Happy Happy Birthday Knightin Dear!!!

Happy Birthday to my little "Earth Day" boy!!

Knightin is such a happy, silly boy and we are so blessed to have him in our lives.

We love you Kni, Kni!!!!

Question?

How do you keep a group of 30+ cub scouts and their families quiet for 45 minutes?

Give Up?

You do a Pack Night on aviation and have a friend come in and talk about it, bringing with him several of his RC model airplanes. I wish I had my camera, but of course I forgot it, but this was a really cool night for the boys. Rod a guy from our ward, brought in to gas power planes, one electric and a helicopter. These aren't little planes either. They were probably 3.5 to 5 feet. I guess this is Rod's little hobby. He has stacks of these babies at home. He is a trucker and has a flight simulation program that he play while out on the road. He is one addicted big boy!

We were going to go outside and have him show the boys how they fly, but the weather ended up being terrible, so that had to wait. He hopes that near the end of the summer we can do it again and pray for great weather. He did get to turn on his jet and show the boys how loud they are and he flew is helicopter and some of the boys got to do that as well.

It was a fun night and many of the boys went home with new things to add to their next years Christmas List, sorry parents!!

Landscaping

This year we have been very blessed and have been able to do a lot. Getting to start our landscaping is one of those things that bring me much happiness in life. We didn't think that we would be able to start on it for a couple years yet so this is amazing and we have amazing friends and family that are helping make our dollar stretch as far as it can. We still have far to go and won't get it all done this year, but we will have a good chunk of it done and the biggest thing is we will have grass, YEAH!!!!!Our lot is a lot higher then most of the lots on our street and like many homes we have a city easement. Well that easement is very sloped and we couldn't do a lot with it, so we decided to cut it down at our property line and put in a rock retaining wall. This way we can put gravel down and use it for parking. So this is where we started. We had a ton of dirt and luckily our neighbors wanted it and we didn't have to have it hauled off.We brought in a mini excavator next, and started all of our initial shaping and putting in our rock wall. We will have a walkway up the center that will go to a porch next year if all goes well.Mona city is putting in a sewer. It will probably get done in a few years, and at that point everyone in the city has to put in there sewer line and break down their septic and fill it with sand. We decided to put in our line now instead of later. Why mess up our landscaping just to buy us a few years of not having to put it in. Look at that ugly hole. It goes from about 6 ft. deep to about 13 ft. I know other will probably still be deeper, but that was bad enough especially when Todd is at the bottom of it and our excavator friend is telling us all these horror stories about dirt wall collapsing and killing the people. I'm glad it's done and filled in. We got to work around all 4 of our main lines, those are the fun pipes you see sticking through the ground.One of our small rock wall put in and most of the front wall.

Our big pile of rocks in the back of our neighbors yard.The front done with all the first shaping. we have a few more rocks to put in, but they are all smaller.

The start of our backyard retaining wall. It is all put in as well. In front of the wall will all be grass and some planter boxes on the side. Trees will line the back right above the rocks and then there is the pathway that goes between the rocks that will go out into the kids playground area someday, plus a garden.
Sprinklers our next project, hopefully they will be started next week.
Here are a couple of pictures of Kni and TJ enjoying our freshly dug up dirt.

Butterflies

Taylar got a Butterfly Pavilion from her Grandma and Grandpa Jim for Christmas. They give you a certificate to send in to have 10 eggs sent to you. They will send it to you as soon as they have the eggs. They send 10, but will guarantee that 6 will live. Tay got lucky and all ten survived. They are in the Caterpillar stage for 7-10 days, then in the cocoon for another 7-10 days. You then feed them sugar water or oranges after they emerge. They say you can keep the butterflies in the pavilion or you can let them go, right now Taylar is keeping them. She'll probably let them go in a few days. She is still way to excited to send her babies off just yet! Brand new baby Caterpillars

A little bigger

A lot bigger!Getting fat from eating all that yummy food on the floor of the jar.

Preparing to cocoon themselves.

All 10 in their cocoons

Taylar placed them in the butterfly pavilion after they were in their cocoons.

Full picture!

Newly hatched (or whatever you call it) Butterflies!

Taylar holding the very first butterfly to emerge!

This was such a fun experience for Taylar to watch the process of a Caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Thank You Grandma and Grandpa Jim!

We've got the "Blues"

We took Knightin in for his check-up a little over a week ago. The hopes was that his cast could come off, and it did come off for a short little while, but this would not last. They had to cut it off to take the x-ray, and boy did Kni freak out with the cast cutter. It was so loud and I'm sure it didn't help that it looks scary to a little boy as well. He cried and cried. When it was off he also whined that it hurt and that he wanted to have his "band-aid" bake on (how cute is that). So I guess it didn't surprise me when my doctor said it is healing nice, but it isn't where it needs to be for us to leave the cast off. So a new cast was put on. Knightin choose blue this time, and was very excited to get it back on. I think the thing I'm most excited for is to give him a full real bath when this is all over. His next appointment is on the 4th, it should come off then, so that will be a happy day!
Knightin doesn't think twice about it being on his foot. He goes and does everything he wants. We did get him a little shoe so that he would have more traction. He kept slipping while running through the kitchen!

Burraston Ponds

We finally got a chance to do something for Spring Break. The first few days where cold and then Thursday afternoon I had commitments, plus all of the days Todd got home late. He normally get off at two, but of course the week that the kids are off and we could potentially do something fun, there is a big ole' inspection at work and he has to be there during it. Grateful for the overtime though! So Saturday was a beautiful day, and after working in the yard for a little and then fixing the kids bikes, we took them to the Library and then out to Burraston Ponds. We stayed several hours and they had a lot of fun.

They Fished, though we did not catch anything but moss. We did get to watch a Hawk fishing, that was pretty cool.

We love to Slingshot Shoot, we are great at it yet, but we still have a lot of fun. Brayden and Ki did most of the shooting yesterday, but a few other including me took a couple of shots. Austin wanted to do it as well, but he messed up his right hand Thursday making it a little hard to do much of anything along that line. He had fun get cans and bottle ready for them though. Thank You to all the Camper that didn't do what they were suppose to do and clean up after themselves. This allowed us to have plenty of beer bottles and cans for target practice.
(If you bring up this picture and look at the top right picture of Ki shooting, you can see the bootle busting in half from him hitting it, I didn't think I caught it.)

Burraston I guess has a bunch of Crawdads. My Nephews told me that a great way to catch them is to use the fish insides after catching one to lure them out, then grab them. Since we didn't catch any fish that was a little hard to do, but lucky for us one came out of hiding anyway. They ended up get it by it clamping onto the end of the fishing pole. After the kids played with it for a bit, they let it go. TJ thought it was a cute bug, Knightin wasn't sure what to think when it opened it's claw while he was holding it, and Kelten wouldn't touch it at all. Good times!!

The boys found some rope hanging on one of the trees, and had some fun making a rope swing out of it. I have a couple of video clips of them swinging as well.

A slide show of some of the cute pictures of the kids at Burraston's.

Some Landscape Photos

My ring is here!

Todd and I got to go pick up my ring last night. I so love it, and was excited to get it after 2 months of working on it! There are a couple of things that we will fix on it at the end of the summer. They could do it right now but they are at least 3 weeks out, with the engagement season in full swing. So we are choosing to wait. They forgot to put the mil grain edging on it and I need it sized down a bit, but until then I have a gorgeous ring to wear that my husband designed for me! I Love you Hun!!Here is the Lighting bolt that Todd had put on, it is on both sides

Easter

We dyed our eggs and had our hunt all Sunday morning. We normally do this on Saturday, but we spent it playing all day with the kids. So we dyed the eggs, then after lunch we had our hunt, which ended up in the house since it wasn't a very nice day. We also through out some candy to add to the hunt. The babies were in heaven. The hunt was way to easy for the big kids, so why the little ones enjoyed their candy Todd and I hide the eggs really hard and then sent the 3 older ones to search for them. I think they were hunting for almost an hour, and we finally had to give some clues on some of them, but they had a blast.

Hope you all had a great Easter!!

Senior Pictures

It was a chilly afternoon, but we had fun taking these pictures anyway. Nate was a good sport!

Knightin's waddle

We thought his little waddlehe does with his cast on was really cute!