Ginger bread houses 2010

The not so serious side of the table. Well, that's not necessarily true. Harrison was serious about eating candy. Jackson did a good job decorating, he had chimneys.

Catherine was the official house froster.

Sean, Jameson, Emma and Larissa doing some decorating. I totally messed up. I put a bunch of houses in Catherine's car. Unfortunately, I put Larissa and Hailey's houses in the wrong car. The girls were very good natured about my mistake, they made new houses and said they liked them even better than the first ones. I was bound and determined no one was leaving their house at my house.

The hardest worker was without a doubt little Alex. He said that he is "an artist and has been one before." He started before everyone else and finished after everyone else. He takes his decorating very seriously and it shows.

Sonia and Laila came to decorate. They were very crafty with their houses.

Trying to get the cat to jump rope. Little Miss Maren is growing up fast. She is still doing her boot scooting boogie, but is also crawling and surfing the furniture on two feet.

Sean and his "girl" cousins.

David and his bones

David decided to leave the safety of his snugglie and hit the slopes. Unfortunately his snow boarding day ended with him being carted off the mountain in a ski patrol sled. Hmm, he broke his arm skateboarding, his finger playing baseball. What do you think he broke this time?

It's hard to see because the x-ray is dark but he snapped his clavicle in two. No more snow boarding for him for awhile!

Christmas Morning

Needless to say Sean was the most excited.  He woke up and yelled, "It's Christmas, Santa came!" He was pretty darn cute. Alika got up early and had breakfast made for everyone. Carter came over next and made short work of his stocking.

David had the Santa spirit.

Grandma passing out her money cards.

Alika and the visiting kitten.

The family minus grandma. She was taking the pictures. Those are her feet!

Yes, those are snugglies. Too funny. Grandma bought them for the kids. Alika and David are always in the game room wrapped up in a blanket.

The coolest gift ever. Steph made this picture of the house from pictures. The picture of the picture doesn't do it justice. She carved it out of wood so it is dimensional. Now I only wish our yard looked as good as the yard she made.

Christmas Candy

Ya know I look OLD! On the positive side I am younger than I will ever be again. I guess when you have kids on the 30 side of 20 you can't be 20 or even 30.

We made hard candy. Alex and Loreal were the candy troopers and cut until all the candy was done. Nothing like burning your finger tips to remind you that Christmas time is here.

And that's a candy wrap. Cinnamon, orange, strawberry and cherry.

Oh Deer, It's AJ's Dear



AJ's girlfriend came from Costa Rica for Christmas. She met the family and didn't get on the plane and immediately fly home so we take that as a good sign! She's been a really good sport. She and AJ put on antlers, came to the nursing home  and helped drive and chaperon a bunch of Montessori school kids. The kids sang in Spanish,  it was really cute.



Steph even hung out at work with AJ for a day. How exciting is that! We've made a list of all that is "Utah" for her to do during her stay.

The pre-school had a Christmas Pageant. Because we were out of town I didn't know about it until Monday morning and had until 6 pm to have Sean dressed like a lamb, Shepard or wise man. I had to work 12 to 6 so time was of the essence. We went with the Scottish Shepard bathrobe look! Sean thinks Santa is the coolest thing ever.

We had Christmas with Kylie and Brie yesterday. They are so happy and look so good. AJ said "I've never seen them look so pampered." I thought that was a good description.  I can't believe how big they all are. (Side note, Ryan was in jail last weekend. He got picked up for a bench warrant and got bailed out within 12 hours.) The kids cases have also been moved to West Jordan. Their judge retired and Judge Valdez is considered bias because he already terminated Jenny's rights to her first son. On a funny note, we were in the car and Kylie said "I was at the office with Lynette (new foster mom) and she had a picture of Daddy and Grandpa on her computer and they weren't smiling.) He, he, the infamous mug shot. Jenny said "I can't believe she showed that to them." I said "I can't believe they did what they did to make the news." I talked to Lynette briefly and she is already disgusted by Ryan. Gee, it doesn't take long!

This is from two weeks ago but I thought it was cute. Alika came with me to DCFS to supervise a visit with the girls and we walked to McDonald's and all three of them wanted to walk with her. Actually skip would be the more accurate description.

And that's a Florida wrap

It finally warmed up! Sean and I went on the beach and played pirates. The birds were trying to steal or treasure. We actually had our shoes off and were in the water. The natives said we were crazy. Oh well!

This is the pirate ship.

We tried to lure the birds with crab meat. Silly birds weren't having it so we decided to quit wasting our crab on them and ate it ourselves.

Florida sunset

Don spent the morning flying before we left to drive back to Orlando. We spent the night in Orlando so we would be close to the airport. We left the "lizard house" in Lake Placid and went to the HOE TA EL. I love how Sean says that. The air plane has weasels (wheels).

It got windy towards the end of the morning. It was a fun trip. It went really fast. As always it's good to be back home.

Fire ants are not your friend

Fire ants are not nice critters! Don sat down in what he thought was a patch of sand in the grass at the airport but alas it was not a benign pile of sand it was the nest of an irritable ant colony. According to the Internet millions of ants live in these underground tunnels. Don initially felt an ant sting on his hand and brushed it away only to be consumed by stings. They went up his shirt sleeves into his arms up his neck and in his hair. We quit counting after the 75 bites on his arms. We don't know how many there are because there are a lot in his scalp. Sean and I were down at the beach when this happened. Don came home stripped on the patio and went straight to the shower. I wrapped the clothes up in a towel carried them away from my body and put them in the washer.

The ant bites leave white pustules that look like big zits. How can you get so many bites in such a short time? According to the Internet, when one ant attacks it secretes a chemical that make all the ants bite simultaneously and once they start biting they don't stop. The take a chunk out of your skin with their pincher's and then they stick a stinger in the tail into your skin and move around a circle. Seriously, they are ants with a really bad attitude! They inject some sort of toxin that causes the pustule. There are a couple of hundred hospital admissions because of them each year.

More Florida adventure

This whole trip to Florida came about because Don wanted to take ultra light flying lessons and you can't do that in Utah. He also wanted to buy a hyper light airplane. Here it is! It is seriously light which I find seriously scary but Don is seriously excited. These planes evolved from hang gliders. They have an engine and you steer them but they only seat one person. Don is out taking flying lessons today!

Checking out the new toy. Now we just have to figure out how to get it home. Fly it you say? Easier said then done. Since it's a hyper light plane it only flies 150 miles on a tank of gas. That does not exactly make for easy cross country flying. We will have to put it in a trailer and drive it (or have someone else drive it) across the country.

There is a serious gecko population here. You open your door and the lizards run in. They are called house lizards for obvious reasons. They will hang out on your face indefinitely. They are funny little critters. They eat bugs.

Sean named the first gecko "Treasure" as in he treasured it. The second gecko didn't get  a name.

We picked a couple of oranges. Florida is freaking out because the cold is endangering the fruit. The oranges on the trees are juice oranges and are not pretty like the oranges you buy at the store.

The condo we are staying at is on a beach. We keep trying to play but it has been too cold. We go out for awhile, play come home then try again.

Discovery Cove

We went to Discovery Cove. It's an awesome place where you can swim with dolphins. I've wanted to go there ever since I saw Don's sister Darci's pictures of swimming with the dolphins. She used to take her science kids there for a major field trip every other summer. You have to be six to swim so Sean couldn't do it. We decided to just do the non dolphin part of the experience. We swam with sting rays and snorkeled.  We met a 50 pound turtle who liked carrots.



Hanging out in the water.



Check out the two hottest guys on the beach.



Sean looked cute in his gear but I think it's pretty much impossible for a 3-year-old to snorkel. They just don't have the coordination. By golly he tried though and Don sure tried to teach him. The water with the fish and sting rays was seriously cold. We spent more time in the warm river. It was a quarter mile river with caves, birds and water falls. We met a cute little girl named Lora from Ireland who stayed with us after we pulled her out of a deep area. I kept asking her if her parents were worried and she said no. Eventually we heard she was being over head paged and searched for. There was no real good way to get her out so we had to keep her until the end. Don was able to tell a life guard she was with us and her parents eventually saw us passing under a bridge. Her parents were much calmer than I would have been. It was funny at first I couldn't tell if she had a speech problem or an accent. I asked her where she was from and she said "Belfast." I still didn't understand and she said "ya know, Nothen Iland."

  All and all it was a fun day. It was nice the first two hours and then it got cold and started to rain. We didn't get to stay the whole day. It is on my to do again list when the weather is nicer. It was a very nice resort, it's all inclusive food, etc and they limit their guest to 1000 per day so it's not crowded.



Florida

Our flight to Florida was uneventful, hooray! The biggest drama was trying to find a way to keep the ear buds from the head set in Sean's ears so he could watch a movie.

I remembered I had a couple of Iron Man band aids in my purse so we taped those suckers in his ears and all was well.

Our plane didn't get in until midnight and it took what seemed like forever to get our rental car. It was after 1 when we got to the hotel. Once at the hotel the check in was taking a long time. I asked "is there a problem?" He said "I only have rooms with one king bed, I don't have any rooms with two beds." "Oh for Pete's sake, just give us a room with one bed Sean will sleep with us." "Are you sure, that would make it so much easier" he asked? He offered to bring in a roll away we declined. He was going through the cancellations trying to find a room. "Yes, I'm sure one bed will be fine!" We went to our room and fell into bed! We had an early morning planned at Sea World. About an hour later I heard a loud gurgling sound. I know that sound, it's the one Sean makes before he hurls! I was up about two seconds before the spew so I was able to catch most of it on a pillow. I threw the pillow case on the floor, cleaned Sean up and we were asleep again within minutes. About 45 minutes later I didn't hear anything I just felt the warm wet as it hit my face. Awesome. Sean was screaming. I cleaned him up, surveyed the damage. I was now wishing we had a room with two beds so we could move to a clean one! I thought about calling for clean sheets but it was 5 am and we had to be up in a couple of hours so I cleaned Sean up, threw some towels over the barf laid on top of them and went back to sleep. I was doubtful that we would make it to Sea World at 8:30. At 7 Sean woke up happy. We all took showers, let the hotel know about the lovely mess he had made and went to breakfast. Sean didn't eat but he did drink some juice.

Off to Sea World we went

We were met by an orange footed penguin

We bought a "family fun VIP tour". It was worth every penny. We got to feed dolphins.  We were able to touch them too. It was so awesome. We had a tour guide who took us behind the scenes of sea world. We got a personal visit with Santa. Sean was so excited. He was disappointed the night before that Santa didn't meet us at the airport. Santa asked him what he wanted for Christmas but all Sean could do was stare at him and say "you're Santa!" Santa gave him a bell like the one on Polar Express. It was quite the gift.

The dolphins had a lot to say to Sean. I don't speak dolphin but I believe they were saying, "Give us the fish little boy!"

We fed the sea lions too. We couldn't get as close to them as we did the dolphins. Apparently Sea Lions have big teeth and bad attitudes. They were grateful for the food. The birds kept trying to steal the food.

Did you know that penguins poop shoots out five feet from their bums? This is important because if you are going to pet a penguin you don't want to get behind it's bum. They shoot their poop out so it won't get on them! I had never touched a penguin so that was fun. This penguins name is Mario. You pet them with two fingers because they feel like they are being touched by another penguins beak. I missed AJ at this point because he was such a penguin loving kid. He would have loved to pet a penguin when he was little. I'm not sure at 21 that he would care so much but it was  a neat thing to do. If the mom penguins aren't taking good care of their eggs Sea World replaces them with wooden eggs and incubate the real ones. Sneaky Sea World.

The other cool thing about the tour was you got to skip to the front of lines. The Polar Express ride was a little too scary for Sean so we just walked through the exhibit. We loved the Shamu show.  There was a three month old baby whale that hung out with it's mom while she performed. That's a real working mother. Whales breast feed for two years. That would make the World Health Organization happy. Dolphins breast feed for a year. We went to the dolphin nursery. Sean wanted to ride the Shamu roller coaster but Don and I were both remembering the night before and said no. He didn't eat anything all day, just Popsicles and Gatorade but he was a trooper.

On the way out we ran into another penguin. Sean was very observant and told us this penguin had yellow feet and not orange. I would have never noticed. Sean fell asleep in the stroller on the way out of the park. It was a terrific day!