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...

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After deleting potential titles to this post such as "Nazi HOA" or "Trapped in Communist Maple Valley" I decided against those for a more gentle "..." that is more along the lines of how I really feel. Our HOA is currently run by an agency rather than just by the residents because not all of the houses are sold (~5 left). We were digging the sprinkler system trenches as can be seen in the above photo and someone reported us as digging drainage trenches that would drain our water off onto the sloped common areas. Rather than Mr. Anonymous asking us what we were doing or having the HOA quickly come over to see we had to wait almost 3 weeks for approval or suffer a fine. I understand the benefits of an HOA that is run properly, but time delays like this over such simple solutions drive me nuts, (probably just my OCD again!). I resolved to go ahead anyway, but luckily the approval came the same day so we are started again. Now we can fill the ditches back in and hydroseed!

I know many of you use programs to stay caught up on people's blogs. I've mentioned to a few friends about tracking comments as well. I like to track the comments on the blogs of my best friends and family. Here's an explanation if you are interested...right click on the RSS feed button (in blogger it usually says "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" at the bottom) and select the options that says something like, "Copy Link Location." Paste that into a word document or your reader if it will let you edit it after pasting. Our blogs feed when copied will say, "http://calderwood.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default." Change the word "posts" to "comments" and add it to your reader. It should read, "http://calderwood.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default." Whenever anyone posts a comment to that blog you will be able to see it in your reader.

More good news for Seattle housing. Although we didn't buy at the peak we were afraid that we bought too close to it. Luckily housing prices here have been fairly stable in certain areas. We just learned that a house in the neighborhood with our same floor plan (minus 1 extra room and deck that we have) with a smaller yard and not as good of a view sold in less than one week for the same price that we bought ours! Here's to Micro$oft, Boeing and the tech industry helping our local economy.

Due to the lack of pix in this post I snapped a shot of an old photo I had in my car for a YM/YW activity. In the spirit of our good friend Collette's "Flashback Friday," here is an old flashback of mine. If you see any flashback posts out there on a blog, she was the originator. I have seen it spread directly to about 8 or so different others, so props to the original! This is a scout camp I went on and my leader printed the photo out for me (far left crazy guy in cowboy boots) because I was standing on the outside of the group. For some reason he said that was very fitting...

OCD

My Obsessive Compulsive Disorder has been in full swing lately keeping me up late and from doing anything else until I get something done each night for the unpacking. We are starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel as we have finished all the major items and started to put a few things up in the attic. We love being in the new house and the boys have done a pretty good job so far of not destroying it!

The weather has been crazy. We had some normal warm Seattle spring days, then on Friday Seattle set a record low. Here are some pix we took while it was nice outside.






Our move was during a snow fall that left us in 4" of snow and despite growing up in Utah I saw the largest falling snowflakes of my life!
Beck ran into one of the columns in our house and has a sweet reminder to not be crazy and run around the house...

We went to the Puyallup spring fair so that we could go to the demolition derby with our friends the Chapmans. I have always wanted to go to one so it was nice to check that off my "things to do before I die" list. We froze to death but still had a lot of fun.



Besides the finale of the demolition derby there were some crazy things like a car rolling contest. The cars used a ramp to see how many times they could get their cars to roll. The winner rolled 4 times! Needless to say the boys were very involved in watching this show. They also had races where the cars could hit each other as much as they wanted and the final demo was crazy! If you have never been it is more intense than you might think. We kept trying to get pictures of Jodee's shocked face while the different crazy events were going on, but my cheap little camera that we took was too slow.