Other News

 For the past several years we have a tradition to get together with some good friends in our ward to celebrate the 4th of July.  Brittany makes her traditional flag cake, DELICIOUS! And we eat and swim together.

This may sound a little crazy but we sold our car and bought a Razor.  Adam drives a truck for work and I drive a Yukon, for carpool.  So this car was our little run around car.  It is a really fun car to drive and we have enjoyed having it but it is getting older and I worry about the cost of repairs once we start having problems.  Also this car has a sports mode so our insurance charges for a sports car.   We decided we didn't want to try to insure our kids on this car so it is gone.  

 This is our replacement toy.  The razor is street legal so we can run around town and it is really fun to take off road.

 Before heading up to island park we pulled it off the trailer and had some fun with the Adam's kids.

I don't think I mentioned it but when we got home from Island Park we walked in the house and it stunk!  I take a lot of time to make sure the house is cleaned up before leaving on vacation so we don't come home to a stinky mess so I was discouraged trying to figure out what I had forgotten before the trip.  We started to empty the truck and when we opened the garage door it was more than evident where the smell was coming from.
We have a fridge in our garage that had died while we were gone.  The top freezer seal isn't very strong so the top freezer was open and rotten food was melted out all over the garage floor.  It was a disaster!!!  It took several hours to clean the garage floor and clean up all the food.  There were flies everywhere!  My garbage can was so bad that the entire front of the house stunk.  The moment the garbage truck came and dumped the garbage that week I started cleaning out the cans.

I guess cleaning the fridge ended up being a good thing because it gave me a kick start in getting other things clean.  Since I got home from island park I have cleaned and defrosted our chest freezer, scrubbed the area rugs in the house, cleaned my craft room, and the grand finale...cleaned the shed!

Im horrible about before pictures but we were not able to walk in the shed before I got started.  Look at it now!

Part of the loss from our fridge problem is that I lost 17 pints of strawberry freezer jam that I canned in June.  I am so thankful I was able to find a couple more deals on strawberries in July and I re canned the 17 pints of jam.

I am re-motivated in my diet.  I have been "blessed" with the curse of the ability to put on weight just by looking at food.  Adam supplier has a trip scheduled in Feb. to go on a cruise.  This gives me a good goal to motivate me in loosing weight.  I have done really well on my diet despite having to make cookies twice this week and having to bake a cake.  (I didn't cheat at all on the diet!!!)

The kids have stayed busy this month with Ballroom camp and voice lessons (Briggs), Gymnastics and Golf (Ila), and Basketball camp and football (Avram).