Seth 3rd Birthday

3 years down, only 15 to go! Seth turned the big 0-3 and had a great time. Besides the normally small family gathering we also ventured to the dinosaur museuem at Thanksgiving Point...not sure why we thought he would like a museum at 3 years old but it was still a good experience.

Museum

 

This trip started out rough when I made the idiotic mistake of saying it was Seth's Birthday to the worker. So instead of Seth being free (2 and under) I had to pay $10 for him. Seriously, $10 for a 3 year old? What crap.





Once Seth noticed the dinosaur, he insisted I protect him. I appreciated his faith but didn't have the heart to explain to him that I would do nothing to bother the T-Rex except perhaps get stuck in his teeth on the way in or in his bowels on the way out. 

This room was pretty fun. I think the point was to demonstrate floodplains or something...we just made a dinosaur fort. Seth made it a goal to gather all the dinosaurs from all the other stations. What can you do?

This was a convenient sign for the photo but caused an issue when Seth didn't realize it wasn't really for him. He made a beeline for all the fake presents on the display next to it.


 Dinner

We hit up Seth's favorite food joint for dinner (Chick-fil-A). I didn't take many pictures because it is very difficult to do without looking very creepy. For some reason parents don't like strangers taking pictures around their children.

 

  



Not much exciting to add to this shot.

 

Gifts and Guests

 

To cap off the day we had some family over for a small gathering to accumulate more toys for Seth. I admit to being a little jealous.

 

A cute little motion montage made by Em. She is much more artsy than I am.

One of the few days of the year where Seth is allowed to eat all the sugar he wants. I welcome the sugar coma that naturally follows.

Sweet and simple decorations...that was my contribution.

Listen, we know Sloane is adorable but it is Seth's birthday. Pay attention....grandparents are always distracted.

Emily's cute gift table. To my, I mean his disapointment, nobody brought the 80 inch TV he asked for.

Seth's Flag Day cupcakes, apparently only good for the frosting. We threw at least 5 away with the frosting licked off but the actual cupcake left untouched.

We dove deep into my past to order a Baskin Robbins Ice Cream cake. Seth wanted dinosaurs (notice a theme) so we ordered a cake and put our own toys on it. Yeah, we rock.

Papa, Janet and Sloane. Both my dad and Janet were good sports and wore the birthday hats while Sloane simply had no choice.

 



Another Picture. Boom!



 

Backyard Spring Project

When we purchased a new home last year, we knew we would have some significant expenses when it came to finishing our backyard.  But I still intended to get that finished last year...that is, until we got the quote for the fence.  It was waaaay more than I expected it to be.  So last spring we got the fence done.  And we got to enjoy a nice big patch of dirt and weeds all summer and winter while we saved enough money to finish the project. 

In the fall we added some trees and had some concrete work done.  We added a concrete pad for a hot tub...when we can afford that...some day???  And we extended our back patio, tore out the wood stairs, and had cascading stairs put in.  I will not go into the details but the concrete work really almost put me over the edge.  Do NOT ever use Brown Brothers Concrete!  Terrible, terrible terrible!  They didn't do a great job, left a huge mess, never came when they said they would, and didn't finish the job we paid them to do.  Just avoid them!

But I digress.  Where was I?

At first I really wanted to save some money and put the sprinklers in ourselves.  When I say "ourselves" I mean Clint.  But he really wasn't sure where to start or how to do it.  I'm sure he could have figured it out but we had a little baby at the time and I thought the stress of it probably wasn't worth the savings so we contracted it out to Superior Sprinkling, a great company.  They got the job done in a day and a half, upgraded our sprinkler system, fixed a malfunctioning valve in our front yard, and smoothed the dirt out for us in the backyard. 

Well worth the money!  (And quite a different experience from our concrete job!)

We had bought a small amount of leftover sod from our neighbor last year. We learned that we have some really annoying little critters (or varmints, as my mom would say) that like to visit our backyard: GOPHERS! Hate them! Hate them! They wreaked havoc on our poor little patch of grass with their mazes of tunnels and dirt mounds!

Nothing really worked to get rid of these little pests.  We killed a few with rat traps but the poisons didn't seem to work.  It made us so hesitant to spend money finishing the backyard if they were just going to come in and destroy it.

So we got a little creative in our efforts to keep the little brats our of our backyard:

Chicken Wire. 

That's right.  After doing some minor grading and raking out big rocks, we laid chicken wire across our entire yard.  We realize that if we ever have a sprinkler problem we will need to cut through the wire to get to the pipes, but we have mapped out where the sprinkler lines are so hopefully it won't be too much of a hassle.  At first I thought I might be going a little extreme...but I was encouraged when I looked online and saw that others had done something similar.

Laying the chicken wire wasn't difficult. But balancing how it was laid was hard. We couldn't lay the sod directly over the top of the chicken wire. Otherwise the gophers would just pull the grass right through the wire and eat it. And we couldn't bury the wire too deep either. Because then the gophers would be able to just burrow in between the wire and the sod. And we realized we didn't have enough dirt to put over the chicken wire so we had to order a dump truck full and haul it into the back yard by wheel barrow.

Bless Clint!  Since it was still really cold in early April, I was stuck inside with Seth and Sloane.  So he had to do most of the prep work on his own.

We realized that one full dump truck of top soil still wasn't enough.  So we had to make several trips to Lowes for more bags of dirt.  So fun.

Sloane kept us company while we loaded the bags of top soil into the car.

Clint always seems to be in good spirits...even after days of manual labor and a sore back, he's willing to joke around for the camera. You might actually think that lawn roller was heavy!  (It was for me.)

Finally!  The day to lay sod had arrived!  It was mid-April, overcast, and a little chilly! 

Nevertheless, I was excited!

Clint was excited too apparently. 

He quickly prepped the dirt with some fertilizers recommended by our neighbor.

Not only did Brian help us lay sod but he helped Clint with SO much of the prep work!  He's a great neighbor and friend!

Jon and Briana helped out so much as well!  I don't know how we got so lucky to have the friends that we have!

We got the grass completely down just before it started raining!  Great timing!  The only problem is that we noticed that our grass was riddled with dandelions.  At first I thought it was no big deal...it was probably just in a couple pieces of sod.  But I started seeing two to three dandelions in each piece.  When I called the sod farm they assured me the dandelions had been cut at the root and wouldn't grow.  Not true!  Within a month, we had hundreds of dandelions spread across our yard.  I wish I had taken a picture of it!  It was so sad!  We finally decided to sign up for a lawn company who will come treat our yard all summer long.

These last few pictures are of the yard as of this morning!  It's greened up really well and so far...no GOPHER holes! 

 

A glimpse at the weed issue we are STILL dealing with.  There are still a lot of weed remnants that we hope will go away over the next few months!





Memorial Day 2013

That is an amazingly clever title, is it not? It is full of mystery and intrigue. If you hadn't cracked the code yet, this entry will be mostly about our Memorial Day weekend...your mind is blown right?

My typical Memorial Day normally involves as much laziness as possible, which doesn't really separate it from any other weekend other than having an extra day. The TV is normally turned to sports all day while I readily try to avoid working in the yard. If any real activity gets planned it is against my will.

This year, my brother-in-law and his family visited from Colorado. Uh oh.....plans. I knew my dream of an entirely plan-free weekend were blown. Having now completed the weekend I can safely say that I had a blast.

Here is our schedule and then the pictures/commentary.

Friday - Zoo/Dinner
Saturday - Park City
Sunday - Sunday Breakfast / Family Dinner BBQ
Monday - Cunningham Breakfast

Zoo

The visit got off to a rocky start when we decided to eat before entering and a passing little girl puked all over the sidewalk next to us. That vomit induced a change in plans and we decided to eat inside. Once we entered the zoo, we discovered a lack of animals. Not kidding. We walked for 10 minutes before we saw anything other than a wandering chicken.
 

There isn't much interesting to add to this....Seth sitting on a fake elephant in a fake zoo.

We immediately claimed this space as Rasmuss Town. We celebrated this colony with Oreos and sandwiches.

Even Sloane knows she looks ridiculous. Luckily her facial expression saves the day.

The Seal show was actually pretty cool. Our kids were the ones who ignored the "Don't stand in front of the glass" rule. Deal with it.

I know the zoo is under construction but couldn't they at least pretend to care that we are spending our money to enter? The newly complete bear areas are great, but that was the highlight. We spend more time walking past closed exhibits than we spent waiting on Lisa to find a bathroom (always a ton). The trip was a bit of a bust but it was still cool to get out of the house and let Seth observe animals that act worse than he does.

Park City

This was the real part of the weekend that I was dreading. I knew Park City would have a ton of people and long lines. Both were true but we had a really good time. We decided to let Seth ride the Alpine Slide, which meant we had to let him take the ski lift up the mountain. Just thinking about it is making my heart race. I am the most over protective parent you will ever meet. The entire ride up the mountain (without Emily, who had to stay with Sloane at the bottom) I was gripping Seth's leg hard enough to probably leave a bruise. Instead of enjoying the sites, I could only imagine him jumping off the lift while chasing a butterfly.

Seth didn't seem to mind waiting in line, as long as Daddy was there to drag his sorry butt to the slide from the lift.

 

 

Shhhhhhh! There is a wild Lisa attempting a photo, we don't want to spook her.

Going down the Alpine Slide was one of the best memories I have with Seth to date. He absolutely loved it. Once he realized that I wasn't going to let him control the brake, we shot down that mountain with Seth trying to match my cowboy "yeeeeeeeehaaaaaa". He was laughing and smiling the entire way down. I am so grateful my wife suggested this activity.

Then it was Emily's turn to go down the slide. Naturally Seth didn't want to wait in line again so I took him on some kiddie rides to kill time. In all we got roughly 5 minutes out of them, probably not worth $3 a ride.

Looking at my 18 attempts at a photo, you would think this think was going much faster. 13 of my photos look identical, which his head perfectly blocked from the shot. 4 more don't even contain him. This is the winner.....go me.

He actually rode this twice, once with each of us. You would think for the price they charged they could afford to paint the ride every year...guess my expectations are too high.

 Finally Emily came down the mountain. She was actually about 15 minutes before I expected so she caught me a bit off guard. The pictures are not very exciting but short of having a bear chasing her I think they are the best I could do.

It's Emily! Or a stranger! Or a leaf on the camera lens!

Getting closer! Not sure why the stop sign is pointed towards me, apparently they think people waiting at the bottom have a strong impulse to rush the exit area.

She is officially in the red zone. Funnily enough this mirrors her stopping at a red light...about 10 feet short of where she is meant to actually stop. Be careful, don't want to get too close to the line!

Sunday Breakfast and Dinner BBQ

Oops, no pictures. Trust me, they both happened. Emily made a fantastic breakfast casserole she had never tried before (which is par for her. She perfects a recipe and then decides to never actually cook it again) and we got a chance to relax and talk for a few hours.

Later that day, 25 people turned up at my in-laws for a BBQ. I knew the names of at least 15ish of them.. I made it an entire 70 minutes before turning on the basketball game. Emily's cousin looked like he could hug me for turning the game on but being 15 or 16, he is scared of human contact. It was actually a great chance to get to know him (um, blanking on his name but he likes the Bulls/hates the Heat). So maybe it was closer to 14 people whose name I knew.

Memorial Day Breakfast

Again, no pictures. Every Memorial Day/Labor Day my dad cooks breakfast either at home or in the canyon for all of us. It is a really fun tradition that saves us having to cook. I actually threw a softball around with my sister, which was fun minus that fact that she is 5'1" so I overthrew her 10 times. Even Seth got excited about throwing so we bought him his first glove on the way home.

All and all, a really fun weekend. I can't promise I will still wish for a jammed pack holiday weekend but I definitely enjoyed this one.

Trying to establish a habit of posting pictures with captions or stories

It has become blatantly obvious to me that I have left most of the family record keeping up to Emily. While she is much more organized than myself, it is hardly fair. To attempt to remedy that, I will really really really try to do a small update every few weeks with pictures/captions/short stories. So all 2 of you reading this can sit back and enjoy the growing pains.

Cunningham Family Road Trip

It took an entire bag of cotton candy to bribe Seth to sit still for this picture. Amazingly that bad disappeared without a trace a short time later....

During the weekend of May 3rd, we took a quick road trip down to the southern part of Utah. During this excursion, we learned a few things:

1) Sloane is the best baby ever. During the 10 or so hours of driving, she didnt make a peep AND she didnt have any smelly diapers. Champ.

2) Roadtrips that time well with naptime are amazing. We were able to time both our departure and our return journey with Seth's nap so he slept for half the driving. A sleeping Seth equals a well-behaved Seth.

3) Potty Training while on a roadtrip isn't that bad...as long as you aren't afraid of touching every side of the wall in a gas station bathroom stall....and the toilet....and the floor....and the walls again. Everytime I took Seth to go potty I felt like my entire body was being rubbed against a urinal cake.

4) The only limit to the amount of times you can sing along with the Pitch Perfect CD is placed by either your spouse or child. I know I sound good so I guess I don't really need their approval.

 

More Potty Training

 



I really don't have an explanation for this.

 

I don't know how he didn't pee on his own face.


For the past 3/4 weeks we have been diligently trying to get Seth to use the Potty. It has been increasingly successful even though he still struggles to communicate the need to poop PRIOR to soiling his undies. I have finally mostly given up trying to save his "heavily used" undies because I figure a dollar is worth me not dry heaving.

 

Emily Sleeping

 

My entry couldn't possibly be complete without some pictures of Emily sleeping. She absolutely hates that I post these pictures but I can't help it.

 

Looks like Em doesnt just steal the sheets from me...





 

Sloane is patiently waiting for mom to wake up.

 

Emily isn't quite sleeping but apparently she makes a fantastic pillow. Hopefully Sloane comes up for air once in awhile since it looks like she is trying to wedge her heads in between the natural headrests.