Weekend of Celebration

Josh and I are very glad to have Gary home again! Josh steals his dad's hat every day when he gets home from the base, so Gary found one that he could keep and he loves to wear it everywhere. He is doing great adjusting to having his dad home again!

He was pretty worn out from all the excitement of his Dad's return and fell asleep playing in the head board of his bed.

He also fell asleep like this after finishing a Popsicle while watching cartoons.

Last weekend Gary didn't have to be at Camp Williams so we went to Richfield to spend the weekend with my mom and dad. Friday night we celebrated Josh's birthday, Saturday night we celebrated my sister Andrea's birthday, and Sunday was Mother's Day. We made Josh a choo-choo train cake and he had a good time blowing out candles. He blew them out several times. Daddy helping Josh open presents.

Grammy Debbie got Josh a new bike. Josh and Gary had fun putting it together. Andrea helping Josh get ready for his first 4-wheeler ride.

Grandpa Glen and Josh on the 4-wheeler. He had a lot of fun with grandpa!

Grandpa Glen put in a new dishwasher for us. Josh gets the tools out and fixes the dishwasher just like grandpa did. He even grunts while he's doing it and it's pretty funny to watch.

I made the mistake of leaving my checkbook sitting out on the desk. Josh picked up the pen and started doing exactly what he sees mom do with the checkbook!

Welcome Home!!!

Gary is home!!! Josh and I picked him up at Camp Williams last night and we are very excited to have him home! It was neat to have the scouts come put flags all over our lawn for Gary. If you'd like to see the news stories on their arrival there are lots to choose from, but you won't see us in any of them! Here are some links:

Fox 13 News http://www.myfoxutah.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=6445315&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=VSTY&pageId=3.2.1

KSL http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=3210656

Deseret News http://www.deseretnews.com/photo/gallery/story/1,5417,695275748,00.html

Daily Herald http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/264835/17/

Salt Lake Tribune http://www.sltrib.com/ci_9125237

Birthday Boy

Yesterday was Josh's birthday. I can't believe he is already 2! I actually decided to postpone his birthday this year, since Gary will only miss it by a couple weeks. We will do a real celebration when he gets home. Yesterday I let him open a few presents to get him warmed up for the real celebration, and the rest will wait until his dad is home. It is a good thing I decided to postpone the real party because he got sick yesterday in the afternoon and it wasn't much fun.

Playing with the golf clubs Grammy Debbie sent.

Josh will have lots of fun playing catch with his daddy when he gets home.

Instead of eating cake, he got a doughnut and chocolate milk. We're saving the cake for later! He ate the frosting and didn't touch the rest of the doughnut.

Josh's cousins came over and helped him open the presents!

Easter was a while ago, but here's Josh with his Easter stuff. Grammy Debbie sent this chick that sings a song and flaps its wings. He was like that for a long time watching it sing the song.

San Francisco

Last weekend Josh and I went on a quick get away to San Francisco. After rearranging Gary's flight plans so many times I ended up with a credit for an airline. I was going to take Gary somewhere when he gets home, but he doesn't really want to go anywhere after being gone for so long. We decided to plan a trip to visit his mom for when he gets back, and then I used the credit before it expires. Josh has now been from coast to coast, and he hasn't even turned two yet.

This is Josh giving Kirsten a big hug on the pier. Kirsten's husband is in Gary's unit and we've been friends for a few years. While the guys were on leave in September, Kirsten and her husband decided to move to San Francisco, which is where she grew up.

Josh and I on the pier. Alcatraz is behind us. The sea lions at the pier. Josh loved the birds, boats, and sea lions.

Josh also enjoyed riding on the cable cars. The diner we ate at had a motorcycle just the right size for Josh. He got pretty upset when I made him get off it to eat. This one is for Gary. Don't worry, we didn't eat there without you!

We took Josh to an aquarium, and he really liked that. This picture didn't turn out as well, but there was a tunnel we went through. You step on the escalator and it takes you slowly through the tunnel and there's fish all around you.

This was kind of a neat picture I took of the jelly fish.

By the time we got through the aquarium Josh was pretty tired, and not very photogenic!

Kirsten works for the Make-A-Wish foundation and they had a fund raising bowling event. We went bowling to get her out of having to work. The bowling alley workers brought us a ramp so Josh could bowl too. We'd help him carry the bowling ball to it, then he'd push it off the ramp, and as it rolled he'd wave at it and say, "bye ball!" Josh got to play with the balloons, and he found some chocolate to get into.

Josh also had a good time playing on the play ground outside Kirsten's apartment.

As I was unpacking, Josh decided to fix his hair!

Big Boy Bed

A few weeks ago I decided it was time to put away the crib and put Josh in a big boy bed. While Gary was home in September we found this bed at a garage sale and figured it would save us from having to buy another dresser since there's drawers built in. Josh is clutching his Snoopy and his bear that he sleeps with every night. He has to have one stuffed animal for each arm.

This is what happens after climbing in and out of bed for half an hour. It is a little blurry since the room was dark. I think all big boy beds should come equipped with a supply of duct tape to ensure the kid stays put. The first night I fought him for over an hour before I was too exhausted to do it anymore and stuck him back in the crib. Then I took the crib down the next day so that I would be forced to make him sleep in the bed. This was after only 15 minutes of chasing him back to bed. I honestly don't understand where a small child finds the energy to climb in and out of bed so many times. The other morning, around 3:30 I heard a big thud come from his room, so I jumped out of bed and ran in to see what happened. I found him laying on the floor at the foot of his bed, so I picked him up and put him back in his bed. He was really annoyed that I had disturbed him as he was sleeping peacefully on the floor.

Josh likes to be in the tub and it doesn't matter if there is water in it or not, nor does it matter if he is wearing clothes or not. One day he climbed in his baby sitter's tub with his clothes on while she was getting her girl dressed. He even tried to shampoo his hair.

Josh has become quite the little helper. He frequently says, "help you" and then tries to help me with whatever I am doing. He really likes tools, and any chance he gets he will try to run off with my tools and use them. So I had to give him his very own plastic tools, which he uses where ever he has seen grandpa fixing things around my house.

This is Josh winding down for bed by watching one of his favorite movies "llella" otherwise known as Cinderella. He asks for it a lot. I love the mischievous grin in this picture, and he is modeling one of his favorite hats.

More Iraq Pictures

I started this blog mostly to keep everyone updated on Gary during the deployment because I knew he wouldn't keep in contact much while he was gone. But he is limited in what he can tell me, so it is kind of hard to give updates. I'm sure he'll have lots of stories to tell when he gets back, so until then here are a few more pictures from Iraq.

Gary carries a hand gun on his thigh and a rifle over his shoulder.

This is Gary with Micah Sampson. His wife hates facial hair on Micah as much as I hate facial hair on Gary, so they decided to grow mustaches.

Gary riding in his 7 ton, still with the ridiculous mustache.

This is the back of the 7 ton where he usually sleeps when they're out in the field.

A .50 cal and Cheez-Its, what more do you need when you're on watch? This is a picture of the only "mountains" Gary has seen over there. This is Gary and Richard Knudsen with the blow pops I sent in their mouths. Richard's wife Ashley moved in with her parents for the deployment. Her parents happen to be in my ward and don't live far from me, so Ashley and I have become good friends.

This is Gary's living space. He uses the plastic drawers as a desk. Not a lot of closet space or privacy!

Happy Anniversary to us!

Today is our anniversary. We have now been married four years. This massive arrangement of flowers was delivered to me at work on Monday. I was supposed to leave them at work, so Gary sent them to me early so I could look at them all week. I haven't counted, but there's supposed to be a dozen roses for each year we've been married (12 times 4 = 48 roses). That is a lot of roses. They are sitting on my kitchen table and I can smell them when I am sitting in the front room. My house smells wonderful right now. It isn't often I get such an enormous arrangement, so I had to post pictures. In case the first picture doesn't give a good enough perspective on how big of an arrangement this is, I put Josh up next to it. It is as tall as he is, and much wider. I couldn't get him to look at the camera because he kept smelling them and saying, "It's good!" There's kind of a funny story behind these flowers. Just before Christmas Gary sent my sisters an email saying he wanted to do this for me for our anniversary and he asked for their help. Since Gary doesn't have internet access on a regular basis, I've been checking his email for him and getting him messages from it like he asked me to. Thus when my sisters replied to his e-mail, I got their replies. Just about every time Gary tries to surprise me, I always end up finding out or figuring it out before he has the chance. He was so excited to surprise me, and I felt really bad that I had ruined it again. I didn't have the heart to tell him I found out, and decided I'd go along with it and wait to tell him when he gets home that I knew about it. When he logged into his email and saw that my sisters had replied to his e-mails, he knew he'd been caught. But he didn't tell me that he knew that I knew. So we both pretended for a month. He called me on Monday while I was at work and we had a whole conversation about how I always find out about his surprises. This left no doubt in my mind that he knew that I found out about the flowers. I didn't admit to him that I knew he knew that I knew. He didn't admit to me that he knew I knew, so it was a funny conversation. After the flowers were delivered I sent him a motomail telling him I knew that he knew that I knew. At the same time (before he got my message) he e-mailed me and told me that he knew that I knew. We've decided that it is a fun game we play with me figuring out his surprises, and now a new element has been added with me trying to figure out when he's figured out I know, and for him trying to figure out when I've got it figured out. While I was on the phone with him the flowers were delivered to the main receptionist on the first floor of the building I work in. She couldn't call me since I was on the phone, so I didn't find out they had been delivered until I was off the phone with Gary. I work on the 8th floor, so I had to carry this massive arrangement through the whole building to get them to my desk. By the time I got to my desk my arms were tired because they are so heavy. When it was time to go home, I had to carry them through the whole building again to get them to my car. I didn't have enough room at my desk to keep them at work, and I wanted them at home anyway. The only way I could get them home was to put the driver's seat as far forward it would go (it's a good thing I'm so short), then put them on the floor behind me. Josh's car seat is on the other side. I didn't want them to tip over, so I took my coat off and packed it around the vase. Then I got our spare jackets out of the trunk and packed them around the vase. I nearly froze to death scraping my car windows without a coat, but at least my roses were safe! Monday we got hit with a really bad storm. It was extremely windy, and roads were really bad. There was a bad pile up on the freeway in Payson. One news station said there were 60 vehicles involved, 20 of them were semi's. I didn't get close enough to see it, but Melissa did and she said she couldn't even count how many semi's there were. They were jack knifed all over the place in different directions and other vehicles slammed into them. On the south bound lane an oil tanker had tipped over and spilled oil on the road, so both sides were closed. I got off the freeway a couple exits before I usually get off and took back roads home. From where I got on the freeway in Provo to where I got off before Payson, I saw six vehicles had slid off the road (one of them was a semi) and I passed an accident. This isn't even including the mess that closed both sides of the freeway in Payson. Through all this I managed to get home safely, and only damaged one rose in the process!!