Leslie

More of Leslie

Leslie

We had a great Memorial Day breakfast feast with the traditional strawberries & pancakes with our friends from Ogden, Tonia Muir and her daughter & son-in-law, Bart and Lesa Pringle. They stayed over night on Sunday and left before noon on Monday. We invited Joyce and Alan to come for breakfast also. Just as they were leaving to come to our house, their next door neighbor, Leslie, came running to see if she could go too. While she was here I snuck a few pictures of her since I have been wanting to do that for a long time. i had to bribe her with some colored all-day-suckers but once we got started she didn't want to quit. She's a beautiful girl but knows way too much for her little six-year-old body. She comes from an abusive home (step father) and finds solace in the peaceful quiet of Joyce's home.

Something's Missing!

Lost: One front tooth. Off-white in color, small in size. Last seen on Friday, May 21, 2010.
If found, please contact the Tooth Fairy.

Soccer

Tristan played on the Racoon's team this year. He was as good as a 4 year old could be. He had a friend from the ward on his team and made many new friends while learning the sport. We hope to see more playing in the future and less flower picking!

Kennedy was a key player for the Tiger Sharks. Although this is her first year playing on a team for soccer she was quite aggressive. She maintained a good balance of drive and good sportsmanship.

As first-time soccer parents we had a fun year. It's a lot of work to get these little people to all their practices and games while toting along a raging toddler but we managed. It was just long enough for us to say maybe we will do it again.

Update on ward "split"

Just in case you were wondering, we met with our new/old ward for the first time on Sunday. We only had sacrament meeting which was good, because the Bishop stood up and said, "anyone who wasn't released because of the split is now hereby released." So, although the 7th ward has been an existing ward for awhile, they're starting from scratch in staffing it. Jeff was called as Young Men's president. He was sustained on Sunday. I was just called on Wednesday to be a gospel doctrine teacher. One of three. Sounds slightly cushy, doesn't it?
The big surprise of the day--our ward is bigger than the last ward we were in. You call this a "split?" I was thinking as the ward filled the cultural hall and the deacons almost ran out of water. Since we only had Sacrament Meeting we had a Linger Longer afterwards where refreshments were served, the object being to help us get to know each other I guess. Not sure it worked. But I did hear that one neighbor girls said, "I like this new ward. Do we get treats every week?"
In other news, I spent almost all night (until 4:30 am) last night helping out with "grad night" at our new high school. I found myself intensly jealous, wishing I'd had some kind of fun party like that with my classmates as our last hurrah. They played games, went bowling and laser tagging for two hours, had an "amazing race" through the high school, complete with challenges both mental and physical, tons of junk food, prizes (like a Blue Ray player), breakfast cooked by the city council of Eagle Mountain and more. Lots of fun, even for the old fogeys who stayed up to help. We all (includig the kids) were dead on our feet by the end.
I need a nap.

Alyssa

So, look how I beefed this one up!!!!

Park in Cedar

I had almost forgotten about these pictures we took at the park. I played around with the color on some of them.

One more picture of Buffy's baby

Here's the sleeping pose. Actually I caught her blinking and it makes it look like she's asleep.

Buffy (Swindlehurst) Chicala's baby

I did a newborn shoot for Buffy as a shower gift. She is only a week old here. I requested that she come well fed and asleep. She came wide awake and hungry. Oh well. Just reminded me of how much I don't like to take pictures of newborns. In spite of it all, they turned out kind of cute.

blossoms and rain

We had a torrential rainstorm about an hour ago with rivers running down the street. When it finished I grabbed my camera and took some pictures of our apple blossoms washed clean with the rain and in full bloom.

Siennah

Josh's pictures

So, I downloaded a few of Josh's pictures and did some simple edits. Both of them have nice cameras so there's not much you can improve on but here they are.

Pictures from Armenia

I was looking at some of Derek's pictures of Armenia on Photo Bucket & tried downloading a few of them. I didn't know you could do that. Now that I know, I might do some more. Anyway, here a a few that I edited in Photoshop.

Out of the Ordinary Week

I suppose you've noticed that I haven't posted much lately. There just hasn't been anything exciting or interesting to write about. Our lives have been pretty ordinary.
Until this week. We heard on Thursday evening that our water was contaminated and that we should boil it before drinking. So we spent the next few days in a Third World country it seemed. How do you wipe off the counter without using tap water, anyway? I found some creative ways to do it. Sickness has been rampant in our neighborhood and the one to the north of us. People have had IV's for dehydration, been hospitalized, you name it. We escaped pretty lightly with some stomach pains and some nausea on my part. Jeff and the girls weren't affected. I guess it's still possible, even though the boil order has been lifted.
The out-of-the-ordinary didn't end there, either. Although this one is more ordinary for our area. Our ward was realigned today. We are now back in the Saratoga Springs 7th ward. Two streets of our subdivision were lopped off and put a ward with another smaller subdivision and some "field people." This also meant that Jeff was released from his calling in the bishopric. I, too, was part of a mass releasing from callings, which means I'm no longer teaching gospel doctrine, unless I get recalled to the same position. We'll see. The next few weeks should be interesting. Maybe I'll have more to post . . .

Siennah

Siennah

Just posting another pose of Siennah

Bretten's art work

I bought a book called "Drawing on the Right Side of your Brain" for Bretten and he has been working on it. He sent me his first attempt at drawing a person today and I was totally amazed at what he did. He had a small picture of Siennah to look at. His likeness is fairly close. I am really proud of him and hope he will pursue this artistic talent he has.

Recipe

The other day I was asked to take a casserole to a funeral--just something with meat in it. Since I don't make casseroles very often I purused my cook books and found one that looked doable. I set about my task and placed a small bowl in front of my husband for a taste test. He declared it
"good" so I took the remainder to the funeral. The refreshment committee said there weren't too many funeral participants and I would probably get half of it back. The dish came back empty! The next day someone called and asked for my recipe. I guess it passed the test but I wouldn't recommend making a casserole for a funeral without testing it yourself first. Anyway, here it is:

CHICKEN AND PASTA CASSEROLE

3 lbs. boneless, skinless chicken breast
8 oz thin spaghetti
4 T butter
4 T flour
1 C cream
1 C chicken broth
1 C mayonaise
1 C sour cream
1 can Cream mushroom soup
1 C Parmesan cheese, grated
1/8 C lemon juice
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp dry mustard
1 tsp salt
8 oz fresh mushrooms

Cook chicken and cut into bite-size pieces. Set aside. Break spaghetti into thirds and boil in chicken stock. Melt butter and add flour to make a white sauce. Add cream and chicken broth. Stir carefully until thickened and then add sour cream, mayonaise, Parmesan cheese, mushroom soup, lemon juice and spices. Saute fresh mushrooms in butter then add to sauce mixture. Add chicken and spaghetti; mix thoroughly. Pour into large casserole dish. Sprinkle top with Parmesan cheese. Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes or until heated thoroughly. (Note: I used crushed potato chips on top instead of the cheese but either would be good)

Twins

You didn't know that Megyn was a twin did you? Megyn & Myllie!

Cancun

Can you believe we have never taken a trip without our kids? Several months ago we began scheming, thinking, hoping we could go on a vacation together, just the two of us for a few days. One piece fell into place, then another, and another and we found ourselves planning a trip to Cancun, Mexico. Thanks to Chris's fine presenting skills he was asked to present at a meeting there. It just worked out that it was the same time we had been planning to take our little vacation anyway and what better way to go?
We stayed at the JW Marriott where the meeting was held. We were a little nervous about leaving our kids but knew they were in good hands (thanks, Rachel!). We left early Friday morning, and because of a delay in N.C., barely made our connecting flight to Mexico. We were greeted at the airport by a long, long, long line at customs. We waited for well over an hour to get through the gate and then had to wait in another long line after we got our luggage. Note to self: don't fly into Cancun on a Friday--lots of weekenders flying in. When we stepped out of the airport we were almost whisked away by the wind. I would say they were having tropical storm-like weather. As you can see by this picture it was pretty annoying but we were determined not to let that ruin our fun time.



Check out that beautiful blue water. Too bad we couldn't get in it! We tried a few times to go to the beach from our hotel but we were pelted with flying sand. We did go down long enough to notice all the sea shells. They weren't the kind we were used to, oysters and scallops and such. They were the big conch shells. There were so many you could choose from multiple almost-perfect shells. We brought one home to show the kids. One knocked into my ankle as I was walking in the water. Ouch!



Saturday we went on a tour of some Mayan ruins. We saw Coba and Tullum. Both were fascinating. Almost all the pictures we took were at these two sites.

Lots of iguanas at this place. We had to take a picture for Tristan. He likes iguanas for some reason.

Just a couple of honeymooners!

In front of one of the temples. Can you believe we climbed that thing?

We ate some good Mexican food, including fish tacos, fresh oranges with crushed chilies and the best fajitas I have ever had. The people were so nice and helpful and our accomodations were lovely.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, our kids were having so much fun with Rachel they were almost sad to see us come back. They seemed more upset by Rachel leaving today than they were that we were going to be gone for five whole days! Hey, maybe we'll just take this as a sign that we can do this more often.

April showers & May flowers

This "Kodak" moment caught my eye as I was taking out the trash this morning. We had a light snow/hail storm this morning and it looked like the flowers were trying to decide if they should open up to catch any.