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.

Yep, There's Monsters...

Ammon is incredibly smart and creative. He gets really into things and usually obsesses about it for long periods at a time. Recently his free time has been spent creating monsters. I’m not sure if Halloween started this or the movie that we watched together “Monsters vs. Aliens.” He draws them (eyes, mouth, legs, arms, horns, and feet) and then asks for me to cut them out for him. He is adamant that we cut it a certain way. He envisions it looking a specific way and when it doesn’t turn out as he expects he can get a little frustrated. Honestly, I am the same way at times and this is why I seldom do crafts.

Ammon names each monster and interacts with it as if it were a real person. He is very compassionate towards his monsters as well. No matter how many times I tell him that he needs to feed himself and not his monsters, he still insists that they are hungry too. He even attempted to take one with him into bath, but was very upset when the ink washed off the paper and it to fall apart.

The other day, I threw out some of his monsters. Some of them had food on it and were starting to look a little yucky. We seriously had about 50-75 of them in the kitchen drawer and I was running out of space. Surely, he wouldn't miss some of these, right? Well, the next morning Ammon was frantic. He was running around in a daze, screaming about his Monsters. It took me awhile to realize that he knew exactly which ones were missing and described them to me. I felt awful. Unfortunately at this point, the trash had been picked up and digging through the trashcan wasn't an option. I was absolutely amazed that he could describe them all to me, the one with thirteen eyes and blue and black legs, the one with red and orange dots all over its body, etc.

I felt awful about the situation not realizing that he was attached to each and everyone one of these monsters. Luckily, Ammon finally calmed down and we created new monsters together. Today I took pictures of his daily creations. Enjoy!

Each Monster is given a name. This is Blue.

Ammon brings us a lot of joy. Isn't he just the cutest little boy?

Our Little Princess

Maddie Sue is such a joy to our family. She is always smiling and laughing. She loves to run and chase Ammon, enjoys playing peek-a-boo, and has an amazing sense of humor. She loves to wrestle with her big brother and is fearless when it comes to climbing up objects. She has managed to climb onto a chair at our kitchen table and then proceeded to get onto the table. It scared me to death the first time I saw her do this. The chair legs are higher than she is, but she somehow manages to pull herself up onto them. Dinner preparation can be a challenge to say the least.

She seems to be a bit of a tomboy and kind of reminds me of my niece Kaili when she was Maddie Sue’s age. At the same time, she loves her baby doll and insists on wearing the necklaces that daddy brought home for her awhile back. I never thought having a little girl in our home could ever be this much fun!

Maddie is one tough little girl!She makes the funniest facial expressions.

She has four teeth now... and knows how to use them!