April 7, 2009

Happy Birthday Tyrell!

Blowing out candles

Opening presents

Frosting the cake (he has a white spoon)

Tyrell turned nine today! It is hard to believe he is already that old. With my encouragement we bought him a pocket knife, one of those swiss army types with lots of gadgets. It was fun to watch him as I showed him all of the knives' features.

Our Doings and Happenings

The Saturday before conference Tyrell had a scout activity to which the entire family was invited. The activity was a sort of mini day camp. The kids had a lot of fun playing on the puddle jumpers, which are simple little stilts created by attaching pieces of rope to number ten cans. After the activity the boy scout troop, who had camped out behind the church, invited us over to roast hot dogs. I forget what the called the biscuit things they did but they were very good. You basically take a biscuit and roast it with a special roasting stick with a dowel at the end. When you are done the hot dog fits in like a pig in a blanket. We enjoyed them so much that we had them for dinner again on Monday night as a lead in to family home evening, however we skipped roasting the biscuit and hot dog separately and simply wrapped the hot dogs in the biscuits.

Work wise I have been making good progress on the spelling game. I decided to purchase a canvas tent to use as an office. When the tent came one of the angle pieces had a defect that made it unusable so until I got a replacement I simply duct taped one of the joints together. The new tent has been working great with a couple of problems I still need to work out. I am sure I can solve them, it will just take some more time, money and effort. One problem is the sun light. A white tent without any shade is very bright inside during the day, this makes the lap top difficult to see. Putting the fly on the tent helps a little, so far I am getting by well enough I don't think I am going to do anything until I see if there is any issue in the forest. The other problem which is a bit more sticky is the dust. Especially last week when we were getting 30mph gusts of wind, everything in the tent would get covered in dust. I am going to buy an outdoor carpet, but so far don't know where to buy one in town. In January you couldn't go anywhere in town without seeing it for sale, but now that the vendors have left I am not sure where to shop for it. I think I'll just grab some in a few weeks when I pass by a Home Depot.

My new office

I really enjoyed listening to conference over the weekend. The children were terrific. When I went to the Priesthood session I took notes so I could give the family highlights of what I heard from the talks. The next day Dallin decided he would take notes. He wrote down four pages before he declared his hand hurt too much to write anymore. I was very impressed with him.

Lexie made Jacob some new booties

Close up of the booties