Daddy!!!!!

Okay, these pictures are not fabulous I know. You are probably wondering why I would put such poor quality looking pictures on here, but I had to capture this event somehow. Every time Lamon comes home from work he opens the garage door, and the boys go absolutely nuts! All of a sudden no matter what we are doing it's, "Daddy!!!" And they bolt for the door. Lamon usually does not even get a chance to get out of the car before the boys want to greet him!! The boys sure love their Daddy, and Daddy sure loves his boys. I think that you can see that in these pictures, even though they are terrible.

Camping in Snow Canyon

We decided on the spur of the moment on Monday that it was time for Ada to have her first camping experience. We have wanted to go camping for awhile, and so by golly we went! It was so much fun. We have lived here for 4 years and still haven't camped at Snow Canyon. So we went and it was a blast. The kids . . . okay and I . . . played on the rocks and in the sand, we cooked some tinfoil dinners, and roasted marshmallows. It was perfect. The kids slept great, and the only incident we had was when Drew woke up at 4:30 after wetting his sleeping bag. But don't worry as prepared as Lamon and I are we remembered to bring an extra pair of pajamas! We forgot an extra pair of underwear unfortunately . . . but hey, we are improving!The boys slept great though, and Ada slept from 10:00 until 7:30 this morning! It was great! We love camping! And we are so glad the kids do too!

Ada's Blessing Day

Yes, it finally happened. Ada was finally blessed on Sunday the 4th of May. She is three months old , and looks like she is 9 months. She looked a little bigger than the other babies being blessed that day! She looked absolutely beautiful though as you can tell.
Grandma and Grandpa Barksdale, Grandma and Grandpa Mack, Great Grandma Neubert, Annie, Janie, Spencer and Jeanine and their kids, Nate and Kendra and their kids, Brandon and Katie and their kids, and Earl and Carolyn Larsen were all there. We had a Hot Dog Roast the night before at Red Cliffs (which was a lot of fun); and then after the blessing on Sunday we got together for some yummy food that Lamon made, and we had some cake and ice cream to celebrate Drew and Justin's Birthdays.

Her beautiful dress was made by a friend named Kelly Edwards. She was so sweet. I never asked her to make it or anything. One day she just told me that she already bought the material and was going to make it, and it turned out so lovely!

Cake anyone?

I love to make Cakes. The latest is for Drew's 4th birthday tomorrow. If you can't tell it is supposed to be a pirate ship. I sort of fell apart but it is still cool!

Pleasant Vacation?!!!

Amy and Broc came down about a week ago and stayed with us. I'm sure they were planning on having a nice pleasant visit here in the sunshine. There were plans of fishing, of basking in the sun at Sand Hollow while the children played in the water . . . we were going to go out on our new kayak . . . but . . . it didn't quite turn out that way. For one thing the wind was howling so bad there would be no fishing, but worse than that certain events would occur that would keep us all from enjoying any of our planned activities. It was all due to three little mischievious boys ranging in height from about two to three feet tall. Drew has a little buddy next door whom he is always playing with. Drew is always running into Jamin's house and if they are not over there then they are over here. Sometimes there is not a lot of communication going on between us parents, it's just almost understood that if they are not here than they are over there and vice versa. Well, I think we will be a little more aware from now on. Lamon was watching the boys, and Jamin came over to see if the boys could play. Permission granted, Lamon assumed that Kelly was out watching them. Well, Kelly on the other hand assumed that we were watching them. But what really happened was no one was watching them and they decided to have a lot of fun. Soon Drew came in and said, "Dad Dad, we did it, we filled it all the way to the top." Lamon knew almost instantly what Drew was talking about. Someone had ran over a sewage pipe in our front yard recently, and it left a big hole in the top of it. Well, the boys decided it would be a blast to fill the pipe up with rocks, which they did. Well, they clogged it pretty good, and after finding out that a plumber would charge us to have a backhoe come in to dig up our driveway and work on it, Lamon decided to use the shop vacuum to try to suck out all the rocks. It was a pretty dirty job, and he got as many rocks out as he could see six feet down, but the water was still backing up which meant that the clog was even further down the pipe underground somewhere. So the job was about to get a little bit longer, harder, and dirtier. Broc and Lamon decided that instead of having a back hoe come to dig a hole in our yard, they would dig it instead, and then they would saw open the pipe and see if they could get the remaining rocks out. Well even though the boys were both going to dig up the hole, somehow it ended up being the superhuman Broc who pretty much dug the entire hole himself. Soon after the hole was completed and the pipes exposed, the boys discovered that the clog was located clear underground in the middle of the road somewhere. Seeing that I am a female and don't know anything about how to fix things, I don't really know what all happened from the time the hole was dug until the whole ordeal was over, but there was a lot of men looking at the pipes or looking at the road, scratching their heads and doing a lot of man thinking. And somehow with all that man thinking and the gracious help of a plumber who lived next door to Nate, by late evening the problem was solved and the sawed open pipe was replaced. The oblivious kids all had an absolute blast playing in the "poopy" dirt while all of this was going on. We are just grateful for Broc and everyone who helped out because it saved us thousands of dollars we have come to find out. And after helping Lamon in the morning shovel the dirt back into the hole, I am absolutely assured that Broc really does not feel pain at all. I am quite positive. My back was killing me after a few shovels worth of dirt!!! Needless to say, I am sure that Broc and Amy have had some more pleasant vacations in their lifetime. We did at least get to go on a fun drive to Baker's Reservoir, do some Geocaching, and go to Kolob Canyon . . . all of which I was completely wussy and stayed in the car the entire time, pretending like I was doing it for Ada's sake, but really I couldn't stand the bitterly cold wind!! How am I ever going to survive when we move back up North?!!! I'm pathetic.

Finally a date!!!!!!

Last week Lamon and I went on a date finally after quite a drout. We are always going on fun adventures as a family, but we don't get out by ourselves very often. Well last week we had a fabulous adventure. We convinced Nate and Kendra to watch our kids so that we could have a date, and we told them that we would be back in two hours. Well we decided we wanted to go find Elephant Arch, a hike that we had been itching to do for quite some time.
It's a hike that not a ton of people know about, and it is kind of a hunt to find the arch; but we brought our GPS and set off. We were kind of short on time because it took us a while get to the trailhead through random dirt roads since the main road was blocked by a gate. So we had to make a decision about what we wanted to do. Should we just goof around and hike a little bit, or should we try to move fast and find the arch? We decided to find the arch! It was such a fun hike! We were moving as fast as we could, and not far into the hike we ran into sand. Most of the hike was in sand, which is not the easiest terrain to move quickly in. But Lamon, being the wonderful husband that he is, walked in front of me while I treaded in his semi-packed footprints. We got to a point in the hike where a few washes met together, and we were supposed to find a trail that was headed northwest out of the wash. We thought we found the trail and started hiking, but it wasn't the right trail, and we ended up hiking over a little bit of a mountain in order to get back on the trail. That didn't help our time. But we found the arch and it was sooooo cool. The hike was a blast, and Ada had fun too. Ada gets to join Mommy and Daddy on any dates for a while. It was her first real hike, and she was looking up at us smiling the whole time, until she got hungry and I had to nurse her while trying to walk quickly in the sand. That was quite interesting I assure you! We didn't quite make it back in two hours, and I think Kendra and Nate pretty much wanted our hides, but if they knew the efforts we made to make it back!! :) Just kidding. It was definitly a blast!!!

New Feed the Fire Pics

We went for an adventure looking for Fort Pierce. It is an old fort built by the pioneers in order to protect this spring from the indians in the area. It is about 8 miles out into the middle of the desert on the Utah Arizona boarder.

These Pics are of the Valley of Fire. This is one of our new favorite places to go with the kids. There are millions of little holes in the sandstone that the kids love running through and climbing in. It is beautiful down there and is about 5 degrees warmer there than St. George so it is awesome in the winter.



This is Mary at Zion. We love going there in the winter because it is like a ghost town and it feels like we have the entire canyon to ourselves. It had actually snowed the day before we were there durring this visit. We go there about once or twice a month. It is about 30 minuets from our house and we have year passes to both national parks and state parks. If you can't tell, we love being outside.

This is an other pic from Valley of Fire.

This is me biking in the Apple Valley area which is on the way out to Colorado City from Hurricane. The trail is called goosberry mesa. I took this trip with my brothers in law John and Chris. There is about a 1000 ft. cliff about 30 ft. behind me. What a view.

We were at Zion the other day taking Ada for her first outdoor adventure and hiked to the lower emerald pools. She seemed to enjoy it as she slept the entire time. Amy was the awesome photographer that snapped this sweet photo.

We have had so much fun lately here in the desert. I found out a couple of weeks ago that I have to work here until August in order to fill my contract. I guess that we are in for an other hot summer. I bought an inflatable kayak the other day so that means that we will be spending some of those hot summer days on the lake.