Lucky #7

About this time every year Regan decides to have a birthday, it's almost like clock-work...

Here's her current information, so we have something to tease her about when she's older:

• Her favorite color is GOLD.
• When she grows up she wants to be an art teacher or a fashion designer.
• She wants to attend BYU-Hawaii.
• Her favorite subjects are art and math.
• What she wanted more than anything for her birthday was a nail design machine that could add sparkles, etc. to your fingernails. Unfortunately, her mom read the reviews on that product and dodged a major bullet).
• Her favorite show is Scooby-Doo.
• Her favorite food is pepperoni pizza.
• Her favorite book is "If I Were a Lion" by Sarah Weeks, which Aunt Beth gave her for her third birthday. She still loves it, and so does her mom.
• Her favorite things to do are run, dance, swim, read and write stories.

Here she is celebrating... Her new Didj, which on top of being able to play games on, she can program with her spelling words and current math topics each week and have it make games for her. Cool.

Mad Libs. It was cool when I was young and I thought it was cool that they were still popular. What is even cooler is that I can still remember what most of the parts of speech are...

Blowing out the candles on her special request lemon cheesecake.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY REGAN...WE LOVE YOU!!!

Meet the Mohawk

We just got back from a really fun overnight camping trip (yes, camping generally does mean overnight, but in this case I mean we spent just the one night). Unfortunately, as I pulled out the camera to capture all the fun, all I got was a dead battery message. Sigh... Anyway, we had a lot of fun with some families Jeff grew up with. Two of the boys were Regan and Hadyn's ages, and the four of them got along wonderfully. It was funny to see Regan trying to balance on that fine line between being scared that Jeff's friend, Scott, was taking us on a 10:00pm bear hunt, and laughing at the fact that we really didn't expect to see any bears. We did have one glitch in our otherwise perfect trip. The zipper on the door of the tent broke, and would not close. Normally this would not a major problem, I just figured we'd keep the lights off inside the tent to keep the bugs inside to a minimum. I didn't quite work out that way. First, we had just gone on a "bear hunt", and second, Regan can read now, and could understand the signs posted at the outhouse that there were indeed bears in the area and to keep our garbage safely contained. Well, everyone knows that bears politely wait outside of zipped up tents, but actually go inside tents with broken zippers. This caused some understandable panic in Regan and Hadyn. Not to fear, Jeff and Scott marched off like the men they are to fix the tent. 15 minutes later, they came back. We were a little short of duct tape, but the door was sealed with bear-proof tape. Luckily our tent has two doors. Crisis averted.

Upon returning home, we quickly cleaned up and got ready to go to visit yet more friends (could we be more popular?) for a birthday party. Jeff announced that he needed a haircut. Now, many of you have heard me talk about how much I like it when Jeff cuts his hair really short, aka, with the clippers. Well, I've been trying to convince him to do it again, and I finally wore him down. We, of course, started with your basic mohawk, which, truly, Jeff looked great in. I'm not just saying that, he could totally pull it off. Sadly, this picture is as close as most of the world will get to seeing it. I'll try to wear him down on the mohawk being a permanent fixture, but until then, at least I get the buzz cut.

And yes, I did say our camera battery was dead, but it was a mohawk! It had to be captured. I charged the battery for 2 minutes, and was able to get exactly one somewhat blurry picture out of it before it died again. Enjoy. Feel free to leave your positive comments about the mohawk. Maybe if we all in blog-world team together we can see more of Jeff's wild side in the future.

Spa Luke

Last week Hadyn came home from a play date with a make-up kit. Regan immediately took control of it and started giving make-overs to any and all willing participants. On Sunday, Regan and Hadyn informed me that it was my turn, and, let's be honest, much needed.

I was told where to sit, a blanket was draped across my shoulders and I was beautified. Hadyn was in charge of putting lotion on my legs. Both treatments were very much appreciated, and I think the end result was well worth the $1 my neighbor paid for the make-up kit.

Eat your heart out America! Get your apointments fast.

Since they have school and early bed times, slots fill up fast...

Civil Disobedience

We have a standing rule at our house about growing up.

It is strictly forbidden.

Not only do I want to keep my girls little and sweet and cute, but let's be honest, I don't want to be old enough to have grown children.

Unfortunately, this rules seems to go the way of other household rules, and is completely ignored.

Case in point, today Regan started second grade. Seriously, 2nd Grade! I can still picture her the day we brought her home from the hospital (and can still hear her scream...you who knew her then, or had the pleasure of living within a one block radius of our house knows what I'm talking about).

It just seems to be going too fast.

Anyway, here she is on her way out the door.

Why do I even bother to make rules.

I should have made a sign about it.

I hear signs work...Sigh...

And just for reference, here she is on her way to her first day of kindergarten...sniff, sniff...

Route of the Hiawatha

This is a little old news, but newsworthy all the same. A few weeks ago we met up again with the Prestwich's for a camping/biking adventure in Northern Idaho. We actually camped near a tiny town called Avery, which is just past St. Maries, ID. It is a logging community, so their school mascot is a lumberjack. Jeff really gets a kick out of this guy at the high school. I would feel bad not including since Jeff took such pains to really capture his tree-chopping essence...

When we started looking through the three possible campgrounds for a spot for our group, we were starting go get worried that so many spots were taken already, in spite of it being a Wednesday. Luckily there was one spot left, and it was literally the best spot out of the entire area. We had tons of trees and shade, space for a large tent and a camp trailer, trails for the kids to explore, trails to the river for fishing and playing and even huckleberry bushes!

Here's Dave, AKA the pied piper. He had all the kids entranced watching him make a whistle out of a willow.
That's all of our group walking along the St. Joe River. Isn't it so beautiful!? Dave and Jeff are in the waders in the water, and Jeff just caught a fish. He's such a good provider...wait, it's catch and release... oh well, I wasn't thrilled about cleaning them anyway...

One of the days of the campout was set aside for the Route of the Hiawatha. It was such a cool family activity. It is an old railway that has since been converted to a bike trail. It is about 15 miles long and the entire route is on a gentle downhill grade with a shuttle at the base. It is in beautiful mountains and you go over huge trestle bridges and several long, dark tunnels.

Here I am at the trailhead, a tunnel that is just under 2 miles long and dark and muddy and even a little chilly in the deepest part. It was a little eerie at first. You would be in touble without a decent headlamp. I have the girls in the trailer behind me, and they serenaded me the entire tunnel with "Mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing's quite like it for cooling the blood"...that helped, a lot...

One of the bridges we crossed.

At the end. I was hoping for a group shot, but everyone was a little tired and grouchy and wanted to run around. These were the only troopers willing to work with me, and two of them had no real choice. That's Jackson in the middle of my girls, he and Regan became quite the BFF's.

Alas, not everything can go as planned however...