Miscellaneous Adventures

Well, this is another shameless catch-up post with lots of pictures and unrelated topics.  But we wanted to share some of these adventures with you.

Kansas City
On April 21 we went up to Olathe, KS (near Kansas City).  With some encouragement I had finally signed up for another marathon.  They also had a "Munchkin Marathon" for the kids: they had to run a total of at least 25 miles in training, and then they ran the last 1.2 miles (to make 26.2 miles for a marathon) on race day.  Morgan and Emma and their friend, Marian, did a great job preparing for the race and running all that distance (we did a lot of running around our little street circle).  Here they are with their medals:

 We are so proud of them for their hard work.  Emma met her goal of running the whole way without stopping, and Morgan "passed a lot of kids".  I finished my marathon in 3:23, beating my goal of 3:30.

After the race we got to go to the open house for the new Kansas City temple:

Our Backyard Trees
Talmage has been talking about rappelling a lot, lately.  One day when I took a day off from work and stayed home, he told Leslie, "If I don't go rappelling with Dad today, I will never get to go!"  So, I slung some ropes up in a tree in our backyard.  Then I got out my caving gear and hooked Talmage on to hang down below me and ascended up the rope and rappelled back down.  All the kids got to do it:

Leslie even got a couple videos on our camera.  I put them together in this YouTube video (so don't be surprised when Talmage goes up the rope and Peter magically comes down).

Father and Son Campout

Last Friday night we had our Father and Son campout.  I had a lot of fun with Morgan, Talmage, and Peter!  Leslie and Emma got to enjoy a much anticipated "fancy girls night".  My parents flew into town late that night (just for the weekend for a special occasion) and my dad got to come and meet us in the morning for some canoeing on the creek.

Amazing Bike Ride

After we returned from the campout, Emma asked Grandpa Steve to help her take the training wheels off her bike and help her learn to ride without them (yes, I know I have been a neglectful father for not doing it long ago).  He only had to hold on for about three steps before she was a training-wheel-free-solo-riding-expert!  No more training wheels for Emma.  Now we just need to work on helmet and shoes.

Mothers' Day Walk

Yesterday, after a delicious Cafe Rio-style dinner, we went on a walk at the Oklahoma Wesleyan University.  They have such beautiful grounds.  Here are some of our favorite pictures:

What a peaceful Sunday it was to be with my beautiful wife, Leslie, and to have my own amazing mother with us, too!  I'm so thankful for both of them, and for the influence they have had on me and many others.  I love them so much!  They are the ones who make the family I grew up in, and my own young family so wonderful.  Thank you, Leslie and Mom!


Well, there you have it.  Our adventures.  We're glad you took the time to read all the way to the bottom of this post.  Thanks for being our friends!

The Boys - The Continuing Story

Okay, I was about to start writing about how we call Morgan and Emma "The Kids", and Peter and Talmage are "The Boys".  I even titled this post "The Boys".  Then it all started sounding familiar to me.  I looked back at my blog posts and realized that I had done almost the same thing almost exactly a year ago.  So, for those who want to see the original post about "The Boys", here is a link.  For those who want the continuing story, keep reading.

Actually, I'm not going to write much more in this post, but after looking through our pictures it sure seemed like there were an awfully large number of really cute pictures of the boys together.  So, I thought I'd share some of them with you.

It is so fun to see Talmage and Peter growing up - to see them play together, laugh together, work together, and yes, cry together.  We're so glad we have both of them in our family!

Just chillin' together in the back yard.

We seem to have a lot of pictures where Peter is playfully yelling/growling/pushing Talmage, while Talmage grins at the camera.

They are NOT supposed to do this, but we often find that Talmage has climbed into Peter's bed and they have fallen asleep.  Maybe this is why Peter hasn't learned how to climb out of the crib yet?!

We didn't get much snow this year, but they enjoyed what we got.

Making a mess of their sandwiches.

How can you not smile at this picture?  They were playing on the old tractor at my parents house when my mom snapped this picture of them.

And finally, what would this blog post be like without a video of the boys?  This year I finally managed to take the kids (The Kids and The Boys) to several of the home wrestling meets.  Every once in a while we also have a kids vs. dad wrestling match at our house.  Well, one evening The Boys decided to start up a match at the ward potluck dinner (Peter instigated it, really).  Hopefully they were entertaining and not too bothersome to the other families!

We love our Talmage and Peter!!!

Gifts of Christmas

Tonight Emma was reading in the scriptures about the Three Wise Men and the gifts they brought to the baby Jesus.  In her words: "Gold, frankenstein, and myrrh." I promise we haven't watched "Nightmare Before Christmas" this year.

Es-sushi-cargot

The other day Peter came up to me and spit something out of his mouth into my hand (this is not an especially rare occurrence).  The first thing I said upon looking at is was that it looked like a chewed up crustacean (although later research confirmed that I meant to say it looked like a chewed up mollusk).  Here's a picture (it is small at Leslie's request, but for those of you who like looking at gross things, you can see a somewhat bigger version by clicking on the picture):

After discarding the offending mush I walked into the family room and saw a pair of Talmage's pants on the floor.  I picked them up to put them away and a few small things fell out of his pocket:

Peter really had been eating snails!  RAW snails!  Leslie described it best as es-sushi-cargot.  I guess Peter will grow up to like all sorts of fancy, expensive foods. :)

Crazy Tarantula Migration

Who knew that northeastern Oklahoma was for tarantula migrations in the fall?  Actually, we did - we had heard about it from our neighbor and have been watching every year to see some.  Well, we finally did tonight.  Leslie's mom and dad and sister came to visit us so we went to our favorite nearby state park to have dinner in the wild. As we were driving in to the park we saw something large and hairy crawling down the road.  We were in two cars so I called Leslie and told her.  Then we decided to turn around and get out to see it.

We ended up finding two fairly large tarantulas!  Leslie's dad, Merrill, was brave enough to catch one in a large plastic cup, and Morgan caught the other one in an ice cream bucket.  We watched them while we ate dinner and got brave enough to touch their back legs while they were in the bucket.

Peter loved watching them!  We had to make sure that he didn't reach in and smash them.  Actually he did push on them a few times with his chicken nugget.  Hopefully tarantulas are sanitary!? (You might want to scroll down and pause the music on our webpage before watching the videos.)

We showed them to a few other people and then decided to walk down a trail before letting them go.  When we got to a good place we decided we were brave enough to dump them out onto someone's lap.  Morgan and I sat down and Merrill got ready to let the tarantulas out.  Peter decided to climb onto my lap, too.  One tarantula ended up on him and started crawling up his shirt toward his face.  Everyone screamed and we tried to pick Peter up and brush off the tarantula, but it crawled under Peter's armpit and onto his back.  It was an Indiana Jones moment as we tried to get it brushed off him as quickly as we could.  I only wish we got Leslie's face on the video (but you can hear her voice)!  If you watch closely you can see the spider on Peter's back for a second.  This video might be worth watching full screen (click on the YouTube logo at the bottom right of the video and then a new webpage will open up; then click on the icon of the four outward pointing arrows at the very bottom right of the video).

 

Finally we decided the tarantula wasn't too bad and we let him crawl on our hands and arms.  Merrill was the first one brave enough to try it (besides Peter, of course).  Then Morgan tried it and so did I (the tarantula crawled up my arm and onto my back, touching my neck for a minute - ahhh! - before it crawled down my other arm).  We even got Leslie to try it for a minute!

We ended up having a lot of fun before we let him go.  We hope we didn't traumatize the poor tarantula too much!

Oh, What do you do in the Summertime?

Here's what WE did. I finally caught up on blogging about our summer. Just click the links below (or simply scroll down through the posts) to see some of what we did during the hot, hot summer.

May

Greg and Meisha's wedding

June

July

Clark and Kaylee's wedding

So there is a brief report of what we did. Don't worry this is not my journal, as so many blogs say, I keep a pen and paper version for that. Someday i will get around to catching up all the way about Back to School, etc. Enjoy this update until then.

Wedding #2

At the end of July the kids and I drove to Utah to be there for my brother Clark's wedding. How did we do it? Our very nice Grampa Steve flew to Oklahoma and drove with us to Colorado and then with Tutu, too, we drove on to Utah. They were so nice (and very brave) to make the drive with us. It actually went pretty well. We listened to alot of books on tape and made some long rest stops. It was a good adventure.

I didn't take as many pictures on this trip but we did have alot of fun. We stopped in Morgan, UT the first night to spend some time with Nate's sister and her family who were there visiting from North Carolina. It was fun to stay in that beautiful place and swim and have fun with cousins. Big thank you to the Thompson's for letting us stay.

Then it was on to my parents house. They were so helpful to me with the kids. We had alot of fun playing with cousins, playing at the school and park, drinking slurpees, picking apricots, and being outside in my parents' beautiful backyard. We enjoyed a huge rainstorm one day. As the kids were out playing we realized that all the garbage cans were being pushed down the street by all the water. We ran out to save the cans. We got completely soaked and all our little boys were confused and crying, but we had alot of fun and got in our good deed for the day.We also got to see some more of Nate's side of the family. We had dinner with lots of family at Aunt Ruth's, we met our new nephew. Carrie took us to see the renovated BYU campus. And later got to go to the Discovery museum with Kamrah and her two boys.We celebrated Emma's birthday early with a trip to the pioneer park. The kids had lots of fun playing games in the old school house, and panning for gold, and riding the horses, etc. We also got to celebrate on the actual day with the family that was still left in town. She made her own list of simple things she wanted to do for fun. She was the sweetest birthday girl. The night before the wedding we had a little informal party with our family and Kaylee's family and some of Clark and Kaylee's closest friends. We later dubbed it the "Pop-up Party" because we literally set everything up in about 20 min. It was so fun to meet her family and give a little advice to the couple. It was especially a great night because it was the night that everyone was finally in town. My other brother and his wife arrived during the party and Co-Nate flew in just as it started. Nate flew really late that night so he missed the party but I was soooo glad to have him with us again. Here is everyone except Nate and Peter (who had to be put to bed early).Friday was the wedding. They got married in the Salt Lake Temple. It was wonderful to be there again. It is such a beautiful place of great strength and peace. It was a busy day for weddings so there was a bit of a wait for pictures. The little boys got a little tired, bored and hungry. Luckily the luncheon was across the street. We were delayed getting to the reception because of a major traffic jam. It was at a house near Park City. It was fabulous. My sister Karen made hundreds of mini banana creme pies and beautiful sugar cookies with edible flowers on top. She is amazing. The yard was beautiful and had a small playground to keep the kids happy. We had a good time there.
Here's the happy couple. They met before Clark's mission and when he got back in January they picked up again pretty quick. We are so happy to have Kaylee in our family. I have had fun getting to know her. She is beautiful, and positive, and so kind. (And she has been a good friend to Clark's twin sister Holly which is hugely important.) Clark has always been a cool guy. We are glad he found someone so great for him. I am excited that our "Sisters Brimhall" set is now complete. Yeah! Congrats guys.