If anyone wants to check out Melissa's new blog the address is http://www.ladybugpower.blogspot.com/. You can get your Sam fix there.

Here are some pictures of the new house.

As many of you know, we have moved from West Jordan to South Weber. We're very happy with the new house. We saw it early on, before we were really were serious about looking for houses. We didn't really think that it would be available by the time we sold our house. Once we got close to selling our house we looked online and couldn't find it. I assumed it had been sold. However, a friend that I work with lives in the same neighborhood, so I asked him about it. He told me that it had not been sold, but that the family who owned the house had decided to stay.

Selling our house was quite a project. We re-built and painted the fence surrounding the back patio. We painted the family room. We fixed a leak in the basement (which included redoing an entire wall). The whole thing is a pretty interesting process. A good pal of my (Jared Springer, http://www.utahdave.com/) helped us with the sale and did a great job. I recommend him highly.

Anyway, we ended up calling the family and asking if they would still be interested in showing their house. We set up a time to go look at it for a few days later. We saw a few different houses in the meantime. Also, we had been looking online at hundreds of houses. We had a really hard time finding anything that we wanted to look at. When we finally looked at this house we both just felt like it was the right place. We made an offer a couple of weeks later. Things worked out really well and we were able to move in just a couple of weeks after they accepted our offer.

This house has been exactly what we wanted. There is a basement family room that the kids have as their play room. The play room is probably the favorite room of all of ours. The kids really like having a place where they can play without getting hassled by daddy all the time. We feel really blessed to be here.

After much encouragement from Melissa, I've finally made some time to update the blog. The kids are doing great. They are growing like crazy. Lily is potty trained and I am enjoying the first half of our diaper raise. She does a good job of letting us know when she needs to visit the potty. Once she is on the potty, she does a good job of letting us know when she is actually taking care of business. She is very forthcoming with any and all information.

Griffin has really been into baseball this year. He loves going to softball games and playing baseball in Grandma and Grandpa's backyard. We took him to a Bees game and he really seemed to enjoy that as well.

Things for us are moving along like normal. We're having a fun summer and looking forward to some cooler weather in fall.

A nice day at the Draper Temple open house.

Griffin and daddy enjoying a round together.

Lily's cute haircut.

The kids have had a lot of fun at family reunions this year.

We took the kids to the Hill Air Force Base Museum. It was a lot of fun. They do a great job up there. Griffin loved it. He is a plane freak. It was a really good time.

Once there was a snowman, snowman, snowman. Once there was a snowman tall, tall, tall.

Lily wearing her dress from China.

What a cute pair of kids. They are the best.

The sleepy, happy faces shown below didn't last long. Christmas morning: the setting of the first of many battles over the Little People bus.

Happy 30th!!!

Happy Birthday Jako! I am so glad to be married to you! You are the best. Hope you have a great day. You are a great husband and Daddy and I'm so lucky to have you. I'm glad you're older than me, (even though you say you're more "mature"). I love you!

Cute!

I am going to try to start blogging a few of the funny things my kids say. It's hard to do it justice since they don't have a very big vocabulary yet, and a lot of the funniness (is that a word?) comes from the way they pronounce things, but anyway here goes. To give a little background Griffin is like most other kids and has to blow on food if he thinks it is even a little bit hot. Let's face it though he usually just spits on his food instead of blowing on it, anyway, Jake was filling up the bath tub for the kids the other day and was trying to get the temperature right before he put the kids in so he said, "don't touch the water Griff, it's really hot," to which Griffin said, "blow on it?" It was pretty cute.

The other cute/frightening thing this week was from Lily. We were just hanging out on the stairs, for some reason, and Lily looks at me totally serious and says, "you will listen to me!" She didn't say it loud or anything, it was like she was trying to play a Jedi mind trick on me. The funny thing is right after she said it she got this smirk on her face like, "you're going to love this Mom." It was funny and a little terrifying if that's any indication of things to come. A lot of times the things my kids say are an embarrassing reminder of how I sound talking to them, but I promise I do not say, "you will listen to me!"

-Melissa

Stone Cold Lily. Bret and Haley really mess up this picture by smiling. It was supposed to be tough guy faces.

Lily was much more relaxed for Santa this year. Griffy wasn't too interested. He just wanted to get down and run.

CHEEEEESE!!!

Thanksgiving 2008. As you can see above, Griff was pretty into playing in the leaves. Lily liked it, too.

Meet Lily's entourage: Pinky, her pink bear; Bear, her other pink bear; Bat, her pink lamb (named Bat because of the 'baa' sound that lambs make); Kitty, her pink kitty from Cincinatti; Baby, her little doll. She also sleeps with a pillow and anywhere from 3 to 6 blankets.

This picture of Griffy waiting to have his diaper changed is pretty funny. It's all just part of the routine.

They got a little rocking horse toy earlier this year. As you can see, it initially posed them a few problems.

Clearly the rocking horse was even better than Lily's wildest dreams.

The kids have been pretty fun for football season this year. They love their little Utah jackets. Griff says "Go Utes!" whenever he says a letter U.

Aunt Linda was very kind to our kids this year. She gave each a present on the other's birthday. Lily just opened her present from Griff's birthday. She kind of understands how birthday presents work and I think she was worried that she had opened one of Griff's presents. Or, she's worried that she got caught. I'm sure she would've have opened them all given 5 or 10 minutes alone.

We often come into Griffin's room to find that he has positioned his bears like so. It actually scares me a little. If he starts mutilating the neighborhood pets I'm going to be very upset.