Yes, We Are Still Alive

We have not posted for so long that some people may be wondering if we are still alive. Yes, we are surviving here in Illinois. Things have been a little crazy over the last few months as we have been trying to get situated here. It rained a lot last month here in Illinois which we are not used to. It rained for about 3 days straight. When I say rain, I don't mean the sprinkles that we have out west, I mean pouring rain. Anyways, the ground was so saturated that everybody's basement began to flood, including ours. Luckily we don't have anything too important in the basement. Our food storage is down there but it managed to stayed dry. Our basement is concrete and has a drain in it so we didn't have to use a pump to get all of the water out. I took about 2 days to drain. Here is a picture of the "wonderful rain."

Owning a house is good, but a lot of work. The old house that we have is sure pretty on the outside, but it being old we have found a lot of problems. About 1 week after the basement flooding, Becky was working on the computer and all of the sudden she drips of water coming form the ceiling. After a few minutes, it began pouring water from the ceiling and part of the ceiling fell down.

This happend the night before General Conference and when I was watching the BYU football game. I was so ticked. I did not want to call a plumber because it would be very expensive on the weekend. I found the leak in the upstairs bathroom. In order to get to the leak, I had to take out part of the wall as you can see. Luckily, this is in the bathroom closet so we can hide it well.. After working on it for most of Saturday, I was able to fix the leak. Besides all of the house repairs, I have been busy with work and with my church calling. Becky has been busy taking the girls to dance, gymnastics, school and working around the house. She is also busy practicing the piano as she is the only person in the branch that can play the piano. She has been putting a Primary Program together basically all by herself. None of the other ladies in the branch were ever in Primary so they do not know what to do. Becky is putting the program together and she has to play the piano for all of the songs. She is amazing. Even doing all of this she still has time to do fun things for us. She likes having a bigger kitchen where she can make stuff easier. One night I came home from work and she had a wonderful dinner prepared for us. For all of you who know Becky, presentation is very important. Here is a picture of the dinner table all ready. As you can tell, Kaitlin is very excited.Becky had prepared a full four course meal, all of it from scratch. Here is the broccolli salad.The garnishes for the salad and the sandwiches.The sandwich on homemade froccia (sp?) bread. You can see the dessert on the first picture. Becky is amazing and she always has so many creative and fun ideas. I don't know how she does it all, but I'm very glad that I have her.

Kaitlin is staying busy with school, gymnastics and dance. She is doing very well in gymnastics and likes it the best. She has gotten 100% on every spelling test this year. She is a smarty pants. Besides that, she is focusing a lot of her energies on trying to grow some teeth!
Camie is busy just being cute and funny. She is the clown of the family and can always make us laugh. She is loving pre-K. Sorry that this is so long, but we will update you guys on some other things that we have done. Living close to St. Louis is fun because there is lots to do. There are a lot of free things to do there. Last month we went to Grant's Farm. It is actually owned by Anheiser Busch. It is free to get in. First you ride on a tram through a wild animal park, then you go around and see different animals. Of course, there are the famous Clydesdale horses there. This is one of the young Clydesdale horses, if you can see, this horse is trained well as it looks like it is smiling for the picture. You can buy bottles of milk to feed the baby goats. This was the highlight of the girls' day.

Since it is fall, it is the perfect time to break out the kites. Camie was quite the pro at kite flying and she kept hers up in the air the longest. Kaitlin just wanted hers to fall so that she could catch it. I was trying to take pictures of the trees while I was trying to fly my kite. Here is one of the pictures that I took. While I was taking the picture, I wasn't paying attention to the kite and it got tangled with Becky's kite. She was ticked off. She said that I don't know anything about Kite "etiquette". I didn't know there was an etiquette to kite flying. In Brazil, the goal was to knock down other people's kites. Oh well.Well, I know that was long and definitely not as witty as Becky's posts, but at least you can see what we have been up to. I will get Becky to post soon.