Announcement

Well, for those of you who don't already know, the kids have been making a little stir lately with their cute shirts...





I am 22 weeks along as of today. That is 2 weeks past halfway, for those of you not used to counting pregnancy time in weeks. We have had an ultrasound, and everything points to a very healthy little girl! We are so excited! I haven't been nearly as sick this time as I was with Lizzy, which has been a huge blessing since I have to work right now.


I am still loving my job at Primary Children's, working with the babies. Josh is still enjoying school. He is taking Math, English, Sociology, and Drafting. He is doing really well in all of them, and will most likely get A's in all of them. He really likes his math teacher, and that has made a huge difference. This teacher explains all the concepts really well, and also explains the reasons for doing what you are doing, which is something that has been lacking in all of his previous math classes. Josh is also looking for a job right now that he can do in addition to school to help out our financial situation, and get us ready for when I have the baby. He hasn't had any luck yet, but hopefully he'll find something soon.

Mitch still enjoys going to school to see his friends, but the actual schoolwork the class is doing is so far below his level that he is bored. The only thing he can tell you he has learned in school is about the word "conflicts". That is all he has learned this whole year so far. The teacher sends him home extra books to read for homework (while the rest of the class practices their letters) but then it is just us teaching him. It is very frustrating to us to feel like everything he is learning is coming from us, and we would just pull him out of school and homeschool him, but we want him to be able to interact with the other kids still. We still might be able to get him moved up to first grade, but we'll have to see. At home he is learning how to add and subtract numbers with ones, tens, and hundreds columns. The kids in his class are learning their numbers 1-10. He is a smart boy, and a good helper to me. His sister adores him. Here is a picture of the two of them on Halloween.
Lizzy continues to grow cuter every day. She says new words all the time, and has become quite the conversationalist, especially on the phone. She is slowly working on the potty training. She runs everywhere she goes. Anytime anyone blows their nose, she says bless you. She likes to say hi to people, but anytime they try to talk to her, she stares at them like they are crazy to think she would think of talking to them. So silly. Here is a cute picture of her in her pretty dress.

School

Well not much has happened since the last time I wrote. Mitchell started Kindergarten about a month ago. He is very excited to be going to school. He is really far ahead of the other students because he can already read books by himself. Mitchell's favorite thing about school would probably be that he gets to be around lots of other kids and play with them. He definitely gets that from Tania not me. Mitchell's school isn't very far from our apartment. Most of the time we walk or ride our bikes to take him to and from school. This is a picture of him on his first day of school. As you can tell from the picture he has been growing a lot lately. His pants that fit him three months ago now make him look like he is waiting for a flood. Just before school started we bought Mitchell new glasses. The other glasses were broken in every spot that can be broke. Mitchell is doing really good.

Elizabeth also seems to be growing a lot lately. She is finally able to wear clothes that are actually for her age which is 19 months. She is just as cute as ever. She can already talk really good. She can repeat any word you say. She can even repeat hard words like sustenance. If you say hello she says "hello." If you then ask her how she's doing she says "good." At church she seems to enjoy going to nursery. I have never had to force her to stay there, and she is never crying when I leave so I think she does pretty good. This is a picture of her on our bed.

Tania is still working at primary children's medical center, and seems to enjoy it. I think working with kids like she does that have medical rap sheets as long as the rap sheets of America's most wanted criminals would be incredibly stressful, but she seems to love it. I'm glad because the kids normally need a lot of attention, and who better to give it to them but Tania.

I also started school again this fall at the Salt Lake Community College. I am enjoying it so far. Living in Utah isn't that bad either. I don't have to memorize very many street names because of the grid system that the streets are set up on. It makes finding things, and places that I have never been to before really easy. Well I just thought I would write a little to let everyone that keeps asking when we will update our blog know what is going on. I will get Tania to write again soon.

Playing at the apartment

Well it has been a while again. This is Josh trying to give an update since Tania always forgets to. The last couple of months the weather has been very good for playing outside. Our apartment complex has a swimming pool that we have been trying to use frequently. Mitchell loves to play in the pool. He still doesn't quite know how to swim on his own, but he is getting there. We bought him diving sticks, and a kick board to keep him entertained. He loves to play with both. The only problem is he doesn't want to share them. Elizabeth is just like Mitchell she loves the water. One day we were going to go swimming, then we couldn't because something came up. Elizabeth started crying when we were taking her bathing suite off of her. Normally she never cries when we take it off. We bought a floating animal for her to sit in so she can play in the water easier. she loves to splash, and even stick her face in the water. We often stay in the pool for several hours, and if Elizabeth is tired she sometimes falls asleep sitting up in her floating animal. I would say our kids take to water like fish.

A few weeks ago I took the kids to play in the sand in the volleyball court. After the kids were done in the sand they decided they would like to play in the rocks. These picture are of them.

The kids seemed to have a lot of fun.

Well I guess I should tell all of you about Tania and I. Tania is still enjoying her job at Primary Children's Medical Center. So much in fact that it is one of the reasons we are still living in Utah. Tania also loves to swim in the pool Just like the kids, and even cries sometimes when it is time to get out. OK so maybe I'm exaggerating a little. I will start school again here in a few weeks for the Fall semester. Hopefully it will go as good as the last semester did. For those of you in Idaho we will be headed up there soon for a visit. We leave after Tania gets off work on the 28Th of July, and will head back on the 7Th of August. Tania still plans on telling more about our trip a couple months ago. So keep waiting maybe she will write soon. Josh

Engineering Project

This is a project that I had to do along with three others from my engineering class. We had to design and build it. All it had to do was climb stairs, which as you can see it did very easily. This semester is now over and I will be taking the summer off. After the presentations were over, the teacher said that whoever wanted to pit their stair climber against the other ones had his blessing, so everyone took them out in the hall to try to have their projects push the other ones. Ours went up against one that probably weighed 200 lbs because it was made out of solid steel, but ours pushed the other one backwards a few inches until the belt popped off the other one. As you can guess, we were very happy that ours defeated the other one.

VACATION!!!! (part 1)

For Spring Break, we decided to take a vacation. Josh and I went with our friends Harry and Kim to Ocean Shores, WA and Victoria, Canada while the kids stayed with grandma and grandpa in Idaho.

We left after I got off work on Sunday (the 16th) and headed up to Idaho. We got to Josh’s parents and talked until after 3 am. We made it to the airport at 6:57 am, just three minutes before the 30 minute deadline for boarding the plane. Unfortunately, Harry and Kim didn’t get there until 7:03 am, three minutes after the deadline, and they were not allowed to board. The people that worked for the airline just told him to go to another airline because they were booked for the rest of the day. They didn’t offer to help him at all. When he got online to find another flight, he looked at the airline’s website, and found that they still had 15 seats available on the next flight! So Harry bought his ticket on a different airline, and when they got to Seattle, he called the first airline’s headquarters and talked to someone that told him that because the people at the airport were so rude to him they would pay for his ticket on the other airline. So after all that, we were finally on our way!

We drove from the airport down to Ocean Shores and found our WorldMark resort on the beach. We explored the town a little, and then checked in to our suite. It was so nice. Very spacious. We had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a full kitchen with dining area, and living room. We also had a washer and dryer in our unit as well. On the back patio we had our own barbeque grill too. We went out and played on the beach for a couple of hours. Harry and I took our shoes and socks off and played in the water, but Josh and Kim were too chicken. :) The water was freezing! By the time we were done, my feet were bright red and they hurt pretty badly. It was totally worth it though! After we were done playing on the beach and collecting shells, we went to town to buy food. We went to the local grocery store and bought things to make dinner and food for the next day. After we got back to the resort, we made our chicken and rice for dinner, and had a very nice dinner together. After dinner we went out and sat in the hot tub for about an hour.

The next morning, we got up and made breakfast before heading out to the beach. We spent another couple of hours on the beach picking up shells, and we walked out to the jetty and climbed around on the huge rocks and watched as the waves crashed against them. The ocean is so awesome and powerful! Everyone kept their shoes on that day. After we were done, we drove out to a different beach where there used to be an old shipwreck, but it had already been dismantled. So we walked around the beach and found tons of clam shells that still had both sides intact, as well as some oyster shells. Then we went to three different kite stores before we found one that was open still, and bought kites to fly on the beach. After we bought the kites, we drove on the beach for a little while, but decided to wait until the next day to fly our kites. We went back to the resort and grilled up some steaks and had a relaxing evening.

We woke up the next morning, packed our stuff, and checked out. Then we went to the beach and flew our kites. We bought stunt kites, and they were harder to fly than I thought they would be. The wind was really strong and gusty. One time that I was trying to fly the kite, Josh had just launched it, and it decided to do a nose dive straight at his head, even though I hadn’t moved the strings at all. Josh was a lot better at it than I was, so maybe it was just me… One of these days we will try again, when it is not quite so windy.

After flying our kites for an hour or so, we headed off for Canada.

Springtime in the Rockies

Well, it snowed again. That's how it goes here in the Rockies. The weather never can make up its mind. It was really warm on Thursday and Friday, but then Saturday it snowed. Before the snow hit on Saturday, Josh and my dad were cutting down some trees in the backyard. Earlier in the winter, we had a big wind storm and it blew down one of the really tall trees in the backyard and it took out the power lines and phone lines. They had to cut up the tree that fell, and all the other trees it damaged. Mitchell was outside helping for a while, but then he came in and started complaining to my mom that they wouldn't let him do anything cool, just hand the gas can to them. Then he started complaining about no one letting him make macaroni and cheese by himself. Apparently he thinks he's pretty big stuff...

Getting our feet under us

Well it probably seemed to everyone that we had abandoned this blog, but in fact we were just busy getting settled in. Well I guess everyone would like to know what is going on. First I will tell you about Tania. She got her dream job working at Primary Childrens Medical Center, working in the infant medical surgical unit. She really likes it there. She only works with cute little babies. I was going to work until we found out it would cost us more for part time daycare then I would make working while attending school. So instead I am going to school full time studying mechanical engineering. I am enjoying school, and hope to be done with most of my general studies at the end of this semester. Tania works three days a week which works out good so that I can watch the kids when she is at work, and she watches them when I am at school. Mitchell turned five in December. He is still full of energy as always. He is also getting really good at reading. I think he is going through a growth spurt because clothes that he got on his birthday and christmas are already getting small on him. Elizabeth just turned one on the 24th of February. We think she is the cutest little girl in the whole world. I have decided she is going to be a librarian, because she loves to turn the pages in books, and she has extrodinary hearing and sight when it comes to people trying to hide food from her. She still is just crawling around. She is to afraid to walk without holding someones hands.

In December I decided with all the snow that we had received that I should make some snow sculptures. The cowboy in the backyard was about 7 feet tall, and the turtle in the front yard was about 4 feet tall by 4 feet wide. Several of the neighbors commented on how good the turtle was and how unexpected it was. The turtle was freestanding on its own 4 legs, and withstood kids of all ages climbing on it.
Spring time looks like it is starting to arrive. Most of the snow is melted and it is very comfortable to be outside in a tee shirt (and yes, other people think it is warm not just me). Right now we are headed to the park to enjoy the nice weather. Hope all is well with you. Also both of our phone numbers are still the same so if anyone would like to give us a call feel free to do so.