Pop Goes the Monkey

On March 14th we went to see Disney On Ice in Salt Lake City and it was a lot of fun. They had The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Lilo and Stitch, and of course, Cassie’s favorite of all time, Peter Pan. Adam’s mom and sisters came with us which is good because Peter insisted on sitting in my lap the entire time so Angie insisted on sitting in Angie’s lap. Thanks Angie for letting her do that.

So I know this is a week late, but seeing how we still haven’t posted our Christmas photos from last year, a week isn’t all that bad. Last Monday was President’s Day. This was the first time in a decade I’ve had President’s Day off, and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. What do people do on President’s Day? Kind of an odd holiday.

Anyways, I wanted to do something, so I decided to take Cassie and Peter up to the Children’s museum in Salt Lake. Sandy had to get in some work, so I invited my Mom and sister Sophie to come.

It was pretty fun, but extremely busy. When we went to the Children’s museum in Appleton, there were other patrons of course, but we were able to do most the activities by ourselves. Here, there were about a million kids. Every activity was infested with ten to fifteen little monsters pushing and grabbing and stuff like that. Thankfully Cassie isn’t to shy. She just squeezes in and has a good time.

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

As my dear wife mentioned, we’ve been a bit lazy posting lately. I was looking through my pictures on my iPhone and thought I’d share a few. Enjoy!

So we haven’t been the best at updating the blog the past few weeks. As you all know, this is a terribly busy season and thus, sometimes the small things like blogging get neglected.

We’ve definitely been keeping busy the past few weeks with shopping and wrapping and cooking and preparing neighbor gifts, etc. For the most part, these have been fairly mundane activities with few snapshot moments, but we have accumulated a few photos.

I’m sure with Christmas coming, there will be plenty more blogging opportunities before the end of the year. But until then here is Thanksgiving through this weekend:

Here are some more of my favorite family pictures we took this fall. My friend Amy took them again and I think she does a great job.

As we previously mentioned, we recently stayed with Sandy’s family in Appleton, Wisconsin. We packed the kids up, headed to the airport, flew to Chicago, and then headed north for a three hour drive. Traveling with two little monsters can be exhausting, but for the most part, the kids did pretty good (I’m going to overlook the 30 minutes Cassie spent screaming at the top of her lungs in the airplane).

Our time in Wisconsin was pretty quite, which is nice. We did get out and do a few things. We took the kids to see Aunt Ellen’s story time at the library. We went to the Appleton’s Children Museum. We went out to dinner with Ben, Michelle, and Ellen. I was able to take Sandy to see the new Bond movie and grab a bite to eat. We also stopped by Simon’s and spent a bunch of money on cheese.

All told, we had a really good time and are grateful for Sandy’s parents for putting up with us for a week. It was really nice to visit since most of Sandy’s family has never seen Peter and some hadn’t seen Cassie for two years. Hopefully we get the chance to visit again soon. But maybe we’ll go when it’s a tad bit warmer.

Hey everyone! We’re out in Appleton, Wisconsin enjoying the frigid weather, visiting with family, and the cheese. Yesterday we took the kids to the Appleton Children’s Museum and I must admit, it’s a pretty cool place. There was TONs of stuff to do. I’ll let the pictures below do most of the talking, but on the whole, it was an enjoyable experience. We went fairly early in the day, so for the most part, we could do all the activities without a hundred little monsters trying to push their way ahead or us.

Anyhow, the pictures are below. They were taken on my iphone so the quality isn’t all that great. We have some other pictures from our trips, but they are all across our three digital cameras so I’ll probably get them all together once we get home.

Halloween was pretty hectic this year. At 4:00 the family came up to my work for some Trick-or-Treating there. Sandy has never been inside my new office, so that’s nice. Cassie was so funny cause she wouldn’t get within five feet of anyone passing out candy. And no matter how much we prodded, she wouldn’t say “thank you” much less “Trick-or-Treat”.

After my work, we had to be a Trunk-or-Treat at our church building at 5:30. Funny story, on the way back from my office, Cassie asked Sandy for a sucker. Sandy said, she could have one and handed Cassie her candy bucket. A few minutes later Sandy heard Cassie giggling and looked back at her, only to find that Cassie had shoved as many suckers in her mouth as she could. Little white sticks were going in every direction.

After the Trunk-or-Treat, we headed home so that we could give candy out to the same little monsters we saw at the Trunk-or-Treat. I took Cassie around the block so she could gain some valuable Halloweening experience that is sure to come in handy later in life. We started out going at the same time as Cassie’s friend Winston. But Cassie was a little bit slower so she kept losing sight of him. Then a few minutes later we’d see him again and she’d get so excited and demand we followed him until we lost him again.

After the last of the tikes came knocking on our door, my mom, Sophie, Michael and Emily came over so they could see Cassie and Peter all dressed up. Cassie had a bit of a sugar buzz, as I’m sure the vast majority of American children did. She was bouncing all over the place and somehow kept showing up with more candy she had hoarded somewhere.

On the whole, it was pretty fun. More pictures are provided below for your viewing pleasures.

So I finally got around to plugging in our old family PC. He’s been gathering dust for the past six months or so and since we have four other computers, I haven’t been pressed to get him operational. But I finally plugged him in and was able to copy all our family photos off of it and onto our media PC.

Anyways, with Halloween approaching in a few short days, I thought it might be fun to break open the archives and show off Cassie’s first two Halloweens.

2006

In 2006, Cassie was 3 and a half months olds and about as interesting as those flour babies they make you carry around in middle school. So here she is, dressed in a glorified potato sack:

2007

The next year, Cassie was a walking, babbling star. She also was (and still is) quite opinionated, and there is one thing we know for certain: she hated her Halloween costume. For the most part, she screamed and screamed until we took the costume off. Then she happy again.

Tune back in this weekend for Cassie’s and Peter’s latest Halloween adventures!

Sandy came and brought the kids up to my work tonight so that we could drive over to Thanksgiving Point. They’ve got a lot of fun stuff going on right now. We decided to do their Barnyard Boo since Cassie’s still pretty young and we had to lug Peter around.

We did the the Barnyard Boo last year as well with Sam and Jessie for Cadence’s birthday. It’s pretty fun for the little ones. There’s a lot of random activities and lots of animals to look at. It’s fun because Cassie knows how to say the names of all the farm animals, but this is the first time she’s seen them all in person while knowing what they are.

She’s pretty bashful around them, though and she never really wanted to get too close. She also didn’t want to try the pony rides again this year. She just likes to keep her distance and name the animals from afar. She does pretty good with the names and sounds, but for some reason she thinks pigs are really pirate piggies. Weird?!