Memorial Day Weekend Memories

Sorry for the plethora of pix, but we have been trying to be good photo takers again during our family activities. On Thursday evening we drove to a hotel/indoor waterpark about an hour from our house. It was pretty amazing.


They had rides and water games for all ages. Trey ran all over while Bex and Caeden spent most of the time in the kiddie pool with the slides and spray games.
Trevor likes swimming and had to show us how he could stay under water for a long time...

...and cross the lily pad obstacle course.




They had a huge bucket that filled w/ water and when it reached a certain point every 5 minutes or so it would all dump down. It was crazy! Tons of water, all over and hitting you kind of hard.

Trey ran into some friends and had fun trying to get under three small random dumping buckets.


We must not feed Caeden very much b/c he thought the hotel soap looked very appetizing.

Today we met a bunch of people from the ward for a BBQ at one of the local parks by a lake. Check out how good all this grillin' looks!

Lots of meat to eat and kids to try and keep an eye on.



Now that the yard is usable we have been letting the boys play out in it. Caeden has another eating fetish...dirt! We can't keep him out of it.

His brothers thought it was pretty funny to see someone purposely eat dirt.
Caeden loves the baby swing we recently got for our playset, but HATES it when his brothers push him, only mom and dad for some reason.

Cleaning

This morning I tried to get Trey and Becks to help me clean the house. I had Becks wipe the baseboards with a damp cloth (I also gave Caeden a cloth so he could follow Beckham around) and had Trevor vacuum. They did really well for about the amount of minutes they are old - 1 1/2 for Caeden, 3 for Beckham and 6 for Trey. Seriously. After that I let them take a little break and then go back to it for a few minutes.

After getting the main living area more or less cleaned up, Trey said to me: "Mom, there's something you have to learn. There will always be something more to clean. You can just keep cleaning and cleaning and you'll never be done." Out of the mouths of babes.

Now Caeden is asleep and Trey and Becks are playing nicely together in the toy room (which hardly ever happens). I just heard them say "I love you. I love you too." Am I in the right house?

Sweet for computer nerds!

I posted a couple of months ago about getting lots of stuff free or discounted online. Here is one of my favorites that just keeps getting better. Go to drop.io and check it out. You can do all of the following for free:

• send faxes
• receive faxes
• conference calls
• receive temporary emails
• receive temporary sms phone messages
• receive temporary phone messages
• host files for others to download (up to 100mb)
• more...

Some of the stuff is a little difficult to figure out, but again its free. Basically, you create a temporary web page called a "drop." You can send things to that drop spot or send out things from that drop spot. Someone calls your assigned number or emails your assigned email and it goes there. I don't know who would use those features other than a spy or something, but they are still cool. The fax and file hosting are the cool things. File too big for your email? Upload it there, send the url and BAM! You're done. Want to do a conference call with the family so that everybody can talk together, BAM! You're done :)

Coming Together

We've been doing a lot of coming together with family and friends lately and here all of it comes together in one post. On Mother's Day we went to the Ponds for dinner. Our crazy lives the past few months have made us perpetually forget to take pictures of what we are doing. Luckily Jared took a picture of Caeden giving one of his many hugs to their dog Josie.


Last week we had the crazy trip of going to Baltimore to visit Cody and Lisa for Cody's graduation from dental school. Since I left the school had a new school built. The old school is pictured below, now unused.

Because the school and city like to make everyone feel like trash I was not able to tour any part of the new school as an alumnus. Furthermore, I was not even able to take pictures of anything at the new school. I guess its too easy to figure out how to bomb the school when I stand 3 feet from a wall to take a picture of the school sign right in front of me. It just recapitulated why I was so happy to leave and come out to Seattle. Despite the amazing poor customer service, racism and the above experience at the school we did have a good trip. We had a great time with Cody and Lisa, were able to see some good friends like the Taits, (even though we were too dumb to take pictures again) and run into a few old class mates and teachers. After being kicked out of the school we went to Edgar Allan Poe's grave site (right by the school) and took a picture there.


Beckham loves to cook and used his birthday money from Grandma Calderwood to buy more play food. We had the great blessing of having my parents come to watch the kids while we were gone. The boys were able to spend almost 5 days with them! The house was cleaner than we left it and the kids were spoiled. How much better can it get? Not much!

Our yard is starting to grow now that we are changing the late spring snow for sunshine. The bad was that our AC got its first test in the 90 heat when we were in Maryland and my mother unfortunately found out that it didn't work. Hopefully the builder will get it fixed tomorrow before much more suffering goes on.


Marisa learned the importance of using a UV filter to protect your camera lens and also improve your shots. When I bought that lens we also got a circular polarizing filter. All I can say is go out and spend the $20 if you have an SLR and you will be very happy with the results. Both lenses give outdoor shots a big color and contract improvement. We were finally able to take a shot of Rainier from our deck and not have the humidity in the air block it out when viewed through the camera lens.


Here is what our yard looked like a couple of weeks ago before the fence and hydroseeding were done.


I was able to take Bex and Trey on the Fathers-and-sons camp out with the ward. We had fun on our boys night out!


While in Maryland celebrating Cody and Lisa's big achievement we were able to spend some time with Marisa's cousin Kevin. He is a third year dental student at the same school. Marisa was jealous that Cody and Lisa now know her cousin better than she does. All that will change when he moves back to the state though ;)




While driving in MD we saw a stealth bomber fly over head, very slowly. It was awesome!


We're happy for Cody, but sad they will be going to Colorado instead of Spokane, but it will be a better situation there so we are happy for that.

Kaskade Concert Review

The only people young and brave enough (and living close enough) to conquer the Kaskade concert with us were the Chapmans. We dropped all our kids off w/ Marisa's family. They enjoyed some time with the kids and we enjoyed a dinner in Bellevue. We hardly ever get out w/o kids and even less often eat out or go to a concert so we are very happy to the Ponds for helping make that possible.

After dinner we went back to the Ponds to help put the kids to bed. Then at 10:30 we went back out. That was really weird to be heading back out to party after putting the kids to bed. Very surreal to be feeling like a college student again, right after the usual very non-young-college kid event of putting your children to bed. We got to the club in Seattle and tried to look like we were in our element. Ronnie looked cool w/ his faux hawk and we had the two best looking women in their by our sides so we immediately felt comfortable and back to our young, no kids, lots of energy selves.

Kaskade came to the mixing table at around 11 (sorry Cody, I told you wrong on the phone) and played some house music the rest of the night with a few of his own radio songs thrown in. It was cool to see him get into it when he mixed some cool tracks together and everybody got into it. He did an amazing mix of One Republic's Apologize and the old song Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics. Poor Jodee had a glass get knocked off the upper level and hit her in the head, probably the only one that fell down the whole night and she just happened to be there :(

We forgot our camera in the Jeep so we took the above video and these pix with Marisa's phone.


The Chapmans were great dancers and a lot of fun. We didn't get done until (don't read any further mom...) 2 am and got home and in bed at 3. We seemed to do fine the next day so we are still young enough to survive a crazy night like that!

wasup pusaw

Our first two boys' first word was "Uh-oh!" Their second word was wisely "Dah-dah." Our hot tempered third son had to break the tradition and his first work was "no," and not just "no," but "NO!" Also, its not a "no-no" as in "don't do that" from Mom or Dad, but a "No, give that back" from Trey or Bex. It looks like his second will be "Dah-dah" as well, but sticking up for himself with two much bigger brothers has made him hard. He's our street ready boy. Ready to go out and be on his own.

Maybe that is why he has decided to escape the new house lately. He can reach the pull levers and open doors in this house. Here is a pic of what they look like.

Beckham will unlock the deadbolts and allow Caeden to escape. To keep him from escaping (which he has done a couple of times) we bought some small battery operated door alarms to warn us. How many people have to do crazy stuff like this for their 15 month old?

For those of you that are interested in this sort of thing...I heard that Panic at the Disco's lead singer is LDS, well I had to Google it b/c I love to debunk myths (ie-forward this email and Microsoft will pay you $10 for every person that gets it...). It looks like this one is true scroll down near the bottom or search the page for Mormon.

Just because I'm excited about it, I'll post this, but have you seen the show Survivorman? He uses the same software (Sony Vegas) to make his show as I do for our home videos. That gets me excited to go out and edit some more...Sorry about no pictures, we've been bad lately. We'll have some for the next post...