The Boys

Since this blog is also meant to be our journal I figured we should post a little update about each of the boys.

Trey is loving first grade. He gets on the bus at 9am and gets home at 4. He says that he is good at making new friends and still wants to be a scientist when he grows up. Last week at his soccer game he was being his usual timid athletic self. I told him how to be aggressive and go after the ball. He said that he wasn't an athlete, but a scientist. I said that I am kind of like a scientist and I try to be aggressive. He told me that he wants to be a different kind of scientist, "one that predicts things." He wasn't buying into my argument. He has learned to read and write really well and made a song for Halloween on a drawing that he did. That will be at the bottom.

Beckham loves having some alone time with Marisa while Trey is at school and Caeden takes his naps. While eating lunch the other day he wanted Marisa to take some pictures of him and that is the source of the above collage. He says millions of words, but we still have a hard time understanding him. People give him weird looks when they hear him talk after seeing him and thinking he is four (he is still 2).

Caeden is still our angel baby. He is soooo easy. He has started to get into things so we had to take some pictures to show his devil side. He attacked our one plant that was within his new arms reach and decided to eat some dirt when playing outside with his brothers. He has started to pull himself up to things a lot. He loves to laugh at his silly brothers and try to crawl as fast as he can to keep up with them - the three musketeers.


These are Trey's two drawings that he added words to.

The move

Yep, back a few months ago we were contemplating a move to a house that would be closer to where my practice is being built. After weighing out all the options we decided that we want to stay in our general vicinity. We really love our house except for 1 thing (explained below) and figured that we would stay here for a few more years. The main reason that we didn't move to where my practice is being built is because we couldn't leave our amazing ward and half ward (the other part of our ward before it split and we lost 'em). The ward near my practice is not 1/10th as good as what we have here in Maple Valley. We have always felt pretty lucky to have ended up in such a great spot. Literally, more friends than we have time for and not b/c of anything special on our part, just so many great people.

So, fast forward a few months down the road. Over that time span I had been working with King County on the 1 thing we don't like about our home...how busy the street has gotten. It is kind of hard to explain so I made these two pictures. The first shows our neighborhood as it was being built.


The second has all the details. Our current and future homes are marked by blue circles. The blue line is the main road from the main entrance. The development was built so that this road had no houses facing it while all others do. This was to avoid having kids out on the main road. Unfortunately, two things have happened. 1) a lot of people in the neighborhood have started to turn off the main road onto our road (red line) to go to the shopping center next door (Safeway, etc) and save 2-3 seconds of travel time. 2) many people that live in other developments around the city have figured out that they don't have to wait at a stop sign and can cut through our neighborhood to avoid the wait. These are the worst b/c they usually travel past our house at very high speeds. The traffic has also increased because they have finished the second half of the development since we moved in over 2 years ago.

I and some of my neighbors worked every angle we could possibly think of to get this problem corrected. We even got our HOA to agree to pay for some speed humps that wouldn't slow down fire trucks (which was our big problem from the county) and install them at our cost and maintain/take liability for, but still the county STILL said no. After getting the final no on the last possible option we couldn't take living on a street that has become so dangerous. At the same time, up higher in our development a much bigger lot became available that's on a cul-de-sac, is a custom design home, near many of our kid's friends, with an amazing view of Rainier and Seattle/Olympic mountains. We really did not want to pony up to the higher mortgage right now, but we couldn't pass up this opportunity to have such an amazing lot, in our ward, near our kid's friends when there were not any others like this available in the school/ward boundaries and would not be in the foreseeable future! I got the approval of my CFO Ronnie Chapman anyway, so I know it will work out.


We will keep posting pictures as it is built. It looks like it will be done late January to February. It depends on how many options we add on during the next few days as we finish the plan with them.

Probably the last weekend of summer

Beckham gets tired of his paparazzi parents...
I have a really cute 26 y.o. sister that is....


Here is the lot of our new house just after doing the foundation and back filling.

Here is a view of the whole thing from the far corner of the lot
Bex enjoying his post game treat!
Trey collecting shells and rocks on the Sound.
We took a ferry ride on the sound and ran into Emily Price and Cherilee Anderton, our friends from Baltimore (sorry, we don't have pictures yet but I'll post a link if they post them on their blogs - Update: click on their name for their post)

Video of Beckham's first soccer game - he is #4 with the blue shorts.



There are many times that Trey will say something very grown up or state an obscure fact and we will be like, "Where did you learn that?" Its funny when his response is, "From watching cartoons." We had another one of those moments today. On the ride back from a beach on the Puget Sound we had the following conversation:
Trey - "Dad, can we make a dot-com?"
Me - "A dot-com?....oh, yeah, but we already have one for the family."
Trey - "Yeah, but can we make another."
Me - "Sure, what do you want to put on it?"
Trey - "Stuff about Chinese Crocodiles"
Me - "What stuff?"
Trey - "Well, there aren't many of them in China anymore so we have to get information out to the people so we can help save them."
Me - "Wow, where did you learn that?......


And finally, I passed out for the first time ever in my life! When I wrestled in high school I almost passed out many, many times. I would get up too quickly from the mat and the darkness would close around me leaving just one circle of light in each eye that I would fight to not let it close completely. I always won that battle. I even purposely tried to pass out once. When I was in middle school there was this "game" going around where you would breathe real hard then have someone push on your jugulars to make you pass out...great fun right? I could only get myself to try once and it didn't work. Anyway, on Friday night I had been coughing a lot due to a sore throat. I all of the sudden had an excess of mucous in the back of my throat so I hopped out of bed to go spit it in the sink. On the way I (sorry) hacked it from the back to the front to get rid of it. That made a lot of pressure go to my head. That coupled with the standing up too quickly (orthostatic hyp-O-tension thnx Cody) made me pass out and hit my head on the tub. It was kind of surreal and I was actually so amazed that I passed out that I didn't even care about the sore head. Pretty crazy!

Happy Birthday Sweetie

Today Marisa turned 28! Here is a picture she took of a flower in her garden this spring. I'm so glad to have her as my wife and the mother of our children. I have never met another person on this planet that is more perfect for me, and I mean that literally. I am amazed at how hard she works at being a mother despite all the frustrations that our three boys can create for her. She is the kindest person I know. If there is ever a situation where she has to choose between good for her or someone else she always quietly chooses good for the other person, even if her loss is greater than the other's good. My whole youth I wondered if I could ever find someone with all the things I wanted in a future wife. To my surprise I found a Hinckley Scholar that was amazingly beautiful. Very spiritual, yet able to be a little punk and dance until 2 am with sparkles on her eyes and pink in her hair! We love you Marisa...your boys...Carson, Trevor, Beckham and Caeden.

This is us 7 years ago before children.

PS - here are the results of our personality test we took tonight on reference from Niki's blog.

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Catch up

I guess we have been too busy with work, the new house and fun to post our pictures lately. First off, Trey started first grade. He has a bad habit of stripping at school/church so this is what it looks like when he gets off the bus.

Beckham loves to pack his own lunch and get his backpack ready. Luckily we haven't had to chase him down from trying to get on the bus.


Last weekend we went to Rainier with some friends. It was great weather and we had a wonderful view of the top when we arrived at the trail head.We went with some friends in the ward that live in our neighborhood.

We went on a two mile hike (1 each way) to a lake. Caeden wanted to jump on the "hike around" bandwagon and worked his way towards the trail.
The weekend before that we went to the beach with some friends we made before our ward split a year and a half ago.







Here is Trevor and I playing a game together on Xbox.
We watched the movie "Miss Potter." Trey always gravitates towards artistic things and tried to copy the way Beatrix did her watercolorings.

This weekend we went to the BYU game with some non-dental friends we made while in dental school. We left the kids with Marisa's family and had a great child free vacation. BYU didn't win the game, but had a very exciting third quarter. It was lots of fun to visit the LA area and spend some time with the Chapmans. We saw five different families at the game that we knew from previous places we have lived. The church makes the world even smaller.
We went to Hollywood, Santa Monica beach, Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, LA...
The graffiti in LA has risen to an artistic level.


Jodee asked Marisa to growl like a stalking dinosaur and luckily I snapped the picture in time. PS - Jodee, if you post the "picture" I've got one of you for a rebuttal...so be careful!

Thompson's Water Seal

So today has not been the best day. This morning I thought I would make crepes with peaches and whipped cream (sounds good, right?) but I accidentally added too much butter to the batter so I had to make a double recipe and it took me way too long and by the time we sat down to eat everyone was cranky and the boys didn't even want to eat it.

Then Carson had to go in to his office for an emergency (some guy's crown fell off) and we don't like to send him in alone because of safety/liability issues, so we got a babysitter and I went up with him. We thought we would make the best of it and go out for lunch to a place nearby where we had a gift certificate. It took Carson twice as long as he thought it would to cement the crown (the suction was down) and when we got to the restaurant, it turns out they don't serve lunch on Saturday. So we went to some Chinese place where we didn't get free drink refills.

We get home with 10 minutes to spare before Carson's friends come over for the BYU football game and Carson immediately sits down on the couch and starts an online game of Carcassonne. Sorry to call you out on that one Carson, but it's true. So I'm trying to clean up the toys, do the breakfast dishes and set up the food for the game all before they come. Trey and Becks are really excited about BYU football and they pull out all their paraphernalia (can you believe that's how it's spelled? I had to look it up) but that doesn't mean they'll sit still through even the first 10 minutes, so I have to fight them the rest of the time to keep them out of the family room so the guys can enjoy their game.

The game finally finishes and the guys go home (but of course there is a mess for me to clean up) and Carson thinks now will be a good time to put Thompson's Water Seal on the playset. He gets out my dad's sprayer that we borrowed and starts spraying the roof and then his cell phone rings. He has to go up to the office again, a 3 year old girl fell and cut her gums and broke one of her teeth. And we discover the sprayer doesn't spray a fine mist, there are big globs of water seal all over the roof of the playset so I need to find a brush and backbrush it right away before it dries in the direct sunlight it's sitting in. Right then the doorbell rings and it's our new neighbors with a bucket of freshly picked blackberries for us. Carson has to pretty much blow off the neighbors with a quick thanks, sets the blackberries on the table and leaves. I can only find a crappy foam brush so I climb up and start backbrushing, but my arms are not very long and I can't reach the middle of the roof and the baby is crying and the water seal is drying so I run to the garage, get the ladder down and get up to the very top (Trey says "that's dangerous, Mom!") to brush the rest of the mostly dry gloppy water seal. I go back into the house to wash my hands, walk out and Beckham is using the sprayer to spray water seal on Trevor, Caeden, the slide and ladder of the playset and the outdoor toy box and toys. Surprisingly I did not lose my temper but I told him that was a BIG BIG BIG no-no and put him in time out. Trey runs inside to get buckets of hot water from the sink and starts pouring them down the slide and I dunk a rag in the hot water and try to get the water seal off of everything as quickly as possible. I run back inside to get a dry rag and Beckham has gotten into the blackberries, eating them by the handful and they're smeared all over his face, his clothes, and the kitchen rug. Seriously, does anyone want to adopt a very cute and very naughty two year old??? I put him in his room for a "long time out" (the ultimate punishment for Becks) and he fell asleep after a only few minutes of crying because he didn't get a nap today. A little oxyclean on the rug and a dry rag on the slide (I don't know if it will ever be the same) brings me to the computer, typing this post. I think I'm done for the day. I'll let Carson put Trey and Caeden in bed when he gets home and maybe I will make a scrapbook page, which I haven't done in weeks, probably because I've been obsessing about appliances and trim and lighting. But that is a whole other post. I guess I'll let you know in a year if it has been worth it. I'm not really mad anymore, that was very therapeutic! Sorry for the long post (again) and no pix, I couldn't find the camera.