Our family was out playing in the front yard this evening when all of a sudden I looked up and saw a wall of dust (known as a haboob) approaching like something out of a desert in Africa. If you have seen the dust storm scene from the movie Hidalgo you'll get an idea of what it was like. It went from fairly light out to dark like 11pm at night in under a minute. It certainly added a measure of excitement to what was a fairly routine afternoon.
We took a quick day trip down to Picacho Peak State Park to view some of the Civil War in the Southwest re-enactments that they were doing. It was a lot of fun (most especially for Brett perhaps seeing as he is a history major), but the kids enjoyed seeing the guns and cannons and hearing them be shot off, as well as the mock battle that they put on. We also had the chance to sample some authentic Sasparilla and to view people in period costumes.
We had a great time and hope that the state can resolve the budget deficits that are plaguing us so that the state park doesn't have to close so we get to see more of things like this.
Here's some pictures for your enjoyment. I think the cannon firing is the coolest picture of them all, but the kids with me and the gun and Amber and Becca with a "lady" from the Civil War era are also good.
Becca's 6th birthday party was actually on the 8th of February, but we waited until the holiday to have her friend birthday party. The theme was Barbie as the Island Princess and "Ro" as the main character is known in the movie shared the stage at the party with Becca. The girls she invited (about 7 in all) came over and enjoyed a "Ro" cake and ice cream, as well as several games like "Dolphin" musical chairs, creating a flag that represents you and what you like, as well as everyone's favorite, "Pin the Feathers on a Peacock" (my idea actually).
In the end, the girls seemed to enjoy dancing to the music on the DVD as much as anything. We were excited to celebrate with her and appreciate other family members who celebrated earlier with us too.
We love our Becca Roo!
This weekend was our ward's annual Father & Son's campout. We went up to the Barney's Ranch. Nathan, Jared, and Brett went this year (we decided that Ben needed another year of seasoning before he could go on a outing like this). They went up Friday evening and came back Saturday in the early afternoon. As with any camping trip (and Fathers and Sons' campouts in particular), it was without incident. Friday night after dinner (it was still light out) Jared and Nathan were playing around with their ninja swords which they had won at Peter Piper Pizza with their Uncle Travis earlier in the week. I saw Jared running away from the dinner area which his sword stuck into his shorts like it was in some type of holster and yelling "Yah". At that point I turned away, but it wasn't more than 5 minutes later that I see another father carrying Jared to me with the left side of his face a bloody mess. Apparently one of the other young boys (around 3 years old) must have felt a bit threatened by Jared's actions and decided that he needed to defend himself. One swing from a long stick right above Jared's eye did the trick (I'm grateful it wasn't any lower or else it could have done some serious damage).
We got him cleaned up and there were enough opinions that it didn't need stitches that I decided to just clean him up and put some band-aids on it. Sure enough, that seemed to do the trick, and he even went swimming at his Grandma and Grandpa Hinton's house on Saturday after getting home.
After that start, things went much smoother for the rest of the outing. We all slept warm and played all morning in the forest and the nearby creek. Finally around noon we packed up and trekked back down to the valley. It was a wonderful, fun time to spend time together. Here's a small collection of photos from the trip.
Brett: Jared, stop running around with those knives!*
Brett: Do we ever run around with knives? NO!
Jared: Don't worry Dad, I was just pretending they were my jet packs.
Brett: Oh, of course.
*They were butter knifes and he had been putting away the silverware and I was supervising - guess I need to do a better job of that.
Well it has been a banner start to 2009 - full of just about everything thus far!
First, welcome to a 2009 project of mine called the Daily Photo Project. This journey consists of taking at least one picture of something each day of the year. I had heard about this project that others had done and really liked the idea. Every day is a gift and there are so many things that happen daily that are remarkable in their own way. This project is a way to help make us stop and remember that and to document it. I was inspired by Darcy Norman doing it and really like the explanation about the project you can find here. You can check out my 2009/365 project album as it evolves at http://www.picasaweb.com/bretthintons.
We welcomed in the New Year - Brett was the only one to actually welcome it in, but Nathan hung in there until 11pm playing Xbox 360 with his dad! We're looking forward to a great 2009!
Saturday was our busy, eventful day. Brett decided he "needed" to run a network connection between the cable modem and the Xbox 360 to enable the TV recording option with out computer/Xbox 360. What was a 45 minute project (according to Brett) went from 11am to 4:30pm, but was ultimately successful. Woohoo! He also went on a short Daddy-Son date with Jared in the morning which included a trip for ice cream at McDonalds at 9:45am in the morning (what some people must have thought, 50 degree early winter morning and he's giving the kid ice cream!)
While Amber and I were out enjoying dinner with the Hintons and Arringtons, Becca had her chair slid out from under her but one of our other children (who will remain unnamed) and hit her head on the fireplace. The babysitter called and said she had "scraped" her head, but, when we finally got home and were able to look at it, we realized it needed stitches. On to the Urgent Care! 2 stitches later Becca was back home and feeling much better!
We finished the week off with attending Grayson's baby blessing (Jana and Strider's son) and seeing our Ben crawl for the first time. Yea!
There were lots of other fun things like a Friday game night with the kids (playing Candyland and Flag) and making sure to set the rules for video game playing now that school is starting up again (we'll see how that goes :) ).
Happy New Year Everyone! (and for the person looking for pics of the new home - you can check out our photo gallery since it has a few).
 |
| From 2009-52 Weeks Project |
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving at our house, even with a stomach bug that hit each one of the members of our family as the week progressed. At least we were all available to feel well enough to enjoy the Thanksgiving day food!
Amy and Tony Bates and their family, as well as Amber's parents Darris and Cindy, joined us for the holiday. We enjoyed celebrating it in our new home.
We had a great time going to Amazing Jakes and riding the rides, playing LaserTag (including Nathan and Isaiah), and just having a ball. We thought we'd share a couple of the pictures of our fun with you. Of course we forgot to take a picture of the Thanksgiving feast before we ate it, and after dinner there wasn't much left to take a picture of!
We remember at this special time of year how grateful we are for all of our blessings!
Okay, I’ll try my hand (since it has been a while) at writing this month’s newsletter. Where has September gone! Nathan continues to enjoy Kindergarten and has learned to count to 100 in several ways (by 1s, 10s, etc) and is starting to recognize some simple words in books. It’s exciting to see his mind growing in some many ways. His favorite thing lately is to “outthink you”. Something he learned from one of the stories he likes.
Becca is our artist. She creates a tremendous amount of masterpieces – at that’s just during Sacrament Meeting! She loves to draw, color, paint with pens, pencils, chalk, paints, and crayons. She is definitely following in her Grandma Ellis’ footsteps.
Jared is finally to the point where we can say he is potty-trained (Woohoo!). He loves to have fun and play jokes on people and is constantly telling us that he “tricked” us. His favorite thing is to sneek into the fridge and pull out some food (like grapes for example) and hide them in his hand behind his back. He then asks which hand and, after you guess, pulls out both hands to show that he has one in each, all the while yelling “tricked you.” Ben meanwhile has just barely started sleeping all the way through the night. Brett and Amber (and especially Amber) are very excited. We hope by mentioning this that we aren’t jinxing ourselves! Ben has also cut his first teeth, which he (and Mom and Dad) didn’t think was very fun.
Brett has been busy with one workshop, webinar, or event after another. It has been a busy start to the school year (though not for the normal reasons) and the rest of the fall is shaping up to be a busy time. He went to Washington D.C. for a week for training and enjoyed it, as well as the visit with Dustin Hinton and Brad and Autumn Hinton. His hotel was only a block away from Brad and Autumn’s house so it was fun to connect with them while he was there. He was caught on the east coast when Hurricane Ike hit and was initially told by Continental Airlines that his Friday flight (which was cancelled due the hurricane) was going to be rescheduled on Monday. Amber (and Brett) and kids didn’t like having Dad gone even longer, so Brett made a deal with the airlines and they were able to get him home Friday evening (4 hours earlier than he had originally been scheduled to land!).
Amber has been keeping busy with a full schedule of kids, preschool, teething baby, helping a sick husband for a couple of weeks, and holding the fort together, all while teaching the occasional piano lesson. She was excited to get a Jr Primary Pianist and both Brett and Amber are enjoying the opportunity to be in Sunday School together. That has happened much since we were married. We are also excited to listen to the prophet and the General Authorities this weekend.
We heard back on home we put an offer in about 5 months ago. We were told that it was ours if we wanted it. We are having a home inspector take a close look at it and are struggling to decide if we we really want to move (even just 2 doors down) or not. We really do love our little home here on the corner! We’ll see what happens on that front in the upcoming month. Finally, we’re looking forward to Nathan’s sixth birthday in a couple of days and are planning on having a swashbucklingly good time. Arrrggghhh Matey!
We're posting this a little late, but as the saying goes, "better late than......." (slideshow at the bottom)
We started our July out by sending Brett off to NECC Conference (national educational technology conference). He said NECC was great and he loved seeing the Alamo and the River walk there in San Antonio, Texas where the conference was being held. He loves to travel and see new places but he also misses his family a lot when he’s gone and we’re grateful for that. He flew back in town Wednesday evening and we picked him up with the car loaded for the Ellis Family Reunion and our camping trip.
The Ellis Reunion that followed Brett's return from San Antonio was awesome. We picked him up as he flew in and drove to Page that night before traveling the rest of the way to Pocatello the next day. Every year the reunions get better and better and every year we think they can’t possibly get any better but they always do. The rented gym was really fun watching everyone take turns jumping from the waterfall into a pit filled with foam blocks, but it was especially fun watching to see if anyone could beat John at diving over a 6 ft foam wall from a trampoline in the floor to the same pit filled with foam. John can get some air that’s for sure. Our kids kind of liked roller skating, but we liked it, especially the adult race at the end. The parents seriously had just as much fun if not more than the kids. But the ultimate high light was the sumo wrestling. We have never laughed so hard for so long. We really thought someone was going to pee there pants or start crying from having laughed so long. Becca’s favorite was the slip-n-slide and the Birthday Piñata is always one of our families favorite. I almost forgot to mention the fireworks, they were Brett’s favorite since we can’t buy or set off fireworks in Arizona. Well done John and Rachelle. Thanks for all your hard work and to Mom and Dad, Josh and Cami for housing everyone. We can’t wait for next years. Go Sarah!
We took our first non-family reunion family vacation this summer and it was sooooo much fun. Our plan was to go camping two days in Yellowstone National Park (YNP) and then two more days at Cherry Hills Campground in Utah. Amber was really nervous about the YNP part of our vacation because 1)over the years the animal sightings have been fewer and fewer, 2)long car drives with little kids not to mention a newborn can be well… you know and 3)gasoline was climbing even higher to just over $4.00 a gallon. Thankfully Amber was pleasantly surprised and YNP was just as exciting in its own way as Cherry Hills would be. We knew the kids would love Cherry Hills because they have a water park, mini-golfing, and a hamster haven (a play place like at McDonald’s). Here are some of our favorite highlights.
[flickr-photo:id=2752838788,size=m]Packing the Car: We left the Ellis Family Reunion in Pocatello, Idaho on a Monday and headed north. We stopped a few hours later in Rexburg to get food for the next three days. At this point the car was already packed to the hilt with a tent, sleeping bags, blankets, pillows, camping gear, a cooler (filled with just some of the camping gear!), luggage and entertainment items for the kids. Poor Ben was evening sleeping at night in his car seat because there wasn’t even enough room to fit the pack and play. So when we got back to the car with the 14 or so bags of groceries and even more camping gear we didn’t know where we were going to fit it all in. By the time we were done unloading the cooler so we could fill it up with ice and some of the groceries the car was literally packed almost three feet high from the floor up and to the ceiling in the back and around the kids (with the soft stuff like pillows, and sleeping bags).
[flickr-photo:id=2752022973,size=m]Yellowstone: It was awesome. Right when we got into the park we saw a Bald Eagle sitting on its nest and Buffalo within 20 feet of the road. The kids love to go on hikes so we planned to take them on two hikes the first was an easy short mile hike to a natural bridge. We were right about the easiness of the hike but wrong about it being short. Jared, Becca, or Nathan would stop every 10 seconds to explore something off to the side of the trial and it was almost three hours later when we returned to the car. We decided one hike was sufficient. The kids tolerated the rotten-egg smelling geysers at their parents’ insistence, but the most exciting thing we experienced were seeing two brown bears and Becca spotting a Black Bear 30-40 ft out her side of the car! The not so fun highlights of camping in YNP were 1)taking down and setting up camp with children “helping” where help wasn’t needed and not helping when it was needed and 2)Amber taking Becca to the bathroom at midnight worrying they’d meet a bear in the dark. On our way out of YNP we got in a traffic jam because a huge Buffalo was walking down the middle of the road. We were only three cars back and it took us at least twenty minutes to get around it. Last year it was a prong horn cow in the road on the way home from Drew and Rachelle’s, this year a buffalo, who knows what animal will grace our presence on the road home next year!
Cherry Hills: Definitely a family favorite. The kids loved to go mini-golfing. We’ve learned a few tricks over the years and it was even somewhat enjoyable to take three kids mini-golfing. Our favorite pass time at Cherry Hills was the water slides and lazy river. The lazy river was only three feet deep and so it was perfect for young kids like ours who can swim and when they’re tired they can stand up and only have the water come to their chest. The hydro tubes were a blast for the kids and even dad. Mom preferred the inner-tube ride where you can go down in groups on your tube. Jared didn’t love any of the water slides or lazy river parts of the park; he did however enjoy the pirate ship and toddler water park. The water was only a foot high and he played there for two hours pretending to shoot the cannons, steering the ship, and going down the little kiddie slides with Becca.
On our way home from Cherry Hills saw Kung Fu Panda with the kids and spent a few days with Bryan, Noel and Eliza. While we were there we had a BBQ with Stacey, Mark and Emily and Brett helped Bryan fix his bee infested Basket Ball Hoop. We celebrated Amber’s birthday when we got home with cake and ice cream with the Hintons. That’s it for us.
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.