I just wanted to share a picture of something that I love, my kids playing together.

There is something so sweet about your kids playing so nicely together. Lindsay and Logan get along pretty well and Logan is now to the point where he can kind of show Lindsay what he wants her to do. She may not understand what he’s trying to tell her but that’s what I’m here for.
They love to play with the ‘jumping rope’ as Lindsay calls it. They’ll both hold on to one end of the jumping rope and pull each other around. Lindsay has to humor Logan but not very much because he’s ridiculously strong.
They still like to wrestle and smile all the way through it.
They’ll take turns on the roller coaster, even when I’m not there! I usually just put all the gates up when I take a shower and let them play together and so far no one has gotten hurt. The other day when I came out they were taking turns as if they didn’t know any other way.
Logan loves it when Lindsay throws a ball really far so he has to go get it and then he’ll come back to her and then he’ll throw it and she’ll go get it.
One of my favorite things they do is ‘Ring around the Roses’, just the two of them. They just giggle and giggle and do it over and over again. Too cute.
Logan imitates Lindsay more and more the older he gets. Logan can already spin around in a circle just from watching Lindsay and he even does her weird eye thing when he spins. I don’t remember when Lindsay could spin in a circle but it doesn’t seem like she was this young.
Not only do they play well together but they love each other so much. Logan is not allowed to go to sleep unless Lindsay has given him a hug and a kiss first. She gets really emotional if for whatever reason she doesn’t get to give him a kiss and a hug before he goes to sleep. Logan lights up when he first sees Lindsay in the morning. And yesterday they almost brought me to tears. Lindsay had gone potty and as soon as she opened the door, Logan went running to her and they just gave each other a big hug! I’m so happy that they love each other and that they are so close. I hope they always stay that way.

I love my kids and I really want them to experience everything life has to offer. But there are just some things I don’t like and playdoh is one of them. Lindsay has a great time with it and last year she wanted to play with it constantly and I would let her because it gave her something to do while I was taking care of tiny Logan. But we would always forget to put it away and it would dry up and there would be tears so I threw it all away and said I wouldn’t get it again. But I obviously didn’t mean it because I kept all the little toys that go with it and Lindsay will see them and ask if she can play with playdoh and I would tell her we don’t have any and she would get sad so I broke down and bought some more. Lindsay is excited the strike is over! She’s older now and stronger and so she can squeeze and push the playdoh through all the fun little design makers all by herself which means I don’t necessarily have to be playing with it too but I am usually right there anyway. I didn’t know how Logan would react to it, whether he would try to eat it or what. This was his reaction:

He just kind of poked at it. He didn’t like the way it felt and actually handed it back to me after a few minutes. So he played with the container and lid instead.

Lindsay still loves it and had a blast!


She’s so cute to watch because she concentrates so hard on what she’s doing. Lindsay may love it but I still really hate the mess it makes.

Beth mentioned last night that the trenches for our sprinklers would be dug today. Unfortunately, because of the rain we got over the past several days, our yard is pretty muddy. I called the trencher guy to see if he could still do it, and he said, “Well, if you sink an inch, my trenching machine will sink six inches.” I think he’s underestimating my size, but I get the point. So he will be coming on Saturday, instead. Bummer.

Oh, and as long as we’re talking about bad things that happened from this last rainstorm, our basement flooded again. Last spring, we had a problem caused by California Boy Jeff not knowing that you had to turn off the water to the sprinklers in the winter time. So the pipe froze and broke, and then when it thawed, it flooded our yard, which flooded our window-well, which flooded our basement. Well, this year I was smart, and I turned off the water for the winter. Unfortunately, when we fixed the pipe last year, apparently we jarred loose the caulking where the pipe goes into the house. So we had this rainstorm, which caused a puddle to form on the side of the house, right where there was a not-quite-blocked hole in the wall. Puddles being as they are, the water took the path of least resistance, which put it in the storage room in our basement.

There are three silver linings to this decidedly non-silver story:

1) After last year’s flood, we wisely decided to put everything in the storage room on 2×4s. That means that not much real stuff got wet, and nothing got ruined.
2) We had a couple big scraps of carpet that we threw down on the floor in the storage room, just so we wouldn’t have to walk on hard, cold concrete whenever we went into the room. These pieces of carpet probably saved us hundreds of dollars, because while THEY got soaked, they contained the flooding to the unfinished storage room, for the most part. There are a couple wet spots in the finished entryway, but by and large, the carpet saved the real rooms.
3) We probably needed to clean out the storage room and organize it a little bit, anyway. Beth just got back from Home Depot with a couple heavy-duty storage shelves, and if we end up with a clean, functional, pleasant storage room (with room for food storage), it will be hard to view this flood as a bad thing, in the long run.

So we have now had two floods in two years, and both of them were of the “it could have been a lot worse” variety. I was telling Beth how frustrating it is for me to be responsible for things I know nothing about (like basements and sprinklers and whatnot), but it’s part of being a homeowner. And we will still take the benefits of homeownership over the convenience of the alternative any day.

Our kids surprised us this morning by sleeping in! We got some things done around the house like hanging up a fire extinguisher, moving Logan’s crib to the lowest it could go and cleaning out the garage. Then we took the kids to see Horton Hears A Who. I was a little scared because we had never taken Logan to a movie before and he’s not known for his ability to be quiet. So, we went during his nap, put him in the stroller and he slept the whole time! I was so relieved! Lindsay really enjoyed it and Jeffy and I thought it was cute. She really likes the book and at the end when they are about to put the clover into the hot beezlenut juice, she was pretty nervous and then she cheered when all the animals could finally hear the Who’s. Then we just hung out the rest of the day and enjoyed having daddy’s full attention. We are getting our trenches dug in our backyard tomorrow for our sprinklers so that has been set into motion. I will update more about that later.

Dear Niki and Flavio,

I’m sorry to have to tell you that we are no longer in need of your lawn mower. Jeffy and I are officially grown-ups today and we bought our own! We will miss your sweet little grass cutter with it’s soothing sounds of hard work but it’s time we move on.

Love, Jeff and Beth

(Now if it would just stop raining we could actually use it!)

I know that title is confusing but once you read this it’ll all make sense, I promise. Logan is my sweet little boy who I love so much but one thing I have noticed with him is that he can’t just put a toy down, he has to throw it! He can put his cup down gently on the table, he has to slam it! He can’t just throw a ball or drive a car silently he has to scream ‘BALL’ or “VROOM VROOM.’ Why does everything have to be so LOUD?!! Is it just a boy thing? Because I love it!

My favorite summertime show is back, So you think you can dance! I absolutely love this show and I am so proud to admit it! It’s probably just because I can NOT dance at all and so I really enjoy watching other people do what I sometimes wish I could do better, but I am not willing to try. They can do some CRAZY things! But just because I love the dancing doesn’t mean I love the judges. I HATE Mary with her annoying EVERYTHING and her stupid hot tamale train. Whatever. And if you think Simon is bad, whoa man! Nigel can be down right mean! And because he’s the producer of the show he says what goes. He goes too far sometimes with the people who just aren’t good and most of the time it’s just childish and I hate that. But still I love the dancing and I love the music. It’s a good time.

Tonight when I got home from bishopric meeting, Lindsay was crying because she had forgotten to drink her milk before bed. I went upstairs to comfort her, and I ended up hanging out in her room for about 15 minutes or so. We were talking about miscellaneous stuff, and I let out a little tiny toot. One of my favorite things about Lindsay is that she will laugh at anything with me; all I have to do is start laughing, and she will bust a gut right along with me. So after I tooted, I started laughing, and so did she. We laughed for about 30 seconds, and then she got a look on her face that was a cross between serious and confused (if you’ve ever seen the look where she furrows her brow when she’s thinking hard about something, that’s the one). She looked me in the eye and said, “Wait … why is that funny?” I didn’t have an answer.

I know this isn’t as exciting as something about the kids, but Jeffy and I watched all three Indiana Jones movies in the past three days. Jeffy had never seen all of them all the way through so it was really fun to watch them together. I LOVE them all and I love to watch them because it reminds me of when my family used to watch them together. Good times! We’re going to see the new one tomorrow night and Eric said it was pretty good so I look forward to watching another great movie with my awesome hubby!

The kids HAVE been cute I just haven’t had the will to blog lately. Jeff’s cousin Adam and his family came over for dinner last night and we all had a great time. Lindsay had a blast playing with their two older boys and after last night I think it’s safe to say that Lindsay has more fun with boys. Don’t get me wrong, she has fun with her little girl friends but she had a blast running around and jumping off stuff and not having to pretend to be a princess or dance around. And maybe she doesn’t necessarily like to play with boys more, maybe it was just a nice change from girls.

Logan started waving hi, finally!! For awhile there I really didn’t think he was ever going to do it. His favorite word is no and he means yes half the time he says no. He LOVES to play ring around the rosies with Lindsay and he usually still wants to play when she’s done and so he’ll pull her arm until she does it again. We have played with our new water sprinklers the last couple of days and so I’ll get those pictures up here soon.

I learned a new word tonight: ba-donka-donk. I know, I know, I’m TOTALLY behind the times because apparently it’s not a new word. And by word, I mean slang. Hugh Laurie was on Ellen today and they were trying to guess American vs. British slang words and it was really too funny. So ba-donka-donk was one of them and I agree with Hugh when he said, “That’s a fantastic word, isn’t it?” Wherever you live has to be pretty awesome if ba-donka-donk actually means something. I love living in America.