Autumn in the Rockies

This is my favorite time of the year, and Lisa and I decided to get out today and enjoy it. We have our annual pass to Pikes Peak, so we drove to the top of Pikes Peak again with Lisa's mom and brother, they drove out for the weekend. There are alot of pictures, but hey, it was so beautiful I had to share it with you all.
This shot is from the North looking South to Pikes Peak. We just loved all the aspens in their full, golden splendor. Awesome sight.

Once at the summit, we were treated with great views in all directions. This one is to the South of the peak.

Enjoying the scenery.


Playing with grandma.

View to the West from the peak.

Below the reservoir the aspens were so bright and beautiful. It was a great day to take the drive.

If you live nearby, I highly recommend taking advantage of the good weather and going for a drive in the mountains. You will enjoy the autumn colors of the Rocky Mountains.

It's a...

BOY!!!!

My turn for celebrating!

I turned 27 today! Hurray right? Getting older is fun, right? I guess so. : ) My cute visiting teachers made me this watermelon cake - which was great, because then we didn't have to make one. Cody bought me the beautiful flowers and some other fun stuff and the kids gave me candy and a HUGE Elmo birthday card. I couldn't ask for anything more! After baths tonight I decided it was finally time to cut Aubrey's mullet off. It's been getting progressively longer over the past few months. I know the cut is far from perfect - I have absolutely no training, but figured my best can't be that bad. Plus, I always do her hair anyway, so I can hide or fix mistakes later. Now hopefully the hair in front will catch up and even everything out.
Tucker had to get in on the "cheese" action. Good news with this boy - no accidents for a week!
Tomorrow is a big day so check back with us tomorrow night. We finally get to find out whether we are having a boy or girl. If you haven't voted on our poll to the right, let us know what your gut feeling is. Oh and watch TV, the Office is back! (Thank you to everyone that emailed, left messages on Facebook or called me today! I appreciate it!)

Scout Camp

I took the young men in our ward on an overnighter Friday night. We went camping up in the Rampart Range. It was a short trip, but fun to get them up in the mountains. Lisa had a primary activity she was in charge of Saturday morning, so I took Tucker with me. Lisa took advantage of her "girls night out" with Aubrey and went shopping at the mall. She says they had a great time together. Tucker had alot of fun, slept great in his sleeping bag, and enjoyed being outside with his daddy. Saturday morning after breakfast he did get stung by a bee though, poor guy. He handled it like a total stud though. Here are a few of the pictures I took:
This is the view we woke up to. From our campsite looking south at Pikes Peak.


The boys passing off requirements to cook a breakfast.

Tucker pointing to where we saw the bunny rabbit. For those that know him, yes that orange hunting beanie is his favorite hat. He always has to wear it when it gets cold. That's my redneck son!

Tuckers right ear where the bee stung him. Poor little kid.

Tucker turns 3!!!

That's right, our oldest is now 3! It was so fun to remember back 3 years ago to the exciting events taking place in our lives. Now, we've got a very energetic kid that we love! I love to make my kids their birthday cakes, and I have to say, I'm very proud of this years creation. Tucker absolutely loves Little Einsteins and he watches it practically every day. I couldn't pass up the chance to make this beauty when I saw this website.
Tucker loved it and when I ask him if he had a good birthday, he talks about the rocket cake.
We went to Tucker's favorite place for dinner - Chuck-E-Cheese! We have one very close to our house and pass it almost every day. We've been telling him for months that he could go for his birthday, and we finally made it. He had a blast with his tokens and tickets.

We invited his little friend, Colby and his mom, Cassie, to join us.

After dinner and when all our tokens ran out, we came back to our place for cake, ice cream and presents.

Lovin' that ice cream! Tucker picked out the ice cream we served. He wanted "pink" so we choose peppermint!
Colby & Cassie Christensen.
Tucker received a fun wooden train set, Dumbo, Toy Story, and Thomas the train bedding. (He got to pick that out himself and was adamant that it be Thomas.)

Colby gave him this awesome Black & Decker tool set. He wore those goggles around all night and has the red marks on his face to prove it!
Tucker is so much fun to have in our house. He is so cute and sweet and tells us that he loves us. Happy Birthday! We love you!

Halfway there

I've hit the 20 week mark! I thought I'd finally post a picture of my pregnant self. The lighting isn't so great, but oh well. I felt the baby move around 17.5 weeks and have been feeling pretty good with only the occasional heartburn. I've brought my maternity clothes from out of the basement but haven't had to start wearing them yet.

We were supposed to go camping this weekend, but it rained for almost 24 hours from Thursday to Friday and we decided it just wouldn't be fun setting up a tent in the mud with kids. We ended up spending most of the weekend with our friends the Christensens (whom we were going to go camping with). Saturday morning I went to a fun craft fair with my friend Cassie and her mother-in-law, Cynthia and the guys (Jordan and Cody) took all the kids to the zoo.
(Tucker and Colby)
It was sooo nice to have some girl time without the kids. Plus I bought some really cute stuff at the fair, and have some great ideas of things to make. Hopefully I'll have some new posts on Pieces by Lisa in the next little while. : ) We watched the BYU game and have just been hanging out at home other than that.

Tucker is doing awesome with the potty training business. He has far exceeded my expectations at this point. The past 4 mornings he's woken up with a dry pull-up and immediately tells me he needs to go potty. We even tried a nap with just underwear and he did great. He's not perfect by any means, still had an accident or two, but overall I'm very impressed and proud of him. Whahoo!
Aubrey came down with the croup the last couple days and has the horrible cough and sad sounding cry. She's slept a lot and I think is starting to improve. She had croup over Christmas last year as well, but that was much worse than this time around.

I took Tucker into the doctor this past Wednesday cuz I thought he might be getting sick, but nothing was wrong with him. I was surprised that he still weighs under 30lbs. His pediatrician (whom I love - I finally found an office that will do a great job with my kids!) had me get Tucker retested for his peanut allergies. I explained his past history with the peanut and how he'd been tested before (with results coming back as negative) and they immediately sent me down to the lab for a retest. We'll find out the results this week. He's obviously allergic, and I don't feed him peanuts, but I do feed him cashews, pistachios, pecans, and almonds because so far he's been fine with those.
Today is my parents 30th wedding anniversary. All of us siblings are surprising them with a framed picture of the above for them. They don't have any pictures up around our house of back in their early days, so we thought it would be fun for their anniversary. Unfortunately, the quality of the scan we took is horrible. We blew the picture up anyway and are hoping they'll be able to provide us with the original slide so we can get a better picture.

Hmm..not much else is new with us. I'm reading my first Anita Stansfield book and Confessions of a Shopaholic book; been scrapbooking a bit and taking a little break from sewing. Cody is working away, loving that it's football season and playing WOW.

We find out on September 25th the gender of our baby. We can't wait to find out. I've had a feeling that it's a girl, but have been thinking boy names all week, so who knows.

Nothing too exciting happening as of late, but we've got birthdays coming up the next 2 weeks, TV shows returning to the networks, a baby to find out more about, possible visitors and much more, so stay tuned!

Mountain West Conf. Owns the PAC-10

Today was an amazing display of BYU dominance as they took UCLA behind the wood shed and soundly beat them down. 59-0. Max Hall threw for 7 touchdowns today. It was the worst defeat for UCLA in 75 years. It was unbelievable how dominant BYU was. After last weeks game at Washington, I thought for sure they were going to lose to UCLA, but they showed up to play and humbled the Bruins. In all, the Mountain West Conference went 4-0 today against the overhyped PAC-10. New Mexico beat Arizona, BYU destroyed UCLA, TCU pounded Stanford, and UNLV beat a very over rated Arizona State team at Arizona State! That is hillarious that one of the worst teams in the MWC beat one of the best in the PAC 10. Today was proof that the MWC deserves to get a BCS bid and that without USC the PAC-10 might as well be the BIG East, or the WAC, or the MWC. So funny how they got their heads handed to them on a platter today. I love it.

Big Snake

I now know why I dreaded potty training so much. It really is HORRIBLE! At least that's what I thought Friday afternoon through Saturday morning. I totally wanted to give up and stop for a few weeks, month, who knows. Tucker did excellent Thursday evening and Friday morning. We set the timer, he'd sit on the potty...things were good. Then his independent spirit took over and it was "NO! NO! NO!" Everytime the timer would go off I'd get all excited and say, "Let's go pee pee on the potty" and he'd tell me NO and say he didn't need to go, then one minute later, he'd pee in his underwear. So frustrating.

Finally I stripped him of his Buzz/Nemo underwear and made him go commando. We stopped with the timer too. Guess what? That works for us. And we pulled out his little potty chair, now he can watch Little Einsteins and not have to miss a moment. He will tell me "It's coming", sit down and pee in his potty. Then he'll even take it to the bathroom, dump it in the potty, flush the toilet and be on his way to get his treat. I can't believe it! He's actually doing it on his own. Yesterday morning I was upstairs getting ready for church and I heard the toilet flush. He'd dumped his excretions and was headed back to the living room. Yippee!

Now, the part I knew would be absolute hardest would be the #2 in the potty. For those of you that know Tucker, you know he's had trouble with his digestive system since he was a few weeks old. Poor kid would go poop every 10 ten days when he was that little. He was on non-diluted prune juice since he was an infant. Finally after Aubrey was born, the doctors decided it really was a problem (duh!) and prescribed him a daily laxative to help him go more regularly. When someone cries and screams everytime they have to poop, obviously it's a problem! Well, last evening, Tucker sat on his potty, and Cody just expected him to pee, when he grunted and cried loudly and then he stood up and said he pooped a big snake. What?! Are you serious? You pooped on your own? Sweet! He can poop as many "big snakes" as he wants. We are proud parents. : ) (Oh, and I'm sure you all understand why there aren't pictures in this post. I'm know you really didn't want to see the "big snake" or Tucker's naked bum!)

I'm hoping today will be our last "naked" day and then we can try wearing underwear again and eventually pants. Thank goodness those first couple of days are over and hopefully we'll continue on a mostly uphill slant. Thanks again for everyone that's left us advice on the blog or we've talked to on the phone. It's nice to know those with kids have to go through this phase of life and that 99% of us struggle with it. : )

Trailer Trash Thursday

At our office we were looking for an activity for all the staff, and we decided on Trailer Trash Thursday. We closed the office early (11:00) and then dressed up and headed over to the goodwill store to complete our outfits. Dr. Miller gave everyone an allotment of $25 to finish off their outfit. The goal was to dress as trailer trash as possible. Some of the staff came up with some hilarious outfits. I'll try to get some pictures later. I went for the redneck version of trailer trash with the camo hat, john deer t-shirt, flannel shirt unbuttoned and torn jeans. I used Bryce's neighbors as my inspiration!

After the visit to the goodwill store, we then headed out for some go-cart racing, bumper cars, put-put golf and laser tag. It was pretty funny all around. So in honor of that great office day, I am recommending the song "I Will Remember You" by Skid Row as the song of the day. Oh yeah, that one has been getting played a lot on my play list lately. That's right, you all know you want to go back and dig up your 80's white trash rock tunes. Go dust off those songs from Tesla, Warrant, Slaughter, AC/DC, and Def Leppard. Go on, you'll thank me for it later after getting in touch with that side of yourself.

New Present For Cody

Update on Tucker: things are progressing smoothly. He has successfuly gone potty into his second day now. He loves the sticker chart, and enjoys his cool underwear. Heck, I even think his underwear are cool. What boy wouldn't want to wear undies with cars, nemo, Buzz Lightyear and other cool characters?

Now to the title of my post. My parents gave me $100 for graduation, and I didn't quite know what to spend it on, until last week. I was scanning Evogear.com (a great site if you want discounted ski gear) and found a pair of skis worthy of my money. Evogear gets the overstocked items that manufacturers want to unload, and Evogear turns around and sells them for way cheap. In my case, I bought a pair of new skis for $89!

How cool is that? Money well spent. I can't wait to use them in a few months! Thank you Mom and Dad!

What we have to look forward to...

Tucker is starting his road to potty training tomorrow. Any tips? We're already planning on not going anywhere all weekend. I've got pull-ups, underwear, carpet cleaner, a sticker chart, potty treats...anything else?

Wet Mountains

When Cody got home from work last Thursday, we packed up the car and headed to the mountains for a little camping excursion. Cody isn't a big fan of "campsite" camping, so this time we found a dirt road in the national forest and drove until we found a good site. The site was awesome! It was by a stream and I think 2 cars drove by the entire time we were there. We roasted hotdogs over the fire. The best way to have a hotdog!
The kids loved exploring and, of course, were filthy dirty. They both needed new outdoor shoes and I bought some in time for the trip, and all I can say now is goodbye clean white, hello brown dirt!
We only stayed one night, but had fun and decided that we would love to own property and a cabin in the Wetmore Mountains someday. It was beautiful and not too far away from where we live.

The rest of our Labor Day weekend we spent at home. Cody and I both had to prepare talks for Sacrament meeting on Sunday, so that consumed Saturday (I guess Cody did watch and listen to some football, go BYU!, and we did take a little break and headed to our ward's annual Luau). Today we cleaned up around the house, I went running without the kids (yippee!) and we "labored" at home.