In Utah: Help!

In her short life, Kindle has learned to scream when a certain sibling gets too close to her. He is not mean, if anything he is a bit too loving, and on occasion too rough in trying to play with her. These pictures made me laugh as you can see how progressively uncomfortable she gets as he gets more in her space...Check it out, and take special note of the looks on her face.

Hi dad! Aren't I cute?
Look at me!
Smiley!!
Oh no, here comes trouble
Mom, are you going to stop him? He's on my boppy!
Seriously mom, he's on me and my boppy now!!
Mom, mom, help me please...

We all made it to Utah!

Off to Utah

Driving to Utah we slept in Missoula, Montana the first night.

This is the view from our hotel window:
S & E
A (he was feeling pretty sick...poor kid!)

Sandpoint

Up until now, we have not actually been able to go see the "beach" at Sandpoint, Idaho, so last Sat, May 24th, we decided to make the drive out there to see it. It was a bit rainy and cold, but it was fun nonetheless. Here's some pics...

All 4Cute K
There is this little Statue of Liberty. Here's S by it.
Throwing rocks in.
S & E with Lady Liberty.
E as Lady Liberty

Montana here we come...

Well, over this past weekend we drove to Hamilton, MT to visit Wes's cousin and his family. When Wes was in Medical school in Omaha, Eli (the aforementioned cousin) was in dental school there as well, so our kids were pretty great friends. Visiting this weekend was a great time especially for the kids to get to see their cousins and play with them. They already miss them terribly since we left yesterday...Here are a few pics from the trip (again mostly taken by our little cameraman E)

This is what E looked like much of the drive there. Look at the lovely scenery he is missing...
Armour was happy to take the picture (not really this happy to be in the car, but he is a ham for the camera!!) (Notice how miserable Solace looks in the corner there)
Sol in the car drinking a Capri Sun
Solace & Madison (taken by...you guessed it, Ender)
Eli & Trieste (Ender is quite proud of this picture he took as well)
Brynne (taken by E)
3 girls (taken by E)
Mommy (taken by E)
I commandeered the camera back and took this pic or Brynne & Ender.
Watching a movie

2 princesses
2 princesses and the small prince...
Just hanging out...
Wes & mini-Wes (seriously-could he look more like his dad?!)

Thank you Janelle!

Thank you Janelle Money for posting wedding pictures on your facebook! I am totally stealing them so I can show off more of the wedding. Here are a few of Janelle's pics from Jecca's wedding!

They kiss (Also, notice Wes & Armour in the foreground-proves we were there!) The immediate family (Wes is further over on the right-basically I am saying he was cut out!)
Steve
Anne and Steve at the reception
The happy couple
See-I was totally there with the kids! Here we are with Stef eating ice cream.

Well, she's hitched!!!

On Dec 27, 2007, Wesley's baby sister, Jessica got married to Eric...Oops, I mean Bret Gardner (At the wedding, the guy marrying them kept calling him Eric, which incidentally is his brother's name). So, I took a TON of really, really cute pics that actually turned out well, but as my previous blog mentioned my computer blipped, and this is the extent of the pics that survived, so enjoy these cake and bouquet throwing pics! Congrats Bret and Jessica Gardner! We are so excited to have a new uncle Bret!! As a total side note, Ender and his cousin Brenden (he is 5 months older then Ender) figured out that Bret is the tie breaker in Wesley's family that makes more boys than girls (grandma and grandpa cancel each other out, the 3 that were married before Jessica and their spouses cancel each other out, Tom and Stef cancel each other out, Ty's son and daughter cancel each other out, Solace and Ender cancel each other out, and before she was married, Jessica and Armour canceled each other out. Leaving Bret as the tie breaker). How these two little boys figured this out I do not know, but now I feel some pressure for this baby to be a girl and tie it up again! :) We will find out about that for sure tomorrow!

The Castaway!

Skipping right along...

I am going to skip right past the engagement and Wedding part and just skip straight to the Honeymoon! Nice, huh?! Well, here's a few things about those things...

So, we got engaged on Feb 4th, but I didn't have a ring until a few weeks later. Wes took me to regional conference at the LDS Conference Center in downtown SLC and after it was over took me for a walk around Temple Square. He proposed to me officially with the ring there at the fountain looking at the Temple. It was really sweet and romantic!

We were married on May 17, 2001. It was a great wedding and a fun filled day of activities after the ceremony. We had a great time.

On May 18, 2001 at like 4 am we went to the airport to fly out to Florida for our Honeymoon. We had done this thing for our honeymoon where we got the trip really cheap by attending a presentation one morning for time shares. So, the company we did this through arranged for all the hotels and stuff. Our first 3 nights were in Orlando and that hotel was alright. THe next coupl nights were supposed to be at a hotel in Daytona Beach. Wes was really excited about this part as the hotel was guaranteed to be right on the beach.

So, we drove away from Orlando to Daytona Beach, and started to look for the address. At first we could not find it in the plethora of awseome beachfront hotel along the street where the hotel was located, so we stopped at one of the hotels to ask where our hotel, "The Castaway" was located. THe guy explained that is was about 5 miles down the road because the street is split by east and west addresses and this was a west address...

As we got back on the road and started down toward the address, the neighborhood got progressively worse and worse, until we saw this run down shop on the left side of the street. It had towels in the windows with naked women printed on them, and a huge blinking neon sign that said "Exotic tobacco pipes" and had a neon sign style picture of a bong...lovely! As we were just getting over the shock on the shop, we noticed that our equally worn down hotel was actually right across the street. It looked like something out of a horror movie-looked abandoned, run dow , rusty...scarry! But we thought we would go in anyway and see how it was inside-besides, it was the only place we had to stay.

The one-toothed man behind the counter took 20 minutes to get our information in the computer, then said "oops, I messed up," and because he had evidently never known about a backspace key, he started the whole process all over again. When he finally got us checked in, we got into the elevator and pushed the floor number, and stood there in the shakey elevator of a few minutes before the doors opened up and another family got in with us. Then we all sat in the elevator for a few more minutes. Then decided it hadn't moved, pushed the open door button, and sure enough, we were still in the lobby. So we all relocated to the other elevator which slowly but surely got us to our respective floors. As the door on our floor opened, I was overwhelmed by the stench of fish guts and mold-gross, then when we turned the corner to our hallway, it looked exactly like the hallway in "The Shining". So, we sent into our hole of a room, and realized that there was not a door on the sliding door part, and that the balcony was just open and all the people around could come in and out of our room as they pleased.

We decided to just go on a walk on the beach and at least take advantage of the fact that the hotel really was right on the beach at least. We planned on a 1-2 hour walk at most. When we got out to the beach, Wesley saw a dock a wasy off and wanted to walk to that, so we walked. We walked, and walked and walked. And it got darker and darker and darker...And later and later and later...after who-knows-how-long walking, it was pitch black and the dock was not any closer. So, we decided for our safety, we would go ahead and walk up to the street where there was light and find our way back to the hotel. Wes was carrying his walet and we were both just in our swimsuits. I managed to get hit on a number of times (that was back before I had 3 kids), we saw 2-3 drug deals happening, 3-4 arrests going on, a police chase, and had a cop tell us we wer enot in a safe place and that we should find our way back to whereever we were supposed to be...it was CRAZY!!

I never thought I could be glad to see that disgusting hole of a hotel, but I was ecstatic! Gotta love the Castaway...