From October

My father and grandfather came into town for the festivities. We took the opportunity to take a 4 generation picture.


Maybe the love of wheels is in our genetics.

So we made this water bottle rocket launcher. It was really cool.

The kids all decorated their own bottles. They were excited to become "Rocket Scientists!"


So here is one getting pressurized with air ready to launch. There is also water in it to act as a propellant.
We would launch them and get wet while all the kids looked on as their rockets reached for the tops of the trees.

One of us spotted the bottle while the other tried to not get hit.
Isn't that what every 5 year old boy wants to do for their birthday?

17 October 2009

No explanation needed. Just Picture.

8 October 2009

Spoons

I know I haven't ranted here in a bit, so here is my spoon rant. It is really a utensil rant in general. We have successfully grown a pequin bush. To most Americans this would be known as a birds eye bush. It produces peppers. They are some of the best tasting peppers that we have had. They are small and red. They pack quite a punch though. They rank around a 4 on the 0-10 scale for heat. Jalepenos are like a 1-2 for reference. So, I decided to try one of these peppers. I haven't really had anything like this for 7 years or so. When I used to eat these on my mission, I could just drink some milk or something to help calm the heat in my mouth. No milk and low tolerance for heat means I needed to find a solution. There was the equivalence of a frozen raspberry smoothie in the freezer. That was my back up plan. So I popped one of these peppers into my mouth. It was hot as ever. I ate it and had a drink of water followed by a soothing cold treat to cover the spice.

So this is where the spoons come in. In preparation to cool my mouth, I asked my wife to reach into the dishwasher to pull out a spoon. She was kind enough to do this. She grabbed a metal spoon with a plastic handle like you would get at the dollar store. I knew that plastic handles and frozen treats do not mix well, so I asked her to get one that was all metal. As part of every flatware set, there seems to be 1 soup spoon. She managed to pull it out. It would have been great for scooping out the frozen treat, but I really wanted a thin slab to cover my whole tongue. I thanked here and dug down for a normal metal spoon. It worked great.

We were putting away the dishes later that night. I went to put away the utensils. There were probably 10 spoons, 3 forks and 1 knife to put away, aside from the 6 baby spoons. I couldn't exactly figure out at first why this seemed to odd to me except that the spoon holder was overflowing with spoons. Apparently a lot of spoons are used in our house. I don't really eat cereal because of the milk issue, so I don't really use spoons frequently. It was a little concerning that there was such a disparagy in the spoon to fork ratio. Does anyone else experience this, or is it just me?

27 September 2009

Just some random views of life.

A face Levi likes to make
Look! I found a bucket. Not the one full of balls behind me, but the empty one.
He got there by himself... and couldn't get out.
Is this helpful or not?
Book reading time for the boys.

At least the fan hadn't been turned on. Never leave the baby powder out where a 2 year old can find it. Although the room smells a little fresher now.

That's all for this installment.

My most recent find: cereal for $0.64 a box!!!!!! I also found a clearance item at Michael's that rang up as $0.01!!!!!

School is going very well for both Daddy and Michael! They are both learning a lot! And we are able to carpool to get Michael to school!

We got rid of our mouse (we hope they are all gone)!!!!!!

The two going to school are just getting over an illness, and hopefully none of the rest of us will get it.

And and update on the garden:Our tomatoes are six feet high, with lots of flowers and no tomatoes. We got one banana pepper, and the lettuce and spinach were excellent. I also have growing 8 citrus trees. The key lime only gave us two fruits this year, but it had a hard time – it was neglected while we were away visiting family this summer. The others won’t be old enough to produce for another 4 or 5 years –citrus have to be 7 years old before they produce. I have a grape vine that should produce some good grapes this next year, and a blackberry bush with the same timetable. Three of the pequin (birds eye) peppers are flowering and putting out peppers, one is piddle and stunted. I have some bell peppers growing and producing as well! I don’t know exactly what to expect from the pomegranate tree. It is only a year old, and growing nicely, but I know nothing of when it will produce. I am still waiting for the cherry pit and the peach pits to sprout. The garlic didn’t do as well as I was hoping. They are a shallow rooted plant. So, since I didn’t water them every day I only have one left, and even that one I don’t have much hope for. I am going to try more potatoes in the next few days and see if we can get a second, larger crop.

This is just and update on our life.

29 August 2009

The culmination of 3 years later.

So, we have been the Pagets in Florida for 3 years now. That isn't exactly what I thought would be happening when we got here, but here we are anyway. It became evident with the birth of Levi that we would need to consolidate eventually. The opportunity came and went for us to move to a 3 bedroom apartment, but some projects stayed.

Introducing the making of the bunk beds.

It started about 3 years ago when I was out with the pickup truck garage sale-ing. I found a twin bed with a trundle and almost new mattresses for sale. After a quick consultation with my wife, we decided to get the beds. They have been great. I don't know how many relatives and neighbor's kids have slept on them, not to mention the long nights with sick kids that we didn't want to sleep on the floor anymore. It became apparent though that we would need a bunk bed unless we could manage to get the boys a bigger room. They don't seem too keen on my ideas of adding an addition on to our apartment. So, we started working on the consolidation project... a bunk bed. The idea was that we would get some storage underneath that we weren't getting with the trundle, but still have the beds available for the growing kids. So here is a picture of what we started with - two twin beds. We sold the frames today - thank you Craigslist on a Saturday morning.

So this started with the decision to build them to be sturdy. Someone was worried about that so much that we decided to use 4x4's to build them. This wasn't the first time my wife was so worried. We had an entertainment center one time that would have been the safest place to be in the house in case of an earthquake. So we started looking around for un-treated yellow pine 4x4's. After a lot of calling, this lead to a visit up to Climax, Georgia to get the wood from a lumber mill. I got there and the wood I needed was 3 rows back and 4 pallets down. The guy asked me why I wanted the yellow pine. I told him it was the price. He offered the easy to access cypress for the same price, so I gladly took him up on the offer. Everything was rough cut, so I had to plane it down. That means a new tool for me... an electric planer. I made a huge mess, but it sure smelled good. Here is me working on this beautiful honey colored wood.
And the clearly visible mess this made. It filled 2 large trash bags.
I finally found a use for my handcart project. It is great for holding 6 foot long lumber.
Then the finishing had to happen after I built everything else out of yellow pine from Home Depot and Lowes. (By the way, Lowes won this time for quality of wood.) I had some water-based polyurethane left over from a previous project (half gallon or so). Our bedroom became the paint shop for a week while we worked on all of these. The side-rails proved to be a difficult task for coating. I wanted to coat the whole thing in one shot. I developed this elaborate rotation system. It worked perfectly for us, and fortunately it is gone.
The room also doubled for a staging area for the building. We got the bed slats from Ikea. I used them as a spacer to figure out how to attach the headboards to the posts.
Once I finished the ends, the construction could begin. I got some help once the old bed frames were gone. It would have been really difficult with out the extra hands. It was kind of difficult with them too. But they helped build their bed. When we got to this point, I leaned on it; it didn't move a bit. Solid? Yes. That was just the lower level.
Levi even helped from a distance. He seemed to really enjoy his time on the toddler bed too. Maybe he enjoyed it a little too much. I think he has to start walking before we would seriously think of a change of beds for him. But now it is available.
Some of the upper level was there in this one. This is an action shot of the real helper.
Here it is with the side-rails and even one of the safety bars. Even some smiles.
We got the beds put together all the way and put on the mattresses and all. Not too bad looking. There is even plenty of storage room underneith... for now.
Some really happy boys about their new beds
They didn't want to wait to try them out. I can't blame them. I liked the ones that I had when I was growing up.
Hopefully this is the end of this project. I now know why they charge so much for comparible quality beds at the furniture stores. They take a long time to make. But it was really fun, and the cypress made it worth while. 3 years of being the Pagets in Florida... with these maybe we can last a bit longer.

26 August 2009

So by request of my mother, here are some pictures. The three boys together after Stake Conference.
They are cute alone too.
Though the pictures don't seem to capture the instant we want.

But some of them are better at posing than others.

Great Bow-Tie.

Then there was the first day of Pre-K. He is just such a big boy now. (Sniff sniff.)
He has his lunch box.
And his backpack.
There you go Mom. Three grandsons down, three to go.