Who sprains their bicep?!

Evidently, I do.  Yeeeeeah, a bicep sprain.  It's Clint's fault {sorry to throw you under the bus, babe, but you really can't wrestle a wimp and expect me to come out unscathed EVERY time!}.  But don't feel bad, I usually get in a few good cheap shots and fish hooks so I'm proud. 

How does a wrestler spell "love"?  P-I-N.  Haha 

So last weekend we're watching "Chuck" {totally hooked on it thanks to my bro Ryan}, and the episode unfortunately ends.  I thought it was unfortunate for the both of us... oh just kidding... it was unfortunate for ME.  Clint seized the opportunity and tackled me.  Now, I was resting quite happily on our comfy couch, completely unprepared for his brutal assault on my peace and relaxation.  However, I was able to pull myself out of my trance fast enough to ensure a rough landing for him when he proceeded to pull me off the couch {his plan was to wrap himself around me and then roll.  My plan was to allow him to do that, and then push us off right at the edge so we landed a little harder than he planned on.  Bru ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!}. 

It was on.

He had extended the challenge, and I accepted.  Our friends' little girl kept coming in to see what all my squealing and Clint's constant "Hey!  That's cheating!" was about.  It's all kind of a blur, I don't remember any specific moment where I thought "well now, I think I may have just sprained my bicep!"  All I know is that when it was all over, we were exhausted and giggling. 

Fast forward to an hour later {I think, I wasn't really paying attention}.  My head is spinning.  I'm feel like I'm about to lose my lunch.  That was the moment that I thought "wow, my shoulder kind of hurts.  Huh..."  Clint let me sleep pretty much the next 2 days, and now here it is, almost a week later and we have an official diagnosis {not that I was avoiding the doctor... entirely.  I was just hoping it would go away on it's own.  No such luck kid!}.  Now I'm drugged up for the next 10 days with IBProfen to help the muscle inflammation go down so the nerves won't be pinched and make my arm go numb if I raise it or use it too much, and a muscle relaxer for the pain {seems kinda backwards to me, but I'm all about smiling and nodding}.

I just have to giggle.  One of those giggles that you don't really hear, but it shakes your whole upper body.  But then I have to stop because it hurts my sprained bicep.  Sheeeeesh.  I really am a wimp!  :O)

My name is Mud

Well, it would be if I had any avid readers out there who were ticked that I don't update this thing very often lately...  BUT, kind readers, allow me to clear my name with this update full of slide shows and fun tidbits of our life over the last month.

Let's see... about a month ago we packed up enough food and warm clothes to supply a small army and headed up the mountain to play in the snow.  It was Keahi's first time and to be honest, she wasn't so thrilled to be stuck on a blanket where she couldn't eat the rocks.  At the bottom of our run, Clint found {and by found I mean fell into} a hole waist~deep in the snow made by a tree that had fallen before the snow came.  We heard that at the top of the mountain, the snow was around 12 feet deep!  We saw little snail-like things all over the place that were actually rocks or bits of snow that started rolling down the hillsides and grew as they rolled.  Pretty cool looking!  We were all freezing by the time we got home and were glad to come back to 70* weather.  {Gotta love it!!}

Next up, Keahi is eating table foods and turned 9 months last week.  8 teeth, 21.5 pounds, size 3 diapers, learning to stand up in the middle of the floor, cruising furniture, hasn't taken her first step yet but it's quickly coming!! 

Also... I had a fun idea for Madi's hair and voila!  It actually worked!!  {Sorry the pics are so pixelated... don't know what happened there}

I hit the big two-five last week!  That's right, I'm a quarter of a century old and I have to say that it wasn't as hard as everyone says it is.  Maybe 30 will be the tough one... I had a great day and don't feel like an old lady yet so life is great!!  :O)  I also was a finalist for our local version of American Idol, that was fun.  There ended up being 22 finalists {I think... there were a LOT of us!} and I had a blast!!  My audition is online, if you want to see it, let me know and I'll email you the link.

This last weekend, the boys {Clint, his dad, brother Rob and gf Kia} took Russell's kayaks and a canoe and took on the river.  We've a TONS of rain this year so it was flowing pretty heavy and a tad on the swift side... {ok, it was really fast but at least no one died right?!}

I think that really the only other thing that deserves note on this post is that our girls are friggin' adorable and we can't get enough of them!!

LOVE IT!!

Snow & Halloween=

Boy howdy have the last 2 weeks been crazy around here!  Clint was in Texas for a training for work for a week and then off to his brother and sister's for a deer hunt for 4 days!  I know, either I'm a saint for letting him run off and leave me with the girls for 11 days, or else I'm crazy!!  {Definately crazy, I know myself and I'm no saint!!}  So, last week I loaded up the girls and visited my Alma Mater {home town}.  We had so much fun eating yummy food at the local Mexican restaurant, catching up with friends, seeing all the improvements and how nice my old house has been fixed up.  I stayed with my friend Rachel and my girls fit right in with her 3 girls and 1 boy {Madi had a blast and was SO upset when we left!}.  It was total chaos but so fun!  When we woke up in the morning, there was 4 inches of snow on the ground just waiting to be played in.  Luckily, I remembered how cold it got there and had come prepared with boots, mittens, a scarf, a beanie, an extra sweatshirt, pants and socks!  Go me!  Madi had such a great time playing in all that white stuff {yes, she's seen snow before but not for a while}.  It was nice to get home though and not worry about the mud that I'm sure followed very quickly after the winter wonderland.  But all that cold got me TOTALLY in the mood for Christmas so when I got home I started up the Christmas music and SO BADLY wanted to decorate for the holidays... but it was only October so I decided to wait... more on that in a later post!  :0)

Now it's time for our Halloween story.  Well, it's actually kinda depressing.  All of our friends were going out of town for the actual holiday, so we had a progressive dinner/Halloween party Friday night.  We dressed all the kids up {so that Grandparents could see their costumes} and let them practice trick or treating.  Michele was so good and had little pens, notebooks, stickers and bubbles for the kids behind the doors in her house!  It was so cute and the kids had a blast!  Thank heavens for that party cuz that was the only Halloween Madi and Keahi got!  I'm not going to go into the whole story here {I don't want to offend anyone or stir up the hornets nest any more than it already is} so suffice it to say that some things happened, some words, ok bad words were loudly exchanged between some people and to avoid a breakdown on my or Madi's part, we instead watched Enchanted at my brother's house.  {Just so you know, the words were NOT between me and Clint, we were on the same team}  It's been over a week now and Madi hasn't mentioned anything about it since Sunday so I doubt she's been scarred for life.  My only regret is that I didn't get a picture of my girls dressed up like Tinkerbell together {yes, they were BOTH Tink, and it was freakin' adorable!!}.  I'm planning on dressing them up again and getting that picture!!!

So there you have it, another chapter in the book that is our lives!  And Clint made it home safe last night around 7:30, for those who were wondering!  :0)  And his girls ALL missed him like mad!

Playing Catch-Up

So much has happened over the last few weeks and I have been so busy that it has sadly passed by without being posted here for all you avid readers of our blog. So terribly sorry! :0) Madison is asleep so we will see how far I can get on this catching up spree…

Make a Smilebox slideshow

August 23rd (the Saturday after our Havasupai excitement) was a great day for adventure, or so Clint and his friends thought! They decided to ride mountain bikes down the mountain, which probably would not have been a problem, except they took a wrong turn at one point and ended up on a trail that isn’t so much a biking trail as it is metal stuck into a giant cliff face with rocks piled on it pretending to be a trail! THEN, to top that off when they did make it back to the trail, two of the guys riding in front of Clint bumped a beehive and royally ticked off all the bees! Clint starts yelling “Bees! Bees! AAAAAAH!” and takes off. Our friend Parker is in front of him and starts pedaling as fast as he can, but can hear Clint gaining on him. He starts wondering why Clint’s bike isn’t catching his back tire when Clint zooms past him… on FOOT! THEN Clint outstrips the guy on the bike in front of Parker and keeps going! He had a helmet on and the bees were up inside stinging his head so he thought the whole swarm was still surrounding him! I can’t believe that he outran two guys pedaling DOWNHILL on bikes! My little gazelle! All in all, they ditched 3 bikes and averaged 15 stings each. Owie! (Poor Andy, it was his birthday!) Later they had to return to get the bikes, luckily the bees were MIA, but the truck broke down. It was definitely exciting!

Make a Smilebox postcard

Some friends of ours came into possession of an extra twin bed and dinette set so guess who got to enjoy the riches? Yeehaw! We did some switching around and ended up with Andy and Michele’s old dinette set (which is BEAUTIFUL!) and put our old one on the corner – it disappeared overnight! Maddie was pretty excited for her “BIG big girl bed” and Mommy had to make her a new bed set. I picked out one I liked from Pottery Barn and with Clint’s aunt’s help figured out the design and size for it and got all the fabric on a Wednesday. The following Wednesday it was finished! It was SO MUCH WORK! But so worth it! I cut out flowers and birds and ironed them onto the squares, then did decorative stitches around each one. For the stems I sewed on some scrapbooking fuzzy string, and for the legs on the birds I used ricrac. Then I quilted around each square and each bird and flower. (That was the hardest part!) I did a pillowcase and a throw pillow to go with it, and it matches what she had in there before so I can still use those throw pillows too! It was a fun project and I’m glad I did it, but I don’t think I’ll do anything as involved for a LOOONG time!!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Labor Day Weekend was fun, we did our traditional trek up the mountain. This time we were joined by all of Clint’s family and that was great! There were only 2 drawbacks, our campsite was far away from everything else and so was kind of isolated, and it rained pretty much the WHOLE TIME. That was miserable! Everyone went up a day before I did because I was sick (I think that blanket tried to do me in!) and the night that I missed was horrible! Everything got wet, the storm kept waking everyone up, and then it was so muddy and cloudy that the morning wasn’t much fun either. We had a birthday party for Clint’s nephew, and Jonnet gave him Moon Sand, which Madison and he loved! They made the biggest mess! Good thing they only opened one bag! It was almost Russell’s birthday and Clint’s sister Missy had got him a present too, a cool beans flashlight that is magnetic on the bottom! The boys and Missy played Frisbee since no one had a football, which is always a joy to watch! :0) Madison and I came home Sunday morning because her runny nose had turned into a chest cold and we were both feeling pretty gross. Monday the sun finally came out and dried up all the rain (any one else singing about spiders?) and Clint’s brothers thought it would be great fun to ride down the hill on Tonka trucks! I’m sad I missed that! Too fun.

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

Thursday was Clint’s birthday (27 years old! I told him that 26 is still young but 27 is OLD!) and we had a party for him Friday night. Any chance we have to get together with our friends, eat pizza, play games, eat brownies and ice cream… we are SO there! You’d NEVER be able to tell what this kid likes to do based on what he got; a backpacking tent, 2 boxes of shotgun shells, a quail call, and a new day pack for hiking. See what I mean? :0) We had a lot of fun with the quail call, Parker’s was the best, followed by Madison! Maddie got him some candy and I got him new blades for his electric razor. (I know, exciting eh? But he needed them and they are expensive, so that’s what he got!)

I believe I should be pretty much caught up at this point… if not I’ll post more later! Hasta!

A FUN 4th of July!

I get a phone call at 5:45ish Friday morning from Clint. “Wanna hear a funny scary story?” He got up waaaaay early to go help with the town pancake breakfast, and realized he needed to fill up his truck with gas. So, he pulls up behind this truck and starts to walk between the two vehicles to get to the gas pump when his police academy training popped into his head reminding him to NEVER walk in between two vehicles if there’s a chance one may start moving… can you see where this is going? Yeah, he walked around behind his truck instead and the driver in the other one threw it in reverse and punched the gas. Clint’s truck had it’s emergency brake on and it STILL jumped back about 6 inches, hitting him in the shin with the ball hitch, leaving a nice 1 ½ inch cut. I don’t even want to think about the alternative ending to this story, one with him in the hospital with two broken legs! YUCK! But keep reading, it gets better!

Clint starts jumping up and down, yelling (I say crying, he says not :) and the guy thinking his leg is broken comes running over. Clint butches up and says he’s fine and examines the truck, no scratches on ours except a large crack on one of the plastic pieces on the bumper. So he asks the guy for his insurance information and the guy says no. “Do you have insurance?” “Yes.” “Can I see it?” “No.” “Ok, I’ll call the police and they’ll get it from you and give it to me.” “The police are coming?” “Yeah, that’s what happens when you get in an accident!” The guy starts getting nervous at this point. The officer that shows up went through the academy with Clint (small town!) and goes to the other guy first. He speaks very broken English (when asked what town he lives in he replies “USA.” “Zip Code?” “USA.” You get the idea). Turns out he is here illegally from Guatemala, no work visa, nada! He says he bought the truck from someone but it’s not in his name, no registration, obviously no license and no insurance. The officer asks him if there are any guns or drugs in the vehicle and he says no. At this point the officer tells Clint he can go do what he needs to do, she’ll come find him when she’s finished. We knew she arrested him after Clint left because he was illegal, but we learned later that not only did he have a gun in the glove box (where he kept reaching to get papers for her) he had a nice little stash of meth! So, Clint has to write up a statement and have an officer pick it up so they can charge this guy with a bunch of stuff, deport him and if he ever comes back he’s automatically a felon.

Lovely way to start the holiday weekend, eh?



The pancake breakfast was fun, we were in charge of music and put waaaay too much energy into trying to help organize a quartet of high schoolers to sing a few songs, but they did great! Then when Maddie and I finally were able to get down there (I say finally for Clint’s sake, he was ansy for us to arrive – we came at 6:40!) Clint and I sang “God Bless the USA”. It was kinda sad for me, everyone after came up and said they didn’t know I could play guitar and how wonderful it was that I knew how to play and when did I learn and all that… That’s what I know KNOWN for in high school, so that was one of those “I guess I’m growing up” moments that makes you want to cry a little bit!




The rest of the day was pretty blah; it was too hot to go to the parade, Clint left to hike up the mountain in the afternoon and it stormed that night so Madison and I stayed home from the fireworks (she was asleep by that point anyway!). Oh well!

Saturday was fun though! Maddie and I made cookies for the camping trip and she got to lick off her first beater! She did a really good job too! I was definitely impressed! Then we packed up and headed up the mountain with Michele and the girls (Andy was with Clint). The boys had taken a new trail and didn’t know what time they’d be up to the cabin so we went looking for them around 2:30. We finally found them at 4 – stinky, exhausted, and happy for jackets, fresh water and my delicious chocolate chip cookies! The trail had disappeared and they had trekked straight up the mountain, through thorns, bushes, rocks, rain (they parked under a big rock during an 1 ½ hour rainstorm), and even followed a bear trail for a while… what these boys were thinking, I don’t know. I doubt I want to know! And on the way home, Clint was already saying, “It was a fun hike!” Yikes!

Once we got them back to the cabin and fed, they washed up in some warm water in the sink. We waited outside with the girls and Michele’s 2 year old asked, “What are Clint and Daddy doing? Are they taking a bath together?” to which we answered, “Yes, they are!” “Oh, that’s cuz they like each other, huh?” to which we again answered, “Yes!” :) Ah, the innocence of childhood! Made us giggle!

Michele bought all three girls matching princess umbrellas and they were a hoot to watch! They were so excited for those things, they took them everywhere – to the outhouse, in the cabin, to the fire ring… it was so fun!

Clint decided he needed to be macho and pushed a tree over. Yes, you read that right, he PUSHED a tree over! Of course, it was one of those hazard trees that are marked by the forest service to be removed, so it was probably weak. Either that or Clint is REALLY strong, because it fell over really fast!

It was so nice to relax with friends and have nothing to do but play! It got me thinking that we are so lucky to have friends who have the same traditions we do! Madison will always get to go camping twice a year with her best friends and I think that is so cool!
I’m already excited for Labor Day weekend (the next time we go up and camp on the mountain)!