Tamsen, soccer extraordinaire

Tamsen started soccer this year. Ever since her friend Kennedi gave her the soccer uniform, Tams has been asking when she gets to play soccer. At her first practice, she spent most of the time following the coach around being the "assistant". At the first game, she just ran back and forth and back and forth. Whichever way the kids were going, she'd follow them, and then all of a sudden realize they'd turned and were going the other direction. I don't think she ever quite caught the concept that she was supposed to try to get in there and kick the ball! During the fourth quarter of the first game, she told the coach, "I need a break from all this running." By the last game of the season, she said she didn't want to play soccer anymore. Guess we'll see how she feels next spring!

Crazy Hair Day

It was crazy hair day at Tamsen's preschool. She was so excited to go to school with her crazy hair. She wore it like this for two days and would still be wearing it "crazy" if I'd let her!

Mowing the Jungle...

Well, it finally warmed up and dried up enough for me to mow the lawn. The grass was so long that it kept jamming up the mower, so it took a good long time to get it mowed. Ahhh... where's the snow when you need it???

Seriously! Where is Spring????

Here's the snowmen that Tamsen and Grandpa Martindale built on April 25th!!

Brett's Graduation

We headed to Provo for Brett's graduation. Mom and Dad got to our house on Wednesday night and we were waiting to hear from Eric -- he had taken Meg to the hospital to be induced, so we were sure we'd get a call Wednesday night or early Thursday morning. No call during the night. Eric called about 10 Thursday morning to let us know that there was no baby yet. We left for Provo and finally about 2:30, Eric called to let us know that Ryan had finally been born. Meg had to have an emergency C-section, but both she and Ryan were doing fine. We got to Provo and sat in traffic for what felt like forever! We finally got to the Marriott Center, and decided to sit clear at the top, so we could lean against the wall. President Deiter F. Uchtdorf and Elder Russell M. Nelson spoke at commencement -- which was cool. Afterwards, we went to dinner, then went to Brett and Britney's place and watched The Office and played Guitar Hero. It was lots of fun to get to spend time with Brett and Britney.

Easter Weekend

We had a pretty fun Easter weekend. On Friday, we went to Baby Animal Days (along with every other person in the valley!). It was insane! There were so many people there. We waited in line for over an hour to ride the horses. I was hoping that it would get better. We went and saw the baby calves, goats and sheep. Tamsen thought it was fun petting the baby sheep. But when we got over to the area where the baby chicks, ducks and rabbits were, the lines were so long. We ended up just wandering around and looking at the baby animals instead of waiting in line to hold them, since we had to leave to get to Salt Lake by 5:30.

We got to Salt Lake to watch Jeremy's band play. Tamsen thought it was so fun listening to the music. She liked clapping and dancing. She told the people that were sitting next to us "You know what the coolest thing about me is? That's my dad playing the guitar." Too funny.

Saturday, we colored eggs. Tamsen had a lot of fun coloring them all. She liked trying to make them rainbow colored and wanted to hide them as soon as we were finished coloring them.

Sunday morning she got up and found her Easter basket. At first she wanted to go find all the eggs, but then she realized that the Easter Bunny had hidden presents too, so she liked finding the clues that led to her gifts. After she'd found everything, she went hunting for eggs and was ready to find more -- apparently two dozen wasn't quite enough!

We had really nice weather, church was nice, it was just a quiet relaxing day.

Happy St. Patricks Day!

To say that Tamsen's Grandma and Nana love St. Patrick's Day would be an understatement. It's a huge holiday in their family, so it's become a big day for us as well. This year, we went and had an Irish dinner with grandma and nana's friends, the Thunell's. We also went to Celtic Night at the Eccles Theatre to watch the Irish dancers and listen to the Irish music. When Tamsen woke up on St. Patrick's Day morning, she found that those mischievious leprechauns had topsy-turvyed our house and hid their treasure somewhere. She had lots of fun seeing what they'd done to the house, pulling cushions off the couch, turning the food green, putting chairs on the table, hanging pictures sideways -- they even turned the toilet water green!

She came in my office with this St Patricks Day outfit that she put together all by herself and told me that she was a "leprechaun daughter". She had fun searching for the "treasure" and pinching anyone she could whether or not they were wearing green!

Where Is Spring???

Here's a picture of our yard on March 5.










Here's a picture of our yard on March 9.

Yes, the snow is up past the swings on the swingset.


I woke up thinking that I was going to get out and spray for weeds after work. Then at about 6:30 am I was sitting there working and I heard a lawn mower. I'm thinking -- who in the world is mowing their lawn this early in the year, and at this time of the morning. So I peeked out the window and saw that it was my neighbor with his snow blower on my driveway taking care of the 6 or so inches of snow that had fallen. Well, it didn't let up all day. Around 3 pm, I went out to brush off the dish, because Tams was mad that the tv wasn't working and there was nearly two feet of snow. I couldn't even get the screen door open! I took out the yardstick to see how much there was -- 20 inches!! And it was still snowing like crazy! And three days later -- snow was gone. Crazy Utah spring!!

What is It?

So, everytime Tamsen goes to her Grandma and Nana's, we come home with all sorts of interesting things, but this one beats all. I have no idea what it is... it's got YoGos in it. When I first got it, it looked like it might be blueberry cheesecake (my favorite!), but when I took the plastic wrap off it... hmmmmm.... let's see, I see some crushed graham crackers, and something that looks like pears, except that they're purple (???) There's some YoGos in there and it's topped with whipped cream. Mmmmm... Yeah, I didn't taste it. If you know what it is, could you please let me know?

Ice Skating

Tamsen has wanted ice skates since I can remember. Her Grandma and Nnana bought her a pair of ice skates, so we went over to the park to try them out. The city floods the park each winter to make an outdoor ice skating rink. She had lots of fun "skating". We skated clear across the rink, and on the way back, she fell down and hit her nose on the ice. It started bleeding. I felt so bad! I gave her my gloves to hold on her nose and we drove a couple blocks to Grandma and Nana's to get cleaned up. Once she was cleaned up, she was ready to go back and skate some more. So we went back to the park, but she decided she wanted to "skate" without the ice skates. After that day, the weather warmed up and the rink closed down. Guess we'll try again next year!

New Years 2009

We had lots of fun on New Years Eve. We watched movies, played games and made lots of fun foods to snack on. At 10 o'clock, we "pretended" it was midnight. We watched the big ball drop in Times Square and blew our horns and had our Happy New Year!

On New Years Day, we hung out at home and had a pretty quiet day. Tamsen wanted to go out and play in the snow, so we went out about 4:30 and built snow men. We built two snowmen, then Tams decided she wanted to build some snow babies. She had lots of fun making snow angels and throwing snowballs at me.