My Boys and Dandilions

My brother Joshua took pictures of Noah teaching Jacob about dandilions. I love these pictures!

 Noah got a mouth full of fluff!

Hiking Adventures

One of my goals for this summer is to go on a hike once a week. We have lived in Washington for 5 years now and I want to get out and see more of it. So this week was just beautiful! I decided to take the kids on a hike we have never been on, but when I checked the website it said it was great for kids. How hard can it be to take 4 kids on a little hike?

 I brought the moby wrap so I could easily carry Jacob. But he wanted to walk the first little bit and we started out great, all smiles.

 So if any of you know my brother Joshua, he has a long goatee. Noah found this moss growing everywhere along the trail. He picked some and put it to his chin and looks just like my brother! Ha!

 The kids had so much fun playing on all the old stumps and rocks along the way.

 As we got further along the trail I started getting really nervous. We passed a big group of older folks coming down and they all seemed amazed that I was hiking with all these little kids by myself. One man warned me that the trail narrows up ahead and to keep the kids close. Well the trail did narrow and that wouldn't be so bad, except the trail was very high up above the river. I was constantly telling the kids to stay away from the edge, hold my hand, don't run and other such things a protective mother would say! I could just see one of them running along and then tripping and falling to the river below. Ugh, I'm such a worry wart!

 Daniel was running up ahead of me and tripped (don't worry, we were not near any big cliffs he could fall from at that time). He fell on his head and got a little "battle wound" on his forehead. You can't take 4 little kids on a hike without at least one scrape or bruise.

 This is a view of the river below us. We weren't too high up at this point. It was beautiful up there.

 One mile up the trail was the 1st of the water falls. This is as far as we got as it was getting late and we needed to get home. 2 miles is far enough for us, especially with carrying a almost two year old.

This was a cool old tree along the trail and the kids begged me to take a picture with them on it. What you can't see is that just behind the tree it drops off over 100 feet to the river below. It was a fun hike, but I think our next hike will not have any cliffs or raging rivers for my littles for fall off or into.

Greenhouse

Kendall and I have been dreaming of getting a greenhouse for years! Kendall has spent hours researching them and yet we have never bought one.....until now! We found a used one that was in our price range and I pushed Kendall to get it.  It was very dirty and took a lot of work getting it cleaned and setting it up. My brother Joshua came over and helped a ton!

 The boys and I learned how to use a rivet gun!

 Noah was up on the ladder taking pictures of us working.

 Here is the inside all done! We are going to have awesome tomatoes this year (hopefully)!

This is a view of the outside of the greenhouse. It takes up a large portion of our back yard, but I think it's totally worth it!

Oh dear, it's been a while!

So it's been a very long time since I last posted. Life has been so very busy and I haven't really been in the mood to blog or had the time. So now I will try to catch you up on what has been going on with our family......
Noah turned 10! Holy cow where has the time gone!?? It seems like just yesterday he was a little toddler learning how to walk and talk! He wanted to take a couple friends to the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. We left the younger kids with my mother so it could just be Noah's day. The boys had a blast! I could tell they were all pretty tired by the time we left cause all 3 of them fell asleep on the drive home! Oh ya, it was snowing on the drive home so Noah was pretty excited cause that was his wish, that it would snow on his birthday. Sadly as we drove further north toward home the snow stopped. :(We came back to our place and opened presents and had apple crisp and ice cream.

Noah really enjoyed his science kits!

We did eventually get snow, lots of snow!

We built another igloo like the one we made a few years ago. This one was bigger though.

We had all the kids in the neighborhood helping us out!

It was a lot of work and the kids had a great time playing in it for a few days!

The kids and Bethany outside the igloo.

We had a couple sunny days and went to the park. Daniel is such a silly little boy!

Another thing that has happened this year is Jacob turned 18 months and now gets to go to nursery at church. This is him on his 1st day of nursery! He isn't a huge fan of it so far. He doesn't like being away from Kendall and I for 2 hours. But they have a wonderful nursery leader who is so great with him!Kendall's sister Bethany left us in February. She moved back to Utah. We miss her a lot! Before she left Kendall and I took her to Seattle and we went on the Underground Tour of the city. It was fun and interesting to hear about how Seattle got started.

There was a ward activity last month. They wouldn't tell anyone what it was and when we got there we found out it was sumo wrestling! It was a lot of fun! My neck sure paid the price for it for the next couple of days!

This is just a silly picture of Jacob being silly!

Oh, and since Noah's is 10yrs old, I thought it was time for him to learn "babysitting" skills. He's not a fan of changing diapers yet (but I'm a fan of him changing diapers!).

Okay, this has become my life! GIRL SCOUT COOKIES! In January we were at a girl scout meeting and Jennifer (troop leader) asks if any one wanted to volunteer to be the troop cookie manager. She said "oh, you just have to be in charge of collecting the money and handling the cookies for our troop." I thought how hard can that be, there are only 5 girls, and said "I'll do it!" I so should have kept my big mouth shut! It seems to rule my life right now!

But as you can see Emma loves it! These pictures really show her true character.....silly!

Silly!

Selling cookies! She has done pretty well. The 1st three site sales we did we both got very cold! Two hours is a long time for these 6yr old girls to be standing in the cold selling cookies, but she has done it and with minimal whining.

This is Emma at a site sale with her fellow girl scout Isabelle and her brother Diego.

Noah is a Weblos scout now. He had is 3rd and final pinewood derby race a couple weeks ago. He wanted to make his car look like a jet. He worked really hard and spent a lot of time on it!

Jacob really enjoyed the races!

And Noah took 1st place for the 3rd year in a row! I don't think he was expecting to win this year as he told me he just wanted to make a cool looking car and if it won then that would be good too.

Noah and his friends with their cars.

Daniel had a birthday in March! He is now 4yrs old! Time really does go by way to fast!

He got a remote control truck from my mom and a star wars lego set from us.

He was pretty excited to play with his new truck and Kendall had to kinda teach him how it works.

We had heathbar pie for his birthday.

Daniel and I sat down the next day and spent the morning working on his lego ship. I was impressed that he was able to put it together without much help from me. I just sat there and pointed to the directions on the little booklet and he figured it out.

So that's kinda some of the things we have been up to, besides the usual school, and normal everyday life stuff. Hopefully I will update a little more often in the future!

Our Thankful Tree

We started a new family tradition this year. About the middle of October I had my brother draw a large tree and we painted and taped it up on the wall in our living room. Then every night until Thanksgiving each person would write something they were thankful for on a leaf and put it up on the tree.

We had a wonderful time each night thinking of things we were thankful for. Our tree was beautiful and I wish we could keep it up all year round! On Thanksgiving day we took all the leaves off the tree and read them. We will definitely be doing this again next year!

We had a nice quiet Thanksgiving with my mother and brother Joshua over for dinner. We had very good food and lots of yummy pie! I gave Kendall a piece of pie and he was busy talking when he noticed Jacob leaning in and snitching his pie.