Garage Sales Gone Wild

Stansbury Park made the news again! This time it wasn't for high winds, record snowfall, or last week's report on faulty concrete in the area (our driveway is fine). No, this time it involved high speed chases, grand theft auto, and the real crime - not covered by this story - was the old overpriced junk that people were trying to sell at their garage sales.

We like to check out the local garage sales on Saturday mornings. This week, while we were driving to the next bargain, we saw a police car speeding down the street toward us, and it turned right down our street! Curious. Hoping our house wasn't on fire, we decided to go home and make sure everything was all right. When we turned the corner to our street, the police car was right in front of our house, and the cop was running down the street (away from our house, thankfully). We then saw him rush back to his car, jump in, and speed around the corner. Ok, good. There was nothing wrong with our house. We continued on to the next garage sale, and ended up talking to a man who had his car carjacked while he putting up...Cue the ominous music...garage sale signs!

Anyway, to make a long story a little shorter, the whole thing ended with a two car crashes and two men in jail. The news report video can be seen on KSL here. (The bald guy being interviewed is in our ward). More information can be found at the Deseret News website.

And the creepy thing about it all? One of the men was caught just down the street from our house. The picture below was taken from our driveway after everything had been wrapped up. If you can't tell, at least three of those cars are police cars, and this picture was taken after almost everyone had left.

The biggest mistake these crooks made was turning in to Stansbury Park when they were being chased by the police. Those of you who have tried to find our house understand how easily one can get lost around here.
(sorry this picture is blurry. It was the best one we could get while hiding behind our truck in order to remain unnoticed.)

Oh yeah. Baby is this big now.

Lil' Gardener

Kyle and Jen (and Ethan) have been spending a lot of time in the yard lately trying to get our garden in. It has been a long process, but we are almost there. We are making raised beds for our garden since we didn't have a lot of success with our soil last year. Kyle has been doing a lot of digging trying to extend our sprinkler system to water our new beds.

Ethan has been our little helper in the garden. For a while now he has been interested in playing with our gardening gloves, but the other day he let us know that he wanted to try them on. He absolutely loved it. We just had to grab the camera. (Funny side note: he also has taken an interest in putting video tape boxes on his hands like gloves and running around the basement.)Jen learned that it isn't safe to leave the flour bucket open with Ethan around. She turned her back for just a second and he was there scooping flour out onto the floor. When she turned back in surprise, he understood that mama wasn't happy and he tried to clean up his mess by picking up the flour and putting it back. That is what he was trying to do here. You can tell he tried to eat some first.
Here are a few pictures from our recent visit to Cache Valley. We took Ethan to First Dam to feed the ducks. He was kind of interested in the ducks, but had more fun running around. When he was given bread crumbs to feed the ducks, he just put them in his mouth.



P.S. This week our new baby is this big:

Mother's Day Surprise

We're expecting again!! We thought it would be fun to save the announcement for Mother's Day. Since Kyle's brother left on his mission shortly before Ethan was born, we thought it would be fun for him to break the news when he called home on Sunday. It was a fun surprise! His brother should be home a few days before the baby is born.

Jen's family was surprised at the news as well. It was nice that no one really noticed her growing belly, but it probably helps that we live 100 miles away and don't see each other as frequently as we used to.

Baby is due November 10 and is currently the size of a lemon (see picture below). We should find out in about a month whether it is a boy or a girl.

Jen has been feeling pretty good the last few weeks but has had strong cravings for bagels with cream cheese and cocoa puffs (not together. . .yet).

For those of you thinking, "What? Again?" (like Jen's sister's response when she heard the news) Ethan and Baby will be a little over 20 months apart and we always wanted to have our first two close. We are just grateful that Ethan will be in nursery by September. We couldn't be more excited and look forward to going through this process again knowing what we are in for (at least we hope we do).

A few of his favorite things

We get a kick out of some of the things that Ethan just adores, and we've been thinking about posting them for several weeks. Well, today we decided that since we didn't have anything else to post, we'd share.

Ethan loves to push his stroller more than ride in it. Last week, we went to the park a few blocks away from our house and he insisted on pushing the stroller all the way home himself. He also wants to push the shopping carts when we are at the grocery store. We have to be patient when he does because he cannot go too fast.

He loves kitchen utensils, especially wooden spoons.

If he ever gets a chance to get into our bathroom, he heads straight for the dental floss. He loves to carry it around the house. We have two of them and it took us a few days to locate them recently. One was under our bed, the other in one of Kyle's church shoes.


Of course you know he loves digging in the dirt with mom's little shovel. What kid doesn't love playing with a cell phone. Some know this well since Ethan has called you by accident! We can't wait until he gets better at this one, but we cannot keep the broom in its place. He is always dragging it around the house.

These are two of Ethan's favorites. He wants us to read them to him probably 10 times a day, no joke. Both Kyle and I can recite these in our sleep. "Big A little a what begins with A . . . ."
He loves to look in the oven to see what's cooking.

This is a fun one. Ethan loves his fluoride drops and gets excited when it it time to have the one drop he gets a day. He also loves to shake the bottle (it is childproof and we are careful, mom--don't worry!)
He even has his own keyboard to pound. He loves to fill his dump truck with his treasures and push them around the house.

No matter what we do we struggle keeping him out of the garbage. This is where he found his following treasure. . .

He can't help but pull these out of the garbage when he sees them.
He loves his empty yogurt container and spoon. Why buy this kid toys?
But most of all he loves his duckies. He sleeps with them every night. He loves to hug and bite them and roll around on the floor with them showing his love. So cute!!
And just for the record, today as we were going around taking pictures of everything, Jen checked the blog of some friends of ours Ryan and Michelle Guy, and just today they posted the same sort of thing. Well, we just wanted to say that we're not stealing the idea. We probably thought of it first - we've been planning on doing this for weeks - and they must have caught wind of it (even though they live in South Dakota), and stole our idea.