Dear Dallin,

It is not polite to urinate in the bathtub while I am in the process of cleaning it. Also wearing a wife beater with no underwear is also not considered "getting dressed". Our tupperware was not purchased to become cages for your toy reptiles.

p.s. I skipped a bunch of words in your book about chameleons tonight. Really, how much can one mom take?

Love,
Mom

What does one do when they have major baby fever and no baby prospects on the way? Why buy baby chicks of course. Dallin and I have 5 new and cute babies in our backyard. We have 2 black and white barred rocks, 1 Americana, 1 gray silkie and a rust colored frizzle. We are loving watching them grow and change and of course sinking countless money and Home Depot trips to build them a new coop! I think a baby might have been cheaper when all else is said and done but we are getting 1 small ,brown, organic egg each day so who is complaining? Mom of course is still weirded out by eating them and will only put them in brownie mix, hence the weight gain!

Here for posterity sake are the names of our beloved chickens:

Buffy
China
Pudding #2 (RIP Pudding #1)
Capri
Liberty
Pocket
and Token

There will be a quiz on this later....

Our trip to Utah August 2010

Despite being deathly ill we took Dallin to the Bean museum on BYU campus bc that is what good parents do...right? This museum is super old and smelled of formaldehyde but it was also free and they had a bug exhibit. We were able to watch a live reptile show where we could see different types of snakes and a huge tortoise.This is the beginning of Dallin's complete and utter obsession with reptiles. Petting this iguana was all it took!
Cheetah or Jaguar?
Dallin loves Peacocks....this one stood still!
Who knew a liger was a real animal? I thought it was only one of Napoleon Dynamite's sketches....learn something new everyday.

We were so excited to go to BYU education week this year. Unfortunately Jake and I were sick the entire week with a sore throat, cough, asthma and every type ache you can imagine. We had lovely cot like accommodations and as we slept with prince NyQuil we dreamed of our king sized feather bed waiting for us back home!

On Sunday we went to church in the prophet's ward hoping to catch a glimpse of him. This was the only one we could find!

Dallin sitting on the Salt Lake City Fountain
Whose idea was it to let him loose in there???
pretending to be a pioneer
Exploring the gardens
Can you find him??

Dallin's 4th birthday party!

Dallin's girlfriend Claire and her sisters came dressed like Astrid from the movie
Shooting down the dragons
Throwing fish into Toothless' mouth
Dallin's dragon cake
So I really dropped the ball on taking great pictures of Dallin at his party. Where is Auntie Amber when you need her? He wanted a How to Train Your Dragon party which was hard to find stuff for. Jake and I spent a lot of time designing games, goody bags and of course Dallin's Hiccup costume. We hardly took any pictures! What was I thinking?

Dallin's first baseball game!

This summer Dallin was able to go to his very first baseball game with daddy, Uncle Jeff and his cousin Brayden. He really liked the fireworks show at the end of the game. Thanks Uncle Jeff for the tickets and the company!

Our Family Farm Summer 2010

Here are some Onions that we grew and this green one was a plant that I thought was going to be a bush bean variety and I really babied it bc it was the only one that sprouted. Well at the end of the season it was still growing well and I finally came to terms with the fact that it was nothing but a stupid weed! Oh well better luck next time.
Roma Tomatoes
Early Girl Tomatoes
Our backyard corn
So since spring we have been official farmers, Dallin and I! We even have the chickens to prove it. We still don't have our lawn in out back so we tried our best to break up the clay soil and plant some veggies.... We have really enjoyed it even though if we had to survive on what we produced we would be looking very skinny by now. I definitely have a new found respect for produce as I realize how much time and energy it takes to get things to grow. Next year we hope to have some type of automatic watering system in place!

Since I was a little girl I have always wanted to grow Sunflowers. Since we now own our home and we have a garden Dallin and I decided to try them this summer. We grew the tallest variety bc "go big or go home" right? They were very pretty but after a particularly bad wind storm they started to lean over the walkway and then they got the dreaded red spider mites that I was never able to get rid of. I think next summer we will try black eyed susans...they grow wild here on the side of the roads and I am thinking they are pretty drought tolerant.

Our Garden

This was brought home on accident from the nursery. It is an Armenian cucumber and it loved the heat. We got about 5 baseball sized cukes off of it but then it stopped producing fruit and just had lovely leaves. We ended up pulling it out at the end of August.
Our zucchini did well but didn't produce as much as I thought they would...the chickens devoured the leaves every chance they could
Cantaloupe grown from seed...ended up dying before it set fruit
These are red bell peppers....they did well but by the time they started to turn red they were sunburned and not very tasty ....we will try sun shade next summer!
Our baby watermelon we grew from seed...it ended up splitting and we fed it to the chickens...

Summer 2010

Nice...my child's head is bigger than my teenage niece's head!



I love these pictures of all the boy cousin's playing together...

Hamilton Pool July 2010

We spent some time at Hamilton Pool this Summer. It is by far our favorite public pool but it is about a 30 minute drive from our new home. It was fun to get together with my sister and Dallin's cousins. He sure loves playing with them. By the end of summer he was even brave enough to go down the kiddie slide!

July 2010

We gave Granny Sue sue a party for her birthday this year because we really felt like she deserved it and it was fun to have all the girly decorations.