Easter Fun

Saturday Riley was almost as excited as he was Christmas Eve. At 6pm he asked, "Is it time for bed yet?" LOL! Actually, he was so excited he didn't get to sleep until 10pm!

He and Maddie got up around 8:30am and quickly ran downstairs to see two Easter Baskets waiting for them. Then they hunted around the house for eggs the Easter Bunny hid - plastic ones rather than real ones, we didn't want the dogs running off to some dark corner of the house leaving them for us to discover when they started to smell. They were very excited and had a great time.

Later we got in the car and headed down to Corvallis for Easter with my Aunt Joan, my Mom's sister. It's always a great time there with lots of excellent food - they always have a fantastic ham! Maddie slept on the way down and Riley watched his new movie the Easter Bunny brought - "Bolt!" We got there just as food was being served and filled our tummies. Then it was time for the Easter Egg hunt. It was raining a little and this year they decided to hide them under their covered porch in the backyard so the kids wouldn't get wet. That was nice. TONS of little kids this year who were all wide-eyed with excitement as they found eggs. Riley and Maddie again had great fun finding a bunch.

Then we went back in, visited with relatives, and finally left for home. On the way back Riley fell asleep - and stayed asleep for several hours at home. Maddie decided she needed to almost ALL of the chocolate she got in her basket from Grammie. She was fine for quite awhile, then all of a sudden it was like someone switched on her hyperdrive mode and she was bouncing all over the place! I've never believed that "sugar-high" theory too much because I've just never seen or experienced it the way some others describe. But this time I became a believer. haha Riley was having a hard time finding a comfortable way to sleep and Maddie kept trying to wake him up. Marci climbed in the back to help Riley be more comfortable, and occupy Maddie. Then we hit very slow traffic, actually coming to a stop a few times. Grrr! In all, we lost 12 minutes, which really wasn't that bad. And there was enough rain coming down combined with the spray from the cars on the road that it was rather hard to see, so driving slow with LOTS of cars on the road was actually kinda OK.

Made it home, Riley still slept, Marci finished her school paper, and with that this class, and Maddie and I played with the rats. Riley woke up, Marci finished, we all chatted and had fun for awhile, then went to bed. It was a really nice Easter this year with even Riley still believing in the Easter Bunny. :)

Geocaching

Last weekend Riley's Cub Scout den went for a hike to fulfill one of their Tiger badge requirements. One of the parents brought a GPS to do some Geocaching. For those that don't know, geocaching is using a GPS to find something others have hidden. See, people hide stuff in parks and other places, and upload the coordinates to a website. Others then download those coordinates into their GPS and set out hunting for it. It's really quite fun. Our GPS for our car can run on batteries AND I can download data to it.

It was fun trying to find the stuff with the other parent last weekend and we all got hooked. We joined the website, downloaded some places close to us and have had fun looking for them. So far we've found three. Two of them were big enough to hold stuff and had a piece of paper in them for you to write your name and date of when you found it. One was just a piece of paper. The others had a pen with them, this one didn't. Now we know we need to carry 1) a pen, 2) something to put in there in case it's one of those type.

Our car GPS is cool, but not really made for walking. Now that we're hooked on this, we're looking forward to the warm weather and doing it all over Portland! And we're starting to look at some good GPS's for walking. Gotta have the right toys, er, tools. ;)

What's really fun is this is something all of us can get into, even Maddie!

What a great weekend!

Man, what a fantastic weekend!  The weather was amazing, a taste of summer.  Saturday Riley's Cub Scout Den took a hike in some woods next to us.  They brought along bags to pick up trash while they were hiking.  Evidently, some kids use that area to play with little plastic bb's because there were TONS on the ground, which the kids LOVED to pick up.  At least they aren't using paintballs and ruining the woods.  haha

Our weekend shopping which featured a stop at Cold Stone - both kids got cotton candy ice cream.  LOL!  Riley helped mow the lawn while we pulled weeds and cleaned up.  We have a push mower which I use when I'm not in a hurry because it saves on gas and gives me a little more exercise.  Riley loves to use it and did a great job, though got tired about half way through - it's tough to push it. 

Sunday the weather was even better.  Riley had a birthday party to go to in the afternoon.  He wanted one of us to stay there with him, but we talked him into just letting us drop him off.  He's at that age now where we can do that, and we would have been bored staying there.  He had a GREAT time and didn't miss us at all!  COOL!

While he was gone, we did more yard work, pulling more weeds, spraying weed killer on some, fertilzing, etc.  It was sooooo nice to be able to wear shorts again!  I turned on the sprinklers and made sure they were all pointing in the right directions.

When Riley got back, he and Maddie took turns driving his electric Jeep.  He almost doesn't fit anymore!  And after a few times of needing some help, Maddie was doing really well!  She really liked that, and having Riley drive her around.  Riley got bored with that and started racing Marci on their Razors.  From about 9am until we went to bed at 8:30pm, we had the windows in the house open.  Ahhhhhh.....

Today (Monday) it's supposed to be about 72 (it's 65 at 11:20am).  I was tempted to call in sick and stay home to have some fun.  But Maddie's at her preschool and Riley is at school.  So I probably would have stayed inside playing Guitar Hero World Tour all day.  haha

We got a lot of stuff done but also had a blast doing stuff as a family.  It was really a great weekend! 

What a weekend!

It started Friday when I came home not feeling all that great and Marci had a graduation to attend.  Marci had also rented a large dumpster for us to fill, some spring cleaning.  I was up several times that night getting something to eat or drink, my body was wanting fuel to fight this thing.

Saturday morning we were all still not feeling great but got busy.  We spent a lot of time in the garage, then in Riley's room, then Maddie's room, then the backyard, tossing things we no longer needed/used/broken.  It was a long hard day of not feeling well, but feeling very good about the work we did.  Went to dinner, then home to watch Iron Man on Blue-Ray which I got for my bday.  Great movie!  That was fun, but it kept us up very late, got to bed around midnight - including the kids. 

Sunday was a very slow morning, but finally around lunch time we got going again.  Finished the garage (well, still some organizing to do and a few boxes to go through but it's MUCH better now).  Saturday Marci got four bales of straw to spread over the backyard.  Thanks to the dogs and the rain, there wasn't much grass left and it was just a big mud pit.  Finished cleaning the backyard and Marci and Riley spread the straw all around.  They did a great job and it looks fantastic!  Major plus is now the dogs won't be coming in super muddy!

Got to bed at our usual time, which was nice.  It was hard to get up this morning and both kids are home sick.  Marci called me at 11:30am and Riley was still sleeping!  Poor kids! 

It was a very busy weekend with lots of hard work which was extra tough thanks to not feeling well.  But we feel great that we were able to get so much done.

My Brithday

Tuesday was my 46th birthday. Wow, 46. I don't know why but it seems more than one year older than 45. 50 is only four years away but feels more like 40 years away. I certainly don't feel 46, more like 36 or maybe 34 - and many will tell you I act more like 26 or even 16. ;)

It was a great day. I got a lot done at work, then went to dinner at Outback with my family, parents and brother. Had a good steak and a nice free ice cream desert! Got some cool stuff, lots of DVD's and a neat new iPod Shuffle. It's amazingly slim and sounds great! Riley got me a very cool radio controlled car. We had fun playing with it and his cars in the street the other day.

I bought a lottery ticket on my birthday, but didn't win anything. :( All in all, it was a really nice birthday. Thanks everyone!

Mini Golf with Riley

Saturday was a Father-Son day.  Riley and I went to this cool minigolf place downtown.  It is in the basement of the Hilton hotel, has a Pirate theme and a LOT of blacklights.  We had a BLAST!!

Riley did better than me on many of the holes.  I'd watch him hit it and couldn't believe how well he did.  Then I'd grab the putter the correct way, line it up, stand correctly, all those proper golf things, and not hit the ball anywhere as good as he did.  LOL!  It was a great way to spend the afternoon.

Then we walked up to Finneggans Toy Store, looked around, agreed we needed to bring Maddie & Marci here, then went home to some great homemade pizza.  After, we played a fun game on the Playstation 3.

All together, a wonderful day and lots of fun. 

Marci and Maddie went shopping and had fun of their own.  It's wonderful to do stuff as a family, but also nice to do stuff one-on-one now and then.

Monster Truck Show

Yesterday Riley and I went to the Monster Truck show.  This time we went with his Cub Scout Pack.  The seats were at one end and I was worried they wouldn't be as good as ours last year (down close on the 50-yard line).  Fortunately, the Rose Garden is small enough that there really isn't a bad seat.  Not great for the trucks because they can't do a lot, but good for us.  I'm glad about that because these tickets were part of a group rate which means they weren't as expensive!  WOOHOO!

We had a great time!  Some trucks just seemed to be going through the motions, others really put on a good show.  This year instead of the dirt bikes, they had two robot transformer cars, one good, one evil.  They did battle by shooting each other.  We were glad we had our Bose noise canceling headphones on, those canon shots were LOUD!  I took some photos, though it was VERY dark.  I set my camera to ISO mode and let it figure out what to do.  The good news is I got some photos.  The bad news is many are at 3200 which is horribly grainy.  BUT, as I've come to realize over the years, I'd rather have a photo like that than no memory of the event at all.  AND I got lucky - I got a photo of the evil robot getting a hole blown in it, lots of sparks flying all over.  I'll upload it later (need to sharpen it up a bit).

We also got the Pit Pass which means we got to see the cars up close.  That was fun, Riley likes that part.  It was just the right amount of time because as it got long and Riley was getting bored, it ended.  And what an ending.  Grave Digger was last, did a few things, then was going to do a big jump and ended up crashing his car on its' side.  It was great!

I downloaded my photos and saw I took 706!!  That's because I changed the setting to sports mode and continuous, so as a truck took off over the cars and went high in the air, I took anywhere from 5-15 photos.  That worked great!  I was able to get some very cool photos.  But of course with that many photos, it means it's going to take me some time to edit them and decide which ones I want to upload.  I don't think I'll send all of them to Flickr. ;)  When I do get them uploaded, I'll be sure to blog about it.

Pinewood Derby & Chocolate Festival

This weekend was Riley's first Cub Scout Pinewood Derby. His car didn't do as well as he wanted, but he still had fun building it and racing it. We were very proud that he didn't throw a fit because he didn't win anything!

Not doing well was partly my fault. It has been a LONG time since I built one of these and forgot a lot of things, like adding weights to get the car as close to 5 ounces as possible. We weighed in at 2.5! Fortunately, someone there had some weights, a drill and a hot glue gun. We got it back to 4.75 ounces. Still too light, but MUCH better than it could have been. This year I've been remembering all of these scout things I did and forgot about. Next year he'll do better with his car. :)


The Chocolate Festival
We've got to this the past two years and had a great time. This year it was AWFUL!! It looked like they raised the admission, there was only about half as much as there was last year, a lot of the places didn't have many samples, several of the vendors were quite rude, and there were a lot of non-chocolate booths, like soap and pit powder. Yes, someone at a Chocolate Festival was selling power to put on your armpits to make them smell better and not sweat. Um, what does THAT have to do with Chocolate???

Anyhow, it was really bad, we were majorly disappointed and probably won't go back next year. At least we had a great time at Red Robin's for dinner after. :)

Day Off

Once again I forgot that everyone has Monday off and I should ask for the day off from work so I could have a nice 3-day weekend. Instead I got to work early and asked if I could leave around 10:30am. Everyone was cool with that and I actually ended up leaving around Noon. Now we're heading off to bowling. WOOHOO!!

Radio Controlled Car

For Christmas Riley got a really cool radio controlled car from Uncle Peter.  It took us this long to finally get it out and play with it.  Riley had a blast and really did a great job driving it.  I also had fun with it and showed Riley a few tricks.  We went back in when the batteries died, recharged them and went back out in the afternoon where he showed Marci and Maddie all the cool things he could do with it.

I totally forgot to get any pictures or video because Saturday morning I came down with something and totally wasn't thinking straight.  D'OH!  The weather is supposed to be somewhat nice so we'll go out and play again, and this time I'll get some photos and video.  :)

Christmas Snow

Last year I was going to try to blog at least once a week. Failed big time there! LOL! Looking at old posts I realized this is kind of a diary of our family and fun to go back and read. I'm going to try to blog more often so years later it'll be fun reading and saying, "Oh ya, I remember that!"

This past Fall was very warm, much more so than normal. It was like global warming had decided to settle over us. Then in December temps went down to where they normally are and more! Around December 14th, it decided to snow.

Ok, no big deal, we often get a bit of snow that time of year. Except this time it didn't stop. And to make things worse, the temps stayed below 30 for several weeks! At home I saw our outside thermometer drop to 12! It was the most and longest snow I've seen since my family moved up here in 1976. You can't see it very well in this photo, but we got probably a total of a foot of snow. It was very dry. A few very windy days blew it around a lot and gave us spots that had very little snow and drifts up to three feet deep!

This is when I really love my job. What I do doesn't require me to be in the office. If I have questions, I can email users - or now that we have our new VOIP (Voice Over IP - internet phone) at work, I can run the software on my work laptop and when my phone at work rings, it rings on my laptop. Just like I'm in the office. Very cool! The only hard part about working from home is trying to get the kids to let me work. I have to work for a little bit, play with them for a little bit, work, play, etc. But fortunately things were slow and I could easily take time off to play with them.

We went out in the snow a lot. Every morning they'd get up and say, "Can we go out and play in the snow now?" For Christmas 2007 Riley got a little sledding board that he was able to use this year. They both loved sledding down the driveway, sometimes making it all the way across the street. Marci and I tried sledding a few times, it certainly was fun! I took a TON of photos that you can see by clicking on any of the photos.

We live within a mile of a little strip mall and grocery store. That was really great because we could walk there instead of needing to drive. When there was a break, Marci went out with the car and did a little shopping. She got another sledding board that was big enough for both of them. That came in handy when we walked up to the store. Both of us pulled the kids on these. It was a little tough at times, but much faster than trying to walk with them, especially Maddie who's little legs just doing go that fast yet.

I also took a bunch of video that I put together into one long 9 minute video. I'm glad my camera can take such good video. Our little camcorder can take better video but this way I don't have to carry both with me.

Thanks to the snow, this was the first time we didn't go anywhere for Christmas. Usually we go to Salem Christmas Eve to be with Marci's family, get up Christmas morning to do a quick Christmas with our family, then over to Rich's parents for Christmas with his family. We couldn't get anywhere so this year it was just us at our house. That was actually pretty nice. No rushing to get here or there, just a nice relaxed time at home.

Finally things cleared up enough by the weekend and we were able to go to Salem Saturday and Rich's parents Sunday. We had a fantastic time at both places. It looked like the snow was going to be gone, the roads were clear, everything was melting. Then it snowed some more, melted, snowed, melted, just kept doing that. The snow also caused a delay in getting together with Rich's Dad to celebrate his 70th birthday - Dec. 19th. We finally got together Sunday Jan 4th and had a nice dinner at Stanfords to celebrate.

But as we were leaving, Old Man Winter had to remind us he's still around by snowing on us one last time. It snowed hard and got bad to drive quick. I'm more of a wimp driving in this than Marci is, so after I got off the main roads, I switched with Marci and she drove the rest of the way home. We got about 1.5 inches, then by midnight it was 40 and everything was melting. By morning it was all gone, everyone was able to go to work and school.

It was a fun and wild way to end 2008! Now we're all back in the swing of things, back to normal sleeping schedules, being tired at work, etc. Lots of fun things coming up in 2009 that I'll be sharing here. On Jan. 31st, Riley has his Cub Scout Pinewood Derby car races! He's really excited to build his car. Also that weekend is the Chocolate Festival, so be ready for lots of photos of cars and messy faces!

We hope all of you had a great 2008 and 2009 is starting off great for you!

OUCH!

Last night when I got home Riley was having fun hitting two rocks together trying to break the bigger one into smaller pieces. I'm putting away my stuff when he comes over crying because he got a piece of rock in his eye. I look and see it, almost right smack in the center of his eye. I tried to get it out but he had rubbed his eye enough that it was kinda stuck. By now he's crying hard.

Called Marci to come help and with both of us working on it, we were able to get it out. Whew! But while we were working on it, we were both in that mild parent panic because it looked like he had rubbed his eye hard enough to embed the piece of rock in it and we weren't able to get it out. I kept reminding myself - and Marci - to stay calm and don't freak him out. At one point I thought we would have to call 911 to get some help. But then Marci was able to get it with a moist q-tip.

Then Riley was fine, his eye didn't bother him at all the rest of the night. Sucks to learn a lesson the hard way, but now he knows to wear protective eye gear the next time he wants to do something like that. ;)