new addition

That's right people, the baby ducks have hatched. The mama ducks had been sitting on eggs and then at the last moment decided to abandon them (RUDE), so Nate put them in the incubator for the rest of their egg time.

So as they hatched we would take them out and put them in the box with the others (don't worry not all these eggs are ducks, there are chickens and pheasants too)

The boys would run downstairs to hold them and touch them every chance they could. Don't worry though, the minute they started to stink I sent the box outside :)

Easter and other stuff

For Easter we colored Easter Eggs on Friday night and then the Easter Bunny came on Saturday morning (Kace wrote him a note so he would for sure remember to come on Saturday). The Easter bunny brought the boys each a BYU hat (Kace wondered how in the world the Easter Bunny would know that we are BYU fans) and a book, sidewalk chalk and some treats.

The boys wanted to wear their hats like their uncle mac. They are also trying to look tough!

We then went in the snow to the town Easter Egg Hunt. The kids had a great time, but it was FREEZING!

Kace drew this lovely portrait of me :)

That night we made some Easter cookies that you read a scripture with each ingredient (found the recipe at the idea room) and then you leave them in the oven overnight and then in the morning they are hollow in the middle (get it?!). I don't know that the boys liked it that much, but I tried :) We are going to do it every year though.

PS And my dear sweet sister HEIDI came over during the priesthood session to hang out with us and make the cookies. That was SOOOO nice of her :) Is that better?

I was surprised at how much they liked finding the eggs they colored. They ran downstairs and looked for the eggs FIRST and then looked for their basket. (when I was growing up, it was definitely the other way around).

A couple of days earlier my Grandma Spencer sent an Easter box to the boys in the mail. They had so much fun opening it and seeing what was inside. Ty kept saying, "WOW, WOW, WOW"

Kace has been dying for me to put this picture of his abscess ("zit"). He loves to squeeze it and watch what comes out (SICK!). Nate lanced it so hopefully it will be no more.

So the duplex is now sold, so we (mostly Nate) is starting on the shed. He has been anxiously awaiting this day! So he has borrowed Roger's backhoe (good thing for good neighbors) and has been going crazy. He has dug a trench for the water and has put in the pipe for the septic hookup. Ty has been loving it (understatement). Everyday he is out in the tractor with his dad. He has to come in and get his little backhoe so he can pretend to scoop dirt as his dad does. He is his dad's little buddy.

the wide world of DANCING!

For those that don't know, I, Rachel Kay Andrew Jones, most uncoordinated dancing person of all time, took dancing for 7, that's right SEVEN years as a youngster. I took from Minnie Hall in Lewiston for a couple of years (please notice the wrinkles in our tights, we love them) and then went to Tueller's School of Dance in Logan for the remainder of the time.

Karen Cottle was my blessed friend to accompany me to dance for all those years. Now, I did like it for the first 3-4 years, but after that I really only took it so I could get the treat (I think I have mentioned this before) that we ALWAYS got afterwards (thanks Janet and mom :) ) There was the one time though that I got a butterfinger and it kind of crunched all over Janet's car and I (and Karen, I think she had to clean it up) got in trouble. But other than that my treat experiences were very positive.
Back to the dancing and uncoordinated part. I was never a good dancer. I am okay with that. I was always on the back row. Oh, well. At least I was good looking :)

I know that most of you are wondering who in the world did my hair (hopefully most of you are wondering who that is). But the truth is, my mom and I had a compromise. I did the back and she gets to take credit for the uni-bang! The next picture, I designed the hairdo all myself.......maybe I shouldn't admit that. At least I have nice legs :)

Now the whole purpose of this post is to show that my dancing skills have NOT been passed on to my kids (actually I think Kace may have my skills a little bit). But Ty, W-O-W. That is all I can say. He LOVES to dance and changes into these blue silky shorts every (and I mean EVERY) time he dances. He also wears these shorts to play basketball or run, but changes his shirt to one that has a number on it for those activities. This is an average dance for Tydon, sometimes he is crazier and sometimes he is more mellow. Anyway, watch and enjoy. You will probably have to turn the sound up. Hope you are entertained!

Craftiness

For those that don't know, I married into an extremely talented crafty family. It is nice for me because they have really great ideas and I get to benefit :). Nate's mom, Donene, is AMAZING! She is seriously the most talented woman I know. She can see something in her head and then create it (this is where I have the problem-seeing things in my head). I have to have her come over and look at paint, carpet, drapes, etc etc because I have such a hard time visualizing something.

Anyway, her latest adventure is making adorable hats, scarfs, flower, booties, you name it she can make it. She has decided to start a blog to sell some of her inventions. You can find it here.

Check it out, you won't be disappointed :) I stole some of these pictures from her personal blog, so you can see some of the other things she has done.

Life

Well, after two weeks of the computer being in the "shop" the pictures are no where to be found. They said that I could take it to another place but it could cost me up to $3000 and there was no guarantee. So if you have pictures of our family from the year 2009 beware because I will probably come find you so I can have some pictures from that year :) It could be worse.....

Lately we have just been waiting for the snow to melt and have really enjoyed (understatement) watching it melt a little bit each day. We made a new snowman with the wet snow that fell the other day. Tydon loved making it with just me and him. Kace added his touch when he got home with the broom and hat.

For Valentine's Day this year I decided not to get the boys a gift, because they get so many other things from their grandparents and great-grandparents that I decided to just do things that would create memories and traditions for them. So we made cookies, Valentine's Rice Krispie bears and Kace informed me that he had never had breakfast in bed, so I decided that should be our new tradition (although when you have breakfast in bed you are only allowed to have water to drink :) ). He was so excited!

Last month Kace invited a friend over and we went sledding. It was a pretty steep hill and there was a jump at the end. So Kace, having no fear, decided that he would try it from the top and had a really bad spill. It knocked the wind out of him and he was crying. But later I read in his journal that the things he was most proud of was "surviving" getting the wind knocked out of him. Other then that we had a great time together!

Sure do love this kid!

What to do.......

So I am so sad.......

I had been hinting to Nate for the past six months or so that I would really like an external hard drive so I could back my pictures up. So for Christmas he got me one. So of course it has sat for the past month and a half and nothing has been put on it. :) So last Sunday he decided to take it upon himself to put the pictures on it himself. So he did. But by the time I got home and looked at the pictures I noticed that all of 2009 was GONE except for 2 months, also 2 folders in 2002 are gone. He said he didn't delete any pictures (by this time he was cleaning my hard drive of all the crap that gathers on it), but we went to the recycle bin anyway and restored everything that he had deleted. Nope, no pictures. So we did a system restore to 2 days earlier and got 2 more months (now a total of 4 months) appeared in the 2009 folder. YEA! So we tried a system restore to earlier (I know they were there 2 weeks ago), but NOPE they didn't come back. I am so sad.

So my question to all of you is........Who is a good COMPUTER GENIUS that can get my pictures back????!!! Who do you take your computer to when it is being dumb? That is all.

It's all Greek to me!

So Nate calls me from work sometime at the beginning of January and asks if I want to go to Greece. Well, of course I do! So I did some calling and found that Donene and Caitlin could watch the boys while we were gone (step one), bought a ticket (step two), and waited a week and a half and boarded the plane to Athens (step three). When we finally got in Athens we got to our hotel and it was less than a mile from the Acropolis, which has the Parthenon and lots of other old stuff. :) Ithought this picture looked like the stadium from Gladiator. Nate didn't think so, but I am saying it is.

Right across the street from our hotel there was the temple of Zeus and Herodian's gate to the city. As you can see it was cold, while we were there. It was interesting to see how advanced they were in their building (most of the ruins dated back to 400 or 500 B.C.) CrazY!

We also went the the OLD olympic stadium. You can see just how excited Nate is at about this point!

Everywhere we go I like to see how that particular country buries their dead (morbid I know). In Greece they have these big marble boxes above ground and most have shrines on top of them.

We stayed in Athens for a day and a half and then started on our way to Volos. This was the city that was close to the air base where Nate was going to be working. We drove for a couple of house and then found that we had to detour off the freeway. So we started our detour and after about an hour we thought we must have gotten lost, but there wasn't another road we could have taken. FINALLY, we got to the freeway again, and there were cops blocking it saying we couldn't get on and had to go on another detour. But while we were there we saw this monster line of tractors on the freeway and thought it was strange. So we get to our hotel and ask the front desk person why all the detours and he told us that every year, this exact week in January the farmers in the area hold a protest against their government for more money for their goods and they use their tractors as blockades on the freeway.

So in Volos there weren't as many people that spoke English so it was a little bit harder for me to get around, especially because Nate ended up working for about 8-9 hours for 3 days, so I was by myself. But one day I got a taxi and rode up to this mountain village called Makrinitsa. It was GORGEOUS! It had cobblestone streets and you had to park your car and walk the streets to the different homes (well that's what I did). The streets zig zagged up and down the mountain. There was a little market that had little shops where everything in them were things that the people had made themselves, so of course I went shopping :).



We stayed in Volos from Sunday until Thursday morning and then left on the train to Athens again. On Friday we were supposed to go on a cruise to some of the Greek Islands, but of course this was the week that the cruise ship was being maintained. So I decided that we should take a ferry, but of course, it was windy and rainy so the ferry's couldn't travel. DANG! (we took a taxi to get tickets for the ferry, and ended up wasting $70 for the stupid taxi ride) So we decided to walk to the top of this mountain, where there was just one little old (ugly) church on the top, but the view was spectacular!



By this time, both of us were ready to go home and were ready to see the boys. It made me happy to hear that they missed us too :)

It was a very fun trip and there were lots of interesting ruins. It was so green everywhere and everywhere you looked there were olive trees. EVERYWHERE! We were surprised to see that they had some pretty tall mountains, we thought it was just going to be rolling hills, but nope, there were mountains. The food was pretty good. Not too sweet or rich. We went to a "tavern" on the sea and had some interesting sea food (this was my least favorite meal).

There were pastry shops everywhere. We wondered how they survived and stayed open because there were so many of them. At almost all the resturants there was Greek salad which was just vegetables, feta cheese (EVERYTHING came with FETA!), and olive oil.

Sorry this is SO LONG :)