still alive.

Sorry we haven't posted in a while. I'm sure we are the only ones living a hectic life at the moment....

Things, however, are going very well for us. We are still trying to get into a house of our own. The problem has been that we've found the perfect house, but the list of hoops/tasks/coordination/and such things is almost 4 months long. We found the house back in January, and we've been actively pursuing it sense then.

To give a general idea, it's a "Short Sale" (It is, but it's not, but it is), 85% remodeled home that we are picking up where the sellers left off. Their finances took a turn for the worst, so we're stepping in, but that makes for lots of fun lender hoops to jump through as well.

At the current moment, we have a closing date of April 30th, and we almost have all of the contractors lined up and blessed by the lender. (We have about $25,000 of repairs/improvements/finish work to do)

It's been quite the learning process. If you need to know anything about an FHA 203k Renovation Loan, just ask, we're getting to be quite fluent. Well, Em is. I just point people her way when they call me at work, she figures it out, then calls me and keeps me up to date.

I really want to post pictures of the home, but because we're not a private blog, and we are slightly concerned about 'cyber psychos', we won't. But if you want to see, let us know and we'll email you some.

I like being a nerd

So I heard about this on NPR today, and apparently the group wanted to do something different, so they got about 15 engineers to create a Rube Goldberg machine. None of the engineers were doing this as employment, they still all had their day jobs, but apparently they were having so much fun, and talking about it at work that at the end, they had over 60 engineers helping out. I'm pretty impressed. You can check out the news story somewhere at NPR.org.

Stress Management

Amazing what peer pressure can do. Earlier today Peter was in a slump, and Grandma suggested that Peter should work out his frustrations with his set of drum sticks. After he gave a myriad of excuses of why not, and his family gave a few chants and cheers, stresses were gone and we were all enjoying a good show. You can too...

my disney world favorite pics.

DISNEY 2010!!!

If you've seen my siblings blogs, you might have noticed that they went to Disney World. Well, yes, we went to. It was an interesting/fun experience for us. It's the first time that I've been to a theme park with my kids. Sure we've been to the Zoo and to little things like that, but never a week long, day after day resort experience.

I would say it took the first day and a half to figure out how to have fun. The first night, by the time we got to the parks, it was freezing cold, we were hungry and it was getting late. Not a good way to start things out. The second day, we were a bit cranky, but lunch tipped me over the limit. Lets just say, Elizabeth almost died, and I ended up with my pants being saturated with apple juice. By the end of the second day, however, we were all having fun. The third day was pretty fun, for those of you who like the Magic Kingdom over EPCOT... :-) Thursday was a bit hard again, it's hard to sit and watch show after show at Hollywood Studios with little kids. Then Friday was again pretty awesome, we went back to the Magic Kingdom and hung out with family. It was a bit wet, but it was lots of fun. Saturday was hard, but we wanted to get to the Animal Kingdom and ride Expedition Everest before we left. Zach even went on the scary dinosaur ride. I thought for sure he was going to be mentally affected from that ride, but he went with his cousins, who loved it, so he followed in suit. Thanks cousins!

In all, we won't return until our youngest is at least 40" tall. That way, no one gets left out of the majority of the fun. It seemed that if you were that hight, which Zach was, thankfully, you can do almost everything. For now, we'll stick with Disney Land and other more affordable/little kid oriented places. Don't get me wrong, however, in all we definitely had a blast and would do it again if the opportunity presented itself. For now, we just want to find a house and not go anywhere for a while.