Air Force Museum

One of the last days of Winter Break for Jordan, we decided to head over to Dayton and visit the Air Force Museum. We were excited to have a fun day out as a family, but I had a cold and was having some serious side effects from it. On our way out of town, we stopped at a Walgreens to pick up medicine. The only kind they had was a night time variety, so I spent the entire day in a foggy daze more interested in every bench that we passed and how nice it would be to lay down on one, than all the cool planes. Besides that little hiccup in our day, we had a lot of fun.

Since I am blogging this some 8 months later, I don't really remember a lot of details about the planes. The thing I am noticing the most, is how much my kids have grown up since then! While I may not remember a lot of details, I do remember thinking a lot of the planes were really cool.

The Disney exhibit was one of my favorites (surprise, surprise). It was really cool to see how Disney let the Air Force use its cartoon characters as a way to boost moral for the troops. It was fun to see all the different characters and how they made appearances. We had a few other pictures, but they were blurry.

We also really enjoyed the World War II section and the modern day warfare section. There were things from the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those exhibits were very touching, especially since there are troops still in those countries. I have such a profound respect and appreciation for all the people who serve in our armed forces.

We thought the name of this plane was kind of funny. We called Lucas "Jucas" a few times that day in honor of it!

I think this may have been Clara's favorite part of the museum. There was a family there with a big bag of coins and they were putting them into the coin twirly thing. Yeah, I'm not really sure what that thing is called. The dad was telling the kids how all the coins they put in there would go to help the museum. I thought it was cool to see this little family do that. I didn't have any coins on me, but I went and bought a few post cards and then me and Clara used the change I got back to have some fun with.

As I am writing this, I am sitting in the back yard of my parents house on a nice summer day while Clara plays in her little pool. With that said, looking at this picture of Lucas still reminds me oh how stinking cold in was that day! I remember running from the car to the museum and back again. Oh winter, how I do not miss you!

Winter Fun

Every time it snowed, Clara BEGGED to go out and build a Frosty of her very own. We had a very cold winter, but it seemed like there was never enough snow at one point to do a whole lot of snowman building. Or at least it never seemed to coincide with when Jordan had time. And lets face it, I wasn't going to go out in the snow and build a snowman! I don't like snow. I don't like cold. Nothing about that sounds fun. I will, however, go and take pictures, since they had a lot of fun doing it! First, we had to get Clara all bundled up. What a chore that is! I am surprised she can even move with all those layers on!

After all snow was gathered and formed into a snowman-like shape (Jordan pretty much did all the work for that), it was time to put on the face- a carrot nose, we used chocolate for the eyes,

and beans for the mouth- you use what you have! Clara loved it!

I am pretty sure her face says it all. She loved building a snowman and that was all she wanted to do for the rest of the winter, but this was the only Frosty that was actually built.
I am throwing this picture in because I like it! Jordan loved that he and Lucas had matching hats. They both wore them a lot during the winter. This was before church one Sunday. They both look so handsome! And Lucas looks so little, compared to now!

We Are Alive

Did you all think we dropped off the face of the earth? It kind of seems that way! But we are still here and doing well. I am going to attempt to catch up the blog on some of the things we have been doing for the last 8 months- yes that is right, 8 months. Wow, I feel like a slacker! Actually, for those who don't already know, I am 8 months pregnant right now. Yup, that's right. I pretty much dropped the blog the second I got pregnant. I just haven't had the energy, motivation, or will power to do it! But now I am thinking about a new baby making its way onto this blog, and there are so many things that we have done between now and then! The good and bad thing is, since I haven't been blogging, I haven't been taking as many pictures lately, so there probably aren't that many things to blog about! I guess we will see as I go through the pictures and reminisce about the last few months! So, you can ignore the next few posts, or you can enjoy a look at a few of the happenings from our life!

It's Over

I finished law school this week. Hooray!

Power Outage

Starting Monday, here in the O-H-I-O, we has some fun weather coming our way. Tuesday morning we woke up to a quarter inch of ice covering everything, including our cars. And the weather was only supposed to get worse from there! Our friends to the north were expecting to get a lot of snow, but we were supposed to get a "warm" front that would just bring us freezing rain and a lot of wind. We went to bed at about 10 pm on Tuesday night. At 10:45 I woke up because it sounded like some idiot was doing fireworks outside. I looked out the window, and I saw a bunch of smoke and flashes of light. Then I saw it. A power line had snapped and was going crazy, making sparks fly everywhere. Then the power went out. The snapped line was two houses down from ours and caused a small fire to start, but because it was raining outside, it went out quickly. Jordan and I figured there wasn't much we could do about it, so we put extra blankets on the kids and went back to bed. When we woke up the next morning, it was 58 degrees in the house, and dropping. Jordan had school, even after he diligently checked to see if it was cancelled about every 30 minutes until the power went out! Clara, Lucas and I tried to brave our cold house for a little while, but the temperature kept dropping. We finally went over to David and Megan's house when it hit 55 degrees. It was just too cold for us! We spent the day just hanging out and trying to figure out what to do. We decided to spend the night back at our house. Some friends from our ward loaned us their propane space heater that is safe for indoor use. I got our the camping stove so we could heat up water for hot cocoa and oatmeal for breakfast the next morning. We brought the kids into our room and had a little slumber party. Parties like that hold very little slumber for me. The next morning, we had a picnic breakfast on the floor of our room. Clara thought that was the coolest thing ever, but she kept asking why she couldn't go play with her toys are be in her room. We tried to teach her about electricity, but only so much can sink into a 2 1/2 year olds mind. I called up my friend Hillary and asked her if she was up for a play date that morning. Luckily she was! As I was leaving, I saw someone from the power company checking the lines. He was about to leave, then asked me if we had power. I told him no and that we had made several calls to the power company to report the outage. He knew nothing about the calls and at first couldn't find anything wrong with the lines, except for the broken one that went to a vacant house, so we was going to leave. I guess a transformer blew, and he couldn't tell that from the ground. I am so glad I stopped and talked to him! Because only 4 or 5 houses were affected by this line being out, we were on the bottom of the fix it list. There were places that had 20-30 or more houses affected by one problem that were a higher priority. But since the guy was there, he said he would fix it right up! YEAH! We went over to Hillary and Leila's for a play date, and when we got home, we had POWER and HEAT! YEAH! Our house got down into the 40's by then. Luckily our fridge was pretty bare, so we didn't lose a lot of food or anything. For the next month, Clara made sure to add electricity to the list of things she is thankful for in her prayers!