My Boys

I woke up in the middle of the night and walked out into the front room to find this.....

...the boys were watching tv together and had fallen asleep. It doesn't look very comfortable, but they seemed to be okay where they were, so I left them there!

My Birthday

I had a nice, relaxing birthday (9/27). Ty got me a lemon cake and made dinner. I chose yummy tacos since we hadn't had those for a while and it is pretty easy to do. Pop came over and celebrated with us. Ty and the kids gave me Adobe Photoshop and I think I need to take a class on it. I know you can do some cool things...I just have to figure it out (anyone want to give me some lessons...hint hint Josh & Karly?!...or Jen?!). Mom & Pop got me a gift card to DSW for some much needed new shoes. I chose tennies since that is what makes my feet hurt the least! It was a good day.

check it out

some new posts and some new older posts - you have to scroll down a little bit for these.

Journal Jog 2008

Ty, Aidan and Connor ran the Reno Gazette Journal Jog this year. It was an 8k (5 miles). Ty has been running this race for several years now. He even won the stroller division 2 years in a row, though he likes to say that doesn't count. Connor ran it with him last year and did really good. This year Connor and Aidan ran the race. Aidan did pretty good since he has been running on the cross country team, but Connor wasn't too far behind and hasn't trained at all except for an occasional quick run around the neighborhood with Aidan. Ty came in 40th out of 1009 runners and 7th in his age division. He did awesome! Aidan was 705th and 29th in his age division and last but not least Connor was 794th and 34th in his age division. Brogan really wanted to run...maybe next year!

If you want to see the results click here for all divisions (Ty has a picture on there) http://www.changeofpace.com/Results/JJ08/2008_journal_jog_results.html

or click here for the male jog overall results (Ty - 8K Run M 35-39, Aidan & Connor - 8K Run M 10-14) http://www.changeofpace.com/Results/JJ08/JMDIV.TXT

Cross Country

Since Aidan likes to run just like his dad, he decided he would join the 7th grade boys Cross Country team. They have had practice every day after school. Then last Thursday the 11th they had their first meet against 2 other middle schools. It was 1 1/2 miles. Aidan took 6th place overall out of about 35 runners with a time of 11:22. He also was the first 7th grade boy from his school to cross the finish line. Unfortunately while I was waiting and watching for his friend Austin to finish he started to walk towards me with red coming out of his mouth and it was on his jersey. I briefly panicked thinking he was coughing up blood. I told Ty what I thought and he told me that he was just throwing up (like that's supposed to make me feel better that he is vomiting blood instead of coughing up blood!). Then I realized that is was just from the Hot Cheetos he had for lunch! Oh boy...you can't scare a mom like that. He was a little dehydrated. It was kinda hot that day and there was only one drinking fountain with a huge line before and after the races. Anyway, he did really good and we were really proud of him.

Just after the start

About to cross the finish line

With Coach McGregor and friend Victor

Finish time - 6th place!

How do you get your kids to do homework?

With m&m's of course! I actually came up with an idea that worked yesterday! I was eating a handful of m&m's and knew the kids were gonna want some too and since they all needed to work on homework, I told them that for every problem they finish they get 1 m&m. Brogan & Finn jumped right on that! Connor didn't get in on it until he saw that it was actually working with the other kids. Aidan was going along with it too even though he thought that only 1 per problem wasn't enough. But when you have about 40 math problems, that's a lot of m&m's! By the time he got through half of them, he thought it was fun and a really good idea. WOW! I came up with a good idea that they all liked? Unbelieveable! And they all sat at the table being fairly quiet (and when I say that, I mean they weren't fighting and being mean to each other) and they were getting their homework done. They all ended up with a good amount of m&m's and didn't even fight about someone having more than they did. Are these really MY kids? When we were done Finn asked if next time can we do it with something other than candy, like vegetables? I said yeah and started suggesting all kinds of things we could use and they were all suggesting things. It was great! I hope it keeps working in the future.

Project "Modesty"

It was my turn to teach the lesson for Activity Days the first week of September. And true to form, I waited until almost the last minute to plan a lesson. I looked up a bunch of different websites to find ideas and kept coming across an idea for modesty. It was to have the girls design modest outfits out of newspaper. Of course, I didn't have enough newspaper for all the girls that normally show up, so I started looking at craigslist and freecycle. A lady had a post from a couple weeks earlier that she had a lot of newspapers she was hoping someone would take and recycle. By dumb luck, she still had them and she worked at someone from my ward's business. When I picked them up, she was really happy that someone was going to use them again and/or recycle (which I did after we were done, especially because she gave me soooo much more than I needed.
So anyway, I gave the girls a lesson on modesty and then split them up into groups (in each group 2 to design and 1 to model) and they got to choose an outfit to design, i.e. swimsuit, church dress, etc. They had so much fun and when they were done with the outfits the models got to walk down the "runway". They even designed an outfit for Finn! What a poser! Aye Yi Yi! Here is a short video of her walking down the runway.

Pencil Anyone?

As school was about to start, I decided to go through all the pencil boxes, drawers, buckets and any other nook or cranny I could think of to sort through crayons, markers and pencils. Apparently we have enough pencils to provide to a small country! If I hear my kids one more time say that they can't find a pencil, I think I will scream.

Aidan's Last Game of the Season...

...until All-Stars that is. He made the 11 year old All Star team. And since his is the only team in our area playing for that age group, they automatically take State and get to go to Regionals in Kerman, CA. Though this is very exciting, it has been a little stressful on Ty, worrying about taking time off work and the costs of going there. Aidan might have to go without us, and I have to say that will be very heartbreaking for me. We just have to see what we can work out.

Anyway, here are a few pictures of Aidan's last game of this season against the 1st place team on Tuesday. His team really needed this win. They were in 2nd place for most of the season until towards the end. So this game determined whether they would take 2nd or 3rd place. Aidan's team won! Barely! They were several points ahead until the last 2 innings of the game. But they pulled it out for a win and were very excited.
Aidan hit it out to right field for a triple.

Just after he scored.

Had to chase a wild pitch.

Father's Day Hike

For Father's Day, Ty wanted to go hiking. We went up to Thomas Creek and went on about a 3 mile hike. Ty likes to run and mountain bike up there, but this was the first time at this creek for the rest of us. It is really pretty up there, especially by the creek where there's a bigger variety of tree, plants, etc. than mostly the pine trees surrounding us.
At the beginning of the hike, Aidan, Finn and Brogan stayed with me while Ty and Connor ran up the trail ahead of us. We were about halfway to our destination when they met back up with us. Aidan had made walking sticks for himself and the twins. Finn kept offering me hers, but I had to tell her thank you, but it's easier to walk without it (in my opinion). Everyone kept throwing sticks in the creek for Chessie to fetch and she would only find them about half the time, but she loved it. At one point we were up above the creek probably about 4-5 feet and she had gone in the creek to get the huge stick Ty threw for her, but she couldn't get out and was not going to let go of that stick. Ty had to grab her by the collar and help her up. The kids had a lot of fun exploring and finding huge pine cones and places to wander through. People go horseback riding up there too, so there were a ton of piles of horse poop to avoid although Aidan told me Brogan stepped in them a couple of times. Eww! Towards the end of the hike there was a cool place where a bunch of trees had fallen over the creek and I had the kids climb over them for a picture with Ty. We had a good time spending time together.
Afterwards we went to see Crampa and have dessert, but we were a little earlier than planned and had dinner too and just hung out for awhile.
HAPPY FATHER'S DAY TY AND POP!