Christmas!

I'm actually writing about Christmas things the day after Christmas, not weeks after.  Its a Christmas Miracle!  As usual, I did horrible with pictures.  I am in survival mode this year.  I swear I'll do better next year.  Plus we had to open presents with only the Christmas tree lights to help us see as there is no light in the front room (love this rental…).

Anyway, Christmas is so great with little kids.  I feel like we're in the Magical Years with my kids and the ages they are right now.  No kids in diapers (so amazing), no teenagers (also amazing), but everyone able to mostly take care of themselves.  So I'm trying my hardest to soak up every second.  Christmas Eve was awesome.  We went skiing in the afternoon.  There are few things better in life than having my whole family on the same ski lift chair.  It's the little things…  Then we had a yummy dinner with ham and twice baked potatoes (tradition from long ago).  After dinner we each shared a talent, sang some Christmas songs, read the nativity and talked about it, and shared our testimonies.  It was the best ever.  Then it was time for Christmas jammies (thanks Grandma Tracy), check out Santa on the Santa Tracker, and straight to bed.

Christmas Day was so fun with all of the snow.  We were pretty low key with presents this year.  It turns out when you build a house and have Christmas at the same time you feel like you're hemorrhaging money.  Good times.  Along with a few presents the kids get to help decorate their new rooms.  The gift that keeps on giving.  In the afternoon we headed up to spend time with family.  For sure one of the best parts about Christmas.  It was great seeing people that we hadn't seen for a while.  We even managed to survive not so great roads.

And I can't move on from Christmas without talking about the Christmas Bus.  I think this was the third year of the bus, and my kids continue to love it.  They count down to the Christmas Bus as much as they count down to Christmas.  One of the best traditions ever.  This year will always be remembered for the fight scene straight out of a movie.  My kids are scarred for life.  Always good times on the Christmas Bus!

Construction Mama

When your husband is a general contractor and you build your own house, you get to do a lot of the work yourself.  You should all be jealous because its awesome.  My days are spent 50/50 being a mom and a construction laborer.  It bothers me to do all of the grunt work, but I also realize that this is all I'm qualified to do in construction.  But let me just say that there's a reason construction laborers have few brain cells.  There's no way anyone with any smarts at all would do something like that all day every day.  No way.

What do I get to do?  Well, I've helped dig holes, mix concrete, and pour footings for our deck.  I've learned how to hold a laser level thing so that we can grade the driveway.  I've done some framing (move lumber, roll out floor joists, and Jake even lets me be his cut guy now).  I got to hang windows again (still have nightmares from doing it on our last house).  This time it went better than last.  I attribute this to my huge muscles.  Today I got to spend the whole day throwing out junk and sweeping the house so that we were ready for our inspection.  It was strangely satisfying to see the house cleaned up.

So, as you can tell, I can pretty much build a house on my own now.  Who needs Jake?  Ok, totally untrue.  I would have no idea what to do without him.  But I am proud of my measuring and cutting abilities (Zack had to show me how to use a tape measure).  And it still stresses me out when Jake gets a level out and asks me to tell him which way something needs to go to be level.  They should teach classes on this.

And finally, the following photo is now how I dress most days.  Jake always complains that all he wears is construction clothes.  Well, I now understand.  I realize that this is the most unflattering picture in the world.  I look like I weigh 500 pounds, which I probably do.  But let me see some stick skinny girl survive as a construction mama.  I think not.  So I just tell myself all day that the other subs look at me and think "Holy crap.  Jake sure is lucky to have a wife like that."  I mean how could they not when I look like this.

PS- Today at lunch I asked Jake if I look like a construction worker.  He said yes.  Despite what I've said on here, this kind of freaks me out.

Turkey Day!

I'm finally posting again.  Must mean there was a major holiday or something.  We are in the grind of building a house.  So our lives pretty much consist of keeping our family running, keeping the business running, and working on our house.  All I can think to write about is updates on the progress of our house.  I realize, however, that this is exciting only for our family.  So be grateful that I choose not to bore you with the details.  Let's just say that as of today we're finally done with framing.  Hallelujah!  Once you get through framing things go a lot quicker.  This is a good thing for sure.

Anyhow, Thanksgiving has come and gone.  Craziness.  Especially since I haven't bought any Christmas presents.  Yes, I need to get going on that.  Thanksgiving itself was kind of a crazy day.  We of course had to work on the house in the morning.  And it of course took longer than we thought.  And yes, our kids were home alone all morning on Thanksgiving.  Because that's how we roll these days.  Not to worry though, we made it up to them by taking them to St George.

I'll tell you how the morning went just so you can appreciate the miracle it was that we even made it to Thanksgiving dinner.  We had to dig and pour (with cement) four small footings for our deck.  Even though they were small, those suckers were hard work.  I spent the morning lifting bags of concrete, mixing concrete, and carrying buckets of water.  This is one of those projects that once you start you have to finish.  Finally, at 12:45, I left to get ready for dinner.  And, oh yeah, to pack for St George.  And dinner was happening at 3:00.  This is where you should be impressed….I managed to throw everything in the car for St George and make myself presentable all in an hour.  That's right, it was a Thanksgiving Miracle.  We killed ourselves, but we made it to dinner.  Sigh of relief.

Dinner was amazing and delicious thanks to Kathy.  She outdid herself.  It was great to spend some time with family digesting yummy food.  And then we jumped in the car to drive to St George.  The theme of our Thanksgiving was run, run, run.  But it was worth it to be able to take a mini-vacation to St George.  We haven't had a single weekend off since the summer.  Every weekend is spent working on our house.  For reals.  So we needed this get away and I was determined to make it happen.

St George was so great.  The weather was perfect and we got to stay at Greg and Tracy's new house (which is awesome).  We went rock climbing, hiking, mountain biking, and 4-wheeling.  So much fun (except for the mountain biking - we all got flat tires due to thorns.  Lame)  It was seriously a great trip. So glad we went and were able to spend some time with our family having fun instead of working.  Hooray for St George!

My buddy Sage

Cousins playing on the rocks

Zack is a climbing machine

Cute Sage

At the Candy Cliffs. Super pretty

Happy Halloween!

I finally have something fun to write about!  Hooray!  Halloween has come and gone.  The annual witchy-poo party was a hit as usual.  How can it not be when you play games, make witches brew, and eat lots of candy?

I love that Halloween was on a Friday.  I think it should be like Thanksgiving where its on the last Friday of October.  The kids didn't have school because it was the end of the term, so it was especially great.  I am not a lover of Halloween.  I've never loved dressing up, and I hate spending money on costumes and candy to pass out.  I feel like the candy is always a gamble.  You don't want to buy too much and be left with lots of candy, but you don't want to run out.  I didn't think we'd get tons of trick-or-treaters in our rental, but we got even less than I thought.  I finally started telling kids to take handfuls of candy.  Oh well…

The kids had a great time.  The weather was perfect, we didn't even need jackets.  Zack was a vampire (I even attempted makeup this year), Kate was Anna and Sage was Elsa (like 90% of the girls this year).  Zack got to go around with some friends and thought he was super cool.  Sage literally ran to every door and went out on a second round with me when she got home.  Nothing better than asking people for candy.

Vampire Zack

Anna and Elsa

the main floor of our house

Still Here

Yet again, its been forever since I posted.  We're still crazy busy, but I feel like it's just the same old stuff every day.  I haven't been able to think of a single interesting thing to write about.  For reals.  I'm sure you don't want to keep hearing details of the craziness.  I'm hoping with Halloween coming up there will be something fun to post about.  Until then, here's a picture of the kiddos in beautiful Midway.  Yes, you should come visit.

Catch Up

Holy cow.  August was so crazy that I'm still recovering from us.  I feel like we're finally getting into a routine with school, so things don't seem quite as crazy.  But for a while there I felt like I barely had time to breathe.  Since the idea of creating individual posts for everything that happened seems super overwhelming, you get a brief summary.  For which you should be grateful.  (I did at least manage to write about Kate's baptism - I'm amazing).

The day of Sage's birthday we left for Oregon.  Oh yeah, I didn't blog about Sage's birthday.  Guess I'm not so amazing.  Sage turned 5.  She was begging and begging to go to Chucky Cheese for her birthday.  So we did.  She loved it and we survived.  We celebrated her birthday a day early so that she didn't have to have a birthday in the car.

So, we went to Oregon.  "We" as in the kids and I, minus Jake.  He was too crazy busy to come, unfortunately.  I was a little nervous to go on my own, but I think my kids have finally reached the age where they can all help and so its not too crazy.  They were troopers for the 13 hour drive.  I was impressed.  The trip was amazing.  I don't know what it was, but this trip was one of the best vacations I've been on (except I really wish Jake was there).  It was great to be with family that I haven't seen for a long time.  It was also the perfect amount of relaxing without being bored.  Plus an ice-cream cone from Tilamook every day is never a bad thing.  It was a fantastic trip.

The day after we got home the kids started school.  Craziness.  Zack is in 5th grade and now gets bused to Timpanogos Intermediate School.  Kate is in 3rd grade and Sage is in Kindergarten.  She's doing dual immersion with spanish which makes me smile.  They're all doing great in school and loving their classes.

Then we had the Park City Showcase of Homes.  It went for two full weekends.  I think it was great for our company, but also exhausting.  Working all weekend and then heading straight into a regular work week is never easy.  The house we had in the showcase turned out fantastic though.  Jake did a great job and we got really great feedback.  We've already gotten some jobs from people who found us there, so I think its good we did it.

Oh yeah, and in the middle of all of this we finally started building our own house.  Because we felt like we needed to add more to our lives.

So now we're in September and finally breathing a bit.  Well, the kids and I are breathing.  Poor Jake is just slammed and still trying to catch up from all of the time the showcase took.  We hope that he'll be able to come up for air soon.  He sure works hard for our family!

And now, here are a million pictures… (in no particular order)

Harvesting rocks for our house - this is what we do on our weekends

Our showcase home

Family Room

Bunk Room (Jake's carpenters made the bunk beds)

Sage's birthday

The cousins at the beach in Oregon

How the Spjutes sit on the beach

Delicious ice cream

Camp fire fun

Hammering our basement (a truly horrible experience in case you were wondering)

Zack found a nasty shell thing

Pirate adventures

The navy museum

The Goonies house

Our future house

Kate The Great Is Eight!!

Kate turned eight and got baptized!!  It happened almost a month ago, but life has been beyond crazy so I'm just now writing about it.  I have lots of catch-up to do.

Anyway, Kate is one of the lucky few who got to be baptized on her birthday.  It was a great day.  She looked super cute, and was really excited to be baptized.  We had lots of family come so it was especially great.  After the baptism we all went to a park for lunch.  We had yummy food and Kate opened her presents.  She picked an awesome lemon cake for her cake.  I love that my kids now pick non-decorated cakes for their birthdays.  Much easier for me.

It was a great day.   I can't believe two of my kids have been baptized.  Crazy how time flies!

Crazy Fun Summer!

I don't know why, but this summer has been crazy busy.  I think I probably said this in my last post.  Its also been crazy fun.  I really have been enjoying it, but I do think the business is starting to wear my kids out.  Today Sage even said, "I like winter better than summer!  Summer is too busy, except I like my birthday!"  Silly girl.  Its been awesome, and looks like its going to keep going right until school starts.

We went camping with the Binghams/Spjutes to Payson Lake.  It was good fun.  I have zero pictures because I'm awesome like that and I planned to steal some from my sisters and they haven't posted yet.  So I'll add those later.  But here's the low-down on what we did.  We had the best yet pirate treasure hunt put on by my dad and Kathy.  The kids loved it.  I love that they do that.  We spent most of the time swimming and canoeing in the lake.  Super fun.  The kids loved it.  We went on the best hike ever after dinner.  Best hike ever because it was only 1/2 mile (perfect with kids), super pretty, and ended with a waterfall.  We of course had yummy food and lots of time to sit and hang out.  Good times for everyone.

My sister Mel has been here from Rhode Island.  We've managed to have a couple of spontaneous get-togethers.  I'm always proud of myself when I do something spontaneous because I tend to be way too into my routine.  One day we met up at City Creek in SLC.  Love that place.  Then the next day we hitched a ride with Jake to Farmington and we all went swimming.  So much fun.  There must be lots of swimming when its hot.  Lots of swimming…

We're still in the process of starting to build our house.  It hasn't started yet.  I'm trying to be patient.  We have been busy getting things ready to go on our lot.  In the spring we had a bunch of dead trees cut down.  They left us with lots of wood to split into useable firewood.  I've never split wood before.  I didn't mind doing it too much, but it took way longer than we thought.  What I thought would be a one afternoon project turned into a two afternoons and every night for a week project.  Holy cow.  The kids loved it.  Actually, that's one thing this lot has been good for - giving our kids lots of opportunity to work.  Its very good for them, although I'm sure they'd disagree.  After splitting the wood we had to load it into Jake's dump trailer so we could move it back further on the lot.  Once we moved it we had to stack it.  Yes, this has been a very long process.  I'm happy to say that the wood is now stacked and ready to use.  Phew!

the annual cousins picture - oldest to youngest

my kids in front of the firewood - there are 2 rows behind the one you can see

Festival Days!

Farmington Festival Days did not let us down this year.  We had all kinds of fun.   Kate has wanted to try running for a while, so she started training with me to run the Festival Days 5K. We made it up to 2 miles in our training.  Race day came and she did awesome!  I know the last mile was hard for her, but she just kept pushing forward, no hesitation or complaints.  She even sprinted past a kid who was in front of us right at the end.  She did so great and wants to do another one.  She finished in 30:43 and got first in her age group.  Awesomeness!  It was so fun running with her!

Kate and her cousin Megan who also ran

Kate getting her medal

Also associated with Festival Days is Zack's birthday.  Every year we celebrate his birthday with the family because we're all together.  I think he now thinks the parade and celebrations are just for him.  Pretty cool birthday if you ask me.  He requested another candy sign for the parade.  It said, "It's my birthday, throw me candy."  And holy cow, he got so much candy.  A ridiculous amount really.  He was loving life:)

Zack's sign and huge bag of candy

Camping!

This summer has been crazy busy.  Crazy.  Thus the lack of posts.  But we've been having some good fun.  We went camping up above Beaver, Utah.  We'd never been there before and it was pretty cool.  We camped in the Tusher Mountains.  I just got online and picked the first campsite I saw.  It ended up being the very last one we got to, at an elevation of 9,500 feet.  Good thing we have a big Dodge to pull Tiny up big mountains.

Jake's cousins who live in Cedar came camping with us.  It was great fun.  They brought all of their kids so our kids had great fun playing together.  It was awesome.  Beautiful campground, good people to hang with, time to relax.  Nothing better.  We will have to make it an annual tradition for sure.

Our awesome group - love getting to know family better!

Rhode Island!

We actually went on a planned, week long vacation.  And we sure needed it with all the moving fun.  We finally went to visit my sister Mel.  She lives in Rhode Island right now, so that's where we went.  And it was pure awesomeness.  For reals.  My kids got to go on a plane for the first time.  They loved it and were troopers.  We flew the red eye on the way out.  I was nervous about it, but my kids rocked it.

Anyway, enough about flying.  The good stuff happened when we got there.  My sister and her family are the best hosts ever.  They were so nice to give up their rooms, bathrooms, food, and time so that we could stay with them.  My kids loved playing with their cousins.  In fact, the first thing they did when we got home was to write letters to their cousins.  I love it when my kids get to play with their cousins.

Mel was super awesome as usual and watched our kids so that we could go to New York.  Jake had never been back east before, so I wanted him to experience the big city.  I forgot how big NYC is.  For Father's Day I got Jake tickets to a Yankees game.  It was awesome.  I even managed to stay the whole game.  You should be proud.  We saw Times Square, FAO Schwartz, cathedrals. Rockefeller Plaza, Central Park, the 911 Memorial, and the Statue of Liberty.  On Jake's first NYC subway ride he got to see street dancers and fake singing cowboys.  I mean, we're from Midway.  We know what real cowboys look like, and those were not real cowboys.  NYC was awesome, but a bit overwhelming to us small town hicks.  I'll take Midway any day.  But I'm glad we got to see all the sights.

The weather cooperated quite nicely for us considering it was early in the year.  We got to go kayaking in the ocean.  Super cool.  My kids cannot paddle, or do anything else in the water for that matter.  Their Navy cousins definitely showed them up in that regard.  We went to the beach a few times.  So fun.  I even braved the cold water to try my hand at the boogie board (I think that's what its called).  I didn't manage to catch a single wave because I'm awesome like that.  But I sure had fun trying.

Jake and I went to tour a couple of crazy mansions.  Crazy.  Like Downton Abbey crazy.  Jake loved it, until they said that the huge, huge house was built in two years.  Then I told him that he needs to step it up:).  We went to an awesome clam shack where I tried fried clams.  Not my favorite, but I had to try them while I was there.  Then we went to a seafood store right on the coast and bought lobster fresh out of the ocean.  They were fun to cook and the kids had lots of fun playing with them.  Poor Ethan named his.  I thought we were going to have to have a funeral, but he handled it like a man.

We even managed to fit in a day in Boston.  Despite the traffic we managed to see a record breaking number of sites.  This would be due to the Spjute's ability to maximize every minute and waste no time.  I guarantee we could make it through any museum in 30 minutes, 60 tops.  If you force us to spend longer be prepared for a meltdown.  I digress…Boston was amazing.  I loved all the historical sites.  We made it through most of the freedom trail and my kids got to go on their first ferry ride.  We also found the best hole in the wall food place ever.  So great.  Jake said his hamburger was, "the best hamburger I've eaten in my life."  And we're old, so that says a lot.

I'll stop the boring details so you can now be bored by a million pictures.  Obviously we had a super amazing time.  So great.  My favorite part?  Spending time with my sister and her family.  Doesn't happen enough.  We got to go running together which I love.  If I had one wish it would be that my siblings and I live on the same street.  In Midway of course.  How awesome would that be?!!

Tired, but ready to fly

asleep during our layover

Introduced the cousins to marbles - so fun

At the Yankee game

Times Square

NYC

Cousin fun

One of the awesome light houses

Cousins!

We even played a duet at church:)

Awesome mansion

Lobster fun

Boston

Paul Revere's house

Chocolate french toast