Bon Fire

So in love

Brianna gearing up for Summer

She loves to wear her swimming suit and floaties - sometimes the floaties are on her feet, sometimes her arms. (She's usually smiling.)

Allison's true love

The story of how casual bath toys - a frog and a duck - became more. One day, Allison was playing with the duck and Brianna wanted it. Dan suggested Brianna get the frog. It was at that moment Allison realized she liked the frog better than the duck, better than her pink bear, better than all the animals. She loved Mr. Frog. She let out a guttural, "NO!" and ran, chubby legs pumping her as fast as they could, arms flailing wildly, screaming, "MY FOG"! to claim her frog. They have been nearly inseperable ever since. She changes his diaper frequently (see pic), asks if he's O.K., if he's having fun, worries about him not wearing socks when it's cold, tries to feed him, the usual mom stuff. (Except when she abandons him for hours on end). He is the first thing she asks about in the morning and the last thing she clamours for at night. I think it's his winning perma-smile.

Installing our hardwood floor

This was spring break, so we decided to put in our hardwood floor since our lives fall apart when our kitchen falls apart.


Monday and Tuesday
Kenny is using the finish nail gun to install the hardwood over the tar paper. He couldn't use the flooring nail gun since it was too close to the island.

Kenny using the floor nail gun on the hardwood. The gun got everything tight and close together and made the floor look great. We only wanted to rent the gun for one day, so we stayed up until 2 am trying to get as far as we could.

Tuesday

After the floor was in, we put wood filler in the cracks and deformities to make the floor uniform. William liked helping with this part and did a great job.

Wednesday and Thursday

We decided to hand sand the floor instead of renting a sander since we had a pretty small floor. Kenny rotated between the electric sander and just a block of wood with sandpaper. Taylor came over and helped us finish it up.

Thursday
After we sanded and washed the floor, we could stain it. William liked to help us with this, too. The color was a little darker than we expected, but we love the color and it works well with our carpet color, too.

While we were painting, we were trying hard not to spill the paint. But William got up to move and kicked over the stain. Kenny and I just moved as quick as we could and got it all spread out. Disaster averted!

Finally we had all the stain on and smoothed out. It looked great!

Friday and Saturday

Kenny applied the first coat of polyurethane Friday afternoon and we stayed the night at Hargrave's house (Andrea's parents). We came over Saturday morning and sanded and washed the floor before applying the second coat of polyurethane. Saturday afternoon we put on the third and last coat. Then we stayed the night at Kartchners (Kenny's parents). Sunday after conference we came home and put our kitchen back together. The floor looks awesome!! We love it.

Our almost finished kitchen. It still needs upper cabinets and a pantry door, but we love it so far.

The Good Old Days

Christmas Video Excerpt

Swings and Water

Taylor is spending a good half hour swinging each day and exclaims "This is reaaal fun" after every swing.

Cutting down our HUGE tree

This is the tree we wanted to cut down in our backyard.

Kenny is up in the tree and Dad (Richard) is down pulling on the life line connected to Kenny's safety harness.

Jordan up in the tree...

...way up in the tree

Kenny scaling the branches to tie them off.

Kenny up in the tree.

The one mishap as the branch hits the shed. There was a rope tied to the end of the branch, and Taylor, Jordan, and Joe would pull the branch as it fell and miss the shed. But pulling as hard as they could didn't move it enough.

This is the last trunk to go down. Jordan is at the bottom trying to get the last few inches cut. The top of the tree is tied off to our big truck, so the tree doesn't fall the wrong way. This video doesn't capture the terror we all felt as we watched Jordan sawing away at the tree and hoped it wasn't about to crush him.

Jordan conquers all!!

Thanks to Jordan, Dad, and Taylor for coming and helping cut down this tree.

BOOM SHACKALAKA!

This is our Chinese New Years party we went to at a friends house. This is the pile of fireworks we lit off that night. Below you can see Katelynn standing in the midst of them, and then you can see me holding one of the 20,000 fire cracker rolls. At one point, In true American fashion, we put two 20,000 firecracker rolls and one 10,000 firecracker roll in a pile and made a trail/fuse to the pile with a 2,000 firecracker roll...and then let'er rip. I can't even describe how loud and sereal it was when the pile went off! It was like being in a state of total bliss. AWESOME!