Diane's Visit

My sister Diane with her 5 boys came to clean-up and fix the pasture because we are sharing a beef cow. Those boys worked pretty hard shoveling a couple inches of dirt out of the barn rooms that was left over from the 2007 flood. They also used a pitch fork to get the moldy hay out of one of the rooms. Hard work and sweat! When Kevin was home from work we all worked on shoveling out fences and gates and fixing the barb wire on the fences.

We found out one room in the barn is set up for milking cows with a trench leading outsite for poop. It is awesome.

We took a break Friday and went on the Bowl hike. It took us about 3 hours and the kids had lots of fun.

I'll have to take pictures of the good work in the barn.

2nd Annual 29th

Happy Birthday Kevin! So it has started. The annual 29th birthday is being carried on. Kevin only remembers his dad being 29 and I guess our kids will have that same memory. Although I did tell the kids he was 30 this year and they told everyone else that but all the same, he is 29 again. The birthday hat is my favorite because it was Samantha's from school. She insisted on keeping it for her dad's birthday and Kevin willingly wore it. It is stored in a drawer now and we will see if it survives until the next birthday.
We did invite some friends over for dinner and cake. We used our whole grain noodles for the first time for lasagna and they were very filling. It was a fun evening.

Grind Your Own Grain Noodles

So when we moved into our house, the previous owners left a few things behind including a noodle maker. It was still unused in the box and very old. We decided to try it out since we are going strictly whole, grind our own grains now. My blood sugar has given me too many problems so we are starting a new lifestyle... Back to the noodle maker-We decided it would be Kevin's job to make noodles since he loves pasta and I was making everything else!

This was truly an experience. We have no idea how noodle dough is supposed to look and so we followed the directions to near disaster. I don't think there was any way that I could have pushed those spaghetti noodles out with how we made the dough. The kids sure enjoyed it but Kevin definitely got his workout and we decided that we needed to try it again to see if we could make it easier.

In the end we made a small amount of spaghetti noodles and I ended up rolling out the dough to cut lasagna noodles. We do love lasagna so at least we know we can do that easily, however we will see how often we have spaghetti!

Erickson Visit

We visited my family for Logan's (my nephew) baptism and to see LeAnn (my sister) since she flew in to visit too. It turned out to be a great weekend and it was super fun to have our kids see a baptism. Samantha will be 8 next year and it was really a good experience. LeAnn's daughter Maryn went hysterical when Logan went under the water, typical reaction for a 1 year old. After Logan was confirmed his brother asked him "Was it fun?". It was so cute to see all our family together and experience such an important thing. Too bad I forgot my camera for that event.
I also got the chance to talk more to my soon to be brother-in-law. JR is a nice guy but its been hard to talk to him when he's kissing my sister the whole time. Christine happened to come late so it was great to get to know him better without the distraction.

LeAnn made a super chocolately cake for Samantha since her birthday was just a few days before. It was really sweet of her. The kids just ran around and played so I snapped some pictures while I did have my camera.
We ended up staying at my sister's Diane's house and it was so fun to have that adventure for our kids. It opened up the opportunity for me to have my allergies treated by my brother Spencer without kids but with Kevin present. So far the allergy treatment has worked! My wrist was a bit beaten up by the adjustment he gave me but it is doing much better because of it! It is so nice to have talented, trained, compassionate family members when you need them!