There's a First Time For Everything

If any of you know me well, you should know that I don't really have an appreciation for bugs of any kind. I don't think there is any where you can live that you can escape them; every where has there wide variety. I just so happen to live the the country of rattles snake (which I know aren't bugs but snake some in at a close second on my hate list), scorpions, and then there are the usual bees, wasps, etc. that I also don't really like. Spiders take a tie at the top along with scorpions; both creatures I could very well do without. Now, my hatred for spiders may not come close to my brother-in-law John's, but it's pretty close. I tell you this because there's a first time for everything. In the midst of moving, we are emptying our storage unit, the one we had to get to fit all our junk from our house. In order not to pay for another month we have to be out by Wednesday. This news of urgency to be out, didn't come to us until Sunday, so we didn't have time to be able to go over there during the day. You ask, "why do you need to go there during the day?" Well, IT'S DARK! And creepy things crawl in the dark! So, we arrived at our unit at about 6:30 last night, just after the sun had set. I got there about 10 minutes before Bo and opened the door but realized I couldn't really move anything until he got there so I climbed back in the car and watched TV with Boo. A little pre-story to this is that during some moving at the apartment earlier that day had resulted in finding 2 spiders that I promptly disposed of, so I was a little spidered out; I had hit my quota for the day. Anyways, back to the story; Bo soon arrived and we started to survey the unit on what to move first. In that process we discovered a spider; imagine that. My He-Man of a husband went to work and stomped it with his boot; after seeing that one we decided to look around the rest of the entry way for more spiders. Sure enough there was another, but not just any spider, this spider:

Yes, that would be a black widow. Isn't it just the creepiest spider you've ever seen? Yet again my husband goes to work. The door way to our unit is a roll back door so there is track on each side for the door to go up; this lovely spider had made her home in the hard-to-get space behind the track. So after pointing it out to me because I had never seen one before, He-Man put on his work gloves, grabbed the spider with his hand out of it's web and wrestled it until it was dead. *sigh* My Hero! Needless to say, I was very much opposed to going back in the storage unit. But with a Hungry He-Man Hero Husband, I didn't have much choice. I inspected every box I touched and everything he wanted me to situate in the truck. After he had killed the spider he told me that was number two for him today. He had seen one in a field at work and got to kill that one too. So we loaded up as much as we could in two cars and decided what to leave for the next trip. As we were situating what was left he discovered yet another black widow on the opposite side of the door in the exact same place. It's like we had two little, ugly, creepy quasi-guardians to watch over our storage unit. Should I feel blessed for this? I think not, I think they were just mooching on free rent among our storage. Unfortunately for us, the second spider wasn't reachable, so we have to go back tonight and take care of the problem. Bo said he thinks a can of WD-40 and a lighter should do the trick. So 5 spiders later, I've had all I can take!

Odds and Ends...

We have all been sick this week with one thing or another. I think our bodies are just finally giving up on us after all the stress we have put them through. Today I took a good long nap, so now I am suffering from a case of insomnia. Since I'm up I just felt like posting some pictures... Enjoy!

Was I ever really that skinny?

He looks mean and ready to hit someone!

It never fails, I'm always smiling nice and he is sticking his tongue out!

Oh yeah, baby! Best costume award!

This was on Bo's mission. I just thought it was a very original picture.

I'll keep looking for some other great pictures. We have so many on our computer, I'm sure I'll find more...

Kids Say The Darndest!

We were sitting at the table this morning while enjoying our bacon and eggs. Eggs are one of Boo's favorite things to eat as long as there is plenty of ketchup with them. Her favorite utensils are the Dora and Diego spoons and forks which we recently bought her; they are smaller than regular utensils with plastic/rubber grips portraying her beloved characters. Bo had left the table since he finished his breakfast first, I was still working on mine, and Boo had eaten enough so she was starting to play with her food. She proceeded to grab Bo's fork and started just talking and talking. After a minute or two I started to really pay attention to her ramblings. She was saying random phrases like:

"fork mommy"

"fork baby"

"they're so happy"

"baby fork, mommy fork"

"okay fork, go night-night"

I then pieced together that she was playing with the two forks and the bigger fork was the mommy fork and her fork, because it was smaller, was the baby fork. She just sat and played "house" with these two forks. Where does she come up with this stuff!

What's all of the fuss about??

As you well know this blog stuff is not my usual cup of tea, but Kay is always on the computer playing around so I thought I would give it a shot. If my thoughts are some what scattered I apologize. What I am trying to do is comment on other peoples comments and posts, and say a few thing about what's going on in our lives. To start with, I wanted to tell everyone that I love my new job/career. I am happy that I am working in a field that I can both support my family and have some job security. At times I find that I miss both Mesa and Joseph City/Holbrook. In Mesa I miss all of the conviences that the big city has to offer and the great friends that we made. On the other hand you can't beat the small town life. Joe Town/Holbrook has friends, family and the opportunity to go shooting when ever I want to. My wife has informed me that two of my friends had a heated discussion that I would like to add to. Friend one hated small towns and the "mentality" that comes with it. Friend Two deafened small town living, pointing out the life in "the big city" has draw backs not to mention "valley attitude". Well friends it is a well known fact that I am a country boy at heart and lets face it when you grow up in Joseph City you have 2 choices, Love it, or Hate it; there is no middle ground. You will never know where you truly stand on the subject until you live on both sides of the fence. Now friends one and two, this is the truth of the matter; what is right for one person is not right for another. A fish can brake through the shimmering surface of the water and soar high in the the fresh air but only for a short time. If the fish stayed out of the life-giving water the end result would be just that, the end. I feel as if I have been babbling on with out coming to a real point. So having said that, the point I was trying to make was quite simply you will like what you like and you should be tolerant of others right to their opinion. Now I have have to go, untill next time.

Moving?... Again?

I was trying to get sympathy from my mom the other day, because it's that time again! Time to Move. Then she said something about 12 times in 10 years... I don't know, all I know is that we have to move again. Bo has an hour commute right now; we live about 50 miles from his job and then factor in diesel truck, and not speeding it takes roughly about an hour. Not to mention, the cost of fuel and wear in tear... So, to save us some money, him some sleep and make his employer happy we have found a place to live and will be able to start moving next week sometime. Here is a picture:

Oh, you noticed, that's great. Yes! It's a house!! 3-bedroom, 2 bath, with a nice sized backyard and my favorite part; 4 big trees. We are actually going to be renting from one of Bo's coworkers for the time being and hopefully decide what we want to do from there. It's actually a pretty nice house and has a "great location"... What really is a great location in a small town anyways? Well in any case, it's great for Bo because it's about 4 blocks from his work, so he can walk or bike to work. We may end up buying this house, or may end up moving yet again in the months to come. But for now, here is where we'll be.

Posterity?

For posterity's sake my mom said I have to start writing down the cute things Boo does so that I can remember when she asks me about them 10 years down the road. And since I consider this blog as some what of a journal it's probably a good idea. So here are 3 stories for posterity:

The first is a funny one, it's always been said if you start a talk with a joke your audience will be more inclined to listen. Lets see how that goes... Boo loves church! She loves it, but she doesn't appreciate sacrament meeting very much. Sitting still and quiet for over an hour just seems too much for her liking. Plus she knows what comes next and she really likes Nursery so it makes her a little antsy. A couple weeks ago we were wrangling her as we always do during church, we try anything; coloring, stickers, toys, food, etc... Nothing works, but somehow we seems to make it. This particular week we had done pretty good and made it to the closing song with out too many interruptions. We were singing the closing hymn when she started to become restless, so in an attempt to calm her I said "Do you want to go to Nursery?", and of course she replied with an excited "YES!". So told that we just had to finish the song, have the closing prayer and then we could go to Nursery. This seemed to suffice her long enough to finish the song. A woman got up to pray and she folded her arms and sat patiently on my lap for a few seconds. When the lady dragged on in her prayer, Boo became concerned that she wasn't going to Nursery so she started to ask me to take her to nursery. I told in a whisper "Shh, we'll go when the prayer is over". She took in a deep breath and again sat patiently. A few seconds later her head had tilted to the side slightly, then more, until she was completely laying down on my arm. Then it started... She proceeded to start SNORING! Quietly at first and then louder and louder and louder. I was trying so hard to keep in my giggles that I couldn't stop her from her disruptive yet funny behavior. Luckily the prayer finally ended and Bo and I both broke out in laughter. Boo was quick to say "Amen" and pull me to take her to Nursery. We are starting to see that she may have a comedic side to her...

The next story is some what just to brag at our gifted child. I am quick to admit that I have a TV addict on my hands; she loves TV. Most days I find peace in her fascination with the Disney channel or Nick Jr., because it gives me a few minutes to myself. People argue that it's not good for her to watch TV, to them I say "You must not value your sanity". But, they are right, she should not spend all day watching TV, and she doesn't, but she does have her shows she likes to watch. But my bragging moment comes from what she learns from "her shows". My 2-year old can count to 10! And even sometimes 12, I'm not saying she's the only one, but I've never seen a 2-year old do that. Once she gets past 3 she just keeps going, but her usual counting goes "1, 2, 1, 2" which makes it rare for her to count to 10 or even 12. She has also learned some Spanish words from Dora. So, TV really can be educational.

This last story isn't really a story, I'm just stating it for a factual purpose for posterity. For those of you who don't know, Boo is allergic to Milk/Dairy. We found out the hard way right after she turned 1 when we went to introduce Milk. Up until this point she had not been interested in eating cheese or yogurt, as these are food items that are okay to have before they turn 1. So we tried some milk with some Cheerios, and she just ate them right up. It was all fine and dandy until I went to go clean her up. By the time I got her to the sink to wash her off she was covered in hives; all over her face, neck, chest and arms. So after a dose of anti-histamine she was fine, but since then we have had a lot of instances of milk problems. If you didn't know, Milk is in EVERYTHING. Most things that have it baked in it don't seem to affect her so badly in the area of hives or throwing-up, it seems to have affect slightly on the way out... So now, for more than a year we have had to be careful at what we feed her and be extra watchful around other people to make sure they don't feed her anything as well. She has always been a little sensitive to food even before we discovered her milk allergy. Some people are surprised at what out there contains Milk, because if you don't have to watch for you just don't think about it. We have had people try to feed her obvious things like chocolate, mac & cheese, etc., that we have to stop them and remind them of the milk contents. My reason for posting this aside from posterity, is that yesterday I was looking through my new parents magazine and found an advertisement for a company that help state an obvious fact, being tactful about it and not embarrassing but and also puts it on a shirt. I am really wanting to get a shirt from there for Boo, my set back is that they are expensive! Here is the "generic" version for allergies, but their website states that you can write/email and get a specific shirt made to fit your child's allergy.

It's kind of an interesting website, it's not just for allergies there are shirts for autism, diabetes, and lots more random stuff. Check it out!

My second reason for the allergy posting is that we have had 2 bad days in the last 4 where she had up-chucked most likely because she ate some form of dairy. I guess it could be worse; she could be allergic to gluten or wheat; that would be really hard to avoid. How does that song go? "Count your many blessings, name them one by one..."

Trip Down Memory Lane

On Sunday before we left we took a couple detours. We stopped by to visit with Lydia for a little while, we're glad she took a few minutes out of her life to entertain us. Then we found some lunch and made one more stop on a more personal nature. Coming up on 5 years ago when I was living in Tucson Bo proposed to me. It was mostly considered a spontaneous move so we ended up here by this fountain.

So because we never go to Tucson we took the opportunity to stop and revisit the moment. Boo also enjoyed the stop. Here's a few pictures of the detour.

Boo had a hard time leaving this fun fountain. Besides needing to go home, the water was FREEZING which of course didn't seem to bother her. She cried all the way to the car until she saw her TV in the car and quickly forgot about the fountain.

Old Tucson Studios

Last week Boo and I went up north to help out a friend that was out of town, and we had an enjoyable time visiting with family and friends. In short, we were gone last week and didn't take any pictures so nothing really to report...

But, we came home on Friday to pack up to go to Tucson on Saturday. Bo's work had a company party in Tucson. They paid for a hotel room for Saturday night, and paid for dinner at Old Tucson Studios.

Even though I had lived in Tucson previously, I never made it out to the Old Tucson Studios, and now that I have gone I should've made time. It is definitely a tourist thing to do, but it was a lot of fun. Although, part of the reason it was fun is because we had Boo there with us and she made it fun to do. She really enjoyed looking at all the fun things they have there.

When you walk in the gate they give you a map of the Studio, it looks like a map to Disneyland. We didn't make it around to see everything due to a press for time and trying to wrangle a 2-year old. Bo would've liked to see all of the historical stuff, but unfortunately that's not something that is very interesting to Boo.

They have a train there that you can ride around the whole studio, and Boo very much liked going on that.

The conductor was this cute old man and he was very sweet to her, he let her get on the conductors seat and take a picture with him.
We got to have a ride all by ourselves, it was fun.

She was very impressed with the horses that they have there. These horses must be very accustomed to people because they didn't even flinch when approached by a little wild 2-year old.

There was an unimpressive very green duck pond with only one duck that she was so desperately trying to feed.

We showed up too late to watch the Can-Can girls so I just got a picture of the from a far.

We passed them a couple time just out walking around, and they were drawn to Boo to tell her how cute she was. Boo didn't really know how to take these scantily clad women in too much make-up. But she was gracious enough to take a picture with one of the girls only because she talked Boo's kind of talk.

Boo is a very friendly kid, which makes us nervous most days. At the "city hall" exhibit there, she noticed a little girl and walked right up to her and started talking to her. The two little girls attached on to each other hand-in-hand and walked off.

They walked around the exhibit while the other little girl, who I was guessing was about 3, told her all about everything including bossing her not to go behind the "Do Not Enter" sign.

I later met the parents of the little girl who's dad works at the same company as Bo. We met in the dinner line and conveyed stories of our overly-friendly, oblivious to stranger-danger daughters.

They have events scheduled throughout the day like the Can-Can dancers, a played-up gun fight and other "old west" shows.

The only one we saw was the gun fight which was interesting, but Boo was highly uninterested. So we didn't watch the whole thing.

Here we are locked in the jail, Boo didn't seem to understand the implication.

Here is the town Saloon, I thought was cool looking. There are movie posters inside that show what movies have been filmed there. There were quite a few John Wayne movie; they have kind of made him the general theme character. He is talked about in almost every exhibit. The only movie I was really interested was the Three Amigos, it was filmed there. I didn't get a picture of it, but we pasted the church that's in the movie on our train ride around the studio.
They served us dinner at the Studio there which was kind of boring, but it was dinner none the less. I think the boring part was really that since Bo is new at the company, we didn't know anyone there. He works in Willcox on a team of 4 people; he has also met a couple of people from the other 2 crews that are out of Willcox. But all of the people he has worked with and met seem to be "anti-social", which in essence describes Bo but we thought we would give the work party a chance.

The party was called Family Fun Day, so they had a lot of activities for kids but Boo was a little too small to enjoy them. They did give some prizes to kids that she liked, her favorites were the glow sticks and the sucker. She later dropped her sucker on the ground and was completely disgusted that the dirt stuck to it, then was mad because I wouldn't let her eat it until I washed it off.

All in all, it was a good adventure and going to the Studio was a lot of fun.