-Logan started Primary. Wow!

-We learned how to make a mess with soup in the blender.

-We found out Ryan was a boy.

-Lindsay started taking piano lessons again and has learned so much!

-Lindsay lost like 5 teeth!

-Lindsay hosted a bake sale for a much deserving family. And received an award at school for it.

-Logan turned 4!

-Snowy and Dragon brought joy into our lives, but we eventually had to give them away.

-Logan scared daddy to death by falling asleep in the back of the car.

-Daddy had back surgery.

-Got a new swing set and a dome climber.

-We spent the month of June at the fields watching the kids play T-ball/Coach pitch.


-Ryan joined our family!

-We had a super fun Madsen Family Reunion at our house. A week full of fun!

-Logan learned to ride a two wheeler.

-Lindsay started 1st grade and Logan started his 2nd year in preschool.


-LiLo moved rooms and now sleep upstairs.

-Lindsay got really sick and lost a lot of weight.

-We went to Florida to visit Winter the dolphin!

-Dressed up as a vampire, Optimus Prime and Tigger for Halloween.


-Lindsay turned 7!

-Ryan started eating foods.

-Mommy and Daddy went to Mexico!

-We went to Disneyland.

-Logan broke his arm…again.

-Ryan learned to sit up.

Thanks for the memories! Here’s the kids partying all night long with our best of friends!

Christmas Eve was super fun. They each opened their Christmas jammies and then it was time to get things ready! It’s so fun to watch your kids get all excited for Santa to come. LiLo made sure we had a plate of goodies for Santa and the reindeer and wrote him a cute little note.

They seemed to go to sleep pretty quickly, which is something I don’t remember doing as a kid, but as a parent I was grateful. And Christmas morning was a blast. Since it was on Sunday we got up and opened our stockings, had breakfast and went to a beautiful Sacrament meeting. Then we came home, got back into our jammies and opened presents. Here’s the picture story of it all.

Logan had some BIG presents this year!



Ryan LOVED the wrapping paper.

Logan finally getting to open the present from Lindsay. It’s a big RC monster truck!

He loves it so much! What a big thank you hug!

Santa brought Lindsay an American Girl doll. She was so excited!



For awhile after he opened that present, he just sat there next to it looking and looking. He had to wait to open it until after everyone was done. So cute.

Lindsay got the Dolphin Tale movie! Only later when she opened it, we discovered that some jerk had opened it at the store and stolen both discs and put it back on the shelf. Poor girl was in tears, but we reassured her that we would go back and get the real thing.

Uncle Laney helped Logan open his gifts because most of them were too big for him to open with just one hand.

Santa brought Lindsay the one thing she really wanted, a magician set!!

Weight: 18 lbs
Height: 27 1/2 inches
Nicknames: RyGuy, Bubby Wubby Bubble Butt, Baby

Ryan is such a fun little baby! He always has a smile for you and it almost always looks like this:

When you go into his room in the morning to get him up he gets really excited and shy and gives you the biggest smile.

He has been a great sleeper from day one and will usually sleep between 10-11 hours each night, sometimes without eating and something with just waking up once, but even then it’s always at least 8 hours since he went to sleep. We are grateful for that! One cute thing he does during the night, is if he gets up to drink a bottle, when you go to put him back down in his crib, he always has to stretch and boy do I love baby stretches!

He LOVES and adores his big sister and brother. The kid hardly needs any toys because Logan is usually right there entertaining him already. The kids can really get him laughing good and he has such a cute little laugh. He loves peek-a-boo and loves when Aunt Laura sings the “Baby, baby, baby” song to him.

He has a cute little cousin that is the same age as he is!

He loves to look at the baby in the mirror and gets almost serious when he talks to him. He starts to kick his legs a lot, almost as if he’s trying to get the baby in the mirror to mess up. So cute.

He learned to sit up on the day he turned 6 months old and it was so nice to have him be able to do that while we were in CA for Christmas.

He started eating food consistently around 5 1/2 months and is getting better at it. That cute little tongue caused some trouble, but he’s got it under control now.

He talks/hums himself to sleep, mostly when we’re in the car, and I LOVE it.

He can sit up in the tub now and has discovered splashing.

He has been on 9 airplane rides so far.

We love him so much!

The day before the trip, Tuesday, started like any other, doing laundry and starting the packing. We weren’t leaving until late evening on Wednesday, but I knew I needed to get as much done on Tuesday as I could.

One thing you must know about me is that I am a list maker. I LOVE making lists. If you were to pick up my iPhone and go to the notepad app, you would see note after note of lists. My brother-in-law once asked me why I don’t just keep the lists I make for vacations so that I don’t have to make it all over again and I simply told him that half the fun is making the list! So, just like every other vacation we have been on, I had my list all ready and was quickly checking things off.

Another thing you must know is that Jeff is almost always in charge of tickets and ID’s and all that stuff. I have it on my list, but he tends to just do it. Can you see where this is going?

After packing and going over the list a hundred times, we packed up the car and were off to the airport. We first had to stop at Les Schwab to see if they would fill up our one tire that keeps losing air because we really didn’t want to get stuck with a flat tire on the way to the airport. Done and done. Now it was just time to get to the airport. We left 2 1/2 hours before our flight so we had plenty of time. It wasn’t much later after we left the tire place that Jeff asked me if his coat was in the car. Shoot! I made sure the kids and I had our jackets and just assumed Jeff could get his own. Oops. After a minute of panicking we decided we would stop in Murray at the Big and Tall store to get him a new jacket on the way to the airport. Disaster avoided. It wasn’t much longer after that when Jeff asked me, “You have the tickets right?” “No! Don’t you???” I should tell you that we had gotten our tickets ahead of time from Digicert for the trip there and for the trip home and it was emphasized that we could not forget them because they could not be reprinted. Serious panicking begins. We were too far to go back and get them, but we had to have the tickets. Jeff got on the phone with Southwest while I called Lane to see where they were. They hadn’t left their house in Springville yet so I asked if they could go by our house and pick up our tickets and Jeff’s coat. The only thing was they were already running late and it would take them 30 extra minutes to go to our house to get the tickets. It’s going to be close! I kept wishing Jeff would pull over just in case we had to go back, but he just kept on going. I decided to call our neighbor Adam to see if he was home. I thought maybe he could bring the tickets closer to the freeway to make it less time consuming for Lane. He was willing to do so and while I was on the phone with him, Jeff confirms that we can reprint our tickets. Yay! After calming down a bit we realized why we had forgotten them. We normally don’t have our tickets ahead of time and have never had to worry about them. We always just check in at the airport. We were so grateful for Lane and Adam who were so willing to help us, but also grateful that they didn’t have to. After all of that, we thought the worst had happened. Boy were we wrong…

[Jeff is taking over this blog entry now, now that Beth has the foreshadowing out of the way.]

So we got to the airport and got our new tickets printed out, and with very little drama we made it to the departure gate with plenty of time to eat the nutritious Burger King meal we picked up after passing through security. We were the only ones (in a group of 85 people) who forgot tickets, and everyone made it on time. We boarded the plane and headed to Disneyland!

Except that halfway through the flight, the captain came on the speaker and said, “We’re getting reports of high winds at LAX, so we’re going to circle around for a while until we’re sure we’ll be able to land in LA.” A few minute later: “Ladies and gentlemen, it appears that the wind has knocked the power out at LAX, so we’re going to keep circling until someone tells us where they want us to land.” And then a few minutes later: “We’re going to be landing in Las Vegas. We’ll have more information for you when we land.”

So we landed in Las Vegas instead of LAX, and we were told that there were two Southwest flights from Vegas to LA later that night with room to fit our whole group. We sat in the Vegas airport for a little over an hour while DigiCert’s trip coordinator, Sue (who deserves knighthood or sainthood or both after this trip), organized who would go on which flight. She wisely decided to have families with small kids on the first flight, just so they could get to the hotel a little bit sooner (since there were two charter buses anyway). So we hopped on the first flight and headed to Disneyland!

Unfortunately, while half the group got on the first flight, all of the luggage got on the second flight. So the families with small kids, instead of getting to the hotel a little earlier, got to sit in the baggage claim area at LAX for an hour until the second flight landed.

But eventually, the flight (and the luggage) got there, we all boarded our buses, and we made it to our hotel by about 1:30 a.m. After a quick trip to the front desk to arrange for us to have adjoining rooms with Lane and Kelly, we headed upstairs and made it to bed by about 2:00. THUS ENDED WEDNESDAY, and obviously the worst was behind us.

Thursday morning, we took our time getting out of the hotel. No alarm clocks or anything, we just slept until we woke up. By the time we made it into Disneyland, it was 10:00. We took turns with Lane and Kelly, one couple would take the babies, and the other would take Lindsay and Logan on rides. We did Big Thunder a couple times, Winnie the Pooh, Splash Mountain (Logan’s first time, and he loved it!), the Haunted Mansion, and Pirates of the Caribbean. We had only been in the park two hours, and we had done a ton, so it was shaping up to be an awesome day.

We decided that Kelly, Beth, Lindsay, and Logan would go on Indiana Jones, while Lane and I stayed out and took care of the babies. While I mixed a bottle, Beth held Ryan and Lindsay and Logan hung around. Logan climbed up on some rocks near where we were sitting. A minute later, Aladdin and Jasmine came by, and they saw Logan, so they came over to talk to him. This spooked him a little bit, and he backed up … but when you’re standing on a rock, there is no back, there’s only down. He fell down, and Beth and I knew immediately from his scream that he was hurt bad. Logan is a super tough kid, and his “I’m hurt really bad” cry has a unique sound. We ran over to him and picked him up, and it was immediately clear that his arm was broken. You know how the part of your arm between your elbow and wrist is straight? Yeah, his wasn’t.

Once I picked him up and stabilized the arm, he stopped crying, partly because he’s tough and partly because his body went into shock. The Disneyland people were wonderful — they quickly formed a perimeter around us to give us our space, they called 911, etc. The Disney nurse came and checked him out and put a makeshift cardboard splint on the arm while we waited for the paramedics. After ten minutes or so, the paramedics finally got to us, and they helped Beth and Logan onto the stretcher. (Beth was holding Logan by this point because I had a bout with nausea as I was sitting there and thinking about how bad the arm was broken.)

As we were being led/wheeled out of Disneyland, one of the employees handed me a bag that had bottles of water, Vitamin Water, several different food items, and a stuffed hippo for Logan. Super thoughtful. Lane and Kelly kept Ryan for us, and they kept Lindsay with them until Flavio got there and took her with him and Hannah for a while.

The rest of the day was long and sad and heartbreaking, but also heartwarming and a lot of other good adjectives. We spent a couple hours thinking the break would require surgery, but the orthopedic surgeon ultimately said that because he is young and his bones are still growing anyway, they could set it and he would be just fine. Everyone at the hospital — UC Irvine Medical Center — was amazing. The nurses were very friendly and good at their jobs, and the ortho who set the arm did a magical job. We were very thankful for “waking sedation,” which allowed Logan to be awake but totally unaware that there were doctors tugging and straightening his mangled arm. And soon enough, he had a temporary cast on his arm, and he was resting comfortably. And all the while, we knew that our other kids were safe and happy and being cared for, thanks to Lane, Kelly, Flavio, Niki, and literally dozens of other friends who texted to see what they could do to help.

We finally got back to our hotel room at about 8:30 that evening. Logan didn’t sleep great that night, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. And hey, we got all the negative stuff out of the way on the very first day at Disneyland. ALL THE NEGATIVE STUFF!!! RIGHT???

Friday morning, we headed into the park, where we met up with my brother Chris and his daughter, Emily. Lindsay and Logan absolutely adore their cousin Emmy, so we were really looking forward to spending the day with her. Chris took Emmy and Lindsay over to some of the fun big kid rides, notably Star Tours and Space Mountain. In the meantime, we took Logan and Ryan to Fantasyland to ride some of the more mellow rides. I started to suspect that Logan was a super tough guy when we were in line for Dumbo, our first ride of the day. He accidentally whacked his arm/cast on the railing, and he looked up at me and said, “Wow, Daddy, that didn’t hurt at all!” So we slowly worked our way up to faster and rockier rides, until eventually, Beth took him on the Matterhorn. He loved it, and we officially declared that he was going to be just fine the rest of the trip. He went on Space Mountain for the first time (with his Uncle Lane), and later we returned to the scene of the crime so he could get his first ride on Indiana Jones.

Did I mention that we got to go to the front of most of the lines? We did, because Disneyland gave us a handicap access card along with several “front of the line” passes that are good on most rides. So on rides that the handicap pass got us to the front, we used it; on the others, we used the magic passes.

It turned out to be a wonderful day, spent with family and friends at the Happiest Place on Earth. Until about 1:30, that is, when Beth discovered that she had no idea where her iPhone was. She couldn’t remember seeing it since lunch. I pulled up the “Find My iPhone” app, and sure enough, GPS placed it somewhere in the vicinity of where we had lunch. Uncle Chris took my phone and set off to find the phone. But then it started moving, and I met up with him, and we spent a couple hours trying to find the phone until the GPS stopped responding, which meant either a) it had gone out of reception, b) someone had turned it off, or c) its battery had died. After a while it didn’t matter, since my phone died too. But before it did, I used “Find My iPhone” to lock her phone and send a message to it with my phone number. And we went and enjoyed the rest of our evening, although a third straight day of drama was wearing on us emotionally.

At 12:47 a.m., as we all slept, my cell phone rang. It was the Disneyland Lost & Found, and they got my number off of Beth’s phone, which had been turned in a few minutes ago. I went back to sleep confident that the tide had turned, and that the worst was really behind us.

And guess what? It really was this time!!!

Saturday morning started with a trip to the Lost & Found to get Beth’s phone back. It was dead and unusable until we could charge it that night, but at least it was back in our possession. We also learned for sure that morning that our trip had been extended by one day. Disneyland and DigiCert had combined forces to give us an extra day in the park and at the hotel, since we lost the entire first day. It warmed our hearts all over again.

Logan was feeling just fine by this point. A little Tylenol in the morning and a little at night, and you’d never know. We went on a few rides in the morning before we went to the luncheon with everyone from Digicert. The food was good and the company was fun. We are absolutely blessed to be a part of this wonderful company! We spent the rest of the day with Niki and Flavio and their girls until it was time for them to leave and then we had a wonderful time just with our little family for the rest of the time. Sunday was amazing and we went on so many rides! The flight home was less chaotic than the flight there and we were happy to be safely home. Thank you, Digicert, for another amazing weekend!

This is our first and ONLY picture we took at the park on Thursday. It’s also the only with Logan cast-free.

Most expensive face painting ever, but totally worth it!


Pretty, pretty girls!

Our broken little puppy back at the scene of the crime. He was standing on a rock on the other side of that wood fence when it happened.

Ryan pretty much loved it all!

Mickey and Minnie!




Ryan enjoying the parade.

It may be California, but it still gets cold! Toon Town doesn’t have too much there, but we love it!



Oh Lindsay and her eyes always being closed…

Lindsay got to bring her class pet, Bob, on our trip. He was so much fun to have with us!

We cannot wait until next year for CARS LAND!!!