Pirate Island

Tonight we went to Pirate Island for a birthday party for one of Mathias' cute little friends. This is the first time we had been here. It is like an upscale Chuck-E-Cheese without the scary robot things. There was a fun arcade room and a fun little boat to play on. The place is decorated really cute. We will definitely have to go back. Mathias had a blast playing the games and playing on the boat. He hardly stopped to eat.

Azlyn wanted in on the fun too. This little girl can hardly wait to be able to keep up with the older kids!

Fun day

The last couple of days have been pretty busy but we have been loving it. To start the day off today we met our friend Jeri and her cute kiddos and Jackie and her baby girl at One Man Band for some breakfast. After breakfast we went to the P.G. parade. I gotta say I am beginning to not like parades. They seem to be more about advertising than they are floats and such now a days.

The kids still loved it though and had a blast getting lots of candy.

After the parade we headed over to the Jackman's house for Cohen's 3rd birthday party. As you can see it was water-themed. Mathias had a blast playing in the pools and shooting water guns. Cohen also got a little dirt bike that Mathias was so excited to try out and then told us that we need to turn his bicycle into a dirt bike. Unfortunately I didn't get a pic of the birthday boy.

I love days like these were it keeps us busy and we get to enjoy the nice weather and spend time with our friends!

Our Saturday

Saturday afternoon our friends Dallas & Candice invited us to go to the parade of homes with them. We saw three homes. The first home we went to was the big 15,000 sf one. It was nice and had pretty much everything in it that you would ever want. It was kinda a Gothic style and just an all around huge house. There were some cool things about it and some that are just way over the top. Then we went to a remodel in Orem. It had been in the parade of homes before but qualified as a remodel because they finished the basement. It was a nice house but very Victorian/traditional and not our style at all. We didn't like it last time and were kinda bummed about it being in the home show again .

The last one we saw was a Modern home redo in Orem. Unfortunately this is the only one we got some pics of. This was one very interesting home. Very modern and artsy. Dev and I thought it would be cool for a vacation house but not one to live in everyday. It just seems too cold and harsh to live in every day. If you look closely in the pictures you can see that all the trim around the doors and the baseboards are made of metal. The big metal claw thing is the light feature over the dinning room table and the kitchen island is concrete. The big metal ball is the light fixture in a little girl's room, it is supposed to be a sun. There were definitely some interesting things in this house that I have never seen before. While we were at the home show Mathias was swimming with his cousins. We came home, grabbed some dinner and Mathias, then headed back over to Dallas and Candice's place for a fun little poker night.

I don't know how to play poker so I watch and play with the kiddos until it is time for them to go to bed, then I just hang out and watch everyone play. We usually put Mathias to bed in their master bedroom an hour or so after we get there. He is such a great kid and doesn't ever fight us about it and goes right to bed. I decided to put Azlyn on the blanket next to Kenzley. I wanted to see how they would react to each other. Kenzley is 6 months and Azlyn is 2 months. Azlyn tried so hard to talk to Kenz and just sat and cooed and smiled at her. Kenz just kinda stared at her. I thought it was pretty cute.

Of course I had to throw in a quick picture of the boys playing cars. Mathias loves playing with Cohen. It was such a fun day for all of us and it was sure nice to get out of the house for the day!

Thanksgiving Point Car Show

What a perfect day for a car show. Not too hot, not too cool. We went to the car show with Joe, Darcy, Parker, and Jim.

There were a ton of cool cars, old and new. Some really cool paint jobs and a lot of cool designs.

Mathias loved checking out all the cars. I love how he just automatically started looking under the hoods and how he would lay on the ground to look under the trucks like he knew exactly what he was looking at or looking for. He absolutely loved the car show and would pull us to look at all the different cars. He is such a fun little boy!

Here are all the kids, minus Azlyn, taking a short break.

The guys checking out a few cars together.

One of Mathias' favorites. He loved that the tire was as big as him!

One of Dev's favorites! He could tell you everything about this car.
Like I said before, it was a super fun day out and I just love spending some time with my fam and some of our friends.
Dev's note: not nearly enough exotic cars. I'm much more interested in Porsches, Lambos, Ferraris, etc.

Pioneer weekend

We went jeeping up A.F. Canyon to Forest Lake with Kevin, Kelly, Holland, Payden, Brian, and Christina. It was such a beautiful day and Mathias was so excited to go jeeping. We are so excited that Kevin and Kelly have a jeep and can go with us now, Mathias loves it as well.

Once we got to Forest Lake it was not so much a lake anymore but a couple of big mud puddles. Kevin decided that he wanted to go through one. It was pretty fun and entertaining to watch and we were not even sure if he would make it through without getting stuck. He almost made it but did end up getting stuck so Dev had to pull him out. Kevin then decided he wanted to try it again but took a different, much easier route the rest of the times.

Brian was the next to get talked into doing it. He went the backwards way though and did not end up making it very far before having to get pulled out.

It took a lot longer to talk Devin AND Mathias into it. These boys do not like to get dirty, which is just weird to me. What boy does not like to play in the mud? They did end up doing it though and had a blast.
They, too, got stuck towards the end. Here they are waiting and getting towed out. Mathias did not know what to think about there being mud all over him and everything else. There is also a pick of Dev showing how dirty he got, which considering how much mud they went through is not really that much. The pic of Mathias crying is because we told him that we were done and were gonna head back down. This kid absolutely loves jeeping and never likes to hear that we are done .

This is what we saw on our drive down. Mathias quickly fell asleep. I have no idea how he can sleep with all the bouncing going on, mind you we have no shocks so it is extra bouncy. We also saw a momma dear and her baby. It was very cool to see so close. It was such a fun day and we are so happy that we have family and friends that enjoy this activity with us.

construction zone!

Dev's brother Scott and his wife Melanie are adding onto their house. We went over the day that they broke ground so Mathias could watch the big tractor. He loved that. Then Rob (the guy driving) asked if he would like to ride in it. He was kinda nervous at first, then loved it. Rob told him not to touch anything and he was so good, Mathias would either keep his hands on Rob's knees or lay them flat against his own legs so he would not even come close to touching anything. I am so glad we went over and he got to experience this! He was in little boy heaven!

Finally a nice warm day!

Today, after Mathias' much needed nice long nap, we decided to head over to Discovery Park. Lately all Mathias wants to do at our park is swing, and quite frankly I am getting tired of pushing him for hours. Discovery Park is pretty big and there is tons to explore. It worked out perfect - he only got on the swings once and it was for about two minutes, tops. I loved the nice weather we had today and can't wait for more of it to come!

playing catch up

For some reason lately I have not really had the desire to blog. I love to look at everyone's but never really get around to updating ours. So this is going to be a quick (we have not been up to that much) little catch up post of what we have been up to the last couple of weeks.

The boys have been playing jeeps a lot inside lately (these pictures are from three different times). As soon as Dev walks in the door Mathias asks him to get his jeep out. Mathias will get his little jeep out and play or he will lie down to be an obstacle for Dev's RC buggy to go over. He also thinks it is pretty fun to have it go under his legs. This is pretty much heaven for both boys, the only thing that would make it better is if it would get warm out and they could go out crawling on the rocks everyday.

We have been helping my mom move and clean out her place the last couple of weeks. She is moving into a smaller place so we have inherited a bunch of her furniture, including her front loading washer and dryer. Her closet in her new place is not deep enough for them so we traded sets. Mathias loves that he can now watch the clothes being cleaned. This is pretty fascinating for some reason.

We have also added a new piece of furniture into our office so we had to switch things around in there and Mathias decided he wanted to be Helpy Helperton and help Dev with the computer. He thinks he has to "fix" everything these days.

We got Mathias some color changing bath tablets and he absolutely loves them. He requests different colors every time and wants to take baths more frequently now.

It was finally warm enough one day when Devin was home so out they went to play with their jeeps on the rocks. They played out there for an hour or so and I think they would have played all day given the chance, but we had some errands to run.

We have also been playing at the park every chance we get now that the weather is a little better. That is one of the perks to living in a condo, the playground is right behind our building and we can go whenever we want with out having to pack up in the car.

Circus

A few weekends ago, my mom took us to the circus. We were on the very first row (minus the vip row) and had center arena seats. They were awesome! There was so much going on at once, Mathais was not sure what to watch at times. His favorite parts where the motorcycles in the big ball and on the high wire, the tigers, elephants, and the goats that were standing on the mini-horses backs. I do not have any pictures because we learned that the only type of camera you can bring is the kind that does not have detachable lenses, and mine does. So this is the only picture I got. Mathias loved his elephant that Mema got him and fell asleep holding him on the way home. He still asks to go back and see the animals (circus).

Best Buds

Mathias warmed up and remembered Dustin really fast. I was a bit worried of this since it had been almost a year since they had seen each other. Mathias actually really loved having Dustin around, as did the rest of us. Dustin would play with him, rough house with him and could actually keep up with him, which let me tell you is getting pretty difficult. One day when Dustin tried to leave, Mathias ran to the door and locked the dead bolt and the handle then put his back against the door, arms spread out, and told Dustin that the door was stuck. He really did not want him to go anywhere! Every day he would ask to "see Mema and Unc Dustin." Mathias was sad when we told him that Dustin was going back on the plane and told us, "Mathias go on plane." Too cute.
Love you bud. Hope you had a good time while you were out here. We miss you.

Picking up "unc Dustin"

My brother Dustin is here for the week. We are all excited to see him and spend some time with him. We have not seen him for almost a year.

We told Mathias that Uncle Dustin was coming here on an air plane and that is all he talked about for a couple of days.When the day came to finally pick him up at the airport, Mathias was excited to see him come off a plane. Well, since they don't really let you go in and wait for them anymore, we waited at the place where you can park your cars and read the flights to see when they came in. This was pretty good though cuz Mathias could get out and move around a bit and watch the airplanes as they came and went. Then Dustin called us when his plane was here and he had gotten in luggage.

It was about dinner time when he got here so we went up to the gate way and had lunch at Tai Foons (Tai Foons is a pretty nice Chinese food place, kinda like P.F. Changs, that I got gift cards to through work). We really did not plan on this but figured what the heck since we were up here anyways. Mom was still in Orem so we walked around for 45 minutes until she got here and then went to eat.

Dustin has this pretty cool phone that you can watch tv on . You can watch live tv or they have a bunch of stuff recorded that you can watch. I tell you, this is the best invention ever if you have a very active child that does not like to sit still and wait for your food to arrive at restaurants. We were able to pull up his favorite show, Little Einsteins, on the phone and he sat there quietly watching it till the food came. It was the best thing ever . I am not sure if they have anything similar through T-Mobile but I think it is something worth looking into just for that.


Anyways, we were not really expecting to be gone long. After all, we were just gonna pick up Dustin then go straight home. So because that was the plan I only brought one diaper. Well, while we were walking around waiting for mom to come, Mathias had a stinky and required a bum change. I had obviously forgotten about the entire Powerade he drank while we were waiting to pick up Uncle Dustin and thought that we would be fine. While we were waiting for our dinner to arrive, mom looked over at me and said, "I think he is wet." I did not think much of it because A. we had just changed him like 45 minutes ago and B. she will change him if he is the slightest bit wet. So our dinner came and Mathias was sitting next to me and said, "Wet," and I looked own and it looked like he spilled something on his chair except he was not holding a drink or anything. Yup, you guessed it, he was soaked. And I am not talking about his shorts being a little wet, I am talking they were soaked and it looked like he spilled something on the seat. I felt so bad. We had no more diapers and I had no idea what we were going to do! I did not even know if there was a grocery store near by and all the cloths stores were closed. Mom asked the front desk lady if they had any diapers that were left behind or anything, they didn't. Again I felt like the worst mom. So we hurried up, paid, and left. Luckily we had a blanket and towel in the car so we put the blanket on his car seat then wrapped the towel around him and buckled him in and hoped for the best. It worked and I learned a lesson, big time, but hey at least it took me 2 1/2 years to learn that one. I will always bring extra diapers!

Park City

Since it was regional conference today (a freebie day, in our opinions) we went up to Park City with our friends Joe, Jeri, and their two kids, Darcy and Parker. They were having some kind of farmers market of sorts. It is always interesting in Park City, you will never now what you will see (crazy tree-huggin' hippies everywhere!).

We came across a guy doing puppet shows, so of course we had to stop and let the kids watch. I don't think Mathias thought too much of it. He watched it for a bit then got a little restless.

This was one of the better puppets bits he did. He had western music playing along with it and acted as the singer.

I just love this picture. As soon as Dev put Mathias up there, Mathias put his hands on Dev's head and rested his chin and watched the show like that.

This was the other best part of the puppet show, in my opinion. He actually acted like he was playing the violin. I just don't know how all those strings did not get tangled.

All in all it was a beautiful day to get out and walk around. Thanks for the fun time you guys.

Eureka

Yesterday we went with some friends to their place out in Eureka for a few hours to ride their 4 wheelers. I was not sure if Mathias would like it because he was afraid of power wheels for a while but he absolutely loved it.

My sexy husband!

Getting ready to go. Good thing all the little boys are around the same age and size because we didn't even think to bring helmets, luckily everyone else was smarter than us and let use theirs.

Little D and Mathias.
One of the four wheelers broke on the way up the trail so I took the opportunity to get a cute pics of the kids while the guys tried to fix the problem.

Getting ready to go again once we got the wheeler working enough to take it back down.

The view at the top of the trail.

Me, Jeri, and Jami at the top.

Here is cute Jami and her son Little Davy.

A playdate with Wyatt

A couple of Thursday's ago my friend Betsy and her son Wyatt came over to hang out for a bit. The boys play so well together and were pretty content to play cars out on the patio while pizza cooked for lunch. After pizza we went outside and finger painted for a bit. This was the first time Mathias has done this and I think it was the first for Wyatt also. It was pretty fun to watch them. Mathias looked at me like, "I'm allowed to get dirty mommy?" After we were done and cleaned up we came back inside to play and read cars. Thanks for coming you guys, we will have to do this more often.

soccer party

Last Saturday, Dev's soccer team got together for a little party after their soccer game. We all met at a little park in Lehi and had some dinner and let the kids run and play on the playgrounds. They also rented out the pool but we did not go to that because it was way past Mathias' bed time.

Mathias is so lucky to have cousins that live nearby, and ones that completely adore him at that.

Little Miss Brinley was very content just pushing Mathias and twisting him around in the swing, which she did till it was time to leave. She is an awesome cousin and will be a great babysitter and mom one day.

The guys and boys played capture the flag till it was time to go. It looked like they where having a lot of fun.

Go Dev!

Dev's note: Don't worry, I got him