A new water table.

My two dollar garage sale purchase for endless afternoon fun water table.

Rusty pulled out his world cup medals. The people at work have been asking to see them for a few years. The kids found them on the counter and thought they would be fun to play with. How many kids get to play with Daddy's world cup medal?

Thanksgiving 2010

This Thanksgiving was all about good food and good friends. We ate dinner at the Petersons for the second year. Dawn went all out on fabulous decor for the feast. She even went so far as to buy matching bibs for Ridge and Aliya. Don't they look so cute! We had a pre-thanksgiving craft day where we weaved placemats and made pilgrim hats. We ate dinner around 1:30 on Thanksgiving Day. After dinner Holly, Dawn, and Rusty (yes, you read that right) studied the ads and made plans for their big black Friday shopping trip. The rest of us non-psycho shoppers ate pie and played in the yard. In the evening we went to the movies. Dawn, Jeff, Holly, and Mike went to Harry Potter and Rusty and I went with all of the kids to Tangled. Two thumbs up by us for Tangled. You know a movie is good when the adults enjoy it as much as the kids. At the end of the day everybody went to bed.....except the psycho shoppers. Holly, Rusty and Dawn left to shop at 11:00 p.m. and came home at 11:30 a.m. There is a story behind this shopping trip. Holly has begged me to go shopping on black Friday with her for many, many years. I have not budged. It sounds like absolute torture. Last year Rusty told Holly he would go with her next year. I said that was fine, Mike and I would sit around and eat cranberry muffins and chex mix. He stayed true to his word and is an official black Friday shopper. He has heard plenty about it at work. I'm just glad he did most of the Christmas shopping for the kids and I don't have to. Rusty stayed up the next day and we took the girls to the beach. By bedtime he was falling asleep while trying to read the girls a story. We had a great Thanksgiving and a great four day weekend. Big thanks to the Petersons for another fun Thanksgiving.

Katelyn turns four!

I know I say it all the time, but they really are getiing too big too fast. Katelyn is officially the same age that Kyleigh was when we moved to Hawaii. Since there is the same age difference, Ridge is as old as Katelyn was when we moved. Crazy!

Katelyn turned four on November 18th and we had an all day party. We started the day with pancake men. We then got Katelyn all dressed up for her big day. The Giles family gave her a new skirt for her birthday. Wendi said she saw the skirt and thought of Katelyn. It is so our little Kate-Kate. She LOVES it. We even had a matching hairbow and necklace to complete her outfit. Daddy took Katelyn to work with him in the morning to be his birthday assistant. At lunch she went out to Keoki's with Daddy and Uncle Mikey. Rusty said everyone was smiling and staring as she walked in and half of the people stopped them to talk to her. Her big request for lunch was hula pie, which was granted. Kyleigh had even reminded me to bring a shirt to put over her white shirt so it didn't get stained with the chocolate sauce. After lunch we picked her up and headed to Claire's so she could pick out some birthday bling. We also went to the humane society and played with the puppies and kitties.

Her party this year was a farm animal party. A few months ago I put some things in a joint garage sale with a few other ladies. Katelyn had a hard time parting with everything in the pile. As a compromise I let her keep the duck cake pan that we had from her first birthday. Ever since then she has been planning her duck cake for her next birthday. When it came time to make the cake I went down to get the pan and couldn't find it anywhere. She was set on a duck cake so we had to improvise. Rusty grabbed a little rubber duck toy, Kyleigh held the flashlight, and I traced our duck projection. It worked great. I made the cake and used our stencil to cut out the duck. I had some cake left over so I made water for our duck. We also had pig and cow ice cream sandwiches. I had found a cute set of ice cream sandwich molds the week before at a garage sale (perfect timing). Of course Katelyn wanted pizza again so we challenged everyone to make a pizza farm animal. The results were less impressive than last years smiley face pizzas, but they still tasted good.

Her gifts were so fun this year. She opened each one and wanted to play with them right away. Kyleigh was so sweet and insisted on giving her a build a bear gift certificate. Kyleigh got one for her birthday and had so much fun picking clothes off the website that she wanted to give Katelyn one. You need about $20.00 to get an outfit for your bear. She was willing to pay the whole amount from her allowance, but I told her we could split it to help her out. Because you buy it online you don't acutally get a card so she made a card to wrap up for Katelyn. She was so excited to give it to her and it was so cute.

We gave Katelyn a scooter. She has been scooting around the house ever since. The next morning she was scootering around when we called her in for breakfast. She scootered into the dining room and carefully parked her scooter. It took awhile. We asked her to move over a chair. She unparked her scooter, scooted the 1 1/2 feet and reparked her scooter. It was very funny.

She went to bed on November 18th a happy four year old.
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Drive-In Movie Night

Family fun magazine had a great idea for a drive-in movie night with cars made out of boxes. I gathered the troops for double the fun crazy girl time. We had 7 girls over to make cars on a Thursday and the movie night on Friday. Besides the 7 girls who joined us, we had our two girls, 2 girl babies.....and Ridge. What a lucky guy. The girls chose a color and painted paper plates for wheels, then made license plates while the moms cut and taped boxes together to make the car bodies. We moved the furniture back to make a big enough parking lot for all of the cars. Holly brought over her never ending roll of tickets that she uses for every party. We gave each of the girls four tickets. They used them to "buy" their nachos, juice boxes, caramel popcorn and movie ticket. We watched The Tale of Desperaux, which we just finished reading to the girls. The movie wasn't very impressive and because of our ancient T.V. and lots of background noise it was hard to hear. Before long the parking lot was empty. Ridge took over a few cars and ended up getting in a car accident. No injuries reported. Everyone had a great time.

We went to Oahu for three days. We stayed at a friends condo. He was away for the weekend. It was air conditioned. We sat down and reveled in the fabulous cool air. Usually we have nothing less than every minute of our vacations planned. This one was different. Especially when we entered the air conditioned condo. You don't realize how much you love air conditioning until you live without it. We did make a trip to the zoo. The girls loved it. We also bought toy story three and had a pizza night (in the air conditioning). Rusty and Mike went rock climbing one morning. We went to the beach and pool at Koolina one day. We also had dinner with some Silver City friends that are now stationed on Oahu. They made us a fabulous mainland meal (meat and potatoes). Air conditioning and potatoes in one weekend. Sweet!

Laie Temple Open House

After almost 2 years the temple on Oahu is reopening. We took the kids over to go through the open house. We flew in on a Friday morning, got our rental car and went straight to Laie. The temple was beautiful. We had only been through once so I didn't remember much of what it looked like before. Holly said she thought it looked like an entirely new temple. Obviously she pays more attention to the details than me. The kids were pretty reverent in the temple. Katelyn was scared to death of the booties (?) and refused to wear them so I had to carry her the whole way (Rusty had Ridge). She started sobbing as soon as we walked in. We gave her the pamplet with pictures and she decided she would like to look for the places in the temple that matched the pictures. She did fine after that. Here are a few pics from the temple grounds.