I'm kinda a Big Deal on Twitter

Haha! I have a few other blog posts in the works and hopefully I'll post those soon. In the meantime I thought I would share my fame with you all. City Weekly posted a blog quoting one of my tweets. I know some of you have tried twitter and most of you have not. Im addicted! It saves me a whole lots of time, the people I follow are always posting links to news and other items that I no longer have to search for.

Anyways, my tweet was about how I wish Rep. Mathason was more of a man like Barny Frank. There is a great clip on the link above to reference what I'm talking about. I agree with Frank that it's too bad that congress is not debating a single payer health care system.

Favorite SYTYCD Dance

This is my favorite SYTYCD dance of all time. It was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Choreography!



So, your probably wondering why I love SYTYCD? Well, I don't dance, I can't dance. I did take some lessons when I was in Jr. High (ya, that helps the self confidence of a jr. high boy) and I have taken some classes with the wife. I have three little sisters that dance, so I grew up spending whole days at dance competitions, which really isn't that bad when your Jr. High and High School age cause those things a chuck full of girls the same age! Then I married a dancer/cheerleader who now teaches dance and my daughter dances. This life time of conditioning has lead me to appreciate and enjoy watching good choreography and dancing.

So there is the short of it.

Christiansen Reunion

Cash, B, Jet, Z man & Luda (aka Ludacris)

We made our annual trip out to Ibapah last weekend for the Christiansen reunion. It was a lot of fun and the kiddies had a blast! B is now to the age that she can remember last year a little bit, add that with the anticipation that Z man was going to be there, she was supper excited. Cash was just excited to go camping and both were excited to play in grandmas new trailer. Here is the link to last years reunion.



They have all sorts of games and activities for the kids, along with rope swings, a huge teeter-todor, a pond and ATV's. The people who take care of the ranch do an excellent job! We pitch our tents on grass, we can throw blankets out on the grass and not worry too much about the kids getting dirty.



This was taken of the boys getting their much needed naps about 10 minutes before the tornado struck! Ok, it wasn't a tornado, but it felt almost like one. You could see the clouds rolling in and the wind was picking up, so everyone started to get ready for a storm. I was able to get the boys in our tent just before the wind really began to blow! After the wind blew hard for a few minutes, I had to stop to look if their was a tornado or not, the rain came and boy did it rain! It poured for a good 10-15 minutes and then stopped and about half hour later, cleared up. T and Jet just about got it from a fly away tarp, luckily some kid grabbed a hold of it before it wrapped them up. I love those kind of summer storm, kinda fun really.



They really loved the motorcycle rides from their grandpa.


I'm probably posting way too many pictures, but we did take 150!

I don't know whats going on in here but it looks like one of the 500 fights the boys had.


Here's another fight, if you look closely, you can see that they're all holding rocks, with Z man holding the biggest, looks more like he has a brick. B is out of there! This ended just fine, I don't think any rocks were thrown, though after Z man dropped the brick, Cash picked it up and started running after Z man until I yelled at him to drop it.


We're horrible parents! Pretty sure Jet had some ear aches going on while we were out there, and instead of coming home, we just stayed. The first night he woke up sometime around 3am and screamed bloody murder for about an hour! He was ticked off! Nothing we did helped him, he didn't want anything, finally I just held him still for about 5 minutes and he was out. But this woke up Cash, who was whinny and wouldn't sleep for about a half hour until I threatened him that I would strap him in his car seat and he would sleep in the car. He sunk to the bottom of our sleeping bag, T was in his by now and pouted himself to sleep. Then B woke up around 5am after all of this and need to poop! Whats going on here? Seriously? Needless to say, it was a long night. Luckily for everyone involved, they all slept just fine the next night.


Can't wait for next year!

Crash Money

Well, it took him three years but he finally succeeded in breaking his arm. He had the eventful day on the 4th of July this year. Every year the Rose Park community has a kids parade, where kids decorate their bikes and go from the Day-Riverside Library to Riverside park where there is a breakfast. About half of the way is along the Jordan River, when the trail moves into the park there is a bit of a hill that goes off of the Jordan River trail down to the park. As we were going along, Cash would cruz ahead on his bike, get stuck, (he has a hard time still pedaling forward) wait for us, we would give him a little help and he would be off again. As we were approaching the downslope Cash came whizzing by me, I told him to stop and wait, of course he listened as good as always, not at all and kept on going. I knew what was coming next. As he turned down the hill and disappeared behind a group of people, I started seeing people jumping out of the way as an out of control 3 year old went flying down the hill! He emerged out of the crowd with his feet off the pedals and veered onto the grass, he soon let go of his handle bars and with arms stretched out crashed onto the grass!

Nope, this isn't how he broke his arm. But he did get right up, took a look at his bike and started crying that the had grass stuck in the one of the pedals. We pulled the grass off, threw his bike back on the sidewalk and he was on his way.



After the breakfast and clean up we headed home. T's mom does a big bbq every 4th, so we thought that we would put all of our kids down for nap before we headed over, this would hopefully mean less grumpy kids for the fireworks. So with all the kids down supposedly following our plan and taking a nap, I headed out to work around the yard. As I'm playing with my tomatoes, T comes running out, "Brad, I think Cash broke his arm!" I thought, crap, it's probably sticking out and all gross looking, the sight of it is going to make me sick. But actually it was hard to tell if he broke his arm or not. He was crying like he had just broken his arm, a good steady cry but not hysterical and holding his arm kinda limp. We played around with his arm for a bit, feeling the bone, having him squeeze his fist and move his fingers. We decided that we should take him in just in case, we didn't want to be like the Hiltons and take our kid in hours later.



I stayed home with the other kiddies, finally getting Jet to sleep. Got a call from T, he had a fracture brake, the doc said that it was the best kinda break for a kid to have and should heal just fine. They first put a wrap on his arm, we could tell right off this wasn't going to last long. The first day that he had it on, he asked multiple times to take it off "It doesn't hurt any more" thinking this would allow him to no longer wear the wrap. When that didn't work he then proceeded on several occasions to start taking off the wrap. Luckily he only had the wrap on for a few days before getting his cast. Casts now-a-days are great! They can get wet! This is perfect for summer, this allows him to still swim and boys get beyond filthy in the summer, if we had to cover the cast in plastic every time we needed to give him a bath, he would never get a bath! At least from me!



He is trying hard to break his other arm! His cast hasn't slowed him down a bit.

Busy

So I know that I have been a huge slacker on my blog but life happens. It's been real hard for some reason to keep this updated, maybe it's because facebook is easier and most of my readers are also friends on facebook, if not all. I've also been super busy with school. I am going to the U for a Master of Public Policy. This is keeping me very busy. Between work and school and the family and a few other projects, leaves me little time for my blog. Hopefully I'll inundate you with some post in the next few weeks before school picks back up.

SYTYCD

So our show, So You Think You Can Dance is back for a 5th season. It took us a while to get into the show this season, that was until last week. Last week was great, probably one of the best SYTYCD shows in the five seasons. Still, no one is really sticking out as a personal favorite. We thinks it's because, so far nobody's personality has really stood out. We really like the following two dances.

You can skip to the dance about -5:40

janette @ Yahoo! Video

Love it!

I am getting really lazy with this blog! Haha! All I do now is post stuff that other people have found!

Happy Monday!

A new twist on the Sound of Music

Who is this kid and where did he come from?

Honestly!?! I'm not sure where this kid came from, he's nothing like either of his parents or his siblings.

I guess this is what we deserve when we try and sleep-in and cash is up doing whatever, well, this is what he does. It's not good to have the two of us parents who are very much not morning people with a boy who is very much a morning person. I think that one day we will learn our lesson but we haven't yet. We continue to let the kids roam free while we try and get an extra half hour of sleep. It doesn't really work because one of us is always getting up every ten minutes to yell at the kids and get them something to eat/drink/watch or tell them, no candy, stay out that and whatever else.



Cash was super excited to play soccer this year. The day they received their jersey's, he had to put his on right then and wore it the rest of the day. He would be excited all morning to go play soccer, we would get there and he would play the first half and be done. Sometimes it didn't even take until half-time, after two or three up and down the fields he would be done. I think during the last game I figured out why he didn't want to play, he's not as fast as the other kids and doesn't get to kick the ball as much. He kinda told me this while I was trying to talk him into playing, not exact words but basically. Hopefully, next year he won't care so much if he is the fastest and play anyway, or maybe he will be the fastest.







Most of the kids played soccer again this year. Cash and G played on a younger team then the others and I'm pretty sure it was the youngest team in the league, their team was always the shortest team out there. It was kinda fun to watch, the ball would go out of bounds and half the yellow team would fall on the ground. By the end of the game there would maybe be three players on the field when there are suppose to be five, the rest would be sitting on their parents laps crying that they didn't want to play anymore.



This next set of pictures is from after b's birthday party (which I still need to post), he is wearing her b-day crown and yes, his soccer jersey. A side note, I don't think we ever washed b's jersey last year, we have washed cash's jersey every week and it has stains. He doesn't like taking it off. Sorry for so many pictures but they tell a better story all together. There are more pictures then what I posted, I tried to cut down the number of pics. Any way, enjoy.



He is a nut and loves to make us laugh and he loves attention. We try not to laugh, cause then that just eggs him on and he keeps going. B laughs at him all the time and that just makes him believe that he is the funniest kid ever making him try even harder to be funny. I feel sorry for our neighbors, they were out in their backyard while the kids were jumping and every time our neighbors would walk by, cash would talk their ears off. It's going to be a long summer for them and a lot of years of crazy kids and early mornings for us.

May Time

May time is planting time! We were able to get our garden, well most of our garden planted this weekend! Yea for tomatoes!! I was pretty tempted to buy a $40 tomato plant, it already had green tomatoes on it and it came in a huge pot with an assortment of herbs. Almost bought one for my mom and mother-in-law, I didn't know if they would want that over my usual flowers. I went with the usual flowers, hope they like them. Maybe next year I'll plant a couple of tomatoes in my house around February or so. If your interested in the $40 tomato plants that already have green tomatoes, they're at Western Gardens.

Still need to plant some melons and a pumpkin, just tilled up some weeds and grass to make the room for them. Looking for a place in the yard to plant a squash, not enough room in my little garden box which already is full of lots of tomatoes (probably too many if there is such a thing), two cucumbers, a zucchini, one red and one greed bell pepper and some Anaheims. My oregano has come back like a champ for the second year in a row. I highly recommend to anyone who likes oregano, to plant it, this is my third year of oregano. I'm rethinking my mint, I don't know what to do with it and it grows out of control! I'm going to quarantine it to see if I can keep it in line and decide later.

We planted/let lose about 1500 lady bugs. I say "about" because the package said 1500 on the front, and the back said that they put in 1800 to account for a mortality rate. They are suppose to take care of bug eggs and some other pesty little bugs, and I think they would be cool to have them randomly in the yard.



My 5 year old niece, K bug, broke her arm last week. First, I'm surprised it took her five years and second I'm surprised cash wasn't first. I'm not looking forward to broken bones and bleeding wounds but the way the boys play, it's only a matter of time.

Wednesday Tunes

Wouldn't be surprised if I have already posted this one. I have been in a hip-hop mood lately.

Timberland - The Way i Are

Catch'n Up

I have loads of blog ideas! Now I just need the time. Well, to catch ya'll up, I can't skip the annual Easter pictures. I don't know what happened but we didn't get any good pictures. Must have been smoking crack, so you'll have to get by with what we have.

All the kids


The boys



The girls, here are their previous Easter pictures


It was kinda nice, they actually slept in Easter morning. Finally, cash wandered into the family room, then we heard him running as fast as he possible could into our room. He comes in with the hugest grin on his face and with his arms out says "You know what the Easter bunny brought us? A whole bunch of candy!!" Not sure if he was this excited on Christmas morning? I don't know if they understood the looking for eggs thing, they kinda didn't care about finding eggs.

Here are the kids with their Easter baskets.


They had umbrellas and watering buckets in their baskets and they love both. With all of this rainy weather they have been using their umbrellas just about every day. B is always asking to go on walks in the rain so she can use her umbrella. They also love to water the plants, even with all the rain they are out in the yard almost everyday watering the plants. Here they are watering our peas!