But wait there's more!!

I can't even believe that it has been over a month since I have updated this poor blog. I promise to be better at this, but to give you any idea of how this last month went I'm going to give you the quick synopsis.

It started with a birthday party for Jason, here's a picture of the happy birthday boy. I don't think he had enough Corona's in him at this point to be happy about being a year older.

Kenny and I struggled to decide if we wanted to take the boys to the 24th of July parade this year since he had the day off work and we haven't taken them there, like ever! In the end, we decided to go early and walk around at the convention center and see the parade floats in an air conditioned building. I took lots of pictures and will hopefully get them up before Halloween, but if it gets to close, just know we had fun and we voted on our favorite floats and we got to see Aunt Fran and Uncle Kenny. It was a fun evening out.

Sometime after this event, I started having pain in my left arm and shoulder. It wouldn't go away and so after 2 weeks I figured I should get it checked since I could hardly move my arm. Of course everything came back fine except for one little blood test. So, I found a doctor (I know I was led to him because he has been amazing) and he was able to help with some of my pain. He did the pressure test and asked me a few other questions and then informed me that I have Fibromyalgia. I know, you all knew this already but I was happy living in denial. But, now I'm happy because Lyrica is amazing!!!

Then we had our annual 24th of July bash. Ya'll can hate me because I sat back and enjoyed myself and sorry, but I didn't take one picture. I was also on pain killers to help me just get out of bed because my arm was still hurting so bad. We had tons of fun and as usual, the street was lit on fire. Shortly after, the asphalt was redone in Mom's circle. That has now become a tradition too.

I was called back into the doctors office and was informed that my blood work was all over the place, that I have tons of inflammation, and am low on blood. Oh, and by the way, they had to draw more blood that day. Does anyone care that I'm already low? I should have caught on when my blood pressure was normal. At least now I know how to get a normal blood pressure reading, figure out how to be about 2 units low on blood when I go in next time. Now I'm left to wait for my doctors appointment with a Rheumatologist, only a month and one week left.

But wait, there's more. My life wouldn't be like any good infomercial if there wasn't something else to add to our month that's not even done yet.

Kenny was also involved in helping with the food storage order for this month and had focused on water storage. It was a great idea and I know we needed to focus on that and we had a lot of people interested. However, the only time we had to take care of the orders was while Kenny was at work on the Saturday before he left for Scout Camp. So, I got to deposit all the checks and find the Emergencies Essential store and place our order. They called during the week while Kenny was gone to inform me that the order was in. Unfortunately, the store closed before I could get there, so Kenny had to come with me to pick up the order right after unloading everything from camp. Poor guy, he gets no break.

We also had to get both boys into the doctors to have physicals because they were both leaving for Boy Scout Camp and had to get all their papers signed by their doctor for camp. We then quickly made sure we had everything for the boys and Kenny to leave for a week in the wilderness. They had so much fun and I will add the pictures later. Kenny survived and both the boys earned seven merit badges. I will do a separate post for their skit, it has to stand alone.

I think I might have gotten the laundry done from camp and am no where close to figuring out their clothing situation for school. But, we crammed in combat back to school shopping and was able to get the boys 4 outfits to start with. Thank you Grandma Shauna and Aunt Becka.

But wait, there's more. Did I mention that during all of this Kenny and I have still been working full time while squeezing in doctor appointments, parties, birthday's, camping, and on Kenny's part has been picking up all the slack at home because I'm exhausted when I finally make it home.

The boys are now in school and have survived their first 2 days. So far they love school and Kelton is excited to be playing the bass clarinet again this year. But then again, it's only the first 2 days, anything can happen tomorrow.

With everything that has happened, I just want to make it through the next week and let August end. Please pray for us to survive and that Kenny has a good birthday!!!

The Art of Begging

Even though this is the pose most of you are used to seeing of Charlie.....

As soon as there is food around, he becomes alert and at the ready. As soon as Kenny sat down to eat dinner last night, Charlie was immediately at his feet. His lightning fast reaction and ease of stealth made me wonder if he has had special ops training.

(Sorry about the demon eyes, I think it's time to start paying more attention to the photography section on Pioneer Woman's blog)

Of course Kenny can't say no, so he begins to share his dinner with Charlie. Pretty soon I'm wondering if Charlie spent some time with the circus to learn this kind of balancing after he was done with his special ops missions.

And of course, who can say no to this kind of talent? Not us!!!!!

Before long he is back to his lounging in the sun and resting for his next mission. You never know when or where food may appear next, and he must be ready.

4th of July

This year we went out to the Grantsville parade for the 4th of July. I thought our boys were going to burst waiting while we got ready and ate breakfast. They couldn't wait to get out there and see their cousins and friends.

Here's Kelton, Taylor, and Seth trying to be patient and wait until we had everyone together so we could walk down to Main Street to watch the parade. I don't even think my boys made it into Grandma's house, we pulled up and they were ready to leave and get to the parade. Eventually, everyone got together and we were able to walk down and find a place along the street to watch.

We bumped into Danny and his family and they were nice enough to let us invade them. It was fun to see Kenny get to visit with Danny and catch up a little. Whenever we come out to Grantsville, we have just enough time to come see family and then leave. Kenny doesn't have much time to catch up with friends. He was able to do that a lot this day. He was also able to visit with Adrian for a minute and see his friend Kent at the park when we went after the parade.

This is Kenny's Grandma. We were trying to make sure and keep her out of the sun as much as possible. She had sun block on, but we were still concerned for her, so Susan draped the flag over her to keep her arms covered. Doesn't she look patriotic? She was a good sport and it was so fun to have her with us at the parade. It is getting harder and harder for her to get around and leave the house much. It was a good surprise to see Aunt Pat pull up with her.

Now, for those of you who don't believe me when I tell you about us attending a redneck parade I took lots of pictures so you can see what I'm talking about. I didn't get any pictures of the three actual floats that were in the parade, that would be no fun when there was so many other things to take pictures of. Just so you know, there was a float for the city royalty, the county royalty, and a float for the only grocery store in town, Soelbergs.

I was, however, very disappointed that there wasn't a dump truck or Semi in this parade. In Tooele there is usually at least one of each. They must have stayed in Tooele because we didn't get that in Grantsville. But, here is some of what we did see:

Here we have a Tooele County Sheriff SUV pulling a trailer. I'm glad to know they have a trailer to haul stuff in when they get called out.

This one was kind of fun. It is a trike pulling a casket. On the glass surrounding the casket it says, "Last Ride". Carrie announced that this is how she would like to be taken to the graveyard when she dies. She said,"who needs a Bentley when you can go in that." Don't worry, none of us will ever forget that this is your wish.

Here's Seth, Kelton, Taylor, and Brinlee watching the parade, and yes that is a dirt bike. About this time there was a break in the parade that lasted several minutes and then finally we saw a boy on a bicycle ride by and then someone on this dirt bike. When things finally got moving again, you will never guess what we had waited for. I would let you try to guess, but I know you would never get it. We had waited for the cheerleaders to come marching by holding lawn chairs. None of us understood this, can someone who was there maybe explain why they were walking down Main Street carrying lawn chairs?

Or, maybe after you see what they were doing you can explain this. I can't believe we all stood there waiting and anticipating what could be coming. It reminds me of the t'shirts we all used to get that said, "my grandma and grandpa went on vacation and all they brought back for me was this t-shirt." We all stood there waiting and waiting and all we got was lousy lawn chairs.

Here we are watching a Tooele County Sheriff's SUV pull their snowmobiles. Sad to say, but this was not the only truck pulling snowmobiles in the parade. I think it was a theme for this year.

This little video has to be the best redneck presentation of the whole parade. I need to apologize for the video, I'm still learning how to really use my camera. Be patient because the last car is the best! I took several little video's of different things. I have the old Military vehicles and the fire trucks. It's a good think there wasn't a fire anywhere because I think most all of them for the town, the BLM and the Depot were in the parade.

We went to the park and looked at the car show and got shaved ice after the parade. We had tons of fun out there with Kenny's family. It was fun to watch the kids run around and get candy and make fun of the "floats". We had the typical BBQ dinner of hamburgers and hot dogs.

We really didn't want to stay out in Grantsville to late and have to deal with the stupid people on I-80 on our way home and my cousin was going to the drive in movies and invited us, so we ended up leaving Grantsville a little early and meeting up with cousins to watch The Last Airbender.

We had tons of fun sitting around and visiting until it was time for the movie to start. We ate pizza and junk food and laughed and laughed while we told stories. It was fun to hear the kids talk about the other times that we had all gotten together and gone to the drive in before. I'm always amazed at how much they remember.

This is my Uncle Ron and my cousin Jessie. I'm so glad they invited us.

Contrary to what I was told about the movie, we liked it. I guess most people I know did not like the movie, but Kelton and I had fun talking about different parts and comparing it to the cartoon. While we were watching the movie, it started lightning and the wind was blowing a little and then it started to rain. The movie takes place mainly in the different water tribes that are at either end of the world in the snow. When it started raining Kelton said that the movie was 4-D because we could feel the rain like what was in the movie. You would think that it would have ruined it for us, but it didn't, because it made it 4-D.

This ended up being a very long fun day. It was fun to spend so much time with family and the little bits of time with some of our friends. I am so thankful to have each and every one of them in our lives.

Bella

We have added a new member to our family. And, please no more questions as to why I did this. I know I'm not a real animal lover, but there is this one soft spot somewhere in me that thinks I need to help every animal (and sometimes car) that needs a good home.

A girl that I work with went to the Manti pageant and there was a woman there giving away kittens. She decided to take one and bring it home, with out talking to her mom first. Well, come to find out her mom hates cats and her brother is allergic to them. The poor kitten was banished to a kennel outside. I had to do something. I couldn't just leave it in a kennel outside.

I sent Kenny a text to ask him if he was okay with me bringing home a kitten, thinking he would say, "no, remember, Charlie is our only and last pet!" But he surprised me and said sure. Plans were put in place for my co-worker to bring the kitten back when it was time for me to leave work and I asked Kenny to start thinking of a name. He quickly said I needed to name her because he named the dog. He never gave me a chance, he text me back within minutes and said, "how about Bella?" Perfect! I mean what kind of a Twilight fan would I be if I didn't name at least one member of our family after a character from the books.

This is Bella! She's a whinny little shit, so the name fits her perfectly.

We thought it would take a while before Bella and Charlie would be okay together but by the next day I got this picture of them from Taylor. So far she has been a wonderful kitten. She hasn't had one accident and is getting along with Charlie. In fact, they are both sitting at my feet asleep right now.

Moon Lake Cont.

I need to add what happened to Taylor our first night there. We finally had put everything away, had dinner and some marshmallows and had just gotten into bed when I heard this;

Taylor: "MoOoOm.......MOM....Moooom are leaches nocturnal?"

I laid there thinking, huh? What's nocturnal, a leach, huh?

Taylor: "There is something stuck to meeeee!"

I was still trying to wake up and figure out what in the world he could be talking about, he hadn't been anywhere near any water yet, a leach?

Taylor finally made it over to the light switch and got a light turned on and announced, "OH, it's a fruit roll up!"

Oh my word, I don't think any of us have ever laughed so hard. I still can't figure out how he ended up with fruit roll up in his bed and I feel really bad that he was so scared and thought that a blood sucking creature was stuck to him. On the other hand, it was such a priceless moment. We are all still trying to figure out why he thought it could be a leach, but for further warning to any of you who want to stay in a cabin that has wood paneling:

Leaches are nocturnal and they live in wood paneling!

Moon Lake

We finally got to leave and take our first real vacation in 2 years. We chose to go to Moon Lake for the first three days of our vacation. We had so much fun up there. It was so nice to not have TV, cell phones, internet, or anything else to take away from our time together as a family.

It is a long drive to get there and the boys and dog did such a wonderful job enduring the trip. This was the first trip that we didn't have the boys buried under half of what we needed to take. I thought that we would have plenty of room in our Expedition for all of our supplies for three days. Kenny thought we needed a little more room and got a box for the top of the truck. He was right, we filled the back of the Expedition and the box on top. I always over pack and as you read you will notice that this time I over packed all the wrong things.

This is our cute little cabin. It has two bedrooms, a small kitchen and a bathroom. It was the perfect size for us. We arrived at our cabin just at dinner time and we were going to roast hot dogs over the fire for dinner, but as we unloaded we quickly realized that we were missing one important part of dinner. We had forgot the roasting sticks. Boiled hot dogs it was, it worked but we were all bummed and dinner was okay but not at all what we had thought we would eat.

That first night we were there Kelton and I took Charlie for a walk down to the lake. It was so peaceful and beautiful. I was surprised to see how low the lake is, usually in June you don't have much of a beach but there was plenty of beach to play and walk on.

I had planned many fun things for us while we were staying at Moon Lake. One of those things was to bake cookies. I quickly remembered that the stove and oven in the kitchen is miniature. I forgot to take a picture of how small that appliance is, but it only had three small burners and I took my smallest cookie sheet and it wouldn't fit in the oven. We decided to try an experiment and try cooking the cookies over charcoal, it worked! We had fresh chocolate chip cookies two of the days we were there and they were wonderful. It was fun to try something new and have it work. It was also fun to watch the people in the cabins on either side of us stare at us like we were crazy.

It was also fun to find something to use the charcoal for that we had hauled all the way up there. Our original intention for the charcoal was to have a dutch oven dinner, but we quickly realized that we had forgot another important part of that dinner. What was it you ask? Oh, nothing as easy to work around as forgetting roasting sticks. Oh no, we forgot the chicken. It was still safe at home in the freezer. Even though we were all bummed, the boys were happy to have a whatever you can find you can have for dinner night. We ended up mainly eating Chex mix for dinner while we played Uno and Trouble.

I'm glad to say that we had a ton of fun that night and laughed so hard as we played games and told stories and remembered other trips we had taken together. I enjoyed watching us all pull together and not let a little thing like forgetting the meat for dinner ruin our fun.

For two days we spent the majority of our time on the beach playing. We had so much fun making all kinds of sand castles. Above and below are two of the castles that the boys built on the first day. They had so much fun digging trenches to their castles so they would have a private lake and a moat. Eventually Kenny and I got in on the building and being the Egypt nerds that we are, we had fun building a pyramid and a sphinx. However, we did run into one small problem, we had dogzilla (aka Charlie) with us and he smashed our sphinx in record time. Napoleon couldn't have done better. Taylor quickly followed and took out the pyramid. We didn't end up with any pictures of our creation, but then we also didn't get any proof of me sitting in the mud building a sand pyramid.

I did however get a picture of me digging my toes into the sand and enjoying the soft cool sand. It may not look it in this picture, but the sand there is so soft. It was like a little piece of heaven to sit there and relax and watch the boys play in the water and build their sand castles.

Kenny and the boys all decided to wade into the water and play a little. I still don't know how they did it, the water was so cold. Kenny only lasted a second and his picture is of him trying to get out of the cold water as quickly as possible. The boys somehow were able to go in and out of the water several times and had a blast just walking around in it. Taylor was trying to hold up his shorts, but they ended up soaked.

I know the boys would be upset if I left out Chunk. That is what they named the pot-gut that hung out around our fire ring. We ended up feeding him a little here and there. We were so surprised when he walked right up to Kenny and sat at his feet for a minute, Chunk was not afraid of people at all. None of could believe how many chipmunks and pot-guts there were. It was fun to watch them run around and even climb up the sides of the cabins. Who needs TV when you this kind of entertainment?

Other than forgetting a few vital items that we needed for dinner's and a couple other things that we had to go to the Lodge to buy, I don't think we did to bad. Even though we took a nap everyday we were at Moon Lake, we were so tired when we got home. This picture of Charlie sums up how we all felt when we got home, we all just collapsed for a while.

Coming home has been bitter sweet. We love it at Moon Lake and it was so relaxing for all of us, but we are so ready to have a night in our own beds.

A horrible, no good, very bad day!!!!!

I keep wishing that today was just a bad dream that was part of my migraine last night, but now that it is time for me to get ready for bed I am coming to the awful truth that today really did happen. I know we all have bad days and sometimes when we think our day can't get any worse, it does. That has been my day today. I vowed to never speak of work on my blog and I'm not really going to start now, but just now that it was a rough day. The kind of day that before you even reach 10:00 am you start thinking that you should have never gotten out of bed.

It didn't start bad. I didn't even poke myself in the eye with my mascara brush this morning. I think my depth perception has left me for the summer, which has been really bad news for my eyes and our car. Unlike Ralph in a Christmas Story, I'm not going to go blind from soap poisoning, it will be from mascara. So far I have been pretty lucky and Kenny hasn't forced me to get a bus pass even though I have run the car into two things in the past week.

Back to today. There comes a point in the day that one of two things happen. One; God knows that you need to be able to laugh or your going to start crying. Or two, Satan knows that if you notice what is about to come in front of you, you will notice it and make fun of it because that is your weakness. No matter how this came to happen it saved my hide. It helped me to not cry while driving down I-15 and crashing the car into one more thing. It gave me a good laugh which distracted me from focusing on all that had happened today. And, well, of course I have to make fun of this.

Alright, I should never have taken this with my phone or while driving (shhhhh, you never heard me say that). So the picture is really blurry but you can just make out the pin striping on the back that looks like a mustache. Really, this car has a mustache on it's butt. Who does that? I did make sure to crop it so no one can see their license plates, I had to do this to protect the innocent. But, really who would pay money to put that on their car?

The next innocent victim was some poor person who had just bought this cute little red car and their front passenger wheel was wobbling all over the place. Could they not feel that? And they had really just bought it, it had the temporary tag in the window.

As soon as I realized that I wasn't about to loose a tire and that I don't have a mustache on my car butt, my day didn't really seem all that bad. It quickly reminded me that it can always be worse. And then it did get worse, my computer crashed. I think I have it fixed now, but who knows.

At least I don't have a car butt mustache!