Random...

Nothing like kicking your feet up on a car and relaxing while you drink your morning milk.

Ket and Tanz love driving their cars along this overpass over Rt 1...makes me nervous, which is probably why they love it so much!

Brandon and Tanny braved the rain to pick the grapes Brandon planted. Made some excellent grape juice!

Hanging with Daddy at the park

Birthday boys!

They were all about blowing out the candles...the cake, not so exciting, but the fire? Loved it! I have more pictures from family birthday parties somewhere (seeing as I'm pretty behind on pictures I figured I'd at least get these going). They were lucky enough to celebrate with both sides of the family, thanks!

Buds

Fill in the blanks...

We are going to have 3 ________ under the age of 3 ________...and we're very excited!

Not that this comes as a surprise, as I'm 20 weeks along, but figured I better make it "blog-fficial."

The really exciting news?

It's a girl!!!

Now if you'll excuse me I've got to continue training Tanzen and Makett to walk up the stairs leading to our door by themselves. Any chance this will qualify me for a handicapped parking parking spot in front of my house? At this point it's transporting three little ones in and out of the house that seems the most daunting.

Mount Rainier

Mount Rainier- 14,410 feet
Day 1-Started as a beautiful day with the occasional glimpse at the mid-section of the mountain, however the top was covered in clouds.


















The weather quickly got ugly as we made our way up the Muir snow field to base camp at 10,000 feet.


















Day 2- Our goal was to start climbing at midnight, however due to heavy rain, snow, and high winds leading to white out conditions we were not able to leave until after 5am.

The Sun rose just beyond mount Tahoma, what a sight to see, truly amazing!!

First big obstacle was a giant crevasse at Ingraham ice falls, the natural snow bridge had fallen so we had to cross the crevasse on an aluminum ladder.

The day was beautiful and we could see Mount Hood, Helen, and Adams poking through the clouds. However, due to our late departure, and poor stability of the mountain, not to mention an avalanche/ice fall about fifty from us, we decided to turn back at about 12,000 feet.

Before heading back, we got a picture of our group. We climb for two organizations: One is the 'Climbing for Crohn's' foundation (the yellow shirts) and the other is 'Radiate Hope', a non-profit that I started that climb mountains for cancer patients, we carry Tibetian prayer flags with the cancer patients initials on the flags. We bring these flags on all the mountains we do with the end goal to place them at the base camp of Everest. Prayer flags represent strength, hope, and compassion. The other aspect of 'Radiate Hope' is to raise money to replace and update radiation equipment in third world countries, so if you are feeling generous and could use a nice tax deduction, please contact us.

Firemen in training

We were lucky to have not one, but three fire trucks visit our ward's Labor day picnic (regardless of the rolling brown-outs at fire stations in Philadelphia). The firemen were great with the kids and Makett and Tanzen were in heaven!

Up!

We have a new favorite hobby- flying a kite. Makett and Tanzen are content just pretending to fly the kite, so when it actually took off high in the air, they were traumatized and wanted it to come back down. They loved running around chasing the kite, I'm continually amazed at how much energy they have!Our fun kite flying days actually had a tragic ending, with our kite in a tree covered with poison ivy. Brandon is pretty determined to get it down, we'll see if he's successful. In the meantime, Tanny and Ketty like waving to their kite whenever we drive by it...they cried for it at first!