Here's what happens when the kids get a hold of the camera

In case you wonder...even if you didn't, here is what happens when my kids get their hands on the camera. It doesn't really bother me anymore, since it's digital and I just erase the pictures, but some of them are quiet funny.

Here is what Nate does with the camera:
I teased Nate that he took this picture to give to his girlfriend....
This is Nate's artistic vision:

This is Dana's artistic vision:

and this:

She also enjoys being silly for the camera.
These are Nate's candids of Kimmy:

They capture her weird little personality well.

What we really did for Jared's birthday

As I mentioned in a previous post, we did more for Jared's birthday than just have a family party. We actually took the whole family to Lake Tahoe for the weekend. This is a picture of Kimmy on the ride up. She has become obsessed with the headphones for the DVD player in the car. You might have to look a little hard to see them on her here, but we can hardly go anywhere anymore without her wanting to wear them, or hear her screaming about how she wants to wear them.

Anyway, we had been talking about going to play in the snow for a while, but each time we tried, Kimmy kept getting sick, and with all of her medical trauma, the last thing I wanted to do was to be so far away from a hospital if she had a seizure. Funny enough, the weekend that everyone was finally feeling good enough to go was Jared's birthday weekend, and he had four whole days off to celebrate.

We went to the Northshore of Tahoe, and though we didn't see much lake, we had an excellent time. We had planned in staying somewhere around Truckee, which is not quite all the way to Tahoe, but when we got there the first couple of hotels we checked out were charging between $140 to $249 per night. HAHAHA! This was supposed to be a quick cheap weekend and paying that much for a hotel room didn't fit into our budget. Luckily, I was able to use our navigation system in our Honda Odyssey as a yellow pages and find a hotel in King's Beach, which is only seven or eight miles away for $40 a night instead.

It was certainly not the Ritz Carlton, but it was sufficient for our needs, especially for the price. And while we were in King's Beach, we randomly ran into two guys from Norway, who fascinated Nate with their ability to speak Norwegian. It made us think of Dee-Rob.

Unfortunately for us, the motel didn't have adjoining rooms, and we forgot how poorly Kimberly sleeps when there is more than just Dana in the bedroom with her. She basically spent the whole night awake either wriggling around in a bed disturbing everyone else in the bed, or screaming from her playpen about how lonely and miserable she was. Not the best night. You may be able to tell from the two pictures above how happily our morning got started since no one really got much sleep, except for Dana, who could sleep through a volcanic eruption!

For breakfast, we went to this restaurant in Truckee, I think it was called the Wagon Wheel. The food was fantastic, and the portions were HUGE! Nate couldn't finish his order, and you know that means there was a ton of food. That is one thing my Nate got from Big Nate...he can eat more than any other kid his age by far.

We had planned on going sledding at the resort Boreal, but their inter tubing area, which was nice, was CRAZY EXPENSIVE!! Anyone who wanted to inter tube had to pay $25 for two hours of inter tubing. If you weren't going to be tubing, but wanted to watch, you had to pay $5. For the whole family to go, it would have cost us $125 for two hours, plus the $7 for parking. I don't know if you can see it in the picture below, but they did have this cool escalator thing that you could ride to the top of the hill so you didn't have to hike, but I certainly wasn't going to pay $125 to go sledding! Lucky for us, we had borrowed a sled from our good friends and neighbors, the Sarots, and were able to find a day-use snow park a mile or so up the road which cost us $5 total for a parking permit.
As you can see, our little snow park was not as tree-free as the Boreal sledding area, but at a savings of $120, I was willing to compromise. And since the kids had never been officially sledding before, they didn't even know the difference.

We didn't really have a very good hill, because the path wasn't smoothed out yet and there wasn't really a good place to sled that didn't have trees at the bottom, directly in the line of sled.

Because of that the first couple of times Nate and Dana went down with Jared, he had to use his feet to stop to avoid the trees (see pic below): and Nate and Dana both got sprayed pretty good in the face with snow. As you can see from our pics too, we were kind of in the shade, so that made it a little chilly for them too. However, after a small amount of begging on my part, Nate and Dana both got up enough courage to go again with me after I swore to them I could do it without spraying them in the face with snow.Of course, Nate still wasn't convinced that sledding was fun, and he spent the rest of them time there either sliding down the hill on his bum or making snowballs and throwing them at trees to destroy them. Thankfully, Kimberly was more than happy to go on unlimited rides with both me and Jared.Kim was also happy enough to wander around in the snow with Nate or Dana and shake off her gloves a lot too.The excitement of this also seemed to wear on Kimmy the longer we were in the snow...

This is the girls when we first got there...Kimmy, 20 minutes after arriving...Kimmy, 30 minutes after arriving...Kimmy after two sled rides with Mom...Kimmy after five sled rides with Mom...Kimmy, before we even got her snow boots off in the car...
Though Nate has yet to be convinced of the fun that sledding can be, he does love to build a snow fort, or in this case, a snow hole.

We had an awesome time, and are thinking of making it an annual trip...Tahoe look out!

Nate says the darndest things...

Nate to Dana after feeling her flex her bicep: "Better than before, but still not solid rock. Feel mine."

Kimmy and her new Bestie...

Our neighbors have a sweet baby girl named Rylee who is just about two months older than Kimberly.Kimmy loves her so much. Rylee goes to daycare several days a week while her mom works, so Kimmy is always asking me "RyRy skol?" when she is not home.
For being so close in age, they play really well together.

We had her for a couple of hours the other night and they were so sweet together. The kept following each other up and down the stairs and holding the same toys.

Jared Is Over The Hill and On His Way Down...

So, Jared recently celebrated his 31st birthday!! When he got that old, I don't know, but it has happened. This year we celebrated with a very low key family party....and a special trip, which I will detail in another forthcoming post.

The kids did a really good job of helping me pick out his presents, he loved all of them, and an even better job putting the tape on the packages. Because the kids aren't quite skilled at wrapping yet, and we all know how Jared feels about gift wrapping and bows and gift tags, putting the tape on definitely seemed like a task they could handle.
Nate was really funny because he got Jared a memory card for the XBOX 360 which he (Nate) really wanted, and he just couldn't fathom how any other gift Jared could have gotten would have been better than that. So he kept asking Jared what his favorite present was, and wasn't it the memory card, ect. all night long. Jared couldn't bear to tell him that he didn't really want it. What a self-less Dad.

One of the big presents that I got Jared was a new suit. He hasn't had a black one since his mission because the only suit he had on his mission was black and he just couldn't bring himself to get one that was black. So since it's been over 10 years, I thought it was time. I got a SMOKIN' deal on it too, and doesn't he look handsome (even if he isn't wearing the whole suit)?
Since Kimmy had to go to bed before we opened presents (probably because she was throwing a temper tantrum, which she has become an expert at lately), I thought I would throw in a picture of her on this post for good measure. She is wearing Spongebob Squarepants disguise glasses which she loves to wear. I like them because when she is wearing them, she is not trying to wear mine!

Happy 2009!

This year for New Year's Eve we had a rockin' Cowley family party. Tons of yummy treats, noise makers and even fireworks. Kimmy had to go to bed at the regular time, but Nate and Dana got to stay up late. Here are some pics of them at our par-tay!

Too bad for us that we didn't realize that the fireworks we bought were actually confetti poppers until after Jared lit one of them on fire.

Around 11:45 Dana asked "Isn't it midnight yet? I want to go to bed!"

We are sure gonna miss this...

As most of you know, Jared's parents, have spent the past 18 months serving a mission at the Visitor's Center at the Oakland Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Lucky for us, that is only about an hour drive for us, so we have been really spoiled and got to see Grandma and Grandpa Cowley, I mean Elder and Sister Cowley about once a month or so for the past 18 months. We were even blessed with the luxury of being close enough to come and see Jared's brothers and their wives/families when they came to visit his parents. In December Kevin and Megan came to visit and we had a great time. Since the trailer can be a little small for six adults and three kids, and since Grandpa had access, we went up to the stake center on temple square and Grandpa was able to let us into the small gymnasium there. We had so much fun...

This is Jared and Kevin re-enacting their childhood playing "soccer."

Dana was determined to perform on the stage for her Grandma, as she was accompanied by her Aunt Megan. As you might guess, she really wants to be on American Idol.

Pretty soon, the soccer game Jared and Kevin were playing looked too fun, so all the kids decided to join in.

After the soccer game was over, the kids played hide and go seek with Grandpa and Daddy, but soon tired of that. So Grandpa, understanding kids as well as he does, decided to come up with a new game. He found some large garbage sacks and blew them up like ballons, and the kids and the "big boys" (Jared and Kevin) spent another hour playing "keep the bag full of Grandpa's hot air off the floor!" Too funny.

And just to show the awesomeness of my new camera (THANKS JARED!!), I took a short video of them playing.

It was so much fun, and the kids can't wait till they get to see everybody again!