Wild Wild West

We just got back from a trip to the family cabin in Island Park, Idaho. While there, we had to stop in West Yellowstone for our traditional family photo. You may notice how much more classy we've become over the years. The kids were very excited about holding guns.
Here's our photo from 2007, when Ethan was only a few months old.

And here's the one from 2006. This picture sat on the desk of the photo studio for many years as an example of how a girl can dress as a modest "saloon girl." It now hangs on the wall above the desk.

We have many more adventures (with pictures) to share soon. Stay tuned.

Ethan's antics

Here are a few quick stories about our silly little boy:

Ethan has had a phobia of fruit for the last few months. Anytime he sees a strawberry, he screams and backs away. When someone is eating a banana, he always complains about the smell.
This afternoon we were eating some plums and when Ethan noticed what we were doing, he ran downstairs to get his pliers. When he came back upstairs, he was plugging his nose so he didn't have to smell the offending fruit.

Ethan and Brooklyn were having a bath earlier this week. We stepped away for a minute, and when we came back one of them dumped a bunch of shampoo into the water and all over both kids' hair. The water was so soapy, we had to give them a quick shower to get all of the soap off. Brooklyn did fine with the shower, but Ethan was traumatized. After he was all cleaned up and dried off, he wanted to draw a picture of the shower. This is what he drew:

You can see the water falling down, and the circle with a cross through it (similar to a "no smoking" sign). At the bottom, he wrote, "No Showers!" (or at least that's what he says he wrote.)

Weekend of the Fourth

This weekend we went to Logan for Fourth of July festivities. As soon as we got out of the van at Grandma Morrey's house, Brooklyn saw the neighbor's cat and had to go shower it with love.

We celebrated Kyle's Grandma Smith's birthday with sparklers. Ethan didn't dare hold one.

We got Brooklyn to hold one for a few seconds.

The family went to Romney Stadium to watch the fireworks. Ethan didn't dare come, but Brooklyn was excited to go. She had a lot of fun running around before the show. When the fireworks started, she sat in Grandma Morrey's lap and hardly moved a muscle. When asked if the fireworks were scary, she replied, "I 'tared." When asked if she like the fireworks, she gave an enthusiastic "Yes!"

She made it most of the way through the fireworks, but couldn't last through the entire show.

The next day, Grandpa Morrey took Jen, Brooklyn, and Grandma Taylor to ride horses. Brooklyn had lots of fun playing on the bleachers while the horses were getting ready to go.

Grandpa Morrey got them ready.

And Brooklyn wandered off into a nearby, picking "pretty flowers" (the giant dandelion-type weeds).

The next day, we took the kids to the Cache Valley Cruise-in. Ethan and Brooklyn both had fun seeing some real-life cars from one of their favorite movies, Cars (of course).

This picture shows their utter excitement, doesn't it?

There were some other fun cars too.

Last weekend, we took the kids to see Cars 2. They were really excited to see it in 3D. We figured the kids would do well since they've each been to a few movies before. When we walked in to the theater, Ethan flipped out about the room being so dark. He cried that he wanted to go home. He burried his face into Kyle's chest until he recognized Woody's and Buzz's voices from the Toy Story short before the featured presentation. He peaked at the screen and cheered up a bit until the Toy Story credits showed up, at which point his face went right back into Kyle's chest where it stayed until the Cars movie started. Again he heard voices he recoginzed and peaked at the screen. After about 10 minutes into the show, Kyle finally convinced him to sit forward and put on his 3D glasses. Kyle never could convince him to sit in his own seat. Brooklyn took a hint from Ethan and insisted Jen hold her. So we had to hold both kids through the entire film. Ethan did fine until the last five minutes. He must have sensed the credits were coming, and he started hystarically screaming. His head went right back into Kyle's chest for the remainder of the show.

We thanked our lucky stars that there were only a handful of people in the theater, although it did give Brooklyn the excuse to run up and down the aisle for the last fifteen minutes of the movie.

After we left the theater and Ethan finally stopped crying, we asked him what he thought of the movie. To our surprise, he firmly declared that he loved the movie! He loved that it had three races, whereas the original Cars only had two. We liked it too, despite the mediocre reviews it has been getting. It's about half an hour too long, and the plot is way too complex for our kids.