My Talented Husband

I wanted to make a post about Jon. He is so talented in so many ways. He is an all around handyman, and an excellent welder. I really think he's chosen a profession that he enjoys and is absolutely fabulous at doing. Ever since he's become a certified welder his confidence and ability has sky rocketed.

We have been so blessed lately. With all of the break downs and repairs we've had to do it's truly been a blessing that he has been offered many side jobs this week to help us financially.

I'm amazed at what he can do with metal! Here are some pictures of his most recent project. He welded some new stairs for an apartment complex.

Here, Jon is cutting out the old rusted and rotted stairs.

After 17 hours of work...here are the new stairs.

This is looking down the stairs. It's pretty dark because it was getting late and the cement was still really wet.

So in the last 48 hours Jon has only slept 20 minutes. He went to work yesterday, then worked on these stairs until 6:30am this morning. After another 8 hours of work he went back to the stairs to finish off the cement. I keep begging him to go to sleep, but he still has more projects he wants to accomplish here at our house and sleep is last on his list. Good thing we have a relaxing family reunion to go to for the next 4 days so he can actually get some R&R.

Cut, Eat,...Catch??

We went to Ryan and Lisa's wedding reception last night. I was asked to make their wedding cake. The cake turned out great. I really liked it. However, the cake didn't like traveling very much. The bottom layer shifted ever so slightly as I transported it. This is what the cake looked like at the reception.
As the night went on the cake started leaning more and more. The heat didn't do it any good, and now that it was slightly off center from transporting, it was starting to sag to the right. You can tell in the picture of them cutting the cake that it was tipping a bit.
They both gave me rave reviews of the cake after they ate it. They said it was so good and really moist. Lisa wanted to taste the vanilla layer and the chocolate layer, so they cut the bottom two tiers. It just so happened that they ended up cutting the cake on the RIGHT side (the weakest side!).
This is the cake after it was cut. That bottom layer is sure suffering. It's trying it's hardest to support the other 3 layers, but eventually it fails!
We missed all of the action. We left right after they cut the cake. I guess minutes later Lisa's mom noticed the cake was beginning to fall. So, everyone ran and caught the cake before it hit the ground. They removed the top two layers and served up the cake. I'm glad it didn't fall completely. I'm actually pretty proud that it held up so well in the heat.

So, congratulations to my cousin, Ryan, and his wife Lisa. I wish you all the happiness in the world!

When It Rains...It Pours!

We have been bogged down a lot lately with unexpected repairs and expenses. Before our trip to Las Vegas we had the A/C pump in our van go out. Plus, we had to replace our alternator.

Now, our house is having problems. Last night our Central Air stopped working. We finally figured out that it was iced over, and we only had to let it defrost and then it worked again. When we turned it on, I smelt a funny gas-type smell. I didn't know if I was just smelling things, or if it really was serious. I decided to call the gas company to come check it out just to be sure. I called at 11pm. They told us to have everyone leave the house and that they'd be to our house within the hour. I laid a blanked out on our front yard and one by one Jon and I picked up a kid from their bed and laid them down on the blanket. Caleb and Leah stayed fast-asleep through the transfer. Alex woke up, and thought it was fun to be outside in the middle of the night. I stayed outside on the blanket with them while we waited for the gas man to get here. Once he came and I was talking to him, Caleb and Leah woke up. Caleb had the funniest comment when he woke up. He said, "Holy cow! How the heck did I get out here!" Once everyone was awake we played "I Spy" and told jokes to pass the time until it was safe to go back inside.

After a thorough check-out of our home it was discovered that our water heater was vented improperly...and had been since we've lived here! The gas man said that our phone call had saved our family's lives. We had a fairly new water heater (only 6 years old), so it wasn't putting out a lot of CO2, but as it aged it would have been putting out a lot more CO2 and eventually it would have asphyxiated us all!! How scary! He turned our water heater off and deemed it unsafe to operate until it was fixed. At least we were safe to to back inside the house.

So, Jon had to take the day off today to put in a new water heater. We needed a shorter one so that the slope of the vent would be correct. We will all sleep better tonight, and every night knowing that we are no longer at risk for carbon monoxide poisoning. We will also be purchasing a Carbon Monoxide detector VERY soon to have in our home.

I am so thankful that Jon is so handy and knows how to fix and install just about anything. It has saved us so much money through all of these repairs.

So, our bathroom had taken a little bit of a back-seat to all of our other repairs and problems, but it is still making progress. The shower is almost done being tiled. Then, we just need to tile the floor of the bathroom and hall. I can't wait to see the finished product and I hope it can get done quickly now (and it will happen a lot faster if nothing else goes wrong). Here are a couple of pictures. One of the bathroom shower tile job, and the other (not so good quality because of poor lighting in our cellar) of Jon installing our new water heater.

We Miss You, Billy!

I can't believe it's been 3 years since Jon's brother, Billy, died. We still miss him everyday. I'm really glad his good friend put together this video to remember him.

More Fireworks

Jon and Caleb with sparklers

Alex spelling his name
Leah with a sparkler
Grandfather Lanier gave the kids more fireworks when we saw him at Christel's house, so we did a few more fireworks at our house once we were home. Jon got pretty close to spelling J-O-N with his sparkler while I took the picture.

More of our Vegas trip

On Saturday we took the kids to the park by Shane and Katie's house that has sprinklers coming out of the ground. It kept them really cool. Even with all of the sunscreen, our kids got burnt shoulders. The adults sat in the shade, but we were still extremely hot.

Here's a cute video of the kids playing:



The kids dried off by playing on the playground. After about 5-10 minutes they were totally dry and we were all roasting.

Leah was Katie's little side-kick. She just loves Aunt Katie. She was especially cuddly with her while we were watching a movie.

Then, Sunday it was time to drive home with another long drive. Our kids do pretty well with traveling for hours...as long as we have movies playing.

We stopped in St. George for a break. We got to tour through the visitor's center and watched a film about pioneers. It was so nice. (This first picture is a bit fuzzy...it was taken by my camera sitting on the van across the street from us)Passing through Nephi we stopped at the Hosie's house for lunch and visiting. Then we visited with Jon's sister, Christel, and her family. The kids played with 3 of their cousins there, Eve, Eden, and Eliza. Ezra was taking a nap while we were there.

We STILL didn't go home after that. We stopped in Springville to have fast Sunday dinner at my parent's house. It was yummy and I'm glad I didn't have to cook anything all day long. When we got home we unpacked some stuff and waited for it to get a little dark so we could do more fireworks. I'll post more about that later.

A HOT Rockin' 4th!

We decided that since I didn't have to teach a cake class on July 5th that we would take a road trip to Las Vegas to visit my brother, Shane, and his family. We left after Jon got off of work on the 3rd and drove into Las Vegas at 10:30pm. I did not like driving through the gorge at night--scary!


On the 4th of July the local rec center outdoor pool had a free swim day. How nice is that? So, we all got there early and went swimming. I'm glad we got there early because the pool reached their maximum capacity and would only let other people into the pool as people were leaving. It was a nice cool activity to do to keep us out of the 110 degree weather.


That night for dinner we had BBQ chicken, corn on the cob, salad, watermelon, and root beer floats for dessert. It was yummy. We played "restraunt" with the kids. Katie and I were the waitresses and we made menu's for the kids to pick what they wanted. We called it the Patio Restraunt and ate outside. It was pretty pleasant. The wind was blowing just enough to keep us a little cool.
After dinner the kids all got in the tub to get clean. As they were taking turns taking baths we had them color some 4th of July coloring pages to keep them entertained. Alex wrote "to Uncl Shan" on his. I thought he did really good sounding out "uncle Shane" and told him that those words had an 'e' on the end of them.

Once we were all ready for bed we went outside and did our fireworks. We kept things simple with pops and sparklers. The kids had a lot of fun, and we also got to see some of the "bigger" fireworks that other people were doing down the street. We had stayed up really late the night before, so we opted out on seeing any BIG fireworks shows so we could put the kids to bed a little earlier.

After the kids were in bed we enjoyed visiting outside. Jon's sitting on Shane and Katie's fabulous always-green astroturf grass. Then, we played games. When I say "we" I mean me, Shane and Katie. Jon's not a big gamer. He did play one game with us one night, so I was happy about that.