Dad and Jude fun times!

Yesterday Gordon and Jude went show shoeing on the backside of Mt. Ashland. Gordon got show shoes for his birthday and was so excited that he (I mean Santa Clause) bought Jude a pair for Christmas. This was their second outing so far, since there really hasn't been that much snow, they haven't had a great chance of using them this season. Jude took his camera and he and Gordon both took some pictures and Gordon took videos of Jude walking around in his snowshoes and sledding down the hills. It's super cute to see him sitting on the sled with his big shoes hanging out the front. The first picture is a small snow ball that they started at the top of the hill and this is what it looked like at the bottom. It made a great path for Jude to sled down! The second one is the igloo that they built. Jude punched a hole in it if you can see it, because he said it was a garage and his sled run can right down the hill and into the garage. The last picture is sledding! Jude insisted that Gordon make a jump some where on the hill. Aaaah, boys!It was pretty warm on the mountain yesterday, as you can see, Jude started with his coat on and ended up with it off, but did keep his sunglasses on all day. Both of them came home with sunburned cheeks!

Kitchen Complete!

Yeah! I have my kitchen back and it's beautiful! The kitchen is totally complete now with moulding and everything. The dining room is done minus the floor trim, but Gordon is completing that tomorrow, so we'll be all back to normal now.
Here is the picture of the dining room and I love the contrast that the maple floor has with my cherry table. This picture actually shows the red wall too which again, I am so glad that we put the green in the kitchen and not this red, but I love it on this wall. I will have to say that without the carpet this room is louder, but well worth it!!!!

Kitchen day 2

On Monday, Gordon and Jude removed the carpet from the hallway and then took a break and went to the dump and then went shooting (not at the dump, by the way). Anyway, Jude shot my shotgun, which I haven't gotten to yet, plus he shot a bunch of Gordon's handguns that they brought with them. Gordon loves his newest handgun and said that it's pretty nice to fire...I'm glad it was worth the money because guns are EXPENSIVE!!!

So on Monday when I got home from work, I removed all the staples in the hall and doorways (from the carpet) and then the staples from the MDF in the kitchen under the linoleum. Someone went CRAZY with the staple gun in the kitchen. There were seriously 50 staples in about a 2 sq ft area! Gordon had to use pry bars, rubber mallets and whatever else he could find just to get the stinking stuff out! He got 80% of the kitchen out on Monday and then last night he pulled out the flooring under the stove and fridge, so needless to say my beautiful clean kitchen is no more! Here's what it looked like:

It was a little dusty, and it's crazy that my camera picked it all up. There is a layer of dust over all the counter tops and the floor, so we vacuumed the floor to prep it for the laminate. Oh, we decided to also put the laminate in the "laundry room" (the closet in the hall), so we ripped out that linoleum too and moved the washer into the living room for now, plus Gordon decided that the dryer was taking up too much room, so we lifted it on top of the washer. Please don't visit our house right now, it's kind of scary! Our living/laundry room:

Since we have moved the oven out and can't plug it in anywhere we had pizza for dinner last night, Jude was in heaven!

Tonight we are hoping to finish the kitchen, so that we can put the oven and fridge back in place, so that we can cook again. We moved both the bookcases that Jim (my father in law) made for me for a couple of Christmas presents (which I love!) and so we had to box up all the books and the boxes are so heavy that I can't lift them, so I scooted them around the table to get them away from the walls for Gordon to paint, but now we are going to have to move them further, so we may accumulate even more junk in the living room. I did take a picture of the dining room, just for posterity's sake. Please don't think that my dining and kitchen look like this all the time...just most of the time. Haha!

It was about 11:30pm when I took this picture and I forgot to turn on the dining room light, so you can't see very well, but the door wall is "cherrywood". I love the way the colors turned out, but you can't really tell yet, because of all the crap stacked everywhere, including the oven/stove in the dining room. As much as Gordon complains about it all, he got at least one new tool out of the deal, a flush cut saw. He had a good time with that and it actually was a great help to get the MDF out up against the cabinets.
So that's it for today, or actually yesterday. I will post more as we progress.

Half my new kitchen!

Gordon painted the kitchen today and it looks great!!! I had actually wanted to paint it a red "cherrywood" color, but when Gordon started, it did not look good with the cabinets, so he stopped and changed to the green that I picked. It's funny when one person picks a color and the other person is not really sure about it, but Gordon was pretty mad at me for stopping him and making him change colors, so he sent Jude and I to see the Chipmunks. When we got back, the kitchen was done, so I cleaned it all up and put it back together. It was great team work. While I cleaned and played with Jude, Gordon painted the slider wall with the red and now we will need to do the other two walls in the tan, so no pictures of that until the paint is done and the floor is in, but here are three of the kitchen with the paint...no floor yet. I will recommend to anyone that is going to do a floor, to paint before you take the old flooring out, you don't have to tape anything off or worry about spilling. So without any more babbling here are the pics:

Waiting for some snow

Jude informed me this morning that it would nice if it would snow, because he wants to try out his new snow gloves from Grandma Susan and make a snowman. I would have to agree that anything besides the glued on ice on the windshield that we had this morning would be better! It took forever to scrape it off and it was seriously infused in the glass! Maybe the snow will come and cover my dead flower beds so I won't feel guilty about not pulling up the dead geraniums yet. I will have to say that they were some of the best plants that I have had, and I got them at Fred Meyer when they had the 50 cents sale, so I recommend to all of you in this area to watch for their spring sale and buy some even though they are small, they are really healthy!

So, on to my post. Christmas was great! We had a nice Christmas Eve dinner and Gordon's Dad's house, Christmas morning at my families and then dinner at Gordon's Uncle's with his Mom. Jude had a great time opening presents and has spent the past few days re-checking what he received and trying everything out. One of the biggest hits has been the roller skates from Grandpa Boots (Swanson). Saturday morning I went to work out and came home to this:

It was so cute! Jude practiced all morning at home and then we met Mom, Dad, Ty, Tori, Brody, Tish, John, Peyton, Summer, Maile and Kai at Roller Odyssey and went rollerskating. Jude was pretty impressed that Grandpa was such a good skater and although we started out a little rough, by the end he was excited about practicing more and being able to skate backwards like Grandpa some time. It was fun to see everyone out skating. Mom took a ton of pictures, so I will have to get some from her, but I spent my time skating and didn't take any pictures. We had a great time.

I found another cute picture of Ty and Tori's little Brody from when we went to Shoji's one night.

Brody was a bit freaked by the fire at the beginning, but after that he had fun. Jude always love eating at the fire place.

A day or so before Christmas, Jude asked me if I could make a holder for his knife, so I did and the next day he picked out the following outfit, so that he would be able to have his knife on his belt, but he had to wear his Davey Crockett shirt (the top part of his Halloween outfit that I made) because it matched the holder. He told me that he wanted to wear the pants, but they didn't have belt loops, so he wouldn't be able to hook the knife on. I couldn't talk him into putting on his coon skin hat though.

Behind Jude is my new floor that is going into the kitchen, dining room and hall. I am so excited! Gordon said we might as well paint before we put the new floor down, so I picked new colors and he is going to get them today so we can get started. I am so ready for the carpet in the dining room to be ripped out!! Finally! I will take some after pictures when we get all done.

Fall festival and pumpkin carving, who could ask for more?

I have a few more pics from the Fall festival that we went to with Tish and Peyton at the beginning of this month. We went to a different farm this year and it was fun and had a lot for the kids to do, but I really missed the huge hay slide! There were other slides (all tube slides) and mazes and peddle bikes and a hay castle. All in all it was fun and Gordon came this year with us, which was great! This is the first time in three years that he has been able to join us, and he enjoyed it too. He rode Kai and then Peyton around on the bikes while Jude and Maile rode their own. Summer's sister in law Jennifer came with us too and she is in the picture with everyone (except me) on the castle.

It's been a while...

So I realized that I haven't put much on our blog since Jude started school and I need to get some events on here.

So far Jude is liking school. The first week was REALLY hard. He didn't especially like getting up for school and even after almost 2 months, that still hasn't changed. He is such a doddler in the morning and it takes forever for the stinker to "wake up" enough to get himself started on things like getting dressed! Well...maybe it will get easier! I won't hold my breath though!

On the 21st of September there were 2 fires that started within in hours of eachother. The first one started in Ashland and went right up the hill toward Auntie and Uncle Pat's and Grandpa and LaVona's houses. The fire department and firefighters tried to evacuate as quickly as possible but Uncle Pat and Auntie quickly set into action and dug a fire line around their homes. One of our customers that we fly for (who owns a fire fighting company) called Dad and asked if Mom was ok. My dad let him know that Mom and their house was safe, but that the fire was up by Grandpa's house. He sent a crew out to go set a line to surround their homes only. They stayed overnight up there after the majority of the fire was put out so that they could watch and extinguish any hot spots. I am very appreciative to Mike and Grayback Forestry for caring for our family!

As the tankers were flying out of the fire base here at work on the Medford Airport, there was a fire that started on Roxy Ann just across the runway view from us. I took some pictures of the tankers as they were leaving and one of Dad and Uncle Danny watching the fires.