October Happenings

I still don't know what prompted this, but one night while I was making dinner, #1 decided to put on a play. She and Daddy designed the "costumes" (construction paper hats/crowns) and then she wrote the lines. She got two chairs and draped blankets between them to be the stage curtains. For some reason, even the people watching the play had to wear costumes, thus #2 and I have on ours!

Here they are reading their lines. #1 wrote "Will you go to the ball with me?" on a piece of paper for Ryan to read. She wrote "Yes, I will." on her piece of paper. And that was the end of the play. A lot of work for two lines, but she was proud of herself! It was cute!

Here we are with our girlies. Don't I have a great husband?!

The girls were enjoing a nice fall day....


playing outside before the cold weather got here....

The girls helped Ryan plant a couple of trees. We purchased another Tulip tree. We planted one at our first house and were pleased with it. We also used tulips in our wedding, so I like that we have a tulip tree! Ryan also found a maple and transplanted it. I think he found it growing in one of our other beds...we'll see if it survives!
Back in the spring....before tax season was over....Ryan and the girls were trying to figure out what to do while I worked one Saturday. The previous home owners had left a small flower bed next to the garage....maybe 4 or 5 feet long. Ryan decided to let the girls plant flowers in it. I have enjoyed that bed all spring, summer and fall and cannot wait to have even more gorgeous flowers next year! Since the girls like "instant gratification," Ryan bought a few six packs of various flowers to plant in the bed. That way they had something pretty to show me that day. But he also purchased wildflower seeds and sprinkled them all over the bed, too. The girls and I both had so much fun checking the flower bed to see what new flowers were blooming. And they kept blooming, and kept blooming! Even after the first frost, we still had flowers in that bed. It was amazing. Here a few of the pictures we have of the flowers. At the very end of the summer, I cut a few and put them in a vase. Next year, I'm going to do that more often so I can enjoy them inside, as well as outside!



Playing in the playroom......

Here are Sweetie and #2 hanging out....can't you tell that Sweetie was being "sweet?!" (I guess I'd be fighting back too if a 3 year old was holding me by the neck!) By the way, #1 has decided that we should change the cat's name to Cutie. "Because she's not really sweet, but she is cute!" She has a very good point!

I found this picture on the camera one day and had to ask Ryan what it was! Apparently after bathtime one day, he put a green plastic barrel from the Lincoln Log set on her nose and got this super cute picture! I love it!

This is how Ryan spent many, many evenings this fall. He took a course at the U of A in order to get a certification that he wants for work. He only needed 3 more hours of physcial science. He could take freshman level geology, or a senior level course called Karst Hydrogeology. He opted for the senior level course because it would pertain to some of his projects at work. WRONG CHOICE!!!! Next time he will opt for the easy A! He had field trips and a presentation and LONG homework assignments! I'm proud of him though. He stuck to it and worked hard and got a B in the class!
(do you see Sweetie sleeping by his leg? She LOVES to curl up on HIS lap every night. We can both be sitting side by side and she chooses him. I think she knows that he doesn't love her as much as the rest of us, so she's trying to woo him. Cats are like that, aren't they?!

The girls took Daddy's spot, so then he had to try to get all 3 of us out of bed and ready for work and school! Yuck! What happened to the days of seeing Ryan off to work and the girls and I hanging out at home in our jammies until after lunch?! They went by so quickly!

Growing up with Grampy Don

I couldn't resist digging out these pictures of #1 and my grandpa. #1 was almost 4 when the pictures of her were taken, and #2 was almost 3 when the pictures of her were taken.


Grampy Don always used to take me for bike rides. I would "ride" in the basket like #1 is. Basically, straddle the back tire and let a foot rest in each basket. It works great unless you hit a bump. That happened to me one time when I was about 5 or 6. I still remember how scary it was flying off the back of that bike and landing head first on the sidewalk....ouch! I reminded Grampy Don to watch out for any bumps!

Going off to explore......

Silver Dollar City

It's been a while since I've posted anything...I got sucked in to Facebook for a while, so my blog has been neglected. Since I'll be busy for the next 3 1/2 months, I thought I should get my blog up to date, or else if will never happen!

In October we went to Silver Dollar City with my brother and his family. We actually went over on a Friday night and visited my grandparents. They are retired and travel full time, so we rented a cabin at the RV park where they were staying and got to spend time with them. We hit the outlet malls on Saturday and had a bonfire on Saturday night. Then we got up on Sunday morning and headed to SDC. The weather was PERFECT and the park was not crowded AT ALL! We could walk up and get right on most of the rides. They only had one person operating a couple of the kiddie rides, so we had to wait for a little while on some of those, but not long...maybe 15 minutes. The cousins had fun getting to go on the rides together, and the parents got to alternate riding with the kids. It was a win-win situation!

#1 and Allison on the trolley ride into the park.
Waiting for Dad to get the stroller rented....doesn't #2 look so happy?! :)

Andrew thought it was taking Uncle Ryan too long to get the stroller!
It was worth the wait! Look at all of that room to spread out!
I'm not too proud to admit that I liked the frog ride, too! It was actually fun!
The big girls were trying to make it look a little more exciting than it was! They rode the kid's roller coaster later, so maybe they were just practicing for it.

See how much fun this ride is?! The dad's each rode with the little ones later in the day, but I didn't think they'd appreciate their picture's being on here, so I left them off.
Grampy Don & Grammy Saundra (the great grandparents) came to SDC for a while. We let them eat with the kids, and the parents snuck up to the next level and had a nice, semi-quiet meal. I love that my girls know their great grandparents!
We all went on the Great American Shootout after lunch. I discovered that my hubby is REALLY GOOD at that game! I had to take a picture to prove how good he did! He won out of everyone on our boat.


We couldn't leave without a stop for ice cream.....what a mess!
We had a great time! We were finally able to get a picture of all of the kids in the parking lot on our way home.

Labor Day Weekend

We had a busy Labor Day weekend. We went to the lake with Ryan's family on Saturday, had #1's best friend from pre-school over on Sunday and went to the lake with my brother & sister-in-law on Monday! #1 also had a birthday party to attended late Monday afternoon. After the party, she came home and fell asleep. When I woke her up, she was really, really hot. I took her temperature, and it was around 101. She had a low temp through the weekend, but by Monday night, it was obvious she had a bug. After a trip to the doctor on Tuesday, we learned that she had strep throat! At least she was able to have a lot of fun before the illness got her down!

After a eating lunch on the boat, we went for a swim in the lake. Ryan tried to fish while we swam, but for some reason the fish just weren't biting....I'm sure it didn't have anything to do with us being in the water...we were really quiet! ha!

Grandpa went for a swim with us...

then we got to ride on the tube! I don't know which kid is in the tube with me in this picture, but both of them got to ride. They really enjoyed it! #1 even enjoyed swimming from the tube to the boat when we stopped out in the middle of the lake! I was proud of her for swimming so far, and in such deep water!

When #1 was 9 months old, she started going to a Mother's Day Out program at a local church. There was a girl in her class that was one week younger than her. The next year, they were in the same class, and the next year, and the next year! They became best friends, and since we moved their last year of preschool, they have missed each other so much! We have scheduled a few play dates and they have seen each other at birthday parties. We got to have Ryleigh come swim and play on Sunday afternoon. It is so neat that the girls are still such good friends. I will have to be sure and continue to make a point to have Ryleigh over so that they can stay friends for many years to come!

Here are some pictures of the bathing beauties....

We don't have any pictures from our day at the lake on Monday. We went to my sister-in-law's grandfather's house and I forgot my camera. My SIL took pictures, but I haven't gotten copies yet. My SIL's parents and my mom came, too. My little brother stopped by, but didn't have time to swim and tube with us. We swam off of the dock, and then took the houseboat out for lunch. After we got back from our cruise on the houseboat, we took the ski boat out and did some tubing. The girls didn't like the tube as much that day. My brother goes a little bit faster than Grandpa! And there was more activity on the lake, so the water was choppier. At one point, we hit a wake so big that it bounced #2 right out of her seat, up into the air, turned her upside down, and she landed on her side on the tube inbetween our seats. Luckily, I saw the boat cutting through the wake and anticpated what was coming. I had a tight hold on her life jacket. I did not think it would throw her out of the tube like it did though. That scared me so much that I decided I was finished tubing for the day!

First day of Kindergarten

Wow....the first day of school seems like so long ago! #1's first report card should come home on Monday, so I guess it has been about 9 weeks.

She was excited to go to school and was not nervous or sad at all. No tears or clinging to us....

Here are some pictures...I just couldn't resist including the one of the two girls together!!

On our way in, we ran in to our neighbors. Their youngest son started kindergarten this year, too. When they stopped to talk to #1, you could tell that she felt so big and important!
Here she is outside her classroom and sitting at her desk. She had a great first day and has loved every bit of school since....well, except for P.E. It's not her favorite! She doesn't like getting sweaty! :) her words, not mine!

2nd Bi-annual (?) Girl's Trip

Two years ago I went with 2 of my friends on a girl's cruise. We had a blast and decided that we had to go on a trip again sometime. We didn't think our husbands would be too happy if we went on a trip every year, so we decided that we should go every other year. Our wonderful husbands said YES, so this year we went to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2006 Andrea, Felicite & I went. We asked Mary Anne to go, but she wasn't able to go. This year she was ready for it, even though she was leaving behind her 6 month old baby! (I've decided that 2nd kids get left behind more often than 1st kids. #2 was 4 months old when I went on the cruise 2 years ago!)

We called Felicite to see if she was on board this year, but she had also had another baby, and had several trips planned for this summer, so she wasn't able to come.

We woke up early on Saturday morning and headed to XNA.

We flew into Albuquerque and drove to "Old Town" to eat lunch. It was a lot like the Plaza in Santa Fe....just a little down town area that forms a square and has a park in the middle. We found a little mexican restaurant and thought we were having the first of many mexican meals. It ended up being the ONLY Mexican food we ate the entire trip! The salsa was nice and spicy and the food was yummy. Andrea got a great picture of MA and the guy serenading her!

When we were leaving we found this statue and thought it would be a good group picture. There was a lady sitting on a bench on the sidewalk, so we asked her to take our picture. She took the picture and sat back down, but it didn't really take. We asked her again...and again...and the 3rd time finally worked! She just wasn't holding down on the button long enough. Since she went to so much trouble taking our picture, I think it deserves a spot on the blog!

As we left Albuquerque and headed to Santa Fe, we saw mountains! We had to record the first glimpse of mountains...even though it is from the window of the car as we drove down the interstate!

We made it to Santa Fe and stayed at a great condo! Funny story about the gated condo. We had a garage door opener that opened the gate. It worked great every time we entered the parking area, but we always seemed to have problems with it when we left. The parking area was a circle drive, so there was one entrance and one exit. There was a condo unit in between the entrance and exit, so it was very clear that you had to go in one and out the other. Every time we would drive over to the exit gate, we would have problems with our opener. We would pull up really close to the gate, and then it would swing towards our car as it opened, so we had to hurry and put the car in reverse so that the gate didn't hit the front of it. One day when we were leaving, we could not get the exit gate to open. We went back into the condo to swap openers (there was a spare in the condo). The other opener worked just fine, so we left. Then that opener started giving us problems. We were leaving for dinner our LAST night there and could not get the stupid gate to open so we could leave! MA got out of the car and walked up closer to the gate, pushing the buttons on the opener, trying to get it to open and couldn't. I ran back into the condo and got the 1st opener and tried it. It wouldn't work. Then I got both openers and started walking back and forth pushing them both and pointing them at anything that I thought might possibly be a sensor. In desperation, I turned back to the girls in the car to see if they had any ideas on how to open the gate. An older couple that lived in the condo between the 2 gates had come out of their condo and were informing MA and Andrea that the exit gate had a motion sensor and did not require the openers. Apparently, the entire time we had been staying at the condo, we were opening the entrance gate on our way out! I had noticed a couple of times that the entrance gate was open as we drove by, but I just thought someone happened to get to the condos at the same time we were leaving! It would have been nice to know that we didn't need the openers a little bit earlier in the trip, but the next day (when we were leaving for good) we were able to leave without even TRYING the openers! :)

Anyway - here is a picture of us in front of the condo.

After we got to the condo and unloaded, MA and I wanted to sit and rest for awhile. Andrea was able to sit and do nothing for about 10 minutes before she was begging us to get up so we could go explore Santa Fe! She does not slow down well....always has to be going and doing! Guess that is part of what we love about her! We went down by the plaza and saw this beautiful church...we knew that the oldest church in the US was in Santa Fe, and this church was right in the middle of town and a lot of people were visiting it, so we thought it must be THE church. On our next to last day in Santa Fe, Andrea found the oldest church, and it wasn't this one! We do have a lot of pictures of this church though! When Andrea found THE church, it was after dinner and too dark to take pictures, so we drove by it on our way out of town. MA and I stayed in the car while Andrea took some pictures. She even discovered the oldest house in the US was right next door. Apparently the house was built for the priest to live in, while everyone else lived in tents.

Above - the 3 of us in front of the church we thought was the oldest church.

Below - the actual oldest church....(yes, I know, it makes sense now that the oldest church wouldn't be as elaborate as the one above!)

Below - Andrea in front of the oldest house. She was really excited about getting to see the oldest church AND house, so I thought I should post the picture that has her in it! Some other tourist lady offered to take her picture...

Back to the really pretty church that was not the oldest....even the door was detailed and elaborate. Here is a picture of the door....and all of those little rectangles are metal sculpture type plates. The other picture is of one of the individual plates.

Below - the garden in front of the church had different statues. This one had some beautiful turquoise on it. Of the statues and art in that garden, this one was probably my favorite.

The most frustrating thing about Santa Fe is that everything closes so early! At 5pm all of the street vendors packed up and went home...restaurants closed around 9. Nothing opened until 9am or 10am. When the 3 of us do something in AR, we usually meet at a restaurant around 7:30 or so and stay for a good two or three hours! Sometimes we meet even later and stay until 11pm! Our first night, we went to the La Cantina Sena (I think that was the name) and were able to have 8pm reservations, but little did we know that would be the latest we would get the whole trip! La Cantina Sena was like a broadway dinner theater. The wait staff sang broadway hits in between courses. It was entertaining and something different that you don't find around here.

When we were out exploring, we ran across the tax collector's office. We couldn't resist getting a picture of me by it...even though I'm not a tax collector, I "get" to be the bearer of bad news often enough...one of those "don't shoot the messenger" sort of things!

We took a picture of the Palace of the Governors, not knowing that it would look totally different the next time we saw it! The Native American artisans bring their goods and sell them on the sidewalk, but since it was 5:05 when we took this picture, they were already gone for the day! We took a picture a couple of days later when the sidewalk was full...I'll post that picture on another post.

Andrea thought of a great game that we could play at night at the condo. She thought of personal questions that we had to answer about ourselves, and then try to guess the answers of the other girls. She decided the game could be called Fun University (which MA and I quickly nicknamed FU) and we had freshman and graduate level "courses." The graduate level had harder questions....she surprised us with gifts for playing the game! We all had matching PJs! She liked the shirts because the had '08 on them (the year of the trip) and since they said Univeristy, she named the game after the shirts. You can't tell in the picture, but Andrea's PJ bottoms don't match mine and MA's. Our pants were pink and purple plaid....Andrea claims that they didn't have her size in that color, so she had to get blue and purple plaid....yeah, right! She'll make up anything to get out of wearing pink! :) The other 2 nights MA & I had to come up with questions...it was really quite fun b/c there were some random facts that we learned about each other that we probably wouldn't have found out otherwise. Who knew that we all preferred cinnamon gum to mint or fruity gum!?

Day 2 - Santa Fe - Rafting

We started our second day with the BEST BREAKFAST!!! Since we would be rafting through lunch time, we were advised to eat a big breakfast. And did we ever! We went to a French bakery/cafe and had yummy food! MA and I split a piece of quiche and then ordered something sweet to top it off. MA & Andrea had blueberry crepes with Nutella. I got to sample a bite and it was delicious!

I couldn't resist a strawberry tart...

Just to prove how much we LOVED this place....we went there every day for the rest of our visit! We decided that we would not want to be disappointed if we went anywhere else and did not receive such yummy food! And we were SO excited about our food, we took PICTURES of ourselves with it. We had no makeup and hadn't showered! We were on our way to go rafting, so we were grungy, but we sure didn't want to pass up an opportunity to have pictures so we could reminisce!

Side note - I borrowed 2 of my little brothers triathlon shirts because they were quick drying and would be good to wear on the rafting trip. The waitress asked us if we were in town for the Santa Fe triathlon that had taken place the day before...we had to be truthful and confess that we had never been in a triathlon...we were just wearing borrowed shirts. Then when we got to the rafting place, another girl had a triathlon shirt. She started asking us detailed questions about what kinds of triathlons we do, so we had to repeat our story again! I'm not going to borrow those shirts anymore. I feel like such a poser!

Here we are getting ready to go white water rafting on the Rio Grande! Don't you love our helmets!?

Here is a picture of some of the rapids we were on. They were Class 2....I think the guy said that there were a couple of places that were Class 3....but that was maybe only if the water was a little higher. There was one time that we had to paddle straight towards a rock, then back paddle to stop, then our side of the boat (just the 3 of us) had to jump to the other side of the boat because the guide had to flip the boat up on its side so that we could sqeeze between two boulders. It was really cool and really fun!

We stopped at his big boulder so we could climb up on it and jump off. Here are MA & I making our way to the top. Andrea didn't jump because she was afraid snakes might be there!

Our guide took this picture from the water for me....I thought it turned out pretty cool.

Here is a picture of Andrea from her picture taking spot. I took this one from the water as I was swimming back to the boat.

Apparently the rafting guides enjoy shooting each other with water guns. We got to a wide, calm spot on the river and our guide whipped out this water gun and started spraying another guide. The other guide pulled out his gun and sprayed our guide. It was funny for a little bit, but all of the rafters got soaked in the process, and they did it for a long time!

Here we are on the river!

We went to Il Piato for dinner that night. It was a nice Italian type restaurant. We kept laughing because the portions seemed really small. They were actually quite normal size, but we are so used to HUGE portions at chains (such as Olive Garden, Carinos, etc), that "normal size" seems small. Andrea ordered a glass of wine....which I think cost her $7-$9, and when they brought it, we just started laughing (after the waitress left)! **Below - I had to toast her with my water glass, just so we would have proof that the portion sizes really were small!