Fun with Daddy

Lona had to take care of some business in AZ, so I am lucky enough to take a couple days off work to spend some "Daddy Time" with the kiddos. We miss mommy a lot, but we are making the most of our time together. We went to the zoo and the children's museum yesterday. Today we went to a national guard family day. They had a lot of great activities and Ammon loved. building and watching his rocket take off.

He got to launch his rocket twice with impressive results. It easily surpassed 100 ft both times.

He also tried to launch Mike from Monsters, Inc.

Maddie was in constant amazement at the zoo.

Chillin' on a wood frog at the zoo.

Ammon in front of the flamingos. He says that he really loves flamingos.

It's Melman!

This was a cute moment where Ammon actually agreed to hold his sister's hand. He looks thrilled, doesn't he?

Ammon is sporting the new pajamas he got from a Disney giveaway at our activity today.

A New England Easter

The weather was absolutely beautiful this weekend. I love sunshine!

There has been a lot rain and flooding in our area and many people had water in the basements and even on the main floor of their homes. The entire Warwick Mall was under water. All Nathan could see on his way home were the tops of the vehicles, the rest of it was completely covered by the flooding. There were several road delays too while Nathan travelled home due to roads being closed. We're grateful that we weren't personally effected by the floods and our thoughts and prayers go out to those that were.

Maddie Sue was not too fond of the Easter Bunny
Daddy & Miss Maddie Sue
Ammon & Ethan Adams after the egg hunt
Maddie Sue & Mommy

The kids helped me bake & decorate a "bunny" cake. They weren't too excited to eat the cake, but enjoyed the candy that we put on top of it.

Happy Easter from our homes to yours.

Family Update

So, I’ve been lagging on blog posts lately. Mainly because I lost the battery charger to the camera either somewhere in Arizona or on the plane ride back to Connecticut when I flew back with Ammon & Maddie Sue in January. What good is a post without pictures, huh?

Here’s an update on our family: Nathan was “TDY” for five weeks, while he attended SOS Training in Alabama for latter part of February and the entire month of March. It seemed like the weather in Connecticut was either snowing or raining the entire time that Nathan was gone, which kind of made the situation a little more depressing. However, the day after I flew to Arizona the sun finally showed itself in Connecticut.

After completing an internal audit with Dean Douglas Homes & Development and Kingston Contracting for the 2009 combined financial statements, a letter was received in the mail regarding a state audit. In less than a week, I booked flights to Arizona and travelled back with Ammon and Maddie Sue. I am so incredibly blessed to have such a supportive family who helped take care of my dear children while I spent numerous hours at the office preparing and completing the state audit.

After the audit, we flew to Birmingham, Alabama to attend Nathan’s graduation and then drove back to Connecticut. To be totally honest, I guess I’ve been a bit of a pessimist the past few weeks, because this was not an event that I was looking forward to. It ended up being an incredible experience though. Ammon and Maddie Sue had their share of meltdowns in the car and we were all pretty cramped in the Corolla, but altogether it was a very positive experience.
We visited cousins in Georgia. It has been years since we last saw Tim & Shayleen Palmer. We were able to meet Katrina and Katie, both of whom we’d never seen in person, but felt like we knew from their blog posts. Ammon really enjoyed interacting with Katrina and “making music with her on the piano.” He also constantly repeats a phrase that she said while eating lunch, that when she was three years old, she didn’t like tomatoes, but now that she is four she does. The entire thing is kind of humorous, because he still will not eat tomatoes!

After staying the night in North Carolina, we visited our sister Emily and her sweet family in Virginia (well, everyone but David who was away doing volunteer work for the less fortunate). We met cousin Rhett for the first time (of whom we also felt like we already knew from blog postings) and played with Preston and Claire. Emily also made a wonderful lunch for us. We stopped by the Temple in Washington DC, walked through the visitor’s center and grounds. We then made the long trip home arriving very early Sunday morning. It was wonderful to have time to interact with Nathan. We're happy to be home & settled and back into our regular routines again.

Everyone in our home is finally healthy after taking turns with cold & flu bugs. We're crossing our fingers and hoping that it stays that way. Nathan leaves for Alabama for a training for the Air National Guard for 5 weeks.

Ammon has been facinated with creating monsters for months now, and recently began creating snowmen too. He is very particular about the # of fingers that his snowmen have on each hand, the # of holes in each button (for the eyes), the size of the carrot (for the nose) and the # of stones and colors used (for the mouth). He is very much a perfectionist and is very frustrated when the drawing don't measure up to his expectations. I can honestly relate to his frustration as I can be the same way with things, but having Ammon in my life has really helped me to mellow out.

Maddie Sue loves shoes and walks around trying to wear everyone's. It's adorable watching her trying to walk in my shoes! She does pretty good considering how tiny her little feet are inside a size 9 women's shoe.

What a mess!

Ammon & his snowman "3Body"

Mealtime with his friends

Maddie loves to chat on the phone...

Christmas & Sunshine..

For the first time in four years, we travelled back to Arizona for the holidays and spent Christmas and New Years with our families. The trip started out a little rocky when we all ended up with a stomach virus, but we still managed to have a lot of fun and enjoyed spending some quality time with our families. Thank you all for the special memories made! We attended Christmas parties, visited zoos, enjoyed riding quads, playing with cousins, Nathan attended a Suns game with his dad and brothers, I had a girls' night out with friends from high school, double date night with Aaron & Tamra, and we had a deep pit bbq in Tonto Basin.

I also experienced another first... Dean Douglas Homes, Dean Douglas Development, and Kingston Contracting had their first internal audit. Numerous hours were spent in preparation, but I was very pleased with the end results.

Wedding Video

Since we currently only had our wedding video montage on VHS, I decided to enter the digital age and put in online. There is a funny story behind it. When Lona and I first got married, we had no video done. A year later, I took on a job that trained me to edit video. I later took up doing wedding video montages for people and it bothered me that I didn't have one of my own. I then set out to recreate our wedding moment so we could have our own video montage. I grew out my hair, Lona got her hair done, and got my friend, Trevor Dayley, to shoot the video. It may be a little cheesy, but I am glad that we made it. Lona and I are coming up on ten years of marriage this June and I cannot believe how fast time has passed. I am more in love with Lona than ever before. She is an amazing woman and mother and I am blessed have her in my life.

The video has a little outtake reel at the end and the clip of Trevor walking away in his socks. I had brought a change of clothes to get to work, but forgot shoes, so Trevor let me use the shoes he was wearing since he was heading home anyways.