New addition to our family!

Some of you may already know and perhaps some have even already met our new addition to our family! For the past couple of weeks we have become the proud parents of a little kitten we have named Gizmo! He has truly been a joy in our lives and has brought us much comfort and happiness. He is such a funny cat and we have posted a few pictures to show you how funny he can be.

The Bernstien Bears

I remember as early as my own childhood reading the original version of the Bernstien Bears Book thinking how cool it would be to have a tree like the one in the original where they went to find the honey, I can even remember wondering if there truly was a tree that looked like this or whether it was just someones creative imagination. Well yesterday as Darin and I took a walk by the river I saw this tree and realized that there probably really was a tree that inspired the tree in the Bernstien Bear book and perhaps this is the tree!

Special Visitors

On August 15th we were blessed with a visit from Brent and his family, even though it was short, we had a nice time. After being showered with wonderful gifts (Mother's Day and Father's Day) we took the kids to McDonalds for lunch, Brighton was so cute because he kept calling it Oma's Donalds, he was a little more excited to eat his fries and play in the toys then eat his Chicken Nuggets. We were so greatful to Shayla's family for sharing them for a few hours during their family reunion vacation. Brent telling Brighton it is time to leave, Brighton learned to love the Hotels, so alls he had to say was it was time to go to the new hotel.
I love this picture because I can really see the Steed side of Brighton!
Seth was such a good baby, a little tired in this picture after eating lunch!

It was so fun to have Brighton at our house, Obpa took him into the entertainment/guest room to watch "Cars"while we visited with his mom and dad!
Seth is so good natured he can entertain himself with most anything, of course it always helps to have his big brother bring him things to play with!

The promised answer!

Last week we had a couple of scares at our house, it all started a week ago Monday when Darin and I were busy doing home improvement type stuff when Darin got this bright idea to sweep the very dirty stairs down to the cellar/crawl space, this was a good idea just not so good without a mask, unfortuneately he sucked in a lot of dust/dirty/mold and by Wednesday morning had a fever and a nasty cough, when I got home later that afternoon his fever was higher, so I took him to instant care where we found out that he had a chest infection, they didn't even bother doing a chest x-ray, but instead put him on a heavy duty antibiotic and a narcotic for his cough, by this time he was coughing up some pretty nasty yellow phlem, by Friday morning the phlem was looking like the picture in the last post, the funny thing is I knew he had this cough and in fact just before he sent me the picture he had told me that he had been coughing up some darkish stuff, but for some odd reason the only thing I could see in that picture was a ghost or a demon. As a side note on Friday morning at work I was having a bit of a head ache and touched the left top side of my head and there was this goose egg size bump on my head and it hurt to touch, the weird thing was I had not hit my head on anything and the bump was not discolored in anyway, it scared me a bit since it had not been there the day before. We went to instant care that afternoon, but the doctor was clueless and said he had know clue what was going on, but that if it didn't go away in two weeks they would do a CT scan. Well I don't have the head ache so much anymore (or I have gotten use to it) and it doesn't seem so swollen to me, but it is still there and it still hurts to touch. Needless to say it has been an interesting week and we are looking forward to a little better health! Sorry about the picture hopefully you can see the bump as it makes my head a little more squared at the top.

Can you guess what this is?

The other day I got this text from my sweet husband, when I first got it from him in the middle of the night while at work, I wondered if he had caught the image of some demon or a ghost on his phone camera. Would anyone care to guess what it might be? Watch for the real answer coming soon!

Jumping the Hurtles!

It's been awhile since I have last wrote and like my daughter in law Shayla says sometimes I am just not in the mood to blog, I am not sure if it is because I don't feel like I have anything interesting to say or I am just to busy and tired to find the time to sit down and do it.
We have settled more into our house the past month, today we just purchased a washer and dryer, which will make our lives a whole lot easier, they will be delivered tomorrow and we will be set if I just knew the proper way to put in a dryer hood, we have the outlet, but no hole in the

wall for the exhaust, hopefully we will be able to find someone in the ward who could help us, in the meantime I guess we will be putting the exhaust hose out the window or the door.

Also today we went to court once again with Darin's Ex-wife Tracie, over the past 3 years that we have been together she has been claiming that we have been behind on our support payments, well for those of you who do not know Utah State law you are required not only to pay Child Support which is a set amount you are also required to pay 1/2 all medical and child care expenses, since these two items can be quite expensive and there is no guidelines or control over how much is spent on these items, there are months that we have been handed a bill for over $700 above and beyond the $333 that we pay in Child Support. Well to make a long story short, there were some disputes as to how much we owed her. After we inputed all the bills we had recieved from her in a spread sheet and compared it to all the monies that had been paid her it appeared we did not owe her but about 1/5 of what she was claiming. Well shortly after we put our house into escrow we recieved a summons to go to court in June, she was claiming we owed $7,450. Well part of the reason we bought our house was to take advantage of the tax credit for first time home buyers. We recieved that money in June and promptly paid her what she was asking knowing that it was above and beyond what we actually owed, we were hoping that that would make her happy and we would not have to go to court. Well she was greedy and insisted that we still go to court so she could ask for attorney fees and other stipulations, but since we were well prepared with our spread sheets the commisioner ruled in our favor and said there were no attorney fees to be paid and that she needed to be more organized and forthcoming with her bills, he also would not give her any of her other demands but in fact insisted that she must be willing to communicate with us if she wants to get paid. While this was a blessing it still felt hollow as alls we really want is to be able to get along and do what is best for the girls. We are grateful for all the prayers and felt the Lord with us, with all the disturbing experiences we have thus had with the courts, it was wonderful to deal with a man who clearly took his job seriously, you could tell that he did not take these things lightly and before he ruled he paused and put his head down for over a minute in what seemed to be perhaps a prayer for guidance, it was a wonderful experience for us.

Happy Father's Day!!!

I've noticed while there is such a Holiday as Father's Day it seems to take the back burner to Mother's day, here are some of the things that I have noticed:

1. Most of the wards that I have lived in, while they always seem to have something nice for the Mothers almost always the Father's are forgotten. (unless you have a super ambitious RS President or other ambitious Sister in the ward)

2. I don't remember ever hearing a Sacrament Meeting with talks dedicated to Father's, but almost every Mother's Day there is at least one talk on Mothers.

3. While the media might have a few reminder commercials out there for Father's Day, it is nothing compared to Mother's Day and it is little and late in coming.

With these few things said I'd like to dedicate this post to the wonderful Father's in my life, there are many and they each have Blessed my life in so many ways I could never count! I Love each of you and hope for you a Wonderful Father's Day!!!!!!

Pros and Cons of Owning a House!

We have had quite an awaking to ownership and even more of an awaking of the shotty job people do to get a house sold. Below I will share some of our experience thus far.


unfortuneately for your viewing pleasure I was not able to take a picture of the nasty bug filled florensent lighting that was in place previous to this track lighting that we installed in it's place, sorry the picture is not to clear, but I wanted you to get the effect of what it looks like turned on. The blubs used in these track lighting fixers unfortuneately cost between $5 to $12 each, luckily for me I found some on clearance at Shopko for $1.24 each!

We were given a surprise a couple of days after we started staying at our house as we had one of the toilets clogged, as we inspected it we found that the water had been shut off to the toilet, when we turned it on to our surprise we found that it would not stop running, with a little closer inspection we found that the hardware in the tank did not match each other and thus it would not turn off.....sooo we did our first fix by putting a new value system in the tank, now not only
does it shut off, but it uses much less water.

Our front bathroom had been an add on to the house and was designed with all new brushed nickel fixtures except the faucet which was the ugliest comercial grade faucet you would find in any public bathroom. I found on Clearance at Lowes a Peerless brushed nickel faucet for $16 and installed it! not my bathroom is finished!
Our Kitchen is quite large, but until we can afford to put in an island with a dishwasher, we have virtually no counter space, so we decided a hood microwave was a must, since we had a hood installed already, we figured installing a hood microwave would not be too hard. we did some price shopping and found we could get a decent one for about $199, but when we were ready to buy it we found the floor model at Lowe's on sell for $109, it was a stainless steel upgrade worth $349. When we got ready to install the hood, to our surprise the old hood had been jerryrigged, by just splicing the electrical cord out of the wall to the wires in the cord of the hood. So I got the pleasure of putting in a new socket in the cabinet above and then we drilled the holes for the hardware of the Microwave and installed it. It has been nice to finally have a microwave again and eventually we will upgrade our stove to Stainless steel too.

In Our House!!!!!!

Many of you may have been wondering what was going on with the purchase of our home in Ogden, well here is the up date. We were suppose to close on May 28th, so that it would fund and record by the 29th and we would get in by the weekend, well unfortuneately for us the FHA computer system went down the week before we were suppose to close creating a back log in document preparation, needless to say our loan documents were not prepared till early afternoon May 29th, throwing our move off by a week. We were able to get our keys the afternoon of Monday June 1st, but because of our work schedules we were not able to really start the move till Friday June 5th. We picked up the truck at about 2pm and worked non-stop till about 9pm loading moving and unloading the truck, the first 3 1/2 hours we were on our own, but thankfully we had some of the Elders in the ward show up and help finish the move off. I am so thankful for the help we recieved, because without it I don't think we would have made it. I had to work that night and didn't get off till Saturday morning around 10am, due to my exhaustion and Darin's and the fact that we both had to work tonight, we did not get anything unpacked today as you can see by these pictures. We are so grateful to be in and excited to settle in and do a bit of decorating.

Where There is a Will

As you all know the past 3 years I have let my hair grow out to it natural stress laiden grey hair. Many of you have had your opinions and comments on it and while I personally enjoyed not having to hassle with the dying of it, I must admitt the vain side of me missed how young I felt with it dyed. Many of you probably thought that I was forced into not dying it and that simply was not true, the fact was that my husband was one who claimed to not understand why women felt they needed to do that and he felt that he could and would love me just as much undyed as dyed, I believed him and trusted him and so I proceeded to grow it out, keep in mind everytime he would mention that he thought a woman looked nice I had to point out that there was a 99% chance that they dyed their hair. Well many times he has told me if I wanted to dye it that was fine, but he did not want to be the one to try and pick out a color. Well anyways this last week we got some movies in the mail from Feature Films for Families and there was this film called "Where there is a Will", well we watched it and the old lady in the film is the mother from "Happy Days" and she is looking rather old and haggerdly and is basically given up on life, until she is reunited with her grandson whom she has not seen since he was a child. Well she gets a new lease on life, has eye surgery, gets some hip clothes and dyes her hair and magically she becomes a new woman looking and acting 20 years younger. Well at the end of this touching movie my husband looks over at me, takes me in his arms and tells me he wants me to dye my hair and that he knows that it will make me feel better about myself! Not only that but he wants me to have it done at a Salon and he wants to come help pick out the color. So today we went to Mastercuts (where I get my haircut) and had my hair dyed professionally for the 2nd time in my life! It has been exciting to see how hard it is for my sweetie to keep his eyes off of me and I feel fantastic! So if I had Brent and Shayla's Monkey Meter right now I would have to give getting your hair dye a #5! Below is a picture taken a couple of weeks ago and one taken after the dye and cut! What do you all think?

Happy Birthday Logan!

Can you believe my Logan is 13 today? Where has the time gone? Happy Birthday Logan, hopefully one of your brothers will let you see this post! Logan has grown in so many ways in the last year, his voice has turned deep and he sounds like a man, he has grown like a foot and has passed me up and most importantly he has matured spiritually and intellectually in he role as Deacon Quoram President and in he grades in school. He is thoughtful of others and has a wonderful sense of humor and has brought much joy to our family! I will say it once again.....Happy Birthday dear Logan!

What it means to me to be a Mother

I was sitting there during Sacrament Meeting while they were giving talks about Motherhood thinking about what it means to me to be a Mom. I use to think that Mother's Day was kind of a depressing day, a day where all of the areas that you fell short in were pointed out and a reminder that you could never measure up, but recently in the past few years I have learned a greater lesson about Mother's Day and it has become more of a sacred day for me and for some odd reason I don't really feel like I don't measure up, but instead I just feel Extremely Blessed.

This is what I realized about Mother's Day (at least from a Mother's point of view), it is not a day to worship Mother's, but to find gratitude for not only having Mother's but for being Mother's, when I started thinking of all the reasons I am gratiful to be a mother (mostly my incredible kids), I started felling less sorry for myself and instead realized how incredibly Blessed I have been to be a Mother to the most wonderful children on earth. Over the years my children have taught me more about the Savior and my Heavenly Father then I could possibly learn on my own, and I don't just mean because I can relate more to him and how he loves me. I have had children who from a very young age taught me simple lessons of faith and trust in the Lord and while most children would use some of the things I have put them through as an excuse to turn away from God, they have been an example of true faith in God holding to the rod and setting an example of true believers. Now I realize that Heavenly Father had everything to do with placing these wonderful spirits in my home and because of that I would like to express my gratitude to him for Blessing me with the children that I have.

With that said, I will say I am not perfect and at times I find myself feeling sorry for myself for being so far away from them and not being able to spend as much time with them as I like and I ache for them in ways I never knew was possible, but I have been blessed with the time I do have with them and I know that they all love me and for this I am immensely grateful.

So for this Mother's Day I would like to pay a tribute to the reason I am a Mother, MY CHILDREN!!!!! I love you guys!

Humility!!

Okay so I recall a few months ago Brent blogging about learning to accept being wrong even when he felt like he was right or something along those lines, well I have to write about my own version, It all started out tonight at work, well for those of you who do not know Darin and I both work at the same job in a duplex, we work the graveyard shift and he works on one side of the duplex and I work the other. Well for the last year since I have worked here his side has had cable and mine has not, well the boys over here have been wanting to get it and since we have a new PC they were told that it would be looked into. Well one of the boys on the other side decided to hook this side up to the cable they have on their side and in the process found out that the cable that they are getting is pirated from the neighbors next door, so for the past couple of days we have had cable. The thing is Darin has had cable and has watched it to help get through the night for the past year and there was always the underlying thought that the cable was not being paid for legally, when the boy hooked it up over here, we let the landlord, the PC and the Regional Manager all know about the pirated cable and they never told us to unhook it. Well tonight happens to be one of my double shifts and I only got a couple hours of sleep before going to my shift this afternoon at 2pm, so I was counting on that cable to help keep me awake, anyways I started to watch cable right after we got done with scripture study and a couple of minutes into it the cable went out, then Darin comes to my side and says he unhooked it, keep in mind his side is not unhooked even though he says he is not going to watch it, not only was I upset because I am tired and planned on watching it, I was hurt because of the lack of thought towards me and when I voiced my displeasure alls he could say was he was just trying to do the right thing. Well I know deep down inside I am wrong, but I was fighting the natural man inside of me and I was really mad. I know that this is a tempral thing and not even important at that, so why am I letting it bother me? As I try to humble myself I realize that it is Satan trying his best to put a wedge in between my sweet husband and I because he does not like it when we are doing good things and gratefully some very good things are happening in our lives that he does not like. So with that said I shall go apologize to my husband and have sweet heart prayers which by the way I have put off because of my wickedness, thanks for letting me voice my frusterations with myself.

The House!!!

As most of you know for the past 21 months we have been living in Darin's parents house while they were on their mission to Brazil, well they returned the first week in March and since then we have been living in their basement. Before we moved into their house we were renting one of the apartments that are subsided by the government for low income families (we only qualified because when we moved in I had not yet got a job), it was a small two bedroom apartment and cost us in rent $685. Well both Darin and I work in Ogden and our old apartment was in Layton and his parents are in Kaysville which is about 20 miles away. We thought about living with Darin's parents for awhile and save some money, but with the situation with Darin's girls, our living there has made it hard for his parents to have a comfortable relationship with the girls, being as their mother won't let them come to their house as long as we are living there, this along with the distance traveling helped us make a decision that we needed to move out. Well we did some research and found that if we bought a house close to our work, not only could we save a ton of money on gas each month we could also get a much bigger house with a yard and pay less a month then we would pay for rent. So for the last couple of weeks we have been searching for a house. We found a lot of houses listed for between 75K to 100K that we liked, but we found out quickly after a couple of hours of appointments last week that most of the houses listed as low as 75K had a lot of work to do on them. For those of you who have not been to the older part of Ogden, there are a ton of goregeous homes built at the turn of the last century, unfortuneately if they have not been kept up there is a lot of work to do on them. The house we found and decided to buy is about 104 years old, it is rather on the plain looking side compared to some of the decorative ones in the area, but it has all new plumbing, wiring, water heater, central heat and air, new double paned windows, tile floors, an added bathroom and remodeled kitchen and other bath. With a little imagination we believe we can add some character to the outside of the house to make it look as nice as the inside. We put an offer on the house this morning for 96.500 and had the offer accepted this afternoon, this house was listed for 120,000 originally back at the end of February. If things go smoothly we will be by the end of May, also it is fairly close to Weber State and we both plan on returning to school in the fall!

Service Porch and Back Door

Back Bedroom with view into bathroom

Back Bathroom between middle and back bedrooms

Middle Bedroom with view to bathroom
Front Bedroom and Closet Front Door

Front Room Bathroom Door

Front Bathroom
Kitchen
Dining Area
Living Room

Happy Birthday Kerstin!!!

I just want to wish my sweet Daughter Kerstin a Happy Birthday!!!! Hope you are having a wonderful day! Today I will do my best to find time to talk to you after a straight 36 hour shift at work, I love you!

An exciting week!

I would like to aplogize in advance for these pictures, while they are pictures that I personally took of these two temples in the last year, I did not have my camera this week while visiting these temples so they are not pictures taken at the time of the actual experience.

My week started out fairly normal, but by the middle of the week it was pretty caotic, as some of you may remember just a month or so ago, I had some changes at my other job and got a new manager there, the change had it's challenges, but in the long run I think it will be a good change. Well at this job I am at right now (the one that both me and Darin work at) we had some changes of our own 2 or so weeks ago, out of nowhere we were told that our manager was no longer working, this made things a little crazy, but our regional manager has been great through it all, luckily we still had a couple of assistant managers around to hold things together. For the last couple of months one of these assistants has made life miserble for most of the employees, by undermining our postion with the boys we work with, making it very difficult to work, well on Wednesday some of this undermining came to a head while I was at work and I got very frusterated (almost to the point of putting my 2 weeks notice in), due to these frusterations and some of the behaviors of one of the boys that assistant got into an argument with the regional manager and ended up calling him a few choice things then quiting very unproffesional like, right in front of the boys, which in turn caused some problems. As difficult as the behaviors of the boys may be, the staff has been very relieved and we finally have a work place that is practically stress free. Hopefully by the end of the week we will have a new manager, we could use your prayers as Darin has applied for this position and will be interviewing on Tuesday. If he gets the job we hopefully will be purchasing a home close by here in Ogden in the next month or so. On Thursday I had the opportunity of meeting Matt, Skyler and Seth at the Salt Lake Temple and going through a live session for the first time, this was a very interesting and wonderful experience and I would encourage anyone who can to take that opportunity sometime in their life to do so. On Friday night CC and Joe flew in from Vegas and on Saturday morning I drove them and Matt back to Rexburg, on the way we stopped in Idaho Falls and went to the Temple there, it was an interesting experience too, because it was much like a live session in that you went through 4 different rooms, but they still used the movie, it was an awesome experience also, although it seemed a little smaller then what I expected. After the Temple we went to Red Robin to eat then headed back to Rexburg where we dropped Matt off, then ran to the store for CC and Joe to get some groceries, after I dropped them off I had to head home to make it to work by 10. I think we had a great time and I am grateful for the time I was able to spend with them.

Food can be Art

This week we were blessed to have some extra visitors for a few days. On Tuesday Benji, Tim, and Logan came up for Easter break. unfortuneately we had to both work, so we were not able to spend as much time with them as we would have liked, but really did enjoy the time that we got. On Wednesday afternoon the boys caught the Frontrunner (the new train running between Ogden and Salt Lake) and went down to Salt Lake to Temple Square and the Joseph Smith movie, they had a good time, then on Thursday morning they drove up to Rexburg to pick up Matt, Cynthia and Joe, they drove back that night. Matt left for Alabama early the next morning to visit an old missionary companion and will return on Monday. Friday we spent most of the day with the kids visiting, eating and playing games. The picture is Luke"s representation of our dinner we had last night in Celebration of Easter. We sure hope the kids had as good a time as we did.

Easter Egg Hunt

This year a long time tradition and favorite of mine is not going to happen for the first time in about 23 years. As much as I would like to have my grandkids and others around to share this fun activity for me, living states apart and having no one who lives close enough to come, has made this decision at least for this year a reality. I have had many questions though, from participants of the past and I would love to share my ratio, techinque or whatever you would call it along with the history of my egg hunt with you. About 24 years ago our ward in California had an Easter Egg hunt for the kids in our ward, I was excited along with my two children at the time (Brent and Kerstin), unfortuneately to their dismass neither of them found a single egg at the activity and they were both heart broken, so I went home and decided that I would put on my own Easter Egg Hunt where no child would go home without filling their basket with eggs. The first hunt was realitive small only 5 children involved, my 2 children, my friends 2 children and a boy I babysat, it was a success and thus the Egg Hunt was started. I had a ratio of approximately 2 and a half dozen eggs per child. Usually I would hide plastic and hard boiled eggs and since eggs can be expensive I would have the children exchange their eggs for the prizes. The prizes almost always were quarters, dollars, candy and prizes or small toys. Every year I would assign different eggs different prizes, some years the hard boiled eggs would be the prizes or small toys, other years it might be a certain color of plastic egg, this is entirely up to the person holding the hunt. Generallly for me most of the eggs would be money, with candy and prizes being around the same amount (no one wants an overload of candy before Easter). Sometimes I would get my prizes at Oriental Trading, but most of the time I would watch at the store or go to the dollar store and find small fun items costing anywhere from a dime to a dollar for the prizes. As hard and confusing at times it was to do the prizes or small toys, this was one of the favorites of the egg hunt. I hope this post was helpful to some who have been asking and hopefully not to late in coming....Enjoy and happy hunting!

Under the Weather

The first day of spring started out beautiful and we had tempatures in the 70's for the first time this year, even our apricot tree had started to bloom, but it was short lived when two days later we were hit with a storm, we still had hope, cuz the snow was light and the tempatures did not go lower then the 30's. this weather hung around for a couple of days last week and then finally by the weekend we were starting to warm up again and have some clear skies, we were stoked. Then when I was on my way home from work on Sunday morning at around 7am I notice the weather was awesome it was 50* and I thought to myself .....yes....spring at last, I got home and laid down for a couple of hours and got up for church to find these weather conditions before me, aproximately a foot of snow and tempatures in the 20's. As the day went on after Fasting and attending a very spiritual Testimony meeting I got contemplating the weather cycles we have been experiencing lately and found myself comparing them to my own life and the recent events. I realized a couple of things about life, First I learned that when you think that things could not possibly get any worse, the Lord shows us that they can, but along with that he shows us that with our trials come great blessings and lessons learned, perhaps the biggest one being that if we allow him to, he will help us get through anything. Second I learned that how we view life is largely on what we focus on...the good or the bad, most truly happy people recognize their trials as blessings and an opportunity to grow, while a miserable person facing the same trails may view life as unfair or themselves as a victim.

I know it has been awhile since I have posted, partially because I did not know how to express what we are experiencing without sounding depressing. Well first off Grandma and Grandpa arrived home safely from Brazil and have been absolutely wonderful to us, not one negative word about the condition of the house or the yard, we have been truly blessed. Second we have been blessed to have Luke visit again during track break, it has been fun although we really haven't had the time together that I would like to spend with him, maybe this week! Third on the 24th of March we had our pre-trail in regards to our custody battle with the girls and while some might say they thought this was over and behind us, unfortunately we were forced to settle at a pre-trail, the good news is the legal part has come to and end (no more Guardian at litem , no more court or lawyer fees) the bad news is the stipulations remain the same (paid supervision and thus Darin's rights still limited) but since we will not be seeing the girls anyway for awhile this reallly does not matter. Fourth we will not be moving anytime soon, because we feel at this time it is important to keep in place health insurance for the boys (since they will be losing their primary insurance April 6th) and with the economy changing jobs seems a bit of a risky bussiness, although we do know that we do need to move on and find new jobs eventually. All and all even though our lives at times seem a bit boring, we have been extremely blessed and find great job in our family!