My first Pinterst project

So I've spent many days and nights looking all over pinterest and admiring all of the cute things that people make and amazed at their creativity and always wishing I could do that and make our house cuter and homier! So I found this one that was a "birthday board" and thought it was a great way to keep track of everyone's birthdays since so many people are having kids it's becoming harder to remember them all!

So here's my progress:

When we get this hung up I'll get a better picture so you can see all of the names. I'm really happy with the way it turned out and have to give Traci credit for helping me get my booty in gear and finally getting this done! And if you guys didn't notice there are a lot of birthday's in July and we're kind of lacking in June and November. So for all of the people planning to have kids if you could please try to avoid having them in July for awhile, just until this board evens out a little more. I would greatly appreciate it!! haha. Just kidding!! Kind of! Anyways I had a ton of fun making this and seeing it get done and am anxious to keep making projects!!

Ice Blocking

In the middle of June one of Ryan's cousins was getting married so his family from Seattle came over. I haven't been able to spend much time with them in the past so it was a lot of fun getting to spend time with them all. Ryan and his cousin Mike were helping cook for the wedding reception and we were all helping keep things going and it was a lot of fun.
Here they are getting ready to cook.

Here they are toasting after cooking a LOT of hamburgers for the wedding. 

The next day was the last day we were all going to have together and Ryan and I were trying to find something to do with his cousin Gage that is 13 and Ryan came up with Ice Blocking! Ryan and I almost did this with his friends a couple of years ago and then it never happened so I was excited to finally get to do this. Ryan calls it "sledding for the summer time". Basically you ride big blocks of ice down a hill. We put some foil tins on top of it to keep our pants dry and it was a ton of fun. After awhile we got the rest of his cousins into it. Here we're all getting ready to go.

There Ryan goes!

 And he crashes. That's Gage right next to him because he just went down right before Ryan.

There Gage goes again and that's Austin in the corner.

There I go. I didn't fall TOO much that day!

Here's Jennifer.

Here are all the boys getting ready to go. His cousin Mike was going to take his son Austin down. They were using a double ice block, two blocks with a bigger tin. We found that to be more stable than just one block.

It was a lot of fun getting to spend time with his family and can't wait to see them all again in September for another wedding!

Dworshak

This last weekend Ryan and I went up to Dworshak and spent the weekend with his family at his Aunt and Uncle's cabin. It's so beautiful there! We went up once last year and were excited to go back up.
Here are some of the views from their cabin. It's so beautiful and relaxing it was hard to leave!

Ryan's Uncle Larry took Ryan and I for a cruise. He rode on the 4-wheeler and Ryan and I rode on their Polaris Razr which was a lot of fun. Ryan drove the whole time and I just looked around and took pictures which I was enjoying. Here are some pictures from our drive. 



Here we started going up an old logging road. I can't believe Dad used to drive semi's on these! Crazy.

Brayden hasn't done anything like this before so after some convincing he went on a ride with Shandra and Doug and came back yelling "Let's go again" He went for another big ride the next day.

And later in the afternoon we went down to the water to take Starsky swimming which he loves. Here are some action shots. 

Here's a family photo of all the people that were up there. It was such a fun weekend it was so hard to leave!

Just Dance!

In June, Ryan and I made the trip over to the Tri-Cities to watch Kennedy and Isabella at their dance recital that they have once a year. It's such a big recital! There are so many kids and different dance routines that I give major props to the people that organize this. We were there for 2 1/2 hours and with exception of the intermission, there was constantly kids dancing. Isabella did one dance routine and Kennedy did three and you can tell how much hard work they've done because they both did such a great job! We weren't supposed to take photos but Ryan snuck in a few!

They both did such an amazing job! And they were both so cute in their outfits and all decked out for their routines. It was so much fun getting to see the girls and I can't wait until next year for their next recital.

Hopefully our Future Home ♥

Ryan and I have been going a little stir crazy in our apartment and have been house hunting since early February. We finally found a house that we loved! We found it by luck because the family didn't even have it posted online and just had a sign in their yard and it's not on a busy street at all. After a week of negotiating the cost we eventually came to an agreement with the couple and now hopefully everything will go according to plan and we'll close on our house May 31st!! We just had our house inspection on thursday and he didn't find anything to major which is great. Here are a few pictures they had posted online from when they tried selling their house last year:

Through the doorway here you can see the stairway that goes up and downstairs.

 That stairway there goes to two bedrooms, one being the master, and a full bathroom. The downstairs goes to another bedroom, a closet with access to the crawlspace which goes under most of the house and will be amazing for storage! The bathroom also is the laundry room. And there is also another room that they use as their office now but could be turned into a bedroom if we just add a door to the doorway. So that's nice we at least have that option!

And when talking to Nicole we determined that the size of the backyard was "at least a 4 trampoline sized yard" I like that kind of measurement! haha. We are anxious for closing and keeping our fingers crossed that nothing prevents us from eventually moving in to: 1826 birch ct :)

Orlando, FL ♥

Sorry I'm blogging about our trip over a month later! I really did try blogging about it a few weeks ago but my internet wasn't working for me. But we had an amazing time! We quickly learned how little change or cash we carried when we were scraping around my purse and his car trying to find change for the tolls....it would seem like somewhere on all the travel sites we looked at they would've mentioned pay tolls! We ended up not having enough change and had to mail in a check for not the $1.25...but 26.25....ugh! And we also got ourselves lost thinking that we'd easily find our way from the airport to the hotel and were very mistaken. it took us probably close to an hour getting from the airport to our hotel which would normally be about a 20 minute drive! But we finally got to our hotel and this was the view from our hotel! We stayed at the Wyndham Grand Orlando:

From our room we could watch the fireworks from Walt Disney World that went off every night at 9:00. They were so much fun to watch.  And down below was the pool and bar where we went every night.

The next day we went to Universal Studios to of course....go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

 This was the entrance to Harry Potter....look at all the people! Oh my it was so crowded there it was hard to move around. It was even harder to get into the shops which was a bummer because there was just SO many people. The rest of the park wasn't nearly as bad...most likely because EVERYONE was in Harry Potter world. It looked exactly like Hogsmeade though which was awesome!

Me with the conductor :)

Inside Hogwarts was a ride which at the time had a 90 minute wait so we decided to go back early on another day because we had a three day pass to Universal Studios. There were also a couple of other rides that also had long waits...including getting into Ollivanders Wand Shop...it was going to take over an hour to get in there. So our first day was mainly just looking at everything and taking pictures. They had a rollercoaster that was themed around the Triwizard Cup which was a LOT of fun and the ride inside Hogwarts was supposed to be like you were riding on a broom and that ride was crazy! I honestly don't know how Harry does it ;) Our first day here we went to Margaritaville and ate. Man they had amazing Margaritas :)

Our third day in Orlando we road tripped to Cape Canaveral and went to Kennedy Space Center. This place was unbelievable. We went on the "VIP" tour that took us inside the Vehicle Assembly Building.

This is the big building you always see on movies that the shuttles come out of :) In November they started letting people tour inside the building, which is the first time in 33 years that "non-essential personnel" have been allowed in here since they were always building shuttles and there was always gas and fuel and it wasn't very safe. But now that the space program has been closed down people can tour in here until they start building again. So that was really awesome that we were able to go inside this. This building was incredible. It was SO huge. It's the largest one story building in the world and it felt like you were going to fall over when you looked at the ceiling.

The bus drove us out as far as they could on to the Cape Canaveral air force base and here was a view of some of the launch pads. We were advised to NOT go on the grass due to the face that this river here is loaded with alligators and they're hard to see in the grass. That was comforting.

Here was part of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB)....this picture of course doesn't show all the way to the top. But still huge. Inside here was also the Discovery space shuttle! They were holding it here until they moved it to the Smithsonian in April. So that was also amazing that we got to see that.

This picture above was really cool. So because they're so close the the ocean they of course have hurricanes. So to ensure that the shuttles they build are safe, they build them in the middle of the building and then lift them with a crane in through that hole and onto the other wise there they can then move them outside and to the launch pad. It turns out the the newer shuttles like the Discovery only had a few inches of clearance between this hole and it took I think almost 9 hours to move it through it. Talk about stressful!!

This is a picture of pictures of them lifiting the shuttle. Pretty impressive! After touring through all of the building and watching an iMax movie about the Hubble and spending a good 7 hours here...we went to Cocoa Beach and walked in the Atlantic which was amazingly warm. We were pretty wiped from our day at the Kennedy Space Center and so we only walked around for a little bit and then headed back to Orlando.

Just to back track a little bit....this is a picture of the launch pad that sent man to the moon. And this next picture is an alligator that was a few feet from the bus.

The tour guide pointed out this alligator and as everyone was looking at it he said "So on your right is a launch pad that sent man to the moon....and on your left is an alligator" He was a pretty funny tour guide. Here is a picture of us on our tour. We're pretty close to the launch pad pictured above and the Atlantic is in the background.

This day of our trip was completely amazing and I definitely recommend people try to make a trip here if they are in Florida. It was amazing. Our next few days we went back to Universal Studios and left our cameras at home so we wouldn't have to worry about getting our cameras wet and went on all of the rides which were a ton of fun. We got there as soon as it opened so we the lines weren't quite as long. It was a ton of fun! We spent one day at Walt Disney World and just went to the Magical Kingdom and that was a lot of fun. And one day we spent basically sleeping the whole day because we were so worn out from all of our full days at the theme parks we still hadn't caught up with the time change. It was a good lazy day. :) We had such an amazing time and I can't wait until we start planning another trip. A week was definitely not enough time for a vacation. I was not ready to go back! And I was loving the weather. It was hard coming back to Lewiston where it was snowing!! But we definitely made lots of fun memories. :)