What's In A Name

Bex really likes soccer and it definitely isn't because of us pushing "his name" on him. In all honesty we hope people don't see him playing soccer and think we are "bend it like Beckham" junkies who named our kid after a soccer star. He wanted to play so badly last year when Trevor played that we couldn't resist putting him in this year. One problem with that though...he is supposed to be 3. Well, when we signed him up, they didn't ask and we didn't tell. Here he is playing soccer and having fun. Trey is also playing the same night same time, but we need to get him smaller shorts. He can't run and keep those shorts on his skinny body at the same time!




Here are two videos of baby Caeden. He is really starting to get chunky. About the same as what Trevor once reached, but no where near the morbidly obese size of Beckham.

Caeden does a funny thing that neither of our other two boys did. He rotates his right hand at the wrist. It is the same motion that he makes when he is rubbing his eyes when he is sleepy. You can see it better in the second video.


Video 2

He can also be loud at times as you have seen.

Feed the addiction

I have an xbox 360 and use it more as a Tivo or game console when I get together with other guys in the neighborhood than a game console for myself. I have never played much home alone. Trey has really gotten into downloading the free trials and playing them lately. One trial that we really have liked is Carcassonne. It is similar to Settlers, but better for playing on a console because I have tried the Settlers trial as well and didn't like it as much as the board version. Risa, Trey and I all like the trial of this game so much we paid to upgrade to the full version and play it as a family. (BTW, that makes me feel a little old to be playing games with my kids on the xbox.) For some reason I have become addicted to this game. Out of 20 something thousand I have managed to be ranked about 700 in the world and still climbing. One great thing about the xbox is that I can stream all my music from the computer and play it while I am playing the game. Here are some screen shots of the game.



Speaking of music, here is my updated list of latest songs that I have downloaded:

Name	Artist
The Great Escape	Boys Like Girls
Bubbly	Colbie Caillat
Wait For You	Elliott Yamin
Stronger	Kanye West Ft. Daft Punk
If Everyone Cared	Nickelback
Apologize	One Republic
Hey There Delilah	Plain White T's
Shut Up And Drive	Rihanna
The Way I Are	Timberland

Acceptable In The 80's	Calvin Harris
All Good Things Come To An End	Nelly Furtado
All This Love	The Similou
Another Chance (Full Mix)	Roger Sanchez
Because Of You	Ne-Yo
Big Girls Don't Cry	Fergie
Stranger	Hilary Duff
Sugar, We're Going Down Swinging	Fall Out Boy
Thanks For The Memories	Fall Out Boy
Umbrella (Remix)	Rihanna Ft. Jay-Z

This song list is shorter so it shouldn't be so overwhelming as the last one.

Edit: I should add two things, the Kanye West song is my strong favorite right now, and it is the edited version, so fresh and so clean!

Beach

We went to two beaches this past week. On Thursday we had our company party on Lake Sammamish. The boys loved it as usual. The weather was perfect so Marisa and I enjoyed being outside in the 78 degree sun, slight breeze, boys entertaining themselves while we laid around on the grass.

Then we got together with some of our friends and went to Pacific Beach for the weekend. It is turning into an annual event because it is so much fun to camp together. Beaches in Washington are very different from our beach experiences on the East Coast. First off, you always end up wearing a jacket at least part of the time. What makes it so much fun is that you can drive and do fires on the beach. At times you get some really nice sun and go out into the water, but no body boarding because the slope of the land is so gradual you would have to walk forever to get into water up to your waist (makes it nice that you don't have to worry about your kids as much as they play in the water either). On the flip side, it makes for great skim boarding. I fell pretty hard once doing that and am still feeling the pain. We played lots of Bocci Ball while the kids dug in the sand and found crab/clam shells. Below is a video of us w/ our final night bonfire at sunset.

Going, going, gone.

We are headed off to the beach today. All packed and waiting for 10 am to meet up w/ some friends and drive out.

Here are some promised pix from the scout camp I took the boys on two weeks ago.

Cape Flattery, most NW point in the continental US

Chicago dogs!
5 hour drive...
4x4'in
Neah Bay
Coast guard showing us a helo op practice
Low tide fun
cooking mussels on a fire, wrapped in kelp and eating....

Journal Rollercoaster

Marisa is going to love this post when she wakes up tomorrow!

One of my few strong points in the gospel is that I have always been a good journal writer, I guess that is why I am the only guy that does a blog, but I have the hottest wife out there so I don't really care...

Anyway, the picture above is a short excerpt from Marisa's journal from the day after we met, Oct 24th 1998. I have been scanning in all of our old journals so they can be in digital form. I will put them on discs and give them to family so that if anything ever happens to our house things like this and our pictures won't be lost. We can't help but read them as we scan them, what an emotional roller coaster that can be.

One minute we'll read something that makes us happy like realizing that we really did know each other (or at least the core) well when we got married though we had only been dating 7 months. The next minute we'll read something that is extremely embarrassing. We could see it as a glass half full because of the positive changes we have made, but its hard not to think of how stupid and _____ (insert negative adjective/adverb here, they pretty much all fit) we were.

Sometimes it can be funny. On my flight back from Argentina when I finished my mission I wrote, "I didn’t have much desires to eat in the first place." If you know Spanish that is a direct translation back to English from Spanish syntax. There are many more things I could post, but to save face it ain't gonna happen. I just hope that posterity reads everything with enough love and admiration for us that they see things through a positive lens.

Back to the picture at the start. "I just want to date." Looks like that didn't happen. She didn't write about me working my smooth mojo, but at least it was all positive.

Summer Camp

One of the other leaders had a very nice camera and some excellent skills to go along with it. He made a webjournal of our trip that you can see here. A couple of the shots are ones I took with his camera that increased my coveting of a Canon 40D. I'll upload some of my own pictures from my small camera soon as well.

Last night I finished the editor's cut of our home video (Spring-Fall 2006, I'm behind). I'll watch the rendered video tonight, make any final changes, do the last render and post it soon.

Life as a Single Mom

Carson was at scout camp this week so the boys and I were on our own. Our friends the Kargis' were in town so we had a lot of fun. We went swimming at their hotel pool, spent a whole day at the Woodland Park Zoo, went to 2 parks, watched TMNT 3 times and had dinner at my parents' house with Uncle Pete and Grandma Nielsen. Here are 3 pix of the boys at the park at Mud Mountain Dam:

Caeden and his new love, the baby swing

Becks and his silly grin with Caeden in the background

Trey doing his favorite thing - digging in the sand and making a crazy mess

All the kids at the zoo: Beckham, Dane Kargis, Luke Collings, Trey, Wyatt Allen, Lauren Thorpe, Abigail and Shane Allen, Maggie Kargis, Eden Collings, Emma Kargis and Kate Thorpe. I guess we are missing Preston Kargis, Tucker Collings and Caeden. They were probably asleep in the strollers (thank goodness).

The boys were really good and the weather was decent so it really would have been an awesome week if I hadn't been sick. I've had something for about 10 days that has given me a relentless sore throat and dry cough with off and on fever/chills/aches. Beckham might have something similar because he's been really cranky but without definable symptoms. But Caeden and Trey seemed to have escaped it, although Caeden is teething so that kind of stinks. Carson had the same sickness as I did while he was at scout camp so that wasn't too fun for him, but otherwise they had a really great trip out to the coast that he said he post about later. Last night (Saturday) after Carson got home we went to dinner and a movie with some friends. We saw the Bourne Ultimatum and loved it as much as the first two, although I have to say it didn't end quite as I expected and I don't know what I think about that. I guess I'll have to read the books.


We finished reading the 7th Harry Potter book together at the beginning of the week and the book was amazing but we're sad that the series is over. Maybe in a few years we'll read it with the boys and get to enjoy it again. We saw the 5th movie a couple of weeks ago and we loved it too... I guess we are pretty easy to please. Or maybe we just know what we like. One good thing about Carson and me is that we like a lot of the same things, especially books and movies and music. He likes most chick flicks and I like most action adventure movies, so we can always find something we agree on, and we'd rather see movies or read books together so we can talk about them.


Carson's parents got Trey this pop-up book of The Jungle Book for his birthday and it is the most amazing 3-D book I have ever seen. You can find some directions to make easy pop-ups at http://robertsabuda.com/. Yesterday we made a bat for Trey and a castle for Becks and it was really fun, if your kids like crafts I would definitely recommend it.


Caeden is starting to eat more foods and army-crawl around. We tried the gerber corn stars and he tried his hardest to get them in his mouth: Later that day I was outside eating watermelon with the boys and the phone rang so I ran inside and when I went back out, Caeden had gone for my watermelon as fast as he could and was sucking on it, grass and all:

I really can't believe he is getting so big already. He will smile and try to catch the eye of anyone who walks by so people always say "What a happy baby!" He certainly likes attention, but interestingly he is my only baby so far who will entertain himself, whether in the jumper or just crawling around after toys and chewing on everything he comes across. I'm so happy that I don't have to take care of him every second because the other two are still so demanding. It's fun to see the 3 of them together, I love having the three boys and I wouldn't even mind having another boy, just as long as I have at least one girl so I can buy hair ribbons and skirts and girly scrapbook products and break out a can of pink wall paint!


Sorry this was such a long post, I guess there was a lot to write about. My personality is "Thorough" and Carson's is "Efficient" so apparently that applies to our blog posting as well.

Addendum

Here are some more pictures and I added the ones back on to the previous post that were missing for a day for some reason.

My sister Kristin and Bex on the slide
My nephew Tucker w/ my dad pushing.
The cuzins...


Collette managed to take a great picture of the boyz.

Busy Bees

We got back late Monday night from our summer vacation. It is easy for me to take a day or two off here and there, but difficult for me to take off large amounts of time. That caused us to take a short trip to Utah and Idaho for a family reunion. I was very glad to go because it has been five years since we last went and I used to go every year for many years. Unfortunately we left our camera bag in the car of Marisa's mother when she took us to the airport so we didn't take very many pictures. We did manage to pull out our little camera when we went to visit my two best friends from high school. We have all had only boys that now total 8! With varied nap times, crying times, etc we never got all eight together for a picture. We really wanted to so I guess we will have to get together again soon :)

Here are some pictures of old, married, tired, over parented, 30-somethings remembering the good old days and playing some dice games...


Sorry, Chris. That is the best pic I had of you...


The two babies were interested in seeing another of "their kind."
Here are 62.5 percent of the kids. Both Chris and our seconds kids are very similar in hair cut, size, personality, etc. It was pretty funny.
After hanging out with family and friends in Utah we headed to Victor, Idaho for the reunion. The city has changed a TON. It has gone from the small little farming community of a couple hundred to million dollar movie star home hideaway with all the spill over from Jackson Hole.

We did the reunion this year at a lodge and it was great. They had a huge swing that made the adults feels like little kids because you could go so high and swing so far out. They also had a very steep and fast metal slide. So much so that we didn't want to let Beckham go down by himself. Marisa once took Trevor down and Beckham was going to wait for her to come back up and take him down. As she got to the bottom and turned around she saw her crazy son coming down behind her. He did pretty well so we started letting him go by himself.

Here is a video of my cousin Zach going down the slide (technically second cousin since my dad and his grandma are siblings, but due to age similarities we have always felt like his parents were our aunt/uncle and their kids were our cousins). We had a great time playing around the lodge and hanging out with family. I am looking forward to going again next year.

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- It was A LOT steeper than it looks...

Now that we are back there are many things making our life even more busy. We have to make some serious decisions about a house we could potentially move to, finalize the prep for next week's scout summer camp that I am over and do some more space planning for the dental office so that I can get the plans to the city in September. When they are finalized I'll post them.

We are happy to be back in the great weather of the PNW. We went to the Seattle Street of Dreams and fell in love this this house. The home we are looking at ourselves will be craftsman style so it was nice to see several of the homes there be craftsman as well for ideas on what to do with the one we are looking at.