can you believe it?

of all the things, who'd of ever thunk?

me a fireman? ok, so its volunteer; same thing right? well not quite - i don't get a pension. but other than that, iget to do everything that the paid professionals do.

the kids sure were thrilled to see me in all my gear.

as much as they were to see me riding the truck the other night.

i'll let you know how it goes after my first real run....can't wait. so far, its just been training, but i sure am excited!

Our Summer so Far!

We tried to go camping but kept getting rained out and had to cancel our reservations a few times. So we decided to just do it in the

backyard this time. Maybe next time

we can venture away. :)

The kids made up our camps name.

We even had our own little campfire and cooked several meals on it.

We also discovered Letterboxing. It is similar to Geo-chaching (sp?) but a lot more primitive. People plant boxes in public parks and areas and give specific directions on how to locate the box. They give it a name and have a specific rubber stamp in it along with a small notebook. You stamp their stamp in your own "Letterboxing Notebook" and then you take your own family stamp (found a great one at the Dollar Tree) and stamp it in their notebook. Then you hide it again for the next person to find. We've visited many interesting and fun places as a family and have also planted one of our own. :)

Brianna found this one. Good job Bree!!

We discovered the Bamboo portion of the Mercer Arboretum. The kids had a lot of fun posing and climbing (or attempting to climb) the bamboo.

INTODUCING...... THE AMAZING BAMBOO CLIMBERS!!!!!!!

First up.... Colton, always the Army Tough Guy.

Next..... Taylor.....G.I. Jane

Brianna the Monkey Girl....

And last, but definitely not least, Cameron....... always the Funny Guy.......

Today, the kids decided they wanted to go to Cow Appreciation Day at Chik fil A. I wasn't going to complain about a "FREE-99" deal, so the kids and I got creative and took some pictures with our cow Chloe and Oldie Goldie before we went to collect our loot. (The extra kid in the picture is Cameron's friend I have been watching this summer.)

long time no....

work has kept me quite busy, and today is the first time I've not been completely preoccupied with other things.

I love my new job...hope to be there for many moons. i get to work on many projects, large and small. frequently, i'm working on projects for local hospital expansions, new hospitals, and even some petro/chem plants in the area.

best of all...i get good feedback from my co-workers occassionaly.

talking of feedback, one of the hardest things about parenting/housekeeping is the lack of it; the absence of acknowledgement, notice, commentary. the other day, we were sitting in church, and behind us was a couple..he's a cop. after sacrament meeting, they pulled us aside, and told us how impressed they were with how we handled 6 kids for the 75 minutes. they went on and on about it. made us feel really good, especially coming from a man i look up to.

now if i can only borrow a feather from his cap, and stick it in mine. i realize that becky works soooo hard to keep our house together, to rear the kids, and teach them to live the gospel, etc. and frequently i don't notice - and she desn't have co-workers or a boss to give her praise, compliments, or a raise. its simple not to, because we try to keep the yard looking nice; with kids, we're always cleaning up one mess or another, or ten others. what i'd fail to recognize is the effort it takes to maintain the status quo....its not about new accomplishments, but about the daily grind.

so here's to you becky: you do a great job! the house looks good. and most importantly, the kids are happy.

so, i'm trying to make the effort from here on to notice what my lovely and wonderful bride does while I'm gone all day...invite to all you other guys out there: you're wives work too, even if they are home all day (those are the hardest jobs). compliment them on what they do. it'll make their day, and you can both smile! :)

Life is good. :)

Life has been very good to us. Rob has a great new job, everyone is healthy, we're all happy (most of the time), and we're a all a little crazy - which just adds to the fun of life. Here are just a few pics from the past month.

Worlds Best Piggy-Back Ride Ever! The Triple Decker Piggy Ride!!

Bree and Grandma Allred loving on each other.

Taylor and Colton just being buds... well, after I made them be buddies. Sometimes when two of the kids are fighting with each other, I assign them to be buddies and they have to stay with each other the rest of the day and help each other out. Most the time it works great and they end up like this. Ah.... sweet inspiration.

It's so fun tickling your kids to death. :) Cameron, you're a good sport with an infectious laugh. :) Nice smile there too!

The newest member of our family. I know we're a bit crazy... we've established that already. She's a Great Dane rescue. We decided Harley needed someone her own size to play with -- well, she's a little bigger, but just a year old so she'll grow more. She's so much fun and has such a goofy personality. She's a puppy in a huge body.

Harley and Chloe staring each other down in the backyard before tearing off again to romp and play and jump on each other. It's so fun to watch them just play together. :) Everyone should have a Great Dane. :)

Oh, and of coarse, Tayter Tot turned 9 on February 5th. Happy Birthday Taylor! We love you!

Happy New Year!!!! -- It's going to be AWESOME!!

Finally!!!! We have a new job! Rob starts on February 2 at Siemens Building Technologies as a Sales Application Engineer. So life is looking up, we have a plan and we're going to push ahead this year.

Here are a couple of pictures from the past few months.

Christmas morning going through the stockings.

A typical scene this past year. We've been watching my sister Gloria's kids after school every day, so it gets a tiny crowded.

Stitch, our bengal cat, broke his pelvis a few weeks ago. We're not sure how. The vet said that he will be o.k. in 4-6 weeks. Poor guy. He is the coolest guy. He has the personality of a laid back dog .

Harley hardly has any fur so she gets cold in the winter. So she wears one of my sweatshirts.


This is our foster dog that became permanant. We fostered her and her four puppies awhile ago and when taking her back to the shelter when the puppies were old enough, I couldn't let her go. She is the sweetest thing in the world. She is about 9 years old and is heart worm positive. She's missing most of her teeth and has a cateract in one of her eyes. She's too old to undergo treatment, so we will just love her and give her a nice retirement in her final stage of life. Although she seems to have been defying the odds. She still has a lot of energy and doesn't show any of the symptoms yet. We've had her for almost a year now.

Taylor being her typical self. She went as a rock star for Halloween.

She loves to play guitar hero and rock band.

Colton got his face painted with Christmas lights during a Christmas party.

I thought it was so cool looking. Colton is doing awesome in school and loves to

cook and love on all of the animals.

Cameron wearing his daddy's cowboy hat. Cameron is into coin collecting and loves reading the Spiderwick Chronicles and Harry Potter.

Brianna, is just one of the kids now. There is nothing they can do that she can't. Except for riding the bus and going to school. She thinks that is so unfair.

Rob and I are as happy as can be. We are best friends and love to hang out together. We love to read, watch movies, do the grocery shopping and have picnics at the park together.

So, that's our update for now. We will try to post more often. Love all you guys!

almost traumatic

most already know that we survived hurricane ike this month. the hurricane itself was not bad. since this was the first of this kind of experience for either becky or myself, we really didn't know what to do. so, as most inexperienced people, we took the sum of our knowledge, and added it to the worst-case scenarios given by the liberal media, who strike fear into the hearts of all those who will listen, with every given chance. the night of ike, we camped out in the living room, an our couches. it wasn't bad, until the power went out about 1am. then it started to get stuffy. i went out to talk to one of our neighbors. as we were standing by our gates talking, we had a nice wind gust that blew open our 6'x6' solid wood gates, with ease. as they blew open, i had to hold on to the gate post for dear life, hoping i didn't get blown away; just knowing that the huge oak i was standing under was sure to come down on us.

when the winds got too scary, becky and i decided to move the family into a 'safe room'. this just happened to be the 4'x5' half bath in the laundry room. keep in mind, we already had no electricity....no a/c, no lights, no nothing. we shoved cameron inside the cabinets under the sink and counter, with his pillow, and a blanket for cushion. then we brought in the two dog beds, and put them on the floor. taylor, colton, and brianna got to share those. becky sat on the toilet, and i got the wonderfully too hard counter top, trying not to kick taylor in the head when my feet would slip off. we filled the sink with ice, so we could fan it, and try to cool the room. that was, until the condensation started soaking cameron. then he found a spot on the floor too.

we stayed that way for 4 hours, with the kids coloring and playing cards by flashlight, and becky and i listening to the news on a walkman i rigged up to an old car speaker. after that, becky and i switched places, and there we were for another 3 or 4 hours. that was traumatic. i am still surprised that the bathroom has managed to dry out from all the bear cave mouths of the kids, and the gallons that we sweat all over. i never imagined that leaving that room, to walk around an un-air-conditioned house would be so releiving. the rest of the house felt really cool....evn though it was 80+ degrees.

we decded that next time, we'll camp out in our bedroom, and have a window a/c unit. forget spending the night in a bathroom, especially with the kids getting bigger.

i must admit tht the 15 days post-huricane w/o power was not half as bad as that one night in the restroom. i spent a lot of time sleeping on the couches at night, because i could open all the donstairs windows, and prop open the living room door, and get a good breeze coming through. it almost felt normal.

but now we have power back, and life is slowly returning to normal. the county has yet to make any progress in picking up branches, tree trunks, and other debris in our neighborhood, so we have many piles on our block. 3 of which belong to us. i guess thats what we get for having one of the larger yards in the neighborhood. after we had cleaned the yard, and gott the piles together, and scooped everything possible into 50 gallon yard bags, we found out that the county won't take the bagged stuff, bcause they can't mulch the bags. thanks for letting us know before hand!

since i know the shopping centers around here have once- or semi-weekly dumpster service (and they can't fill their dumpsters when clsed for lack of power), i felt no guilt in making sure their expenses were not wasted. i took out all the back seats in the van and loaded it up 3 times with the bagged debris, and filled 2 dumpsters, and then some. westill have the piles, but at least all the black bags have disappeared!

all in all, no harm to the house, and except for some blisters on taylor's part (from raking the yard), no harm to the family.

see ya next time.

Newest updates

so, we've had lots of fun lately. in july, i took a weekend off of my new work, and we went and had some fun. our adventure took us up to lewisville for john's surprise 40th birthday party. i didn't know half the people there, but almost our entire family was there. it was good to see them all again. here are some of the pictures from it. unfortunately, we just aren't as japanese touristy as we could be....sometimes we're a little slow with the camera, or altogether forget we have it.

one of my many home improvement projects is finally making some progress. one of our dogs got very sick, one night, and when we woke up that morning, the entire downstairs was covered in who knows how many different kinds of bodily fluids, etc. there was just no way we were going to try and clean the carpet and live with it, so we tore it all out. now, we have a wood floor going in. i was able to get a portion of the wall replaced, after dad helped me repair some roof problems, and the floor was moving along nicely. here's some before & after pics.

this morning, taylor had a youth triathalon. she had to swim 50m, then bike 1mi, then run 1/4mi. she placed 7th in her age group. we'revery proud of her, and how well she did. here are some pics and video that we got of it.

...here's a video montage i made from it...

recent happenings

so, i found out recently that our ward's primary assigns primary kids to bring the sacrament bread, instead of the ym group doing it. they have certain rules that you have to go by: ie. no milk, eggs rye, etc. for allergen reasons. the cool thing is it gives the primary kids the chance to feel involved in a part of something special. especially when you have a ward full of martha stewart-ish people.

a couple weeks ago, we were all excited about the sacrament bread because it was a good white homemade bread. so we thought. until it hit our tongues. it might have been sourdough, but it certainly was more dough than bread. it was almost hilarious to see the facial reactions of everyone around us as they tried to swallow it down. it would have made a good mastercard commercial...1 loaf of undercooked sourdough: $2.00, the look on a 5 year-old's face: priceless.

anyway, we got the notice not too long after that day that it was taylor's turn. she was excited, and determined to not make such a faux pas. we decided to use the opportunity to teach her some baking skills. so last saturday, becky walked her through making a batch of bread. then sunday morning, taylor got a spiral notebook, an the cookbook. in the notebook she wrote: taylor's bread recipe; then copied mom's recipe out of the book. she made a loaf of bread completely on her own, except she asked for some help in forming the loaf. i didn't even know she was doing it, until it was time to stick it in the oven.

the loaf was still steaming when we got to church, and taylor handed it to the teachers. since we were sitting right behind the deacons, we were some of the first to get some bread. taylor's face beamed when she tasted it, and then she spent the next few minutes looking around the chapel at all the other people as they ate her bread. i could tell she was very proud of herself. i'm sure she told her primary teacher that she had done it, but i don't know how many others knew.

the cool part is that since she felt such an integral part of the meeting, almost the center of it (i would bet) in her eyes; she paid attention to the whole meeting.

so for you're viewing pleasure, here is taylor with her bread. oh yeah, this is not the loaf from church. she decided to wake up this morning and make another loaf on her own.

while i was taking this picture, our own local spiderman had to be part of the crowd, so here's one or two of him as well.

cameron had his 7th birthday a couple of weeks ago. while becky and i were at the store, discussing what we could possible do for him that would just make his day, i had a stroke of genius inspiration. those only come every once in a blue moon, and you gotta be careful 'cause the stroke part may be the only part that stays around when its done with you. anyway, i was thinking that cam is such the entrepreneur. nothing makes him smile quite like the sight of money. so, i scanned a dollar bill into the computer, took out george's doppelganger, and put in cameron's noggin. then i changed all the ones to sevens, the best MS Paint would let me. we took the graphic into walmart on an sd card, and had it printed on a sheet of sugar paper. when becky made the cake, she stuck cam's 7-dollar bill on it. he was thrilled! here's how it turned out.

not to bore you much longer, but you should know that i just started a new job, and lucky me, i get to work from home! the only time i've really even left is to go to office depot to get large format prints of floorplans. i just don't think the company would spring for buying me a plotter for my home office. since most of my time is spent pouring (or is it pooring?) over floorplans, i had to get some sort of drafing desk. i could not find a single one anywhere tha would fit a full-size set of prints, with the exception of one that was in the $300 range. so, i went to lowes and got me some materials, and made myself one. its kind of a permanent fixture in my office, but it works for me, and should i ever decide to get rid of it, i only left 6 or so screw holes in the wall. here is my most recent pride and joy. behold: the drafting table!