Goodbye Old Friend

The time has come for Cade to say goodbye to his dear friend, The Truck. It was Cade's pride and joy and in his words, its what kept him sane. (I don't know who could have been driving him insane :) It was a little beat up when we got it so it was great for him to take it out hunting/scouting/whatever and not worry about beating it up more. That poor thing was a bit rickety and lately we have been afraid to drive it out of town. Cade thought since day one that the clutch was going out, but it held on and never gave up on us. The bed liner even flew right out one day while driving down the I-17 and Cade was able to retrieve it and put it back on (Thankfully it flew off to the side and didn't cause any collisions). But as much as he loved that thing, it just wasn't big enough for Conner to sit in safely.

After one hour on Craigslist for $5,900 Cade received about 10 phone calls on it. One man close by asked to test drive it and then offered $5,500. Cade had only been hoping for $5,000 so he took it. It was immediately apparent to me that Cade should have asked for more and let others test drive it and see who would offer the most for it, but he said he was too busy to let everyone test drive it. And again I reminded him of how bad of an idea it was to start this project on the last week of tax season!! But I was at work during all of this so it was already sold and done with by the time I got home and I had no say in the matter. My only consolation is that we bought the truck almost 6 years ago for about $8,000 so it was a pretty good deal overall.

Now that we were suddenly down to one vehicle it was time to buy another. Cade had been somewhat searching Craigslist and dealerships for months so we had a pretty good idea of what we were after. Good thing because we only had about a day to find something. I hate making any decisions quickly, but somehow we are always very rushed when we buy our cars. Cade went down to Mesa to test drive a few, but I had to work and couldn't go with him. But luckily for me Ashley just happened to be driving down from Utah and was passing by my area right about when I was getting off so she made a little detour and picked me up. After a day of searching we settled on this bad boy.



Cade is quickly falling in love with his new truck. He loves that it is lifted and has rims. I personally think it just looks like something is missing, but I'm obviously not into cars and their accessories. But we do love how we can all fit nicely into it and its automatic so I can actually drive this one! The only downside is we wanted a bench seat so we could fit our possible future children into it, but there are rarely any for sale with a bench seat plus all of our other requirements. So someday we may be switching out the seats, but its nice to have the bucket seats for now. I don't know why but Cade decided his old license plate just wouldn't do so he requested a new one so that it was no longer ###-SHE :) The sad thing though is when we got home our garage door was broken so we have to leave our new friend out front for a few days until we are home long enough for someone to come by and fix it. (Cade was going to attempt to replace the broken spring himself, but then he read a strong warning about how easily one can loose a limb or life trying to do so and he quickly decided he would rather call a professional.)

First Haircut

Since Conner was born I have been trimming the hair around his ears and neck as needed. I don't know anything about how to cut hair and have only ever cut Cade's with an electric razor, which takes no skill whatsoever. I had been putting off cutting Conner's because I wasn't about to use a razor and make it that short and I really didn't want to mess it up trying to use scissors. I'm also not about to start paying a professional to cut his hair already. But as you can see, by 4 and a half months, it was just getting too long and difficult to keep looking nice.

So after he fell into a deep sleep one night I did a quick google search on how to cut boys' hair and got to work.

Since this was my first attempt and his hair is his trademark I wanted to make sure I didn't butcher it so I only took a little bit off.

I didn't get an "after" picture because he was too tired and just went straight to bed after. But here is a picture from a few days later at Logan's blessing with Grandma Johnson.





I know you can't really see it that well in the picture but I can tell you that I did a pretty dang good job for a first timer! This actually happened about 3 weeks ago (I've been a little too busy for blogging lately) and its already getting close to needing to be cut again. I'm hoping I'll be an old pro soon with all the practice I'll be getting.

Random Happenings

Here's a few things that have been going on around our house lately.

I love bread of all kinds so for a long time now I've been wanting to learn how to make some good rolls. But sadly, yeast and I don't seem to get along very well and I tend to stay away from making bread of all kinds. Then my relief society needed people to sign up to make either rolls or soups and I don't make any soups either so I thought it would be a good time to force myself to learn to make some rolls. I decided to make my mom's recipe since I know what it should taste and look like. As usual yeast was not being my friend and the rolls turned out looking like this. Not at all fluffy and light like they should be. What a waste.



Before giving in and buying rolls for the activity I decided to try another recipe that seemed fairly simple. And it worked! They were easy and delicious. They had to rise for an hour in a muffin tin and I ran out of muffin tins and made a few foil cups to put the leftover dough into and thats all I got a picture of. So even though they don't look that great here, rest assured the ones that were in a muffin tin were beautifully formed.



Last week we learned a lesson that I thought I would share with all parents of small children in case you don't already know. Our washing machine suddenly stopped working properly, it wasn't draining and was making a terrible noise. After having a repairman come out to fix it we learned that one of Conner's little socks plugged up the drain hose. So after paying $108 to have it fixed and replace the hose we learned that we needed to buy a mesh bag from Walmart for $1.50 to wash all small things in. I sure wish I had known that sooner.

This bit of information I am embarrassed to share, but I guess I will anyway. While Cade and I were dating I worked at this discount clothing store that sold new items from stores that often had some kind of damage to them. Cade bought this nice jacket that had a messed up seam for $5 because he knew his grandma could fix it for him. He was right, she made it look like new. It was his favorite jacket and he wore it frequently, but for the last year or so it has been developing more and more holes in it. I kept trying to get Cade to throw it away or at least stop wearing it in public but he wouldn't. He had to have a new one similar to it before he would get rid of it. We found a possible replacement jacket Thanksgiving weekend but it wasn't on sale at all and I refused to buy anything that wasn't on sale during the best sale time of the year. So Cade kept pretending to look for a new one and then last week we were doing some quick shopping and went back to look for that jacket. We were in luck, it was on clearance for $25 (down from $80)! Finally, we can go out in public again without looking homeless, yay!!

Old jacket. I don't think I need to point out all the holes, they're pretty obvious.

New jacket. He may look slightly homeless here too, but its because he's wearing his pajamas and getting ready for bed. But hey, when I'm ready to blog I don't have time for him to get ready for pictures.

And the best news of all. Conner has been scooting out of his blankets or kicking them off of him every night now and we could tell that he was waking up a couple of times just because he was cold. So we bought him a sleepbag to wear over his pjs and a miracle occurred. He slept for 8 hours straight!! We weren't convinced it wasn't just a coincidence but out of the 4 nights that he has worn it, 3 of those nights he slept at least 7 hours. Its like a magic bag!

Just discovering a fun, new toy.

Daddy did his hair this day :) And no, his feet aren't this big but he was out of clean socks in his size.

 

One Century Old

My Grandma Mason turned a whopping 100 years old on Sunday! Woohoo! Even though she isn't too thrilled to still be around I was pretty excited to see her hit that milestone. We got the family together to celebrate. Here is a picture of all of us, it's a small family. My grandparents only had two kids, my mom and her twin sister Lynda. Her sister also only had two kids. So there are a total of 6 grandkids on my mom's side. Besides my grandma and us, my cousin Barbara (yes she is named after my mom) and my uncle Dick are pictured. (My aunt Lynda died a few years ago and my other cousin Richard couldn't make it to the party.)



A Tongan lady from my parents ward made my grandma a lei and a thing for her head. (I have no idea what that is called.) Here she is sporting them.

We began the night by admiring this truck my uncle restored. He likes to restore old cars. Then we had a delicious dinner with 2 desserts. A lemon coconut cake courtesy of Carol Ann and a chocolate ice cream brownie cake courtesy of Jen. Both were fancy and fabulous.

After that we played a rousing game of Jeopardy with questions about my grandma's life with my mom as Alex Trebek.



I never really think about what my grandparents life was like before I existed, its neat to find out about their life before they were grandparents. Just think, my grandma lived through 2 world wars, the great depression, and saw the invention of tvs, computers, cell phones and so much more. Some interesting facts about my grandma:

1. Her and my grandpa worked at competing oil companies and had to secretly date, elope, and then they lived separately for the first year of their marriage. Crazy how much things like that mattered back then.
2. Her family was one of the first in the neighborhood to get indoor plumbing when she was a teenager.
3. She had a tumor the size of a football on her kidney and her incompetent doctor treated her for arthritis. Luckily, before it was too late she switched doctors and was then properly diagnosed. We were lucky she made it to age 50, let alone 100.
4. Her first kiss was to a missionary. Scandolous.

Here are us cousins pictured with grandma.

All of us girls through 4 generations.



Look At That Hair!

99% of the time that we go out in public we hear the phrase "Look at that hair!" I'm not going to lie, I don't get tired of hearing it (although I do run out of responses for it). Family and friends will tell you how cute your kid is no matter what. Whether the baby has Dumbo ears or a nose the size of Texas, loved ones will still tell you how cute your baby is. But when strangers stop you at church, the grocery store, and the doctor's office to ooh and ah over your baby you know there is some truth to it (and I'm not at all biased!). Just for fun I thought I would share some of Conner's hairdos, the good and the bad. Unfortunately, no matter how much he is smiling when I grab the camera he is usually too fascinated with it to smile for the pictures.

Here is your basic comb over.



Here is the modified Alfalfa sprout. He has some unruly cowlicks in the front that cause this style.

Cade calls this the Corporate Executive look. A lady at church called it a Surfer Dude. I call it ugly.

The Wild Man. I had some fun with the blowdryer one day.

The Jimmy Neutron (wet and then dried)

The faux hawk.

Enough with the hairdos. Last night when Conner woke up to eat I picked him up and noticed his pjs were quite wet and so was the blanket he was wrapped in and the blanket he was laying on. I didn't think it had been THAT long since his diaper had been changed and I wondered how it had soaked through so much. When I opened up his pjs I found that he was quite "exposed" and his diaper was completely off, balled up under his legs. I have no idea how that happened but suspect it had something to do with how someone (aka daddy) had put on his diaper before bed. No pics of the event due to the graphic nature.