GO DUCKS!!!

First off, we got visitors!!! Yay for that! Melissa, Brayden and Diana came out to see us for a few days. We mainly just hung out, ate a lot of good food, (played the wii a little too much) until Friday, then drove up to Dallas, where we met John. Ya gotta know that whenever you're with John, you always see more than what we have planned. This time was the Stockyards. It was a cool old little place that reminded me of Jackson Hole, WY.

Jete and Jerzi were both too chicken to ride (sit on) this Longhorn, so we forced Jerzi to get on with me. Ya gotta take advantage of opportunities, right?

The kids got to ride these little horses/ponies, (I don't know what they are). But I guess they weren't as scary as that big ol ugly hot, salivating Longhorn, cuz they loved the ride. Someday, hopefully we will be able to get our own horses, so we can go on real horse rides. That's my plan. :)





Onto the real reason we went to Dallas!


We went to a Ducks game!!!
WOOT WOOT!!!

Our car ride over to the game. In case you can't tell, we're Ducks fans. (John bought us all Ducks shirts to wear. Soo nice!) It was fun to walk around before the game and see all the tailgaters, and get heckled at. My personal favorite was the people that were walking around with a duck (stuffed animal) on a leash, pretending it is dead. I also loved when we just walk past random people and they high five you cuz you're wearing "their" team. I couldn't stop smiling and laughing at it all. I love the football atmosphere.




They were playing at the Dallas Cowboys Stadium. It was so amazing, and HUGE!
I couldn't get it in one picture, that's how big it is. So that is two pics combined.

The Oregon Ducks vs. LSU Tigers
AGGHHHH! So exciting!!!

Both teams ranked in the top 5, people were calling it the game of the year!
Plus, look at this stadium! So awesome!

Here's the gang gettin stoked to go inside.

They played Kenny Chesney's "The Boys of Fall" while they were warming up. I love this song. I can't even explain how excited for the game I was while I was listening to this song.... and I love football!

Pure happiness!

Had and Jete, excited to be here!

So the Ducks always have sweet uniforms.

I love to see what uniforms they're wearing each game. I didn't know how cool their gloves were though until I came to the game. When you put your hands together to make the "O", the O has wings. LOVE IT!!!

I loved seeing this, and all the O's people were holding up and yelling out.

These LSU players must not have got the memo...

only one person is supposed to fake an injury at a time.

To be honest, I wasn't very excited to take the kids with us, mainly for selfish reasons. It would be hard to pay attention to the game, I might have to leave with one of them and miss the game, they would be a distraction to others all around us...., ya know, things like that. But they were pretty good, especially considering how long the game was and that it was way past their bed times. They both got into the game. Jerz kept yelling out "DOE DUCKS!!" She still yells it out in our house all the time, or whenever she sees football on tv. We love it. I'm sure it was a little hard, and a little annoying for everyone that we went with though, for them to be there and climbing around (So I'm sorry to all of you). But everyone was so nice and helpful with them.

We kept them busy with snacks, treats, and pop.

And when that got old, we started passing them around.

Game Day was there, and set up right in front of us.

Although the game didn't turn out how we wanted, it was a
pretty dang awesome experience! Thank you so much John and Melissa!

Love and Hate

This post has been a long time comin. Yes, we have moved! Awhile ago in fact....at the end of May. We now live in Texas, and it's so hot my clothes feel like they melt to me. And they basically do really melt to you if you're outside longer than oh, say, 3 or 4 minutes. We've been having some fun times sweating our guts out.

Well, peeps have asked to see pics of my house, and I took a pic, then I was informed not to put them on here. So sorry, you don't get to see it. But I love it. I was so excited to move here, and to be in a house!!! I knew there were gonna be advantages and disadvantages to having a house, but as far as I was concerned, the advantages far outway the disadvantages! (We're just renting.) Since we've been here I've come up with a list of things I have loved about being in a house, and being here in Texas. But everything's not always roses. So I've also made a small list of things I've hated so far. :) But first I've got to start with when we first got here.

We arrived to find our house had LOTS of things that didn't work. That kinda bugged me, but our landlord was willing to fix all of it, so it was fine. I was fine, and loving our new house. Until I was in our kitchen, standing there, admiring it. I got a faint glimpse of an awful smell.

I started sniffing around. (I'm a hound dog according to Had.) The closer I got to one whole wall, the stronger the smell.

I sniffed out our cupboards, the microwave, our oven, the floor, everything. I could smell it everywhere, but nothing was stronger than any other place. So I came to the conclusion we had a dead animal in the wall. That's the only logical explanation.

Had, of course, couldn't smell anything, or pretended not to, I'm not sure which.
I told him we had to have something done about it. It wreaked! And he was like, "There's nothing to do if it's in the wall. You're just gonna have to deal with it."
I really don't do well with smells!

I was so sad. All the sudden, I wasn't excited about our house anymore. I didn't want to cook, or even go into our kitchen that I was so excited about.

Well, to make a long story a tad shorter, our microwave was one of the appliances that didn't work when we got there. So when the guy came to replace it, he pulled it out of the wall, and lo and behold....

THREE DEAD BIRDS were sitting on the vent of the microwave!
I wanted to throw up. It was so gross. There were feathers everywhere, and the smell was wretched! The guy that pulled it out felt really bad that he let me see it, probably because I kept dry heaving. They kept asking me if I was gonna be ok. I was so disgusted and yet so relieved that the smell was going to be gone!

Well, we found out how they got in there. There is a vent outside on the back wall of our house that a bird kept flying around. So we already had suspiscions. Had took off the cover, and pulled out armfuls of nesty crap. I again wanted to puke. There were 4 baby eggs in there, and the nest was packed into this vent farther than Had could reach his arm in there, with a wire hanger all pulled apart and streched out. The vent lead all the way across the ceiling of our kitchen, and right down to the vent of the microwave. Sick!

Here's the vent/big hole in the wall where the nest was, and part of the nest that Had dug out.

Here's Jete, sweating in the sun with the egg he just "accidentally" broke .

A look at the disgustingness!

(The guy who pulled the microwave out of the wall told us to leave it on the curb and by morning someone would have picked it up. Sure enough, the next morning we look out there, and its gone. Dead birds and all!)

So that was definitely the #1 thing I didn't love when I got here.

#2. Cockroaches!

I have only seen one in my house, and it was this one.

They're huge, and it freaked me out. There better not be any more!

#3. Poor Had!

A few days before his residency started, Hadley's stomach/side started hurting really bad. When it got to the point that he could barely walk, and when he did, had to walk all doubled over, he went to the ER. They immediately took him back and got him set up to get his appendix taken out. I felt so bad and hated that I wasn't with him at the hospital until after the surgery, because I had to take our kids to the only peeps that we knew, which lived one hour away. It was rough. (We were very grateful to have those friends here though that took our kids for us while we spent the night in the hospital. Thank you Tyson and Lauren!)







#4. Lizards!
I used to think lizards were kinda cool. I thought they were even a little bit cute, for a fast, scaley little rodent/creature anway. Turns out they're all over here. One came into our house when the front door got opened. I tried to trap it so that I could take him back outside, and I accidentally squished it to the wall. I felt bad. I still kinda liked them. A couple more came in our front door. Then they started getting a little on my nerves. And now I'm paranoid about our front door. Every time I open it I have to put up a baracaid in case there are any lizards just waiting to come in.


Then one day, I lost all my affection for these slimy, creepy little things.

I got in the shower that day, and when I grabbed the shampoo bottle, a lizard came scurrying out from behind it. Yeah, I freaked just a little! I hurried and grabbed a little toy cup that was in there and put it over him, so I could finish showering. Well, I accidentally cut off a little part of his tail with the cup. And I may have accidentally suffocated him. I don't know which one did the damage, but when I got out of the shower, I went to take him outside, and he didn't move. I think he was still alive, but not doing so good. Don't ask me how he got into my shower. It's on the second floor. I thought it was a fluke. Then a couple weeks ago, Had was showering and he yells out to me, "Hey, I got a friend in here showering with me!" Sick! I now hate lizards! How in the world do they get in my shower?


That little thing at the top is part of his tail I cut off.





On to happier thoughts.....
I love my house. For the first couple months we were here, I just kept walking everywhere in our house, going from room to room and smiling. My kids have room to run and play, I have room to put stuff away, and I have an awesome kitchen. We have lived in an apartment for the past 7 years, and those tiny kitchens are no fun, so this is a dream compared to them.





Another thing I love about being in a house...
my kids get to play in our own yard, with our own toys. I can go back in our back yard with them, with my swimming suit on and play in the water with them. It makes me happy to see them have so much fun with each other!



They love to play on this little waterslide. This is usually how it ends up any time Jerzi's on the slide. She starts at the top, cautiously moving down as slow as she possibly can. Jete gets too impatient and heads down right after her, then it knocks Jerzi onto her face at the bottom of the pool. Good thing she laughs about it.



Our backyard isn't awesome. It has tons of weeds, and very little to no grass, but hey, its a backyard, which is better than what we've had before. And the kids can still have fun in it, so I'm happy.

I also love that its so hot that we all want to be in the pool, and that its still hot outside at nights so we can go out when Had gets home.

Havin fun in the sun!

Another thing that I love about our house is that our street isn't very busy, and that our kids can play in the road with all the other neighbor kids. I love that Jete can give Jerz rides down the road and back on his Harley, and that she loves it!

I love being in a house so we can have sweet things like an ice cream truck/van come to our neighborhood.

Jete and Jerz got snow cones from the ice cream van and thought it was the coolest thing ever. It made me happy to just be able to get it for them. I have a very distinct childhood memory of the snow cone truck coming down our street, blaring its music. It would send me and all my siblings into a little frenzy trying to scrounge up our change so that we could buy one. Many times it would go by, and either none of us would get one, or maybe one or two kids would get one if they were lucky enough to find a quarter. Summer days with snow cones are the best!

Last one, even though I could name so many more....
I love that our neighborhood has kids that Jete and Jerzi can play with. I love that they think up crazy things to do to keep cool in this blazing heat.

Seeing them like this just makes me smile.