We're FLOODED!

 It has been raining nonstop today, and this is our flooded street at 10:15am, and still rising...

I am wearing old platform flipflops, and I'm not even in the deepest part, so it would come to my knees without shoes! I asked my neighbor across the street (who was also out marveling at the water) to take these two pictures of me in front of my house. :)

Eliza wanted to come out too. She is standing on our front sidewalk.

 I snapped a pic of a truck braving the water...

And even though this is fuzzy, it helps show how deep it is!

It is still raining hard out there. I am going to go see how deep it is in an hour. :)  Luckily the houses on the block are up on an incline from the street. And we don't have a basement so I guess that's a good thing today.

*Update:
At 11am Eliza had preschool at my friend, Britni's house. I called my other friend, Jen, to see if she could pick up Eliza since I couldn't get out of my driveway. So Eliza and I walked to the end of the street where Jen picked her up. On the way back I waded in to see how much deeper it was, and I heard a voice from my door, "What is going on?!!"  It was Jed, awake from sleeping after his night shift last night. He was standing on our step in shock at all the water!  I gave him a sheepish smile and he laughed and said, "Are you out here playing in it?"  I denied it, saying, "No - I had to take Eliza down the street to catch her ride to preschool... and then I just wanted to see how deep it was..." and he started laughing at me, because he knows I love sloshing through deep water puddles.  Anyway, I made him take another picture of me, showing how the water has risen.  Then I sloshed around picking up floating pizza boxes and such, from the garbage cans waiting along our street. (This morning they were all floating in the water, tipped over, until my nice neighbor picked everyone's garbages up and took them to higher ground.)

Our garbage collectors are pretty dedicated, don't you think? 

 

*4:30pm update! 

The water has gone down some, but there is still a whole lot of water out there. Now that Ben is home from school, all the neighborhood kids are having a heyday!  Eliza, Jed, and Sam all came out to play, too.  :)  (Eliza is wearing her swimming suit under her sweatshirt. I figured, 'Why not?' :)  )

First day of School

September 6 was the first day of school!
Ben was the cutest FIRST GRADER ever. Wow, I can't believe he is in 1st grade!! He was a little late getting out the door and was in a rush to reach the bus stop in time, but he was a good sport about getting his picture taken first. :)
His teacher is Mrs Meadows and I think she is going to be an awesome teacher.  (So far Ben loves first grade and getting to go to school and interacting with all the other kids. He enjoys the whole school environment. He is so independent and motivated, and plus he's Mr. Social :), so he just loves it.)

Eliza also had her first day of Preschool. Here she is with her friends, Myli Hamblin and Jacy Johnson.  They have preschool every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9:30-12:30; each mom teaches once a week at her own house. They are all three and a half and have two years before Kindergarten.
Aren't they so cute?

Ward Campout

We had the funnest ward camp out on September 2nd.  The kids had so much fun!  Especially once it got dark and they all got to stay up late and run around with their headlamps and flashlights.

Sammy and Daddy~

Sammy chilled in the big camp chair for awhile, observing the goings on around him. 

 Eliza playing with Lillian, my friend Anona's little girl.

Jed entertaining the masses with his rocket launchings!  When the big rocket, The Amazon :), went into the forest, we all braved the hordes of mosquitoes to find it. I quickly decided it was not worth it and escaped with Sam. Jed searched for awhile thinking he might find it, and just when he was all tangled up in the underbrush and consigned to the fact that The Amazon was history, he looked up and there in the tree just above him was the small rocket! This was amazing because this was the one that goes up twice as high as The Amazon, and no one had been able to spot it coming down, so for all we knew it had landed in Canada or something.  :)  Talk about an unexpected surprise!

Toledo Childrens Museum

My friend, Jen Johnson, invited me and the kids to join them for a trip to the Children's Museum one day in August.  This was such a fun Children's Museum; we all had a great time. Sammy played on this slide for most of the time. He was kept occupied with going up and down the ramp and up and down the stairs, over and over.

He also had a fun time splashing in the water at this baby water station.

Eliza played in the grocery store most of the time. She would load her cart, put all the food next to the cash register and then put it back in her cart, and so forth. It was cute.

Ben was everywhere at once with his friend Daxton. They had a blast exploring all the possibilities together. Seriously, a Children's Museum is like a kid's heaven. There is no end to the fascinating toys!

a quick trip to Island Park

While we were in Montana, Jed and I left the kids with Michel and took a mini vacation to Island Park, Idaho, where they have a cabin. After arriving, we spent the day canoeing around Wade Lake. Isn't it pretty?

At the tip of one of the arms of the lake, the water is shallow and we could see the fish darting around the canoe below us. Jed fished for a while as I maneuvered our canoe to the good spots in the water. After chasing the fish around a while, Jed caught one. It was pretty exciting to get one. 

That night we went in to West Yellowstone, a town nearby. There is a theater there called The Playmill Theater, which I just LOVE! Last year we saw Beauty and the Beast there and loved it.  Apparently, BYU drama students work here during the summers, and their productions are awesome! The theater is very small and intimate, so you can see every expression on the actors' faces. Anyway, this year we went to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  WOW. It was so good! I absolutely loved it. I think it is my favorite play ever. The music is fantastic and funny, and we have been listening to it nonstop ever since. Really, I have been listening to it all the time ever since we got back, and Ben has portions of it memorized.  We all have fun serenading Ben, "Benjamin, you nasty youth! Your crime has shocked me to the core! Never in my whole career have I encountered this before! Guards! Seize him! Lock him in the cell. Throw the key into the Nile as well!"  We all get a big kick out of that, especially Ben!  I will have to record him singing this, as well as the Close Every Door to Me song. He remembers the tunes even when I forget them.

The next day Jed and I rented a motor boat and went out on Wade Lake again. We saw eagles flying around the tall pine trees as we fished. Later in the afternoon, Jed jumped off this super high rope swing that was probably a 20-25 foot drop into the cold water.  He is nuts!  I was lucky enough to get out of it because it was overcast that day and getting chilly. If it had been a hot day, though, there's no way I would have got out of there dry. :)

 (still on his way out and up...)

 (about to let go...)

 At this point, if it had been me I would have screamed, "What have I done?!  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!"  In fact, when I was video taping Jed, I couldn't help but blurt out, "Oh no!" when he was falling. :)

more on our trip to Montana...

Jed's conference was in Big Sky, Montana, two hours from Billings.  His dad, JT (his friend from residency), and he did some of this:

 (attending classes in Big Sky)

 And a bunch of this:

 (this is a shot coming down from the jump)

They had a lot of fun goofing off together.... and learning, too. :)

When we were in Billings all together, we went on a walk on the rims surrounding the city.  It was a super cool view from up there!

Two of the most awesome guys ever. Seriously. They define COOL.

While Jed and Ben were acting studly and macho on the rock, they suddenly slipped and fell! I was scared out of my wits! So I raced over to them, and took a few pictures in case I never saw them alive again.  (I had to take a couple shots just to make sure I got a good one. You know how that is.)

Luckily, through sheer will-power, and a little muscle strength, they pulled themselves back up to safety. I'm happy to say that they are still with us, and came away tougher from their brush with death.
I'm not sure that Eliza, Michel, or Sammy noticed...

 We visited Jed's sister, Emily, and her family in Wyoming while we were visiting Montana.  Michel rented a big blow up toy for the afternoon and we had a BLAST chasing each other around in that thing!

Sam got some sweet thrills from his older brother. 

We went back to Emily's house and we played in the water for awhile. Very fun!

 (Emily and Michel. Emily is going to have a second boy in a few weeks!)

Earlier in the week, on two different days, Jed, JT, Ryan and I had played on a super fun frisbee golf course that takes you along (and up) the rims as you go through the course. We covered some serious elevation by the end! And we had to search among the boulders and sagebrush for our frisbees sometimes. It was a challenging course, and so fun!
We decided to take all the kids to Pioneer Park to play a low-key game of frisbee golf on the course they have set up there in the grass, and we all had a great time. Afterwards, Jed and his dad recognized an opportunity for some friendly competition. They are always doing funny competitions like this. They see a bar and simultaneously blurt out, "Let's see who can hang on the longest."  :)

(Jed's motto: When it comes to winning, you gotta do whatcha gotta do.)

Jed's cousins from Idaho were visiting for the weekend. We got a picture with the girls: Camille, me, Laura, Anna, and Michel. (They have two brothers who were also visiting: Kent and Brenden.)  They were all so sweet! I absolutely loved getting to know them and hanging out with them. I wish I could see them more often. Jenna, Jed's niece, was there too, but I don't know where she was at the time of the photo. I loved getting to spend time with her and Shane and Kiersten too!

My kids absolutely adored all their cousins. And the older kids were really sweet with my little ones. Kent towed Eliza around the house (see pic). Laura let Eliza sit on her lap all through Primary. Camille and Anna played with Sammy and Eliza a ton. And Ben had a blast hanging out with his cool older cousins and playing the Wii with the boys. :) 

 

our visit to Montana, July 2011 - part 1

At the end of July, Jed attended a Wilderness Medicine Course in Montana with a fellow resident friend and his dad.  The conference was only an hour away from his parents' home, so we decided to fly the kids and I out at the same time and stay with his mom while the boys were gone.  When they came back, we had a great time hearing about all that they learned.  I never have to fear dying in the wilderness now that Jed knows you can survive on ants and ant larva, you can make glasses out of duct tape, you can sleep dry and comfortably with one garbage sack, and you can keep an unconscious person's airway open by pinning his tongue to his bottom lip with a safety pin.    "Yay, I'm in!" :)

When their conference was over, we all got to spend lots of fun time together for a week before we headed home. We took lots of rides on the 4-wheelers:

We spent lots of fun family time hanging out outside.
Ryan set up a zip line in the back yard that Ben went on again and again.

Eliza liked the baby swing too. :)

 
And she liked pushing Sam around in the Little Tykes car.

Sam got lots of Grandma and Grandpa lovin'.

 I did a Salon with the girls. We did hair with some flower clips that I made them. Then we put on pretty smelling lotion and painted nails. We finished our girl's date with a chick flick, The Princess Diaries.  (Eliza has a mouthful of tortilla in this picture. :) )

Ben and Eliza loved all the attention from Grandma and Grandpa. 

 

*More Montana pictures to come...