We had snow!! This is the first day of snow (although the second snow day, School district called it early according to the weather forcast so our first snow day was a day without snow). This day however had snow. It started out with this much snow and ended up with about 71/2 inches of snow by the end of the day. look at the fireplace that Tarin is playing with and then at the end of the pictures, see how much snow there is on it. On Sunday we got another 3 1/2 inches of snow. Plus the freezing rain we got it has been an interesting snow week. Hopefully we will get to Grandma's house safely for Christmas.

Eating snow from hands or sky, it doesn't matter. Just eating snow!!!

yup eating snow!!

The pile of snow on the fence

The fireplace on Sunday night.

Halloween

I am a little out of order with my posts, but here is our Halloween costumes. This year we went to Roger's work and went from desk to desk(nothing unusual there) normally after we are done there, we normally go to the church and do Trunk or treat. This year they did trunk or treat early so we were able to go around our neighborhood. That was different.

Tarin, a cheerleader.

Alia was Hannah Montana (shocking!)

Jacob loved being a puppy.

Jacob actually fell asleep on our way home from Microsoft, and slept on my shoulder all the way around the neighborhood. (My back is still aching!) Then I came home took off his costume, changed his diaper, put his pj's on, and put him to bed all without waking him up. he was done in!! It was very cute.

They got lots of candy! I put it together and it was over 7 lbs!!! We are all still hyper!! It was a lot of fun.

Earthquake Drill

Today our Stake is having an emergency preparedness drill. They set us up in teams according to area. At 5pm we had an "earthquake". We had our team leader come and check on us. We were chosen to have a problem. We had a gas leak and couldn't turn off our gas so we are checking with our Home teacher to see if we can stay with them temporarily. It is a good drill that is checking the communication and effectiveness of the plan. I think it is great. We talked about earthquakes and what we would do this afternoon for family home evening. Then at 5 pm we practiced what we would do. We practiced 2 different places to go during an earthquake. It was good practice. I actually didn't know what to do before I researched it. When we did have our earthquake, we had differing reactions. Roger headed outside (which I told him was wrong) and I stayed in the doorway. I am not sure it was wrong, I just should have dropped and covered. Well now we know. So this was a good drill.

Mother's Weekend

I have not written in a long time, so I must catch up. I had a great time going to visit Rikke in Idaho for Mother's weekend. There were many activities planned, and we went to none of them!! We hung out, went shopping, Hung out, went shopping... you get the picture. It was really fun. We went to church. You would not believe the sound difference in a University ward!! There was no sound. I was almost uncomfortable! Really crazy. We saw Tracy Bohman, and the family. Dana was our lovely chauffeur. She was so sweet. the first day she brought her tiny truck, It was quite hilarious trying to get us all in there. I am really excited to see her this Thanksgiving. It has been a real adjustment without her. We all miss her a ton.


Cat!!

WOW this is a bad picture of me, but I think it is the only one I have of us. My camera was being fickle and so only worked a bit of the time.

Rikke and Stephanie

Rikke and Katrina

Dana

Joyce

I love my kiddo!!

Precious Life

I feel the need to write about Roger's cousin Tymon and his wife Bridget and their life in the last 2 weeks. I am inspired by their strength. I have really come to realise how precious life is and how much I take for granted. Almost 2 weeks ago, Bridget and Tymon had to bury their 15 month old little boy. I have never been to a more difficult funeral. It was so devastating to watch them bury their baby. I came to a realization that I need to treat each day as precious. I need to try a little harder to kiss my children more, to tell them I love them more, to read more stories, to play more, to dance more, and to make more memories. I want to try a little harder each day. I want to try to yell less and praise more. If this tragedy had to be, I, at least can take something from it and do better at being a better mom, wife and friend.

Cakes

Today I went to Michaels crafts and found Dana. She was my cake decorating teacher. We had so much fun with her!! When I say we, I mean Roger and I. Roger really wanted to take cake decorating classes, so we made it our date night. I loved it, Roger loved it and Many people in other Michaels loved the fact that we did it for our date. Dana thought it was cool, so she told every one about us. Some people became very dissatisfied with their husbands because of us, but some went home and started date night with their hubbies. It has been fun. We haven't done it in a while, since Dana is having a hard time getting a gumpaste class that we can go to. It had been a sad time for us. We really like Dana and we really like cake class. I will attach some of my cakes that I have made.

Elmo cupcakes

Vacation

We went on vacation on the Friday before the 1st. We went to Raymond to Roger's Family reunion. It was 4 days of fun with the Family. We discovered that Jacob is allergic to Mosquitoes. He had a golf ball on the side of his face, and then on the side of his foot. Poor guy. It was a ton of fun at the reunion. The kids made lots of friends and they had a great time at the candy parade.

We saw lots of cousins and grandma. Jacob even gave her kisses. He never gives me kisses(pout, pout). Here are some pictures of the reunion and stuff.

Roger and his mom

Note Tarin standing there twirling her hair while everyone scrambles for candy! Pretty typical.all the kids at the family reunion waiting for the candy parade to start. There were a lot!
Tarin

I am Roger!

After Raymond we decided to go the back way to Tobi and Jeff's house. We got to Nakusp at 1am and decided to stay the night. (good thing too because you have to get off this place with a ferry to go to Tobi's house and we didn't know that. We would have missed the hotel we got if we would have kept going) We found only one hotel open and it was a biker hotel. We were a little scared but booked a room anyways. It turned out to be the oldest Hotel in BC. It actually wasn't bad. It had it's own bathroom and the beds were clean so we were happy. When we woke up in the morning the view was amazing. It sat on a lake with a garden that was gorgeous. the kids and I went for a walk in the garden and along the lake while Roger did some work at the hotel. It was very lovely.

Leland Hotel wiht Tarin and Alia posing in front.
Alia wanted to pose and say how hot it was. Tarin heard the word pose and said I want to do the tree pose (my yoga girl!!)

The garden out front of the Hotel. It was very beautiful and very smelly(in a great way)

Then we went to Halcyon hot springs. We asked where we could camp for the night and they said that they let people camp in the grassy field. So we set up tent , stole all the firewood from the surrounding fire rings and went swimming. Just as we got swimming, it started to rain and Roger decided that he should go check on the tarp or put it on or something. So he went and did that and when he came back, he slipped on the very very very slippery stairs and hit his arm. Nobody realized how bad it was until he looked at it later. I was up in the hot pool at that point and he came up and said "Lori, look at this" when he showed me the entire pool gasped. It was like someone put a baseball in half and put it on his arm. It was awful! So poor Roger had to sit out on the deck with ice on his arm. It went down a little but later spread to his entire forearm. It really does look bad. I hope we get something out of it because it was a very bad bruise and it is still bugging him. He is going to have the Dr. look at it. That night we went grocery shopping and got some hotdogs etc and come back to the camp site to discover that we had left the hotdog roasting stick at the store. Alia said that we "won't be able to have any fun now" but we went through the kindling and found the skinniest sticks (not especially skinny though) and set them up to roast with rocks supporting them since they were quite short. We roasted marshmallows and had smores. I think it was more fun not having the roasting stick and improvising(even Alia says so). btw did I mention that the tent was missing the tent pegs so we used kindling for that as well? It was a makeshift camp that used what we had around us but was very very fun. We really secured the tarp on top because it looked like it would rain and it was a good thing too. It poured!!! For about 2 hours and then it was done. It started right after the kids had gone to sleep. So they weren't worried about it. Right when I needed to go to the bathroom, it stopped. It was very accommodating.

We swam for a while the next day, sat out for a thunder storm, Had yummy hot chocolate on Halcyon, swam some more, then went to Tobi's house.

At Tobi's house, we visited, went to the beach, went to a ward activity (Jeff tore his hamstring playing paintball) and had a nice time. On Monday we went to the waterslides while Roger worked, then went on to Lisa's house. At Lisa's house we went to ride on a train ride, played at the park and played at the spray park while Roger worked. It was a lot of fun! We decided to stay one more day and so while Roger worked we went to IKEA and played outside. It was good.

The only downside to the time spent with my sisters was the fact that I had developed a nasty headache. I had discovered that it was a sinus one and could be calmed with Sudafed with Tylenol and Advil every 4 hours. I am going to the Dr. this afternoon. Hopefully she can do something for me because it is really bad and had been almost a week.

So even though it seems like it was a comedy of errors with hurts and allergies and what not, we really did have a very nice time on our vacation.