What do you do in Idaho when the sun shines and the wind stops? Slip and Slide!

Isabel and Andrew had a great time enjoying the long awaited sunshine.
Andrew's favorite thing was spraying his sister with the hose. He thinks it is really fun to tease her.

The water was pretty COLD!!!

He loves playing with the hose. He had a blue swim shirt on so he wouldn't get sunburned, but it was making him cold so I took it off and his skin was blue.

Beautiful Girl!!!

They had so much fun playing out in the warm weather. It has been a really long winter and we are so excited for it to finally warm up enough to play outside. It was so much fun watching them play together, even though they are so far apart in age they still have a lot of fun playing together. I hope they will always be great friends.

Isabel's braces

Isabel got her braces on this Thursday. She was really excited at first, but then that soon faded into nervousness and now she is already tired of them. They sure make her look older. I can't believe how fast she is growing up and becoming a beautiful young woman! The good news for her is that her orthodontist said she would probably only have to wear them for around 18 months or less. So she will be all done with it before she really does go into young women's.

House update

Welcome to our new home!

Jon was doing a little back fill and Andrew loves to ride along in the backhoe. Doesn't Jon look great in his new role as farmer!!!

The rock started to go up yesterday and should be finished today. It looks great.

We love our deck off the back. It will be lots of fun this summer.

The house is coming along great. They should start sheet rocking the inside and finish up the rock on the outside today. We are getting anxious to get it done. We have been living out of boxes for almost a year now and are excited to spread out and get settled.

Horse Show

Last weekend Isabel competed in her first schooling show. She did awesome! It was so fun to watch and see her having such a great time. She competed in three different events. First she did showmanship where you lead your horse with a halter in a set pattern and the judge walks around your horse and looks. It was the thing that she has worked on the least so it went a little rough. She was really nervous about it and so that made her horse nervous and a bit uncooperative. Next she did western equitation, where she walked, trotted, loped and backed her horse up in a pattern. She did super and took a second place ribbon. Then her last event was a walk trot equitation where they go in a circle as a group and the judge tells them when to switch gaits and directions. This is the one she has worked on the most. She did so great!!! We were so excited. She got another second place ribbon and a trophy. That day it was raining so they were trying to hurry the competition along and combined to classes and so there were adults in with her and she beat some of them. The places above her were adults and so if they hadn't combined the classes she would have won. It was lots of fun. She has another show on June 13 at the barn she rides at. Isabel doing her western equitation.
Isabel and two of the girls she rides with at the barn. Their names are Alisa and Whitney and they both have been riding for awhile and they were great to help Isabel since we didn't know what we were doing.

Isabel's first ribbon. Doesn't she look cute in her pink cowgirl clothes.

The proud winner of two ribbons and a trophy!

Update on our house

Today they finished back filling around our foundation and poured the basement floor. They also delivered all of the wood. So framing starts tomorrow. I am really excited for that step so we can start to see it take shape. We decided to move in with my parents while it is getting built. So we will get to sit and watch it go up from her front window.
Jon's last day at Beneficial was yesterday so now you can call him farmer Jon, since he is now officially an Idaho farmer.

A huge sigh of relief

We spent a couple of days this week at Primary Childrens and they ran some more tests on Andrew. They put him under again and scoped his throat again to see how it looked when he was healthy. The doctor told us when it was done that it looked good and he wouldn't need surgery after all. It was a huge relief!!! They also wanted to test him for acid reflux so we had to spend the night there while they did a ph probe study. It was a bummer for us all. Andrew kept asking to go home and saying that he wasn't sick. The worst part was he could only eat or drink every four hours and that was a little hard to explain to a two year old. We don't have the results of that test yet but we should soon. So hopefully we can avoid anymore hospital stays for awhile.

We dug a hole FINALLY

We dug a hole for our house today. WOW! We are really doing it. I can't believe it.

Andrew's vacation

My poor little Andrew got really sick while we were on vacation and ended up spending most of it in the hospital. He had really bad croup and no matter what we tried he couldn't breath. So he ended up in the ICU at the children's hospital for a few days so they could give him breathing treatments every hour and steroids every six hours. The day before we left they scoped his throat and to check and see if he had some sort of blockage or something. They found what they thought was that his vocal chords have some extra flesh and when they get inflamed then it blocks his airway off 90%. So the doctor there recommended he have some surgery to fix that. But we couldn't do it there because they have to wait for the swelling to go down. So since we have been home we have seen a doctor in Salt Lake and he wants to rescope him to look again while he is healthy and see if it looks as bad. They are also going to test him for reflux because that can also cause swelling and inflammation and could be compounding the problem. So we will see what they find out at the end on the month. We are keeping our fingers crossed that he won't need to have surgery after all.

Maybe we will have to take him to Lagoon this summer to make up for this crappy vacation.

Disneyland

Andrew was a little nervous about the characters but he really wanted to see Tigger. So we waited in the line and then when we got up to see him he got scared so mom and Isabel had to help him out.
My little pumpkin!
You can kind of see his black eye in this picture. The first night we got there he was jumping on the couch in our condo and when he jumped off he hit just below his eye on the corner of the coffee table. It was a rough trip for him.

Isabel always likes to get her face painted when we go on vacation.

Gotta love Goofy!

Andrew was not at all afraid to get a picture with Lightening McQueen. He was so excited to get to touch him. Isabel was off riding a riding the Soarin' ride with her grandparents.

The Beach

I love this picture of daddy and son.

We really do love going to the beach. It was one of the highlights of our trip. It wasn't very warm but the kids managed to get wet anyway. It is lots of fun to watch Isabel get in the waves, chase birds and look for shells. She is amazingly at home on the beach. I think the only place she might like better is in the barn with her horse. If only she could ride her horse on the beach I think she would be in heaven. Andrew thought the waves were tons of fun until one took his feet out from under him and he was in the water up to his neck. After that he was really cold and not quite so fun.

Our CRAZY Life

I am probably the worst blogger ever. I need to set aside some time just for keeping up with it. We have had tons of stuff going on. We went to California on vaction the first part of Febuary and had nice day at the beach and a great day at Disneyland. Then Andrew got really sick. We had to take him into the emergency room because he had come down with a really bad case of the croup and couldn't breath. We ended up taking him in again the next night and from there they ended up admitting him into the ICU at the childrens hospital there. He just couldn't breath and they were doing everything they could do for him. It was really scary! He was able to get released the night before we flew out. So it wasn't the best vacation ever. My parents and I did take Isabel one day to Legoland so she wouldn't be totally bummed out, but we missed daddy and Andrew the whole time we were there. He is now seeing a specialist in Salt Lake at Primary Childrens and is going to down at the end of the month to have his throat scoped again. When they did it in California they said they he may have to have surgery on his vocal chords because they appear to be to large and blocking his airway. So at the end of the month we will find out.
The other big event that has happened was the end of February we found out that Jon's parent company decided to close all of their consumer lending division in the US. So Jon's office is officially closing the 6th of April. So I think we are going to try our hand at farming and see if we can grow some huge potatoes for our friends in New Mexico. We found out about Jon's job the day before we were set to break ground on our new house. It was really disappointing. We postponed it temporarily until we were sure what we were doing. But we have decided to go ahead with it anyway. We broke ground today. It is very exciting and very scary at the same time. We decided that if we are going to farm we needed to live out there and there isn't any other houses available out that way. So I guess we will build one and hope for the best.
So that is kind of what is going on here. I will try to keep you all posted on the latest happenings way up here in Idaho.

Our house update.

We are now the proud owners of 4 1/2 acres of prime potato growing property thanks to my parents and grandparents. It will no longer grow any more potatoes, but hopefully we will grow many new memories there instead. Things are starting to move rather quickly on our house. We finished up our plans and have applied for our building permits. We are going out with our builder this week to plot out exactly where the house will sit. It is a bit overwhelming when you walk out in the middle of a field and go "well maybe here would be good" . There are just so many possibilities, so luckily Jon is better about making decisions that I am, or three months from now we might still me trying to figure out the best place to put the house. Hopefully within the next week or two we will have a hole in the ground. It is a little bit tricky because we have quite a bit of snow and it is really cold to be pouring concrete. So I really hope that it starts to warm up soon. It is really exciting!

Andrew the fish

Andrew is my little fish. He loves the water and loves to swim. We try to take the kids to a hot spring that is about an hour from here and let them swim at least once a month. It is a super kid friendly pool because the water is nice and warm and they have a large shallow area. If it wasn't such a drive we would probably go more often.
Jon is teaching Andrew to float on his back. He is fearless of the water and is trying to learn to swim. When he doesn't have his life jacket on he tries to paddle his arms and kick. I would bet he will be swimming by the end of summer.

He LOVES the diving board!!! He loves to jump off by himself and swim over to the side. It is so cute because he looks so little standing up there all alone.

Andrew swimming to the side of the pool.

My little man!

Isabel and Shiloh

Isabel and Shiloh at the barn.
Andrew likes to see his breath while we are trying to stay warm while watching Isabel ride. It has been really cold. Most days we feel really lucky if we get up to 25 and don't have any wind. We sure do miss the winters in New Mexico!

Isabel's pride and joy!

This is Isabel's teacher Lisa. She has been great with Isabel. She is a real cowgirl.

Isabel started taking horse riding lessons in October. She loves it tons!!! She pretty much thinks and talks nonstop about horse stuff. It is really a lot of fun to watch her light up and get so animated when she talks about her horse and the stuff she is doing with it. We got her a horse named Shiloh for Christmas. We also took my old saddle in and had them clean it up and shorten up the stirrups for her. So slowly but surely we are getting her set up to be a super cute cowgirl.