Weekend in Idaho

We went to Idaho this weekend. We had fun seeing family, some of them we hadn't seen since Christmas. First we went to the extended Huls Family Reunion, it was nice to visit with Shaun's Aunts and Uncles and see Great Grandma Huls. After that we went to my parents house the girls had fun on her water slide and slip and slide. Even Lu Lu had some fun getting to know her dog cousin Harley. It was fun to watch them play, neither dog had ever had the chance to play with another dog. It took them a while to get used to each other, but after that they wore each other out chasing each other. Sunday we went to a double baby blessing. Two of Shaun's sisters had baby girls in May. They are both darling little girls and will never be lacking in clothes or accessories. I remember I was a little the same way with Kaylee, now Sydnie is lucky if she gets out of her pajamas before nap time. As always the girls had so much fun seeing their grandparents and playing with cousins.

I was lazy and didn't get my camera out as much as I should have. But I did manage to get a few
shots after the baby blessing:


My girls with their new cousins: London on the left, and Macey on the right.


Morgan and Kaylee getting twisted on the swing by Grandpa Huls


Sydnie and Grandpa Huls

Childhood Memory # 3

Three Ringed Circus
I was going to dedicate this post to memories of our trampoline, but when I started to remember things about our trampoline, it made me think of a few other things we used to do for fun in our back yard. We didn't actually have a circus in our back yard, but this title seemed to fit considering some of things we did for fun back there.

Ring #1: The Trampoline
We were the first kids in our neighborhood to get a trampoline. We had kids from who knows where lined up around that thing waiting for a turn to get on it. There were three rules, no shoes, only three kids on at a time, and you had to have a signed permission slip. My mom had a whole cupboard full of signed permission slips, and I remember being really annoyed that I had to wait my turn to jump on my own trampoline. Just a funny side note: one of my best friend’s mom would not sign a permission slip, she thought trampolines were too dangerous. So, when the rest of us wanted to jump on the trampoline, we would haul out my moms small exercise trampoline, and she would pretend like she was having fun jumping on it, while the rest of us had real fun on the big trampoline. After the excitement died down and other people started getting trampolines, we finally had it to ourselves. We figured out some really fun games to play. We of course played the usual crack the egg and dodge ball, but we had a special trampoline that led us to invent some unique games that other people couldn’t play. Our trampoline was round and stitched together in three pieces leading to some nasty trampoline burns, but the lines it created in our tramp made for some fun games. Here is a picture of our “tramp” with its unique stitching.

One game was called “sharks”, the shark would be in the middle section and the two outer sections were safe and we would jump across the middle section trying not to get touched by the shark. One of the best things we would do on our tramp was put the sprinkler underneath it to cool ourselves off in the summer. We had railroad tracks that ran behind our pasture; there was a freight train that ran those tracks everyday. Whenever we would hear the train coming, we would stop whatever we were doing, even if we were inside, and go on the trampoline and jump the “snake” as we called it. I don’t know how or why this started and why we thought it was so fun. We also had many slumber parties on the trampoline. We lived out in the country, so you could see the stars really well. I loved to look up at the night sky. We saw many shooting stars, one so close that it had a rainbow tail behind it. We would watch satellites zoom by, and try to find constellations, and even made up a few of our own. There is just something about stars that make you think about God, and I spent many nights falling asleep trying to take it all in.

Ring #2 Stilts

The next act in our circus was stilts. I forgot to mention this invention in my last memory, but my dad made us several sets of stilts. I don’t have any pictures of them, but I found this funny Norman Rockwell picture that looks a lot like the stilts my dad made:

The smallest of the set of stilts was just a foot of the ground, then there were several more sets that got increasingly bigger, until the tallest that was about six feet off the ground. I remember watching my older brother walk on the tallest set, and wish I was brave enough to do it. So, I started with the smallest set, and when I got comfortable, I moved to a taller set, until I finally got brave enough to try the tallest set. They were tricky because you had to balance them up against the trampoline to get started, then climb up on them, and finally hold your breath as you took your first step. I was always afraid of falling back down onto the bars of our trampoline. The first 20 tries were pretty unsuccessful, just a couple shaky steps before letting go and jumping down. After a lot of practice, I was finally able to make it across the yard, and then able to walk circles around the yard. I still haven’t a clue what prompted my dad to make those things, but they sure were fun, and I bet not many people can include stilt walking in their resume.

Ring # 3 Barrel Walking
To complete our little backyard circus, we happened to have a couple fifty-five gallon metal drums in our backyard, every once and awhile we would tip them over and try to balance on them. Pretty soon we figured out you could walk on them, and make them roll. We would have contests to see who could get the farthest without falling. We also would try walking two at a time. That always ended in giggling and falling after only a few feet. Whenever we did our barrel rolling tricks, I thought of my great grandpa John Thomas Thornton he had a traveling skating exhibition. He was a professional roller skater (must be where I get my moves) and he had an act he did on a barrel while on his skates, and another act where he roller skated on stilts (Maybe this is where the my dad’s stilt idea came from). I included a picture of him just for fun.

My Great Grandpa John Thomas Thornton posing for some pictures in his skates.

Yearly Photo Shoot With the Girls

This Saturday I spent a couple hours curling hair then drove to Thanksgiving Point to take some pictures. I was really happy with the setting, but I wish I got there about an hour earlier. It was about 8:00P.M. when I finally got there, and it was just a little dark. I was tempted to go out again this week and if it wasn't for all the hair curling I probably would have. But with some creative editing I salvaged a few good ones, I tried a new photo editing technique I just kind of stumbled upon while trying to figure something else out. I like it, it gives kind of a retro look. Family photos are scheduled for next week. Wish me luck!

P.S. I finally figured out how to make your photos bigger on your blog! I would tell you here, but it is way to complicated. I shouldn't say that, once you change the HTML code it is actually very easy. I looked up how by googling it, then of course as always, I had to make my own little adjustments. If you wan't to know how call or e-mail me.

This pose was one of my favorites, you should have seen how many shots I had to take to get one with all of them looking at the camera and smiling. Sydnie was just being a tease and doing all kinds of naughty poses, Brianne won't look at the camera to save her life, but Kaylee just poses and smiles till her cheeks are ready to fall off.

P.S. you can't make wide pictures bigger just long pictures. The wide ones are already as wide as they can be and you just end up cutting off part of the picture.

This is another rare shot with them all smiling. I loved this fence and got some great shots by it.

I love this shot of Sydnie I just wish she would have been smiling instead of smirking. She was being such a little monkey that night.

This is my all time favorite of all the pictures I took that night. Such a sweet picture. It was one of the rare ones that looked good even unedited.

Brianne is so camera shy. She has been since the time she was born. But I do get some sweet little looks out of her sometimes.

I love this one too. She is already a beauty at only 6.


Sydnie and Brianne are tough to get one good shot out of them but Kaylee loves the camera. However, she has gotten such a fake smile lately that it is hard to find one of her with a cute natural smile.


I like this close up of Kaylee too, but the photo editing technique I used on Briannes and Sydnies photos didn't translate as well on Kaylee I think it is the color of her dress, it is cute but too dark for this technique. Oh well I still like it anyway.

Happy Fathers Day

So I thought I would kill two birds with one stone this week. Post a childhood memory, and say Happy Fathers Day to my dad. I chose to write this week on memories surrounding my house, mostly because, as I mention in my last memory, my dad is full of inventions, and when I talk about memories of my house, I can't help but talk about all the fun and interesting things my dad made for our house.

My House

I was one of those rare people who lived in the same house from the time I was born until I graduated from high school. Since I was one of the youngest in my family, my parents had already done all the moving around before I was born, and settled down to this house a year or two before I was born. I loved my house, it was big enough, but not too big. We had a big yard and a pasture. There was plenty of room outside to explore and let our imaginations run wild.

This is a picture of our house from the front. My mom always kept everything nice and neat and always had beautiful flowers planted all around our house.

Here is a view looking out the back door. This is obviously in early spring so everything is pretty barren. As I mentioned before, we had a large yard with a HUGE garden, yes that whole dirt patch in the back is all garden! The front part had fruit trees and it is where we grew pumpkin and squash, and decorative gourds. It also had a root cellar, that you can't really see. It was basically a hole in the ground with a little wooden door. We kept potatoes and carrots in it over the winter. It was super scary, but if you were brave enough, you could usually catch a few frogs down there.

The back garden was where all the major action happened: Peas, beans, carrots, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, melons cucumbers, strawberry's and raspberries were the usual produce back there. Here is a picture of me and a friend and my nephew nick podding a mountain of peas from our garden this would have been just one of many pickings and only a third of what there was to pod because Nancy and my brother Greg would have had their own piles:

Having a garden was great most of the time. Just about anytime during the summer there was something fun ready to eat. You could almost always find some raspberries or strawberries to eat and in the early summer there were fresh peas. We liked to eat them out of the pod or sometimes, pod and all, if the peas were little enough. The bad thing about having a garden was the weeding. Every week my sister and I had to go out and hoe and hand weed 7 rows each and as you can see they were not short rows. We would often race to see who could get done the fastest. It usually ended in tears, with one or the other accusing of cheating or not weeding good enough. I always was so glad when the plants got big enough the weeding got alot easier because the weeds couldn't compete with the big plants. But big plants led to the other drawback, Harvest time, there was raspberries to pick, peas to pod, and beans to snap. My mom was really into canning, so when the peas or beans were ready we would be stuck down in our basement for what seemed like hours podding or snapping. She would get huge bushel baskets full and divide them between my sister and I and we would pod or snap till our fingers were green and sore. One time Nancy and I really wanted to go out and play, so we came up with a great plan: we podded about half of the peas, and then shoved the rest under the podded shells in the garbage. My mom was no dummy, she saw our half full bowls of peas, and found our not so cleverly hidden peas in the garbage. I don't think we got to play that day.

Inventions
My dad was an electrical engineer who worked at the governments nuclear testing facility, but I think he was an inventor at heart. Our house and yard were full of his creations. He was also inventing things to help people, he made a stand for my grandma's easy chair, so she could get in and out of it easier with her bad knees. He invented an electronic device to amplify someone talking, my grandpa had a disease that made it so he could only talk in mumbled whispers so it was to help him communicate easier. He also helped my brother invent some equipment for his bottled water factory. Around our house he invented: a weight machine, rowing machine, an art table for me, It had a top that could be lowered flat like a desk or raised up like an easel. We even had a solar collector that took up a big portion of the back of our house, it collected solar energy and heated the water in our house (that is when it was sunny, the rest of the time we had a standard gas or electric water heater), and lastly his greenhouses: the earliest one was on the back of our house, it was very tall and had a door you could walk into, inside were climbing tomatoes, lettuce, cauliflower and cucumbers. Later on he made greenhouses that were portable. thet were long domes out of PVC and plastic, they had sophisticated watering systems and people were always stopping and asking about them. I think he ended up even making a few for people.

The most memorable of all his inventions were the following: In addition to the awsome swimming pool that I already told you about, we had a really cool playhouse, which he salvaged from an old shack/farmhouse on the property next to ours. They were going to tear it down, but my dad saved it and moved it to our back yard. He put new siding on it and a new roof. Then one half was used as a storage shed and the other half was our playhouse. We loved that thing and spent hours out there decorating. At one point he even let us paint the walls, and we got the old carpet from our house when my mom got new. We thought we could probablly live out there despite the fact there was no water or electricity.

This last invention was definitely a family favorite, and I have to say I think we all miss it a bit. Since it wouldn't fit into the new house they had to say goodbye to our table my dad invented. I even helped him make it. I remember it was a surprise for my mom and I helped him sand the legs on the benches and watched him attach legs to the table. As you can see from the picture below it was a round table, it had curved padded benches that went all around, and the best part was in the middle. I wish I could have found a better picture, but if you look closely you can see in the middle is a huge round table that spun. My mom would just set food on it then you could spin it to whatever food you needed. It was also great for games, you would just set the game board in the middle, and then you could turn it to move your guy, instead of asking someone else to do it for you. Another fun trick we learned, and I'm sure my dad did not intend it to be used for this, was you could sit in the middle of it and get spun like a merry go round, that was lots of fun, but I'm sure we got in lots of trouble, whenever we got caught doing it.

This is the best picture I could find of the table in my limited picture stash. I think this of a little birthday party my mom threw for me from left to right. Tiffany, Me, DeNiece, Krista, and Nancy.

This is the only other picture I have of the table, I threw this one in because it shows the benches I helped my dad make. Don't you love my awesome pegged pants? This was at a family New Years Eve party. In the background are an assortment of inlaws, my sister Janet, and nieces and nephews.

Weekend Fun

I didn't want to do two separate posts so I threw this one in too. We have been lucky enough to have some visitors this weekend and last weekend. And Shaun's yummy strawberry pie to go with both. Last weekend Shaun's brother Josh came with his wife Jenny and their two kids Braden and Tyler. We tried to go cray fishing, but everything was so flooded that it didn't work out. Later they came for pie and rock band. The girls had fun playing with their cousins.

This weekend my sister Laura and my niece Alexis came to stay. Alexis is getting so tall! She is just two years older than Kaylee but already taller than me. Sydnie thought she was the greatest thing ever and followed her around all day. I didn't get any pictures, but my brother Mike and his wife Jenny came over too, and we had a marshmallow roast and more strawberry pie. Laura had come to go to the Utah Valley home show. It was fun to have her stay.

Sydnie enjoying the pie, mostly the whipped cream. While Josh and Shaun get rock band set up in the background.

I wish I had a better picture of the whole crew but at least I sort of got Braden in this one. You can just see him enjoying his pie (sort of, "well I really don't like this pie, aunt Jenn") on the end.

Childhood memories

I have recently been reading my girls stories about my Grandma and Grandpa Thornton, (that would be their great grandparents). My dad put a lot of work into compiling histories about as many as my ancestors as he could find. I have read most of these histories, and some of the more interesting parts to my girls. They really love the stories, and it makes them feel more connected to their ancestors. It made me realize, I really need to start writing down a few of my own memories. I also had an activity for my Y.W. about blogs, and how they can be a great way to share family memories. So I am taking my own advice, and for the next few months, I have a goal of writing down one childhood memory a week until I can't think of anymore. Then when I get done, I will print them in hardbound form for my children to have. I have recently found some great sites for doing this. P.S. mom and dad I am waiting to get your histories to add to our books. I know the girls would love to hear stories about their own grandparents.

Our Swimming Pool

I think we were the luckiest kids in our neighborhood, because not only were we one of the first kids in the neighborhood to get a trampoline, I also had a dad who liked to invent things. I just started to list some of the things he invented, and decided that better be a whole other entry, to do it justice. Needless to say, my favorite invention was our swimming pool. We had hours of fun in this homemade contraption. It was six sided, made out of 2x4's, and in the early years we used black plastic for the lining. It was great because it was so slippery, but it got holes in it pretty easily, so later on we started using a big blue tarp. Every summer when the weather got warm enough, we would haul out the tarp and smooth out the sand underneath (by the way, in the spring and fall we had an awesome sand box) then we would staple the tarp to the edges, leaving one side unstapled, so that we could let the water out and clean it every so often. My dad also made a slide out of 2x4's, and covered it with Aluminum sheeting. The slide was burning hot in the summer but we quickly discovered a hose at the top solved that problem, and also made a great water slide! We would zip down the slide and try ski across the slippery plastic, the person who made it the farthest without falling was the winner. A lot of our make believe play was centered around that pool, we often would pretend we were mermaids or wild horses that loved the water. Often, we would have the whole neighborhood at once, and there would be a line to go down the slide. It might not have been the most glamorous looking pool but to us it was the best pool in the whole world.

Our pool in the early years. I'm too sexy poses from left to right: me, one of my best friends DeNiece, our pesky neighbor Ethan, my sister Nancy, and my other pesky neighbor and brother to the first one Austin. You can see part of our awesome slide in the background.

Here we are a little older, having fun with some of my nieces and nephews. From left to right, Joy, I think the next one is April but I am not sure, my nephew nick, then Amber a neighbor and little sister to the boys in the picture above, Nancy, my best friend Krista, and me.

15 years of Marriage and somebody stole my date!

Today is Shaun and mine anniversary. And I took second place to this cute girl.....

It was a western themed stake daddy daughter BBQ tonight, and Kaylee got to go out with Shaun instead of me. Now before you feel too sorry for me, we actually celebrated our anniversary a couple months ago in Mexico. And earlier this week, to celebrate, we rented out a roller skating rink and played a couple hours of roller hockey, with 10 other couples from our neighborhood. I don't mean to brag, but I was on the winning team all night, and scored 2 goals. Okay, I am bragging, but I'm not very good at sports, so it feels good to win, even though I was playing with a lot of people who had never even roller bladed before.

Sydnie put on some boots, grabbed a red sequin hat, and was all ready to go with daddy and her older sister. This is how she looked after Kaylee and daddy pulled out of the driveway without her....

Poor girl all dressed up for nothing. Mom made it up to her by reading her about 20 books. By the way don't you love how her nose practically disappears when she cries. She has about the littlest nose I have ever seen.

In other news...

Brianne lost another tooth. She bit into an apple and it started to bleed, I think this time she really wanted to have her daddy pull it out. So she tried to leave it alone, but even though Shaun was due to come home in just a couple hours, it just fell out without her even wiggling it. Oh well, maybe the next one.

Brianne with tooth number two. The girls are saving money this summer to go to Lagoon and Kaylee is very jealous of the money Brianne has been making from the tooth fairy. Cute Brianne even gave her half of the money to help her feel better, but much to Kaylee's dismay, I made her give it back. All I can say is Kaylee better be prepared to be a good example to her little sister, because Brianne thinks she walks on water.

Memorial Weekend

We had a fun yet quiet memorial weekend. Shaun actually had to work a little bit on Saturday, so that kind of cancelled out a lot of more exciting plans we could have made. Instead we stayed home and just did a few fun things around our neighborhood.

You should have seen and heard the commotion the girls had to make to get the ice cream truck to come to our house. It was circling the neighborhood looking for kids. It had made it to about every street but ours. All the neighborhood kids were just about going crazy waiting for it to get to our street. But for some reason it gave up before coming to our street. It was on its way out and you should have heard the commotion all the kids made trying to get its attention to come back. They were yelling and jumping and screaming as loud as they could. It worked! He turned around made about $40 in the process. Needless to say he was back again this week.

Monday night we held the annual neighborhood BBQ/marshmallow roast at our house. We do this every year it is a lot of fun the adults talk and the kids play games, and everyone had fun roasting marshmallows and making smores once the sun goes down. I forgot to get my camera out till the end but there was around 40 kids playing out in our yard at one point.

Even at the end of the party there were still a few people roasting marshmallows. Our neighbors the Shoemakers also loan their yard for the party too, they have all the fun toys for the kids to play on like a trampoline and swing set.

Now that school is out, potty training has officially begun. This is about how good it is going. Wish me luck!