Some More Christmas Pictures

The following are some Christmas pictures that were missed from previous posts.  Most of them are from my phone so the quality is not very good.  Sorry about that.

What we do on Christmas day when we don't have much else to do.

Kids Playing at the Toy Room.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

It has been a long time since I posted anything. That is because we have been on vacation, like Susan said. I was not a 3 week vacation, although it kind of felt that way. The last Sunday before we left I did not write for two reasons. First is that I was the only member of the Bishopric in town that day so I had to run a fair amount of church myself. That is not a big deal but it was time consuming. Second we left on our trip shortly after getting back from church. We had booked a cheap flight out of Indianapolis early Monday morning, but we forgot about the time change, and did not really factor everything in. There was just no way that we were going to wake up at 3 am to get to Indi on time so we stayed that night in a hotel. It was not ideal but it worked out.

We did a tone of things while we were out west. I cannot really tell you about all of them. But I will post the pictures and things that I can. I don't have a lot because I don't know where the camera is. We came home and there were a few people who wanted to look at the house, so we hurried and cleaned up. And I don't know where the camera got placed in all the cleaning. These pictures/videos are from my phone.

This is Alice sitting in a fake Chickens nest at a childrens part of the Idaho falls zoo.

This is Alice riding a horse for the first time ever. We have one of Robert too, but that is on the camera. She did this a Pioneer Village at This is the place monument in Salt Lake City.

Here is Alice and Robert Panning for "Gold." It really is fools gold so the banter that you hear in the video about how much per ounce is nothing. This is in the Pioneer Village at this is the place monument in Salt Lake City.

This out of this world looking video is actually Robert staring at a Monkey sunning itself (Again at the zoo in Idaho). This boy loves animals, this particular animal just looks like it is from another planet.



As for what happened this week. Well not a lot. It was a fairly normal week trying to recover from vacation. I read a lot of e-mail at work and everyone tried to catch up on their sleep.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

Well this week was some what normal, but also very long. Robert has been getting better at talking. Today I wanted to see if he would say the name of his friend Isizey (Susan's comment: Isaac shortened to I-zy). Instead he ran to the door and started yelling bo bo bo. Which we learned this week means go. Susan made me break the bad news to him that Isizey is in California, and we couldn't go play. He was mad. Alice got him to say her name though.

As for Alice she has been at Nature Day camp much of this week. I dropped her of once day at the Planetarium, which is on the campus of he local Community College. But it took me half an hour to find it, because the address has it sitting on a street next to the college. It appears that there are no real streets on the campus. Every building has an address on this same street, but no direct access to it.

Yesterday we went to the Library. When we got there they were having a Sister City thing. Apparently Urbana has a sister city in Mulaui, and we got to try some food from Mulaui and play some games from there it was fun, and Susan really liked the corn meal mush and cooked spinach.

But that wasn't the only unusual thing that we ate yesterday. We were invited over to dinner at a friends house and they served us a goat shoulder. It was good. There was not much of a goat flavor at all. Apparently most of the strong flavor is in the fat and this was a fairly lean cut I guess.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

Well, this week was very busy, with the 4th of July and all. The 4th was a very busy day.

We had a ward Lunch/BBQ. There were lots of games.

Some of them were water games.

After that we went home, and invited another family in our ward over. They have three boys Alice's age.

Finally we went to see the fireworks. Alice was very excited to see the fireworks, but they freaked her out. We had good seats, and she felt like they were going to fall on us. Poor girl. So we came home early.

The next day we went to the zoo in Decatur. It is a little zoo, but it was fun. Robert loves animals and I was hoping he would get really excited about it. He liked looking at the animals and petting some goats at the petting zoo, but he didn't get as excited as I had hoped.

They also have a playground to play on next to the zoo, which he did like a lot, probably because he loves to climb.

Bobby's memorial day summary

Sorry I did not write yesterday. It was a very busy day. I had home teaching and we had some friends from out of town come over for dinner. It was a lot of fun. We had Julia over, one of Susan's friends from college and also some friends that used to live just through the block from us about 3 years ago. They have kids just a bit older then both Robert and Alice. So Alice had lots of fun playing with "new" old friends again, and Robert got to play with someone new. He actually played with them, which is a bit of a first. Susan also got to play with her friends too.

This past week was kind of busy anyways. Alice had a preschool commencement ceremony, but I did not get to go, because Robert was feeling sick that day. He has actually been sick quite a bit recently. He had a fever at the end of last week and the beginning of this week. Then yesterday he work up with a rash all over. I think it was something he ate, but we don't know for sure. The rash was mostly gone this morning, so we will probably never know for sure what happened, but he will not be eating any more fresh pineapple for a while.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

Well, This week has seemed kind of calm, which is good. Robert and Alice went to the doctor on Monday. It turned out OK, especially wen ALice learned that she would not need any shots. Robert, however, did need shots. He seamed to react fairly well, but on Saturday he developed a fever. We kind of think it may have been a reaction to the shots, but just to be sure we did not let him go out much. I stayed home with Robert while Susan and Alice went to a ward activity on Saturday night. Today Susan stayed home with Robert during church, and I stayed with the kids while Susan went to a later Sacrament meeting. This is the first time that we have had a sick child since I was called into the Bishopric. We had to think things through to know how I could still be on the stand and also let Alice go to church. We are very lucky with how obedient Alice is.

But this week was not all about Robert. Alice got to go on a field trip to the Nature center. She got to see snakes and turtles. She also found several mosquitoes, or perhaps more appropriately they found her.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week has been good. Robert has been growing a lot. I think he is an inch taller now then he was last week. He is also able to "eat" on his own with a spoon. Alice has also done a bunch of firsts. She tied her first knot this week, and also wrote her first capital R.

As for the rest of us we are slowly getting better from the cold/sickness that has kept us incapacitated recently.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

First of all I have to respond to Susan's post about Robert. Not that I am concerned about the boy at all of anything, but he is much more well rounded in his play then the post seems to indicate. He like to take cars and drive them around too. He also loves to hit things that make a sound. And one of his most favorite things in the world to do is to bob up and down to music. He seems to be a very well rounded boy.

As for the rest of the week, it really felt like most other weeks. Alice did get her picture in the local paper, as part of her dance class. But we have not even seen it yet, although we had several people tell us all about it. We will try to get a copy up as soon as we can.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

A lot happened this week. Actually a lot happened Saturday and today. That is the way it seems, almost everything happens on Saturday or Sunday. Alice got to go to a friend birthday party on Saturday. The most difficult, and depending on who you are funny, part of the day was when I showed up with the present to wrap for the other little girl who turned two. It was a baby doll from the dollar store with a doctor's kit that came with it. Alice saw it from across the room and instantly wanted it. I tried to pick something that she already had to reduce the possibility of this happening. But she really wanted it, and she was really tired too. She was ready to trade all of her dolls and her doctor's kit in to get this one new doll. After we had refused she fell apart into a pity party. We heard things such as "I don't want to be nice I want to be mean and nasty" or "She gets all the nice things the only thing I get are rusty old clocks". The last one was yelled from the bath room where about the only thing you can see is a clock, and she does not even really know what rust is. The good thing is she calmed down and had one of the best times of her life at the party. There was dancing and candy and fun.

Alice also gave her first talk in Primary today. She did a very good job with it. And just for fun here are some random spinning videos from this week.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week has been mostly normal. Susan has had a lot of things in the evening, but Susan has already talked about that. At work there have been some reorganizations going on, but we still don't know any details about exactly what our next project will be. There is no fear of me being laid-off, hey need people too desperately for that to happen. Just curious what I will end up doing.

Today I decided that I wanted to make scones for breakfast. But just so you know these are Utah Scones. They turned out a lot more like fry bread then the big puffy fried bread balloons that I remember growing up. If you happen to know a good recipe for them please let me know (Dad). We will probably not try them again until next year though.

Alice wanted to include that we read lots of books this morning. She is starting to get into chapter books a bit more. Not that she reads them herself, but that she likes to listen to a story that is a bit longer then a picture book.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week has not seemed that normal. I have been working on a new project at work. I spent all week to finally get it to work, at least a little bit. On the home front this week end has been and will be very different from usual. Susan had a lady's night out party at our house Friday night. It was mostly to celebrate the return of a friend of hers for the summer. Yesterday was a mostly quite day. We went to the park for a picnic. It was fun, Alice got to play in a water fountain and a large sand box. And we got to relax in the shade. Tonight are the fireworks, etc. here, but I don't think we will be going, as Alice really does not like loud noises. Tomorrow our church is having a big Independence day party. We will try and take pictures for next week.

Us at the park

Alice playing in the sand.

Alice Decided this week to give Bob a new look. Se also wanted to take some pictures herself.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week has been interesting to say the least. Susan is still pregnant as of the writing of this post. It has been a hard week for her, just dealing with all the aches and pains and the not knowing when this is all going to happen. Work has been a bit stressful. But we have made some good progress so my boss is not quite so nervous. It was also odd because every day when I head home I have to make absolutely sure that someone can take over for me the next day if I am not there.

Saturday was a very interesting day. In the morning I went out to go help with a friend of mine that was moving some stuff out of a storage garage. It was rainy and wet, but we got started moving things into the van. After moving a number of items I was not paying attention to where my hand was and gave it a fairly good cut right in between two knuckles. Luckily someone else there who, actually was holding the other end of the chest of drawers is a doctor and looked at my hand. He said I probably didn't need to go get stitches. It was small enough they might not bother. So I now have my hand wrapped up with a butterfly bandage holding the cut shut. It is far more annoying then painful, and it is an adventure with a very active 3 year old, a wife that is 9 months pregnant and me trying to use my left hand for everything so I can give my right hand a rest.

After I got it all cleaned up we watched conference and then went to an easter party.

There was egg dying.

And an easter egg hunt. As you can probably see Alice was one of the oldest and fasted searchers there. We felt a little bad taking home about twice as many eggs as we went with, but not too bad. It was great to see Alice having fun with her friends.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week was a very long week. Susan is still pregnant, and she has been doing as much as she normally does so she has been very busy. As the days go on some things get more difficult to do, but she still does them very well, and before I get angry comments about why I am not helping this poor pregnant woman out, I am, but this week has been very stressful too. We have a big deadline coming up on Monday. On Friday what we were working on still was not operating properly. So I had to spend a few hours on Saturday to debug it and get it all working. I am glad that we managed to get close enough that it only took a few hours, but it was still very frustrating that it did not work out as well as I had hoped.

Yesterday Alice picked play an instrument from the star sticks and Susan decided to play the drums with Alice. It turned out to be a lot of fun.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week was quite the week. I flew out Monday morning to California again. The week was a fairly typical week, of lots and lots of meeting in the day, and hanging out at night. This type I went with a new member of my team and so we went out to do some things differently then I usually do. The most significant of these was one night we didn't have any plans so we just decided to drive into San Francisco on a whim. We went to Fisherman's Wharf for dinner. We ate at a place that makes sourdough bread. They made al kinds of animal shapes out of the bread.

Alice was so inspired by the pictures of the bread that she decided that we should make some ourselves. Susan was already planning to make bread anyways. Once I have pictures of how they turned out I will add another post.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This has felt like a busy week, although Susan tends to be the one with the most busy schedule. On monday we had a friend over for a small birthday dinner and Family Home Evening. It was nothing too spectacular, but it was fun. Tuesday, Wednesday, ad Thursday were all fairly normal. Then on Friday we had the ultrasound and got our first look at "Zurg Rex", it was a Friday the 13th so it may have just been the date that made the pictures so difficult to get. With Alice she was on her side so we got a wonderful profile of her sucking on her hand. Friday evening was a baptism, so I had to run over to the church after work to fill up the font. It was a very nice baptism. The brother getting baptized does not speak much English so we had almost the entire meeting in Spanish. It was a bit interesting to hear almost everyone in the ward that speaks Spanish either pray or give a talk or something. I understood a fair amount of it, I guess my Portuguese is not that rusty after all.

Yesterday was a very busy day, but it was nice that I was able to spend most of it with Susan and Alice. Nothing too spectacular happened yesterday. We raked the leaves, went grocery shopping, went to the library and cleaned the church. But, it was still a very full day. While we were bagging leaves Alice wanted to help us smash the leaves in the bags so more would fit, and then she decided to just stay in one of them and color on the side of the bag with her sidewalk chalk.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week was a Halloween extravaganza. Unfortunately I was not there for all of it, but Alice was and that is what is important. On Friday Alice went to a Halloween parade and an assisted living facility. Sadly the management there was a little bit too concerned about swine flew to let the people living there actually hand out candy to the kids, so instead Alice and many other kids marched through the common areas showing off their costumes, and afterwards got a bag of candy for her troubles. That night we had our church's Halloween party. It involved a chili cook off, games for the kids including pumpkin bowling, and a trunk or treating.

Sorry about the quality of the pictures, our camera is dead, and my phone is really bad a movement, like I said before.

On Saturday we went to a Halloween party instead of going trick or treating. We figured that Alice had enough candy already. It was a lot of fun. We had home made pizza, candy, and games. Alice had a difficult time, because she was up past her bedtime, but she also had lots and lots of fun. I would like to post the pictures of me as cousin it, and our family in a bunch of silly wigs, but those will have to wait until they arrive by e-mail. Overall it was a very fun halloween.

Raking Leaves Again

It was another one of those days at home where the only time-sensitive item on my to-do list was "Soak beans overnight" for our church's Trunk or Treat Chili Cookoff tomorrow. Days like this don't often happen, so I delved into a few more "home projects" and spent a lot of time playing with Alice:

• "Raked" the leaves in the front yard. I used the lawnmower to chew up the leaves and dump them into the lawn and leaf bags. Alice generally hates the noisy lawnmower, so she ran inside and watched from the screen door. Every time the lawnmower bag would get full, which was quite often, I'd have to turn off the engine and dump the chewed up leaves into a paper bag. Every time I stopped the lawnmower, Alice would shout through the screen door, "All done?" When I finally said "Yes!" she gleefully skipped outside asking for a pile of leaves she could jump into. Fortunately for her, it was a windy day and leaves were quickly gathering on our lawn once more. We piled and played until she came across a patch of sticky brown stuff and asked, "Is that mud or poop?" Game over.
• Took Alice's red Fisher-Price car for a drive on the street for the first time.
• Played with sidewalk chalk on the driveway.
• Packed a picnic lunch to eat at the church building while I did administrative stuff for the Family History Center. We were pretending the church was our "school" and she got to carry the lunches in her spiffy new-to-her backpack. With the right angle, almost any errand/chore can become exciting fun for this kid. I like this age.
• Posted several large items on craigslist. All part of the cleansing ritual that started with the bathroom remodeling. A nice bathroom and freshly painted kitchen makes the rest of our house look like crap. Most of my time at home this week has been spent de-crapping our house. I now have a literal truck load of perfectly-usable-but-not-worth-storing-anymore stuff that's headed to Goodwill tomorrow.
• Made a spectacular dinner, laid out a splendid table, then crouched with Alice under the table for 10 minutes waiting for Bobby to get home. This girl loooooves to surprise Daddy.

 

Yes, she's wearing a huge rubber band around her head. She found it at the Family History Center one day and decided it was a helmet. It cracks me up, but she's totally serious about it.

Also, while I was preparing our amazing dinner, Alice was preparing a feast of her own for all of her friends and family. I made her pose next to the table she set, which is why she looks so awkward standing there. The clothespins are pretzels, there's one pear, and everything else is either a bagel or a brownie. "Baby Taydoh" and "Baby Tiger" have already been seated.

Punkin' Huntin' Exchange Program

Since discovering it with the Jarvies last year, I've decided to make Negangard Pumpkin Patch an annual tradition in our household. You don't hunt for your perfect pumpkin in the patch, per se, but there's a lot of hunting involved as you wind your way through rows and rows of beautiful, unique, and spectacular pumpkin varieties.

 

Bobby selected a huge one for carving, I instantly fell in love with a multicolored warty one that's shaped like a pyramid, and Alice insisted on five baby pumpkins (at $0.25 a piece, it's easy to say "yes". She also came home with 2 teensy gourds which promptly became mother and baby). Grandma Poulson came home with a pale pink pumpkin that made 3 excellent pies with minimal effort. Grandpa Poulson opted to stay home to work on the bathroom remodeling.

We brought along our friends as part of an exchange program. They are die-hard "hunt in the patch" folks, and we prefer bargain basement prices and more variety, so the two of us agreed to experience each others' version of the great punkin' hunt this year. Here are photos from Negangard's:

Wagons are the best part.

Ready to go!

Where to begin?



Start with the babies, of course.



"One, two, fwee..."



Buddies in the wagon



Helping Daddy find a big one.



The final lineup. We drew faces on the pumpkins this year, though we may carve them when it gets closer to Halloween. Alice drew the face on the middle one. She can't draw a recognizable face on paper, but it's crystal clear on a sphere. She also helped us color the other ones, and she wanted Bobby's pumpkin to have stitches ("tishes"). My warty pumpkin is in the back.

And here are the photos from Curtis Orchards' Pumpkin Patch. We were too late to get good pumpkins in the field this year, but there was still PLENTY to do. Alice and I both had a great time. The best part for her, though, was the doughnut and fresh cider afterwards.

Alice going through the Ruby Slipper Maze

"Mommy! See how big my is. Aaaaaaaaaaaa! Ladybug!"
Alice running through the pumpkin graveyard. She was eager to go ahead and find cool ones to show me. She only biffed it twice.
She's having a great time with baby pumpkin. The wind didn't bother her much this time. We did learn, however, that it's hard to remain modest in a dress while sitting cross-legged in a wagon.
Alice deciding which she wanted more: the baby pumpkin or a fresh apple cider doughnut. Mommy made her choose between them since she had 5 other baby pumpkins waiting at home. Doughnut wins.

The final verdict: I think we'll do both pumpkin patches every year. They both have their exciting bits, and I can't pick just one. Besides, it's all about hanging out with friends and doing something a little out of the ordinary. Both outings were a screaming success by those counts, so I'm excited to continue the tradition indefinitely.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week felt very busy but it probably was all because of yesterday. Yesterday was the annual Apple and Pork Festival. We went in the morning and got there about 11:00. It was also a bit overcast, but not bad. Both of these made it so it wasn't nearly as crowded when we showed up for lunch. We ate BBQ Pork sandwiches, apple cider, apple cake, and kettle corn.

We also did some activities. They had both a petting zoo and a pony ride. We had Alice pick between the two of them. The pony ride was very tempting...

But the petting zoo won.

In addition to the pig and goats, there were lots of sheep, a lama, a pony, and some rabbits.

While there we got to see rope making

Alice was not that interested. We also saw a bunch of antique farm equipment, some of it even being used to grind corn meal. We saw a black smith making nails, some wood turners making bowls and tops, and a man making benches using hand tools and some logs. There were also lots of arts and craft booths, and a flea market. We avoided the flea market. It was a lot of fun. I also have to say that Alice was fabulous during the whole thing. She did not really want to go home at the end but she did not throw a fit when we did go.

That would have made for a full day, but we did a lot more yesterday too. After we got home we were exhausted, but Susan had a church conference to go to, that lasted from 3 to 8. It was quite the event, as Alice and I hung out. We went to the library, played, had a bath. She started to get very grumpy, but it was because she was tired. She went to bed at 7 and she was asleep before her head hit the pillow.