We are here!

We finally made it to Oregon! That is one long drive......and we have Spongebob Squarepants and candy to thank for us making it to Utah in 2 days. We stopped there for a few days to see some of our family and then we came the rest of the way. We kind of just showed up with no place to live except for the Super 8 Motel. We looked for 2 days and nothing was really working out. We ended up finding a really nice place to live. It was a huge blessing and was just one more confirmation from Heavenly Father that this is where we are supposed to be. Here is a picture of the view from our backyard. Pretty nice, huh. We went to a park down the street last week and a deer just comes walking out of the trees like it was no big deal. It's pretty cool to see a deer but I sure hope I never see a cougar or a bear come strolling out of the woods while we're at the park. So far we really like it here. Everyone has been so nice and we seem to be in a really good ward. Sam starts seeing patients on Monday so hopefully everything will go well and hopefully he can be really busy soon so we can make some money. The student loans have already started looming.......scary!!!

Jacky Boy

This is what Mason calls Jack and I have to admit that the rest of us have started calling him that sometimes. I thought I'd write a few things about Jack because he kind of gets left out of things since he doesn't do much yet. He is huge........ I think he weighs almost 20 lbs. and is wearing some 12 month size clothes. He likes to be carried around a lot of the time. I like to carry him and all but hauling around an extra 20 pounds all day makes my arms tired. He is very happy and loves to laugh and smile and thinks that Maddy and Mason are hilarious. We have one of those little chairs with the wheels and Jack just figured out how to move it by himself. He can now entertain himself for about 15 minutes at a time zooming around the kitchen and then it's back to mom holding him. We all really love him and are glad he came to our family.......and some day I really hope that he will sleep :)

Great Wolf Lodge

We wanted to do something fun for graduation and that fun thing we really wanted to do was take the kids to Disney World.....but since we have no money that just wasn't going to work out. We decided to go to the Great Wolf Lodge in Mason, Ohio instead and Maddy and Mason loved it. We drove down and spent the night. They have some neat rooms there. The one we stayed in had a cave and inside the cave were bunk beds for the kids. You can see Mason's happy little face. He loved getting to sleep in the bunk bed. The water park was indoors so it was perfect for people who are as whitey white as we are. Maddy and Mason both almost drowned because of their life jackets but other than that we had a really great time. These pictures turned out pretty terrible but I think you can kind of tell what's going on. Maddy, Mason and Sam went down the big water slide about 10 times. I think Mason was almost scared to death the first time but for some reason he kept getting back on.....only to get really scared again.

Happy Graduation!

Sam graduated!!! Everything that day was really nice. The kids lasted about 20 minutes into the graduation and then we had to crawl over 10 people to get out while 2 out of the 3 were crying loudly.........so needless to say I didn't really get any good pictures but I did manage to get this one with one hand while I was trying to get everybody out before we bothered too many people. It's a good thing Kimball is towards the beginning of the alphabet. There was a dinner that we went to afterwards and it was also really nice. Again the kids lasted about 20 minutes and then things got a little wild. We really did bother some people this time but it wasn't for lack of trying to keep them quiet. Anyways, we are proud of Sam and all of his hard work. We know that he will make a great eye doctor.

Goodbye Ohio, hello Oregon

So we finally know what we are doing with ourselves after 7 years of school. We are moving to a smallish town in north eastern Oregon where they could really use a good eye doctor. We felt like we have been looking and trying to decide what to do for a while and nothing seemed to be right. Then all of a sudden everything kind of fell into place and we really feel like this is what Heavenly Father wants our family to do. We are sad to leave Ohio but excited to start this next part.

Trip to Virginia

We got to go spend about 3 weeks visiting my mom and dad in Virginia. My brother was getting home from his mission so it was good to be able to see him. It was fun to do something else for a little while.......well, I guess I didn't really do anything different but it was fun to just have a change of scenery. We had fun going to the park, playing at the beach, and eating too many treats. It was really good to see my family and hopefully we didn't destroy the house too badly. Thanks mom and dad! These are just a few pictures that we took there that I think are cute. My mom had a picture done of all the grandkids and the boys had matching clothes. Here is Mason in his little suit.......so cute! He was being a stinker though and wouldn't hold still and smile. I like this picture of Maddy but of course Mason still wasn't holding still. He's not so big on holding still.

Trip to Virginia

Tate and Jack are only about 3 weeks apart. Here they are taking turns chewing on a towel. Hopefully when everyone is done with school we can all live sort of close by so that they can be friends. Some of these are pictures from the kite festival that were supposed to go in the post below but I didn't feel like waiting for 10 years while the pictures uploaded at the same time.