Bonnie Springs with the Gallegos Family

I am very lucky that Tanya's in-laws moved to Las Vegas because now I get to see her a little more often then just when I go to Albuquerque. This year they came to Vegas for Thanksgiving so we got to spend a day with them. I suggested we take the kids out to Bonnie Springs for the day. It was a pretty chilly day, which made it perfect to sip hot chocolate in the restaurant at a table next to the big open fire. While we were waiting for lunch the kids enjoyed feeding the ducks and swan in the duck pond right outside the restaurant.

Micaela and Cole posing by the duck pond...Matthew and Cole feeding the ducks...After lunch we headed over to the old west town where the kids got a talkin to from the cowboy. They then got to watch a bank robbery and help the sheriff to capture the bank robber and put him in jail.The kids with a "real" cowboy...Love this pic!We also caught the Cowboy melodrama in the saloon and we treated the kids to rootbeer and crackerjacks. After the show we mosied on over to the petting zoo which the kids loved. Here they are posing with one of the burros that was just hanging around.Micaela tried to get a closer look at the baby doe that was walking around the petting zoo with her mama.We topped our trip off with a ride on the choo choo train.On our way home we ran into a bit of a traffic jam...there were three wild burros just hanging out in the middle of the road.I rolled down my window to get a pic of this burro and quickly had to role it back up, he thought I had a treat to share with him and he practically stuck his head inside my car window.
It was a really fun day and we enjoyed seeing spending the day with Tanya and the kids...I really wish they lived closer though...we miss them!

Thanksgiving 2009

Thanksgiving this year was a little hectic only because we literally finished fixing the house (still had carpet to do but that wouldn't happen until December) about three days before! The rush to get the house ready for Thanksgiving dinner was on!

This year Charlie's parents were coming to Vegas to spend Thanksgiving with us. We were hoping Robin and Cindy and there families would be able to join us but they unfortunately weren't able to make it. We missed having them!

We started cooking early in the morning. We decided that we needed to cook three turkeys, oh yeah and we definitely needed a ham from Honeybaked Hams (my favorite!). Yes we were a little out of our minds and would have leftovers for days to come but hey isn't that one of the best parts about Thanksgiving dinner, leftovers!

My mom came down to the house early so we could make her famous homemade rolls. It just isn't Thanksgiving without these rolls! This year we all pitched in to help her, including Kadence.
I told her she wasn't really baking unless she had flour all over her and flicked a little bit (okay a lot) all over her face to make it look like she was working really hard.Charlie cooked a turkey on the BBQ Grill and we borrowed Joe's (a friend from work) Infrared Turkey Fryer to cook another turkey. It does not use oil and makes one heck of a yummy turkey! The third turkey was cooked the traditional way in my sister's oven. The kids ate olive's off of their fingertips, because that's what kids do on Thanksgiving.And then it was time to eat, the table was set and we were ready to chow down.
It turned out to be a wonderful Thanksgiving and we were very thankful to spend the day with our loved ones in our newly put back together home! We had a lot to be thankful for this year, a new baby boy to add to our family, good jobs in these hard times, and a roof over our head when so many in this town were losing theirs. Today my cup runneth over...

Ashley's Birthday at the Pony Ranch

Kadee's friend Ashley invited her and Cole to her birthday party at the JR Pony Ranch. Cole was starting to get a cold so Charlie kept him and Chance at home, it was just me and Kadee up for the party. It was a super cute place for a birthday party. They had a petting farm full of billy goats for the kids to play with.After a little play time it was time to get the ponies ready to ride. Kadence helped carry the bucket of brushes out to the horse pen.Kadence took a break from brushing the horse with the other girls to give Madison (our babysitter's little girl) a hug.

Finally it was time to ride. This was the kids' favorite part of the party! Kadee and Ashley rode those ponies quite a few times!

Madison loved the playhouse next to the horse pen the best. She is such a cutie!After a chuck wagon lunch it was time to celebrate with cake!All of the kids seemed to have a great time.

At the end of the party the kids got to do a scavenger hunt in the tack shed to find goodies hidden in a huge pile of hay.

It was a great party! Happy Birthday Ashley and thanks for including us in your special day!

Kadence's 1st Grade Progress Report

We had Kadee's 1st, 1st grade teacher conference today. I know my daughter pretty well, I know she is a great kiddo and typically very well behaved but before every teacher conference I get a little nervous. I always anticipate the teacher dropping a bomb on me and telling me something I would never imagine Kadence doing. This time I was more nervous than usual because the night before her conference she told us that the teacher said she didn't have to go and she really didn't want to go. Immediately we bombarded her with 100 questions..."why don't you want to go, what'd you do, did you do something bad, are you in trouble?" She assured us everything was okay, there was only one small little problem, she had lost her math workbook...AGAIN! She lost it a couple weeks earlier, the teacher gave her a new one and now she lost it again...Not the end of the world by any means but we would have to have a talk with her and explain responsibility a little bit better.

At the teacher conference everything went great. She got all A's and one B (which was a 89.8%) what in the heck happened to rounding up! Her teacher is very pleased with her and claimed that she is only one of the few in her class that got all excellents in the behavior category! Good job Kadee Bug!

Oh Toothfairy, It is Time to Visit the Neilson Residence...

About a year ago after one of Kadence's dentist appointments she insisted that her tooth was loose. All of the kids in her kindergarten class were loosing their teeth and for about a year Kadee insisted her tooth was loose and any day it was going to fall out! Well it never did...Finally, this morning she was wiggling it around and just like that out it came! She was so excited!

We put it in her toothfairy pillow and she put it under her pillow when she went to bed! The next morning she woke up to find a five dollar bill in place of her tooth. I explained to her that the tooth fairy usually only leaves a dollar so this must have been a very special "first tooth" to get five buckaroos. I don't think she cared as much about the money as she did about the footprints the toothfairy left in glitter on the table by her bed ;)

Floor Buddies

Chance is constantly on the floor now. No crawling yet, instead he just gets high centered on his belly. But he does enjoy rolling around and playing with Brew dog who is his constant floor buddy!

Family Game Night

The PTA hosted a "Family Game Night" at school for the students and their families. It was a really cute event. The GATE teacher set up about 20 games in the cafeteria and then about another 12 more challenging games in her classroom. My sister watched the boys so Charlie could come and enjoy the night with Kadence. I of course being the volunteer coordinator had volunteered to help with the games. I was so glad Charlie got to come because Kadence wasn't stuck staying "where I could see her" all night.

This was not a highly attended event like the Soc Hop or Carnival but it was actually nice because everyone got an opportunity to play the games they wanted without having to wait to long for a turn. Upon arrival every student received a raffle ticket and at the end of the evening all of the games were raffled off. I was keeping my fingers crossed for Kadee to win one of the games and sure enough her ticket was the second to the last one picked. She chose the checkers game. It was a fun night and reminded me just how fun it is to sit down and play a good board game once in a while!

Can You Say DISASTER!

So Wednesday, October 21, both me and Charlie had to be into work extremely early. While I was in the shower at 4:00 am he came up and asked if I wanted the bad news. I initially thought we had gotten a call from work and something was wrong. I hesitated because who ever really wants to hear bad news right? He told me we had a leak in our living room ceiling, right underneath the master bathroom. GREAT! I came down to check it out and sure enough there was water slowly dripping from the ceiling. So we put a pan under it and headed off to work. Charlie talked to his dad and they thought maybe it was the shower drain so when we got home Charlie took out the drain, putty'd it and tested it out and it seemed to work. Whew, we thought we had escaped a mess. Uh no! The next morning I got in the shower and the water was leaking so bad it made a huge bubble in our ceiling. Time to call insurance!

They sent out a restoration company who gave us the really bad news. They used some fancy schmancy camera to show us that we literally had water all the way down our living room walls in the back corner of our living room. They cut a whole in the ceiling and low and behold, this leak had obviously been slowly taking its toll and a smidgen of mold set in. We stressed and stressed about whether insurance would cover it, how would we fix this, etc. After meeting with our claims adjuster and a contractor we discovered it was the faucet leaking back into the wall and down into the living room. Insurance covered it, thank goodness and destruction began.
Here is a shot of what our bathroom looked like before...We were not going to be able to use it for a while so we had to move all of our stuff into the kid's bathroom...this should be fun I thought, five of us sharing one bathroom, one small bathroom!Our kitchen became our computer storage area! Luckily the kids had their little table they used to eat on for a month.Our garage became our second storage room.Because of the presence of mold they had to quarantine the areas affected until they removed everything and could bring an hygienist to test the air. Charlie stayed at the house during this time so he could take care of the dogs and me and the kids went to stay with my parents. Thank goodness they have an extra room. We were up there for three nights while they got the mold out of our house. Poor Charlie had to put up with the large, extremely noisy, industrial fans the whole time. I don't know how he did it because they drove me crazy after only five minutes!Then they stripped it. We literally had a hole in the floor of the master bathroom/ceiling of the living room. All I could think about the entire time was how in the heck was I going to keep Cole from falling through this?They tore our our tub/shower and the surrounding walls...Did I mention we had a hole in the floor/ceiling?Well, on the upside, I got to see the studs of my house. It was kind of like building a new house from scratch but not!This was my bedroom, that wall had to go too!And after about two weeks it was time to put things back together.We figured if life was going to hand us lemons, by god we were turning it into lemonade one way or another. We decided to redo the bath in a completely different color scheme with new tile and a new shade of paint.

Boy did we have a hard time trying to agree on a paint and carpet color. Oh yes, we did sample each one of these paints. It took us three nights of going back and forth to Home Depot and our entire kitchen island to figure out which one we liked the best.We narrowed it down to three...And finally decided!!!! Now it is time to get this house put back together...It has not been easy...you never realize how nice of a house you actually have and how lucky you are until something like this happens and turns life into a mess! I just kept telling myself, it could always be worse! And we are blessed that this disaster is fixable so I will take a little mess now and then to remind me how lucky I am!