Let the Festivities Begin!

To get an early start on celebrating Halloween, on Friday we took Ryan to the Heber Valley Railroad's Haunted Canyon. He really enjoyed the train ride and didn't really get scared. It seems to take a lot to freak this kid out. Here's some pics.

On Sunday we went to my parents' house for a little dinner/party with the other cousins. It's fun to have them in town again and Ry really enjoys playing with Jos and Braden. We finally found something that makes Ryan a little nervous. After dinner, we went to my parent's neighbor's house. Let's just say Mark decorates more for Halloween than anybody decorates for Christmas. His collection is probably worth more than our house. He has all kinds of creepy mannequins, skulls, and weapons. Still trying to figure out if he really just enjoys Halloween or if he's a devil worshiper. Anyway, he has a pirate skeleton that talks and moves and raises its sword at you. Ryan was really freaked out and wanted to go home after the pirate threatened to kill him. But being the mean parents that we are, we kept taking him to the pirate to watch him get scared.

Can you believe Ryan kept the eyepatch on? We're still working on the little hoop earing.

Autumn's not so bad...yet

Okay, so maybe this season isn't quite so bad, especially since we haven't frozen over yet. There are a few fun things to look forward to that I may have forgotten about since last year. Here's a few of those fun fall things:

College football and doing the wave

The pretty fall colors and jumping off rocks

New episodes of our favorite TV shows

Adding soup back into the mix of dinner recipes

Election season in full swing, complete with awesome impersonations

And the overabundance and excellent price of my favorite cereals.

The death of our very first computer

So I know it's been a while since we've posted anything! Let me explain why. First, life is just a little boring right now. Second, we had a computer issue 2 weeks ago. I couldn't get online on our computer. It was really old! We got it just after we got married, 6 years ago. It finally died. Don't worry, we had all the important files, pictures, and movies saved to our external drive (yes, there is only so much that 18 GB will hold). So I've been using Dave's old laptop to get online and there's no active virus protection, so the computer would shut itself off every 5 minutes and tell me that my computer was being maliciously attacked. Finally, the new computer arrived today and I set it up all by myself. Let me tell you, this thing is fast! I don't have to wait for anything. You'd think it would save me lots of time, but with all it can do, I think this will help me waste a lot more time on the computer. Now there's plenty of room and RAM and whatever else SimCity 4 needs!

My Autumn Rant

So I haven't posted anything for a while. I guess life has been a little boring and there's not a whole lot to tell about. I've noticed that all of my friends have blogged about the changing weather. So here's my 2 cents about Fall. It's okay. Football season is fun and Halloween should be fun again this year. The leaves changing colors is always nice and I'm enjoying the peaches and all of the yummy apple stuff....But.....I'm still not ready for the cold! I'm not quite ready to trade in my short sleeves for sweaters or my nightly fruit smoothies for nightly hot chocolate. And once Christmas is over, there's nothing to look forward to until April? (unless we have a nice tropical vacation planned in January, which is almost becoming a necessity). Sometimes it would be nice to be a bear and sleep all through the winter and wake up to the nice warm weather! Maybe that's what I'll do. I think I'll hibernate this year. So until spring, I'll leave you with some pictures of the summertime things we haven't posted about yet (elementary school carnival, neighborhood luau, Utah vs. UNLV football game, and Dave's parents returning from their Indian mission.)

The Rest of our Vacation: Chicago & the Amish

After checking out Chicago and deciding there wasn't a whole lot to do, we grabbed a pamphlet from our hotel for a little Amish place called Amish Acres. We thought it would be fun to check it out because neither of us has been to Amish country and it was on the way to Michigan. We were a little skeptical about its authenticity, because the name was trade-marked and the pamphlet gave a telephone # and an email address. Do the Amish use phones and computers these days? When we finally got there at 6:00pm, all the little buildings were closed except for the shop and restaurant. So we bought some Amish bread and peach butter (kind of like jam). We also ate at the restaurant. As it turns out, the Amish Acres is located in Nappannee, IN, which has Amish people there, but the farm is not run by the Amish. I guess you could say they exploit the Amish. But it was still fun and let me tell you, the Amish (fake or not) can cook! They served the food family-style, and it was a lot of food! Check out our little buffet (complete with beef, potatoes & gravy, green beans, bread, apple butter, stuffing, fried chicken, beef & noodles, bean soup, pickles & sweet onions, and don't forget the pie). We were stuffed!

After the big dinner, we rolled ourselves out to the car and finished our drive to Kalamazoo. Here's the rest of the pictures.

The Big Game at The Big House

I'm going to skip ahead in our little journey and tell about the big game before another loss to UNLV ruins it all. Don't worry- I'll let you know about the rest of our Chicago & Amish adventures. On Friday, we finished our drive to Ann Arbor. We were a little bit worried about going into a blue town wearing nothing but red. We know how tense feelings can exist between blue people and red people. Let me just say these were the nicest blue people I have ever met. After parking our car a mile and a half away from the stadium (remember, this is still 5 hours before kickoff), we found the tailgating party. It covered the entire golf course. These people really take football seriously. Here's just an extremely small piece of the tailgating going on...






The U's humble little tent...





At the game, we didn't sit with all the other red people in the endzone 80 rows up. If we're going to travel this far for a game, we're going to sit in good seats. So we sat at the 30-yard line 50 rows up, with all the blue people. We were the only red around! I think the people around us were a little upset we were there, especially when the Utes started to dominate. But Dave reassured them that the Utes would make stupid mistakes and rack up plenty of penalties and blow a big lead late in the 3rd/4th quarters. And in typical Utah fashion, the Utes almost blew it. Luckily, they held on and we were able to celebrate the victory!

We were very impressed with the number of Ute fans that made the trip. We estimated there to be 4500-5000 Utes. I know that only accounts for 4% of the attendance (107,000+), but it's a long way to travel for a football game. For being so relatively small, the Utah section sure was loud! What a fun game! I'm glad I finally got to experience a "real" college football game.

Art?

We didn't have any plans on Friday in Chicago, so we decided to walk around the city. We spent most of our time on "The Magnificent Mile" aka Michigan Ave. After the long ride on the ghetto train, we finally made it into downtown. Interesting place. With all the tall buildings, we were unable to see the sun, so it was hard to find our sense of direction. Thanks to our fine navigation skills, we were able to find Michigan Ave. All along the street, there were these strange pieces of "art." How do you define something as a piece of art? I think my definition is that if you would pay money for it to display it in your living room, then it's art. But apparently, others have a different definition of art. I certainly would not want to display random bodices in my living room...

Maybe I could display these on my porch or in the kitchen...

Perhaps art is supposed to make you go "hmmm." If that's the case, I guess all of these creations could be considered great pieces of art.

Rock Star in the Making

Here's Ryan's version of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Listen closely.

Here's The ABCs...

Happy Birthday to you...

and the Itsy Bitsy Spider

Birthday Celebration Comes to a Close

Last night, we finally finished celebrating Ryan's birthday. It all started on Wednesday (his actual birthday). We opened presents and my mom and dad came over for some birthday cake. Then on Saturday we celebrated with Dave's family. Ryan had so much fun running around and getting crazy with his cousins. Unfortunately, I forgot to pull out the camera for pictures of this party. Last night, we went to my parents' house to celebrate with that side of our family. We also celebrated my aunt Liz's birthday and my nephew Cooper's first birthday. Ryan hadn't seen these cousins for awhile, so again, he had fun running around and getting crazy with them. They were so loud the gave my mom a big headache. But it was fun. And Ryan and Braden were really excited about the Lightning McQueen party gear. Ry's having so much fun now with all of his new toys.

Happy Birthday Ryan!

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you! Happy birthday dear Ryan, happy birthday to you!


Can you believe our baby's already 2 years old? He's growing up so fast! Here's what he looked like 2 years ago today.