JOSH GETS A HAIRCUT!!

Yesterday after church Josh started talking about maybe getting his hair cut short, I was kind of surprised, I offered to cut it right then and he said no, maybe when school's out, for the summer. I was like whatever, that means he probably wont do it. Well he came home from school today and said mom cut my hair! I was like are you sure? and he said yes, so He showed me a picture of him with a little bit shorter hair, and told me to do it like that, I had to tell him i am not a hairdresser, the only haircut i know is a buzz! He said well do whatever, so i did, i cut it, and a lot too! I was so nervous, cause any of you who knows Josh knows that he has been known to hit things and cry when he hair has been cut not to his liking, so i was very afraid! But he was very calm and just let me do it! Every once and a while I am starting to see some maturity changes in him, and that is good. Speaking of maturity, he did a really good job on his talk yesterday, It was on miracles and he told the story of how he was run over by a car, i of course lost it, but he did a really good job!

POTATO PINEWOOD DERBY

Last night we had a different kind of pinewood derby, they had the kids assemble the cars there, get a potato and decorate it, then stick it on top of the block of wood, and then race them. They decided to do it that way cause they thought that most of the time the parents make the cars for the boys anyway. I Thought it was kind of weird but the boys seemed to have a great time! I was in charge of making up the awards that had to be potato based, Made me use my brain really hard, but i did come up with some. Tyler won the CURLY FRY AWARD, for most creative spud! I forgot to take my camera, so here is just a picture of his lovely spud, complete with scary teeth! How long can we display this lovely masterpiece until it starts rotting away?

Video of Manoa Falls

We just found these little video clips that Haden did when we werent looking, This one might make you sick!!

Tyler's Poi ball video taken by Haden

Last Day In Hawaii

Day 8

Today was a sad day, it was the last day of our trip, we were leaving at 10:00 pm, so we had all day to play. We checked out of our hotel and loaded the rental car with all of our stuff and headed back to the beach, we decided to spend the whole day there it was the clearest and hottest day of them all. The kids were complaining that they haven't gotten a tan ( i have been putting on 50 SPF everyday on them) so i decided to put only 15 SPF on them that day and boy were we sorry, we all got fried!! The boys wanted to rent boogie boards again, so they spent most of the time doing that, it was a really crazy day the waves were supposed to be 8 to 10 feet that day, the lifeguard came to us and made sure we knew and wanted to know how experienced our kids were, we said not very, so we had to keep a really close eye on them, they were fine as long as they didn't pass the buoy's they had out there, otherwise the waves were really big! It was really hot and pretty crowded, but at least the boys got their money's worth with the boogie boards, it was 25 bucks all day or 10 an hour. we got ripped off the day before cause we only had an hour. We finally left the beach around 4 and headed to David's place to shower and get ready for our long flight home. We had dinner with Dave and then headed to the airport. We had visions of us being so tired we would sleep threw the whole flight, yeah, right, it was miserable, i should have known. We got home Saturday morning around 11:00am, we were very tired! Today we are tring to get back on schedule so we can get up for school and work in the morning, back to life. I am sad to come home, we had a really good time and the boys were really good, only fought a couple of times, I am so glad we decided to do this, it is a vacation we will never forget!ALOHA!!

Kahala Beach/ Waikiki Beach

Day7

Today we decided to hop in the car and see if we could find a different beach to hang out at. We ran into a beach called Kahala beach It was lined with all kinds of huge houses that i am sure costs millions! We got there and it was very pretty with hardly anyone there, we got all of our stuff out and the kids didn't like it, there wasn't any waves and they wanted to boogie board some more. Just then David called, we told him where we were and he told us to walk up the beach a ways and there is a hotel that has some dolphins, so we put all of our gear away and headed up there, it was awesome, they had dolphins, turtles, and sting rays, it was worth our little walk up there. So after we headed back to our car and of course back to Waikiki beach. The kids noticed that you could rent boogie boards there and flippers, so we decided to rent some and they where soo much better than the cheap ones that we had, so they had a really good time with those although we could only get them for an hour cause they were closing. The flipper things made it way easier for them to swim out to the waves, which made me more nervous, Josh has no fear, he would go way out there, so i was on constant look out, but he was fine and they had a blast!

Swap Meet/ Beach

Day 6

Today we went to the Swap Meet, we gave each of the kids $50.00 at the beginning of the trip and told them they could spend it on anything they wanted, they would want to buy something and i would tell them you should wait until we go to the swap meet to get that, so i was really hoping that they would have some good deals or they would be really mad at me! They did of course and everyone was happy. It was fun to see how they all spend their money differently. Tyler spent his money fast, he knew exactly what he wanted to buy and got it really quick, Haden was really conservative and bought just a few things and came home with 20 bucks, Josh spent all of his money and bought only a few things but paid a lot for each item! They all came home happy and that was good. Josh, Haden and I all got temporary tattoo's, that are supposed to last 4 weeks, don't think that they will but we had fun doing that. Then we left and of course went to the beach again the kids were all excited to ride the waves.I was excited to just lay down and relax!

POLYNESIAN CULTURAL CENTER

DAY 5

Today we went to the Polynesian cultural center. It is located on the other side of the island, so we left around 10 in the morning and didn't get back until about 10 at night, so it was a long day, but we had fun. We visited as many villages as we could, they were really interesting i wish we got to see them all, but we just didn't have enough time to do everything, we watched the canoe pageant, we watched the IMAX movie about the reefs, we went to the luau and had a buffet dinner( wasn't the best food, but that's ok) then we took the last tour of the Hawaii Temple and BYU campus and just made it back in time for the night show. The night show was the best and it is a good thing cause the boys were starting to get a little bored, but the fire dancers made up for it!

PEARL HARBOR/ BEACH

DAY 4

Today we decided to take the kids to Pearl Harbor. We only had to wait about an hour to get to our tour, but that was just an hour too long, I think the time change and all the walking around and stuff had finally kicked in the kids were a little tired and cranky. You watch a little movie about pearl harbor before they take you out to see the USS Arizona Memorial and after Josh was like this is so boring it is like being in school. But once we got to the memorial they thought it was cool. After we drove around and had lunch and then of course headed out to the beach again, this time we went where the waves are a little bit bigger and they liked that a whole lot better, a couple of kids came up to Josh and Haden and gave them two boogie boards and said that they were leaving tomorrow so they were passing them along, i guess the people before them, did the same thing, and the people before them, so we were to pass them along when we were done. From that moment on the beach was way funner and they had a blast on them! We went to the calmer beach the first couple of days because we were afraid of what Tyler would do, most of you know that Tyler has been afraid of water for some time now( wouldn't get his face in the water), and we didn't know how he would be in the ocean, well he loved it and i would say he is no longer that scared boy he was last year when he got baptized!

Pali Lookout/Kailua Beach

DAY 3

Today we decided since it was the last day we had David as our tour guide (something about needing to work) we wanted to go and check out a place that looked more like Hawaii before it was all developed, so he took us to a place called Manoa Falls, it was about a mile hike in and a mile out, it was by far our favorite place of the whole trip, it was beautiful, we were so mad we forgot our video camera that day, you could here all these tropical birds, and there was exotic plants everywhere,it was just awesome, it was raining which made everything even more pretty. There was a 160 foot waterfall at the end of the hike, it wasn't going very strong that day, but it didn't matter, from the moment we got out of the car and started the hike i was in heaven! After he took us to a place called the Pali lookout, the winds are so strong there you could stand and lean into the wind and it would hold you up, the views from there was beautiful also, it was a bit cold though, so we didn't stay too long. We then went to a beach that David said was one of the most beautiful on the island, it is called the Kailua beach, which means Toilet by the sea, I don't know why they would call it that, because it really was beautiful! We went to lunch in town there and then headed back to Honolulu. we ended up going to Waikiki beach again, we pretty much ended everyday there.

MANOA FALLS

Day 2

Saturday we woke up pretty early since we are all screwed up with the time change, they are 4 hours behind in Hawaii, Tyler wanted to go to the pool it was like 8 in the morning and David said he would make us breakfast at 10, so we just all went out to the pool, it wasn't hot yet, but Tyler was in heaven. Then we got ready for the day and headed over to David's( he was just one block away from our hotel, maybe 1 minute walk from our place, we had no idea we were that close when we booked it) he made us a huge breakfast, eggs, beacon, banana pancakes, it was all really good. Then we headed to out to hike Diamond Head. It wasn't too hot so that was nice, the hike wasn't too long either, Tyler was the only one who didn't like it, there was a ton of stairs at the end, and he was tired. When we got to the top, he said so how do we get down, i said we walk down and he was pretty mad about that, he was hoping there was some elevator or a helicopter to come get him. For those of you that don't know Tyler, he is my couch potato that would rather sit and watch TV all day if i would let him. The view from up top was really pretty, we didn't take enough pictures, but it was pretty crowded, so we didn't have a lot of time. After we hiked down we decided to head to Waikiki beach and hang out for the rest of the day.

Diamond Head

HAWAII TRIP--DAY 1

We woke up very early and made it to the airport by 4:00 am. We didn't have to many problems except for when we got to L.A. we had to get our boarding passes and go threw security again and we only had an hour to get it done, but we made it, then we found out that they switched planes on us and our seating assignments were no longer the same they had us sitting 8 rows away from each other, we had to fight with them to change it, we lost our window seats but they did get us kind of together, the boys sat behind us. It ended up being ok, this was a new plane and they had individual TVs in the headrest in front of you with all kinds of movies, games and music you could listen to, it really kept the kids entertained. Well me too, i watched 2 movies, it was nice. When we got to Hawaii Doug's brother David met us there with a lei greeting, that was really nice and then we went to get our rental car. we had to wait to check into our hotel so we put all of our stuff in Davids apartment and then we went to eat lunch at Cheeseburger in Paradise, right on the Waikiki boardwalk, that was fun. We finally checked in, our hotel ended up being really nice, it had a kitchen, two queen beds and a pull out couch, so we had plenty of room for all of us to sleep comfortably. That night Dave made us a spaghetti dinner and then we went and checked out the beach and the Hawaiian marketplace. we ended up going to bed fairly early, since we had been up almost 24 hours!

Hawaii Day 1

WE'RE OFF!!

We are leaving for Hawaii in the morning, and when i say morning i mean 3:30 in the morning! Jim is being super nice and taking us there, he was the only one crazy enough to do it! When we booked our 6:00am flight i wasn't thinking about driving time and getting there early and all that other stuff, we just wanted to be in Hawaii for Doug's birthday. So we will have very little sleep tonight, but it will all be worth it once we are laying in the warm sand on the beach in the SUN! We are excited! Well i should get going, we will be back on Saturday the 18th and i will tell of all the great adventures had, hopefully none of them are airline related!---ALOHA!!

HOWIE MANDEL

Tonight for ym/yw's activity they had an Academy Awards ceremony. All the different classes had to make a short movie, they had judges, Simon (our bishop), Paula, and Randy. They asked Doug if he would present one of the categories and to dress up as some movie star. Doug asked Haden who he should dress up as, and he suggested Howie Mandel.So that is what he did. Last night we were tyring to figure out what he could use for those silver cases, we were searching all over for a box or something we could spray paint, and in our search we came across our poker chip cases, perfect! (I knew those poker chips where a wise investment!) Anyways he looked really good and was a hit! He announced the winners of the best supporting actor and actress and Josh won for best supporting Actor! It was fun!

JUST FOR FUN

I saw this on Annemarie's blog and thought it was kind of funny


1. Your Rock Star Name: (first pet & current car)Robby Durango
2. Your Gangsta Name: (fave ice cream flavor, favorite cookie) Toffee bar crunch no bake (that makes no sence!)
3. Your "Fly Guy/Girl Name: (first initial of first name, first three letters of your last name) J-Fil
4. Your Detective Name: (favorite color, favorite animal)Pink Dog
5. Your Soap Opera Name: (middle name, city where you were born) Lea Burbank
6. Your Stars Wars Name: (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first) FilJa
7. Superhero Name: ("The: + 2nd favorite color, favorite drink)The White Pepsi
8. NASCAR Name: (the first names of your grandfathers) James Theo
9. Stripper Name: (the name of your favorite perfume/cologne/scent, favorite candy) Cinnamon Chocolate
10. Witness Protection Name: (mother's & father's middle names)Mack
11. TV Weather Anchor Name: (Your 5th grade teacher's last name, a major city that starts with the same letter) Shannon San Diego
12. Spy Name: (your favorite season/holiday, flower) Summer Poppy
13. Cartoon Name: (favorite fruit, article of clothing you're wearing right now + "ie" or "y") Banana Jeanie
14. Hippy Name: (What you ate for breakfast today, your favorite tree) Muffin Willow
15. Your Rockstar Tour Name: ("The" + your fave hobby/craft + fave weather element + tour)The Shopping Sunshine Tour

DUMB DOG!!

Saturday we were outside with Gunner(our dog)and Tyler was across town playing at a friends house from school, we needed to go pick him up, so Doug thought well lets just take my truck and give Gunner a little ride. We were driving around 45 miles per hour and Doug just happens to look in the rear view mirror and sees Gunner with his front legs sticking out of the truck bed, next thing we know he jumps! So we slam on the breaks, i am picturing this dog dead or all mangled, he was pretty banged up, bleeding out of his mouth, his back was all scrapped up and his toe nails and bleeding and banged up, so we had to put him back in and pick up Tyler and then go straight home and make sure he was okay. He didn't break anything and seems to be fine, we got very lucky, I thought for sure that we would have to take him to the vet and spend all this money getting him fixed up and we would be broke and have no money for Hawaii which we are leaving for Friday! I really don't know what is wrong with our dog, but he is the craziest dog we have ever seen! Haden wasn't home when this happened so when he came home we had to tell him and he was just bawling, he loves Gunner, it was so sad. But he is okay, just walking like an old man who is really soar, but still as crazy as ever!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JIM!

Today is my brother Jim's birthday, and last week was his wife Melissa's birthday, so here's to you two, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!! I am not sure how old Jim is turning, but I do know that he is younger than me, and Melissa is even younger, so if you are feeling old today, remember that you will always be younger than me!

TACO SALAD BOWL

I love taco salads,especially the ones that come in those big fried flour tortilla bowls. As you know i am not eating chips or fries, so I don't think that eating a huge fried flour tortilla bowl is really helping the cause. So i went on line and searched recipes for cooking them in the oven, i ran across a way to make them with no oil, no nothing! you just put a tortilla inside of a microwave safe bowl and stick it in the microwave for 2 minutes. I didn't believe that it would work, or that it would taste good, so i tried it last night and Not only did it work, it tasted great and was super crunchy and way easy and you don't have to mess with the oven or oil! I was so happy last night after eating my yummy taco salad knowing that i didn't eat anymore fat then i would have eating a soft taco! YEAH!!

For each bowl, ease a 10” flour tortilla into a 2-1/2 qt, oven-proof bowl. Microwave on HIGH for 2 minutes. Remove from bowl, invert onto a wire rack and let cool completely.