Kindergarten Christmas Program

Hurray! Grandma Jana was here for a visit on the night that Zachary had his first school program. What a terriffic show we all got to see. It was a fun way to "ring" in the Christmas season as it was based around the story of the Polar Express!

A large group of kindergarten and 2nd graders to teach dances and Christmas music. They even did two songs in sign language and some Spanish. Their teachers must be crazy to put in all that work, but it really paid off!

Here's a rough picture of the scenery. There was even a nice man that played the part of the train conductor.

Here's our big kid posing at the end of the show. All Aboard!

Joshua's #2 Birthday!

Joshua loves the Elmo character lately. He told us round about September that he wanted an Elmo birthday cake. The morning of his birthday I was fixing Macey's hair for the day and Joshua picked out Elmo barretts but he wanted them for HIM not for Macey!

Here's the gang at the party with Joshua's new best buddy... ELMO! "Mine, Elmo" he says!

We're reading Joshua's new Elmo book for the first time. We sure had a fun day with our busy joy boy!

One Sunny Day

WELCOME TO THE CHRISTENSENS!

Finally, I'm posting a picture of the front of the house. I sure do like it better with those few trees gone that David cut down.

The neighbors call this the coveted raspberry patch. It has it's own zone in the sprinkler system! I don't know what we are going to do with it.

We have some pretty awesome trees in the back yard. I wish they came with their own leaf clean-up. We spent 5 hours on Wednesday cleaning up the yard! At least we got it finished a few hours prior to it snowing!

Handy Mannys

David has been working hard on projects at the house. We were hoping that we wouldn't have to do anything major anywhere, but the projects just never end. The joys of owning a home I suppose. Many of you know that we've cut down trees, repaired some plumbing, added a storage room in the garage, have been insulating the garage, and ended up having to redo the surround in the bathroom shower. I say we, but David gets most of the credit along with the loving support (and talent, time and efforts) of Grandpa Ron, Grandma Karen, Grandpa Van, Grandma Marie and numerous other veiled angels. I'm sure this won't be the end of projects as this house has mostly original everything from 1977. It would all be a lot easier to open up moving boxes and get more settled if we weren't fixing up as we go, but a fixin' we will go.

Here are some pictures of SuperMan Dave working on the bathroom fix up job. It's not quite done as we've all taken more than a week off to be sick, but it sure is fun to see it coming along.

The ringing bells of tile being chipped off the wall. Thank goodness for earplugs! We found that after 33 years the tiles had pulled away from the sheetrock behind them. Time for something new.

Grandma & Grandpa got in on some of the clean up and put up of the new surround.

Macey "helping" the handy daddy put new tile around the edge of the new shower/tub surround.

David painted the lovely gold insides of the very dated medicine cabinet. It turned out so great!

David sure has gotten a lot of use out of the little air compressor he got from Santa a few years back. Here he is building a new frame for the medicine cabinet mirror.

Mirror frame in the works.

Handy man Dave sure does love to paint, just like he loves having a headache! I am very grateful that he'll do it and make things look oh so much better!

Joshua wanted in on the action. He has been pretending to paint everything in sight since we moved here! Too bad we don't all have his energy. This house would be in tip top shape in no time at all!

The Amazing Joshua

JOSHUA AND HIS AMAZING....

BLANKIE!!!!!!!!

I could not resist putting these pictures on of Joshua. He was being so silly with his blanket the night we were taking Halloween pictures. He sure is attached to his blanket, but usually his blanket comes in a pair. He has two that he cannot go anywhere without! Silly kid!

Halloween 2009

Macey liked carving up pumpkins once she got the rhythm of things!

"I didn't know you were going to kill it" Charlie Brown

Zachary totally lovin' the goo!

Joshua- totally disgusted with the goo!

We couldn't find the moving box  with candles, so we used glow sticks. It was actually fun to have them glow colors in the house this year.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM:

Spiderman, Purple Dino & Pinky Unicorn

Desert Devils

Here's a video clip link of David and his friend out enjoying the fall weather on their homemade go-buggies.
Anyone looking for an inexpensive thrill needs to get in line for one of these desert rides.
Dave and Rich in the desert one last time before the move.

New House Pictures

These are pictures from our 2nd visit to the house, right before we found out they accepted our purchase offer.

Cave Kitchen

Big Garage

Handy Utility Room with a Half Bath

Unique Loft - Indoor Treehouse

Grandma Jana in the not so popularly carpeted dinning room

Living Room

We took some pictures of the front of the house, but they turned out too dark to post. We'll have to try again later.

Even though this house has some issues (and we are all drop dead tired) with much  more work to do in coming weeks, it is great proof to us that Heavenly Father answers prayers. We will keep trying to move forward and do what we feel He would want us to do.

God bless you all! We love you!

New House Projects

Here are some pictures of what we have been doing on the weekends lately.  It has been quite the project so far, but we are glad that things are going well at the new house.

Lumberjack Dave working in the front yard. We hated to cut down any of the trees, but the yard was just too jumbled. We started with four, trimmed a liliac bush and we'll have to see what more comes down in the spring.

Zachary and Macey, building with Legos in the boys new room. This is the room with the indoor treehouse!

Here's Grandma Karen working on some new shelf paper in the kitchen. Joshua is the official helper/supervisor!

The kitchen needed much more cleaning than we had planned on. We actually took the cupboard doors off, hauled them to Jerome, and scraped grease off with screwdrivers and putty knives!

Handyman Joshua helping to put the doors back on.

Grandpa Ron and David built an insulated storage room for our food storage. This is going to be great, especially considering the fact that the garage itself has no insulation!

Here they are hard at work. They didn't stop until we mentioned the neighbors might not like the nail pounding noise at midnight!

This is what it looked like before they got started.

Here's part of the gang gathered in the living room to eat a sandwich. We were glad to have Caiden come to see us. He and his family were the first Christensen visitors.

Zachary #6 Birthday

Zachary's party was really fun.

He is growning up so fast. #6.... Wow!

Zachary was all about space this year for his birthday.

Here is his astronaut cake. It was fun to make.

We actually found the pan at the DI!

Here's Zachary and Great-Grandma Hadlock.

Joshua, Zachary, and Great-Grandma Crozier.

David has fond memories of playing with Construx building sets as a kid. We decided to find some on ebay for Zachary to enjoy. I think everyone likes them!

It didn't take long for David to work up a spaceport for Zachary to dock his new shuttle.

We had fun making this shuttle pinata. Since Zachary wants to hang it up in his new bedroom we did not smash it up for the party. Instead Zachary filled it with cards for everyone and a bit of candy. We hung it up and let everyone pull on the streamers to take the bottom off after our countdown. It was a fun suprise!

The day before his birthday, Zachary got the elementary school's "Citizen of the Month" award. We are so glad that he is a good boy and even more pleased that he is good to the people around him.