On April 22nd we welcomed the newest little addition to our family!
Abigail Anne was born at 12:49 pm weighing in at 7 lbs 1 oz and was 19″ long. She had a gorgeous head of dark hair as was very healthy!

Now for some pictures of our little lady!!

At the hospital…

8 days old…

Nearly one month old…

She has been a great baby! She sleeps and eats (when I don’t consume dairy) well, and the kids adore her. She’s just starting to have good control of her head and lately she likes to be awake more and interact more… I’ve even seen a couple of smiles sneak out from time to time. She will be two months old this coming week, so I guess I’m still behind on the blog posts.

Anyway, we love our new little Abby!!

As I’m sure many of you know, we moved into an apartment last June with the plan to sell our existing home, find a good piece of land, and build ourselves a house. It took a little longer to get started than we’d hoped, but we finally got our hole dug on December 7th, and are currently waist-deep in the construction process.

Take a look at the images at the top of this post. The one on the left is a 3D rendering of the house we are aiming to build, and the one on the right is our house as it looks now. I think we’re on the right track.

If it looks different from what some of you were expecting to see, its because the house plans have changed from what we were looking at last June, and rather than using a builder (as we had previously planned), Dave has taken on the role of General Contractor for the build. Although a pretty overwhelming responsibility, its been nice for him to be able to call all the shots and nice to know that in the end we will have saved a lot of money. As will every other project we seem to take on, this is no small thing. The hours are crazy, and self-imposed deadlines are fast approaching - Dave is still working full time hours at DuPont, but we figure he also puts in a good 30 hours/week at the house.

The house process has been underway for approx. 4 months now… The following photos are a sampling of our progress thus far. There is still plenty to do, but I am impressed with the amount that’s already been accomplished. We are looking to be done about mid-summer.

December 7th, 2009 - Let the games begin!! Digging commenced

December 14, 2009 - Cement forms for basement

December 23, 2009 - Ground Plumbing

December 24, 2009 - Pouring the basement floor

January 2, 2010 - Basement Framing

January 14, 2010 - Begin first floor walls

January 29, 2010 - Second floor walls begin

February 3, 2010 - Roof Trusses & framework for stairs

March 10, 2010 - Covered porch

April 3, 2o10 - Wiring and plumbing (in progress)

Forgive the gaps in the time line… somewhere in there is also included (in no particular order): waterproofing the foundation, pouring the porch cap, framing built-in desks and bookcases, excessive snow removal, excavation of the walk out basement, septic tank installation, power trunk installation, delivery of appliances, heating and air, building of staircases, additional plumbing and wiring, installation of doors, sheeting on the roof, floor trusses, etc…

As you can see we (Dave) have done a lot so far… but we aren’t ready to move in yet.
At this point, we are hoping to get done with the 4 way inspection before this new baby joins our family. Wish us luck!

But first… a brief history if you will…

May 2008: Homestar Runner-esque drawings… (See http://blog.ernstrom.net/?p=157 for more)

July 2008: We have hair! And noses! (See http://blog.ernstrom.net/?p=233 for more)

August 2008: Family Portrait (See http://blog.ernstrom.net/?p=236 for more)

And now… Jan/Feb 2010…

Skin color, pig tails, shirts, finger/toes/shoes, birthday hats, and balloons. The girl in the first drawing even has whites to her eyes.

Its amazing how much more detail goes into her art when she really wants to. This girl of mine really loves to write and draw and spell. She is seriously a sponge for learning.
Incidentally, she told me the other day that she really wants to be an artist, but that she doesn’t know how. I told her that I think that she is already an artist.

Anyway, thanks for humoring me as I show off on my daughters behalf.

Yes, it was a bit of a surprise. (The good kind of surprise though).

But I have to admit that it was kind of nice to have basically skipped the first third of my pregnancy, and to be able to find out gender at my first appointment. Its a girl, by the way!!

I had a quick unofficial ultrasound then, at my first appointment, and came back a couple of weeks later for the official 20-week thing. It was still a girl then…

She didn’t seem to want to show us her face, the little brat, but here are a couple of pictures anyway…

I am currently 28 weeks pregnant - officially in my final trimester. The baby is due on May 10th - which also happens to be my sister’s birthday. We are currently thinking Brooklyn for a name… its the name that’s stuck the best so far, so we’ll see what happens, I guess.

Anyway, we are (as I’m sure you can imagine) getting pretty anxious to get our house finished so we can get settled in there. As it is, the house isn’t slated to be finished until the end of June at the earliest… so we are anticipating a couple months of chaos right after this baby is born! 3 kids in a 2 bedroom apartment should be interesting too… ha.

ADVENTURE, JAMIE, ADVENTURE!!! (Name that movie)

For months, Dave had been teasing Bridget that we would be skipping her birthday and that she would have to stay 3 years old for another year. Her reactions varied from day to day. Either she knew he was kidding, or she was sincerely devastated. The night before her birthday he finally gave in and told her that she could have a birthday as long as she promised that she would continue to love him and give him hugs and kisses. She agreed.

On the morning of her birthday we (Dave and I) surprised her with a collection of Wizard of Oz stuff. She’s border line obsessed with the movie.

My sister (and super seamstress) sewed this dress for her. It turned out amazing! The outfit was completed with a pair of “ruby slippers” from Wal-Mart. Bridget wore this outfit for every possible second for the first couple of weeks. She still wears it often. She wore it so much in fact that within the first week she’d already ripped a seam - that my mom helped us repair over Thanksgiving.

She also got a set of 8 Wizard of Oz Pez Dispensers and the Wizard of Oz DVD. (Yes, she still collects PEZ).
She likes to watch the movie, while wearing her dress, and holding the pez dispensers. Sometimes she’ll fill them with Candy and eat one when she sees the respective character on the screen.

I made this princess castle cake for the princess-themed surprise birthday party we were planning later that afternoon.
Not my favorite cake… I wish I’d taken the time to use fondant on the castle.

While I setup for the surprise party, Dave took Bridget on a daddy-daughter date to the bowling alley.

When they got back, a bunch of her friends were there ready to yell, “SURPRISE” - Okay, actually, most of them had never been to a surprise party and stood there utterly confused. It was pretty funny!

A new princess dress awaited her arrival. She was thrilled.

The kids made tiaras…

and beaded necklaces…

There were princess party favors.

And cake, of course. The castle cones were by far the favorite.

And gifts.

She hugged most of her friends, but then she did this…

I had to include this kissing picture because of another kissing picture, this one, from August 2007 (yes, its the same boy).

Well, that about sums up her Birthday. I think she had a great time - and I think she was adequately surprised by the party.
The only problem now is that she’s already trying to make plans and ask for things for her “5 year old birthday” - funny kid! Love her though.

THANKSGIVING

We spent Thanksgiving at my parents’ house. It was a small bit of chaos with my six siblings, their spouses and children. But we had a fun time enjoying each others company and gorging on super yummy food. Here are a few glimpses of that day…

7 grand kids…
As I took this picture I was imagining when there’s 10 - we could do some sort of ‘bears in the bed’ themed picture. Ha. I’m crazy, I know.

Every year, the day after Thanksgiving, we have a tradition of helping Grandma Harmer setup her Christmas village. She has over 60 houses! This year, however, she’s been in pretty poor health and didn’t want us to set it up. We convinced her to let us just setup a sampling - figuring she’d be sad to not see it setup at all this year. This is what the final result looked like. Its a fraction of the size of her typical village, but it was good to see it setup, and I think she was glad to see it happen too.

And there you have it… November 2009.

If you click on the image (button) above it should take you to her craft blog…

Text changing test…
(have to change the text size on this one too)

So far so good!

This past October (2009) we decided, nearly on a whim, to pack up and take a trip to California/Disneyland.
Disneyland is always a fun place, and it seemed like good timing where we were out from under our mortgage payment, and hadn’t starting building the house yet.

We went the week before Halloween - and had a ball!

Spencer was just a tiny bit nervous about the characters (and some of the rides). He never cried, but he sure clung to us a lot.

This was “The REAL Snow White” - She was an awesome actress and completely wonderful with Bridget. We were incredibly impressed. Bridget still (almost 3 months later) talks about the real snow white and how she lives in a castle in the sky.

Believe it or not, Bridget’s favorite ride was the Tower of Terror. She was tall enough to ride this year - and did at LEAST 14 times during our trip.

At the princess’ dinner. Cinderella was in second place for most impressive princess.

She loved Splash Mountain too… the kid is fearless, I tell you!

Dumbo…

Aunt Jenna came and hug out with us out there for a couple of days!! We had a great time with her!

At the blue bayou with Aunt Jenna!

At Halloween time Disneyland does this trick or treat thing at night. It was pretty fun to see all the characters dressed up and wander around collecting candy - which was handed out by the handful, by the way. Here we all are with Mickey and Minnie.

The witch from Snow White did an awesome job staying in character. She just kept this sour mean face on the whole time - I don’t think Bridget knew what to think.

We also bet the Bowler Hat Man (Goob) - Very cool!

We spent a lot of time at Disneyland, some times later into the evening too. It was not uncommon for one (or both) of the kids to just crash mid festivities. Here are some cute sleeping pictures of our tired little troopers!

While in California, we also went to a beach in La Jolla. It was a bit chilly, but still tons of fun!

One of Spencer’s favorite activities was chasing Seagulls. He couldn’t ever catch one though - and actually sat and cried a couple of times because of it.

Dave buried Bridget in the sand - she thought that was great!

Spencer also loved playing with the seaweed. Weird kid.

We (mostly Dave) made this cool looking crater out of sand. It was a challenge to build it quick enough that water didn’t pour in when the tide came up. The little girl in the pink came over to ‘help’ toward the end, and laid claim on our masterpiece as we were leaving.

We also went to the San Diego zoo…

The Pandas were the coolest thing there.

And we got to stop in and see my grandmother and my uncle Carl in Long Beach. The kids took an immediate liking to Carl.

It sure was fun to see them. Love you guys!!!!

THEN THERE WAS HALLOWEEN…
We made it back from California the day before Halloween. Just  in time to dawn our outlandish costumes and trick or treat in my parents’ neighborhood.

You may remember the chaos surrounding our costumes last year…
If not, let me refresh your memory. Look here, here, here and here.

We decided to use the same costumes again, figuring that Bridget may not be big enough to fit into hers again next year. But we didn’t have one for Spencer, so we decided to turn the stroller into a cart of scream canisters. It proved to be nearly as lengthy process as any of the costumes from last year… but that seems to be just how it goes around here!

I’ll spare you the ‘making of’ pictures this time - but here are some pictures of the finished scream canisters:

And here we all are, ready to roam the neighborhood.

I would have to say that we had a pretty fun October!
Happy Halloween (in January) everyone!

I’m not really sure what changed that made me loose the motivation to write here. I know I slowed down a bit when Spencer was born, but the near screeching halt didn’t really come until sometime this past summer. Was it the move? The newly cramped quarters? I honestly, don’t know.

At any rate, I also realize that I am, and always have been, a horrible journal keeper. And as cliche as I think it is to say that “this blog is my journal,” there is a certain amount of record keeping that takes place here. And there really is a lot that has transpired over the last several months that has yet to be written down or recorded… a lot of significant things even.

So, today, I try again.
I cannot vow to write weekly, or daily, or to keep up with any regular schedule - because I don’t think I’d stick to it. All I can do is try to catch up, even a little. So, I will commence at this moment in writing a post that at minimum moves me in the direction of catching up. Look for that post later today.

In the meantime, if any of you hear of any blogging elves, please let me know!

How many of you follow The Pioneer Woman’s blog?
(http://thepioneerwoman.com)

I started reading it about 2 years ago after seeing something about it on a photography forum. And I’ve been captivated ever since.
The woman is talented writer/blogger with a vast number of topics to address. Some posts are humorous or absurd, others talk about life on the ranch, homeschooling, or home improvements, etc. She also has a section devoted to recipes and cooking, she has a series titled “Black heels to tractor wheels” where she chronicles her unlikely courtship to her husband, and frequent giveaways. You should check it out if you don’t already read her blog.

At any rate, The Pioneer Woman recently published a cookbook and went on tour around the country meeting people and signing books. One such event was held in Salt Lake City last week. I was on the fence about going since it was a 2 hour drive and we were right in the middle of closing on our construction loan… kind of a busy time. But then Michelle called me, and basically said, “I’ll go if you go.” Michelle and I have been trying to get together for the past several months, so I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to hang out with her and see PW all in the same night.

Fast forward to that night…

The gallery was scheduled to open at 6:30 for a 7:00 presentation by Ree (Pioneer Woman). We got there about 6:00 and there were already 200+ people ahead of us - some having arrived earlier than 4:00. The gallery was packed wall to wall. It was standing room only. So far, not too different than what I expected.

Around 7:30 they started book signing at the neighboring Kings English bookstore. Everyone was assigned a slip of paper with a letter on it. We were to form a line with our letter was called… 20 A’s, 20 B’s, etc… Michelle and I were assigned the letter “J,” but letters were assigned through “R” and there were still a couple hundred people that showed up late, were not assigned letters and stood outside in the cold waiting until the end to see if Ree was still up for signing books. At 8:30 (one hour in) they were still on the letter “C.”

The Kings English bookstore is small, and although it looked to be a pretty cool store, it wasn’t prepared for the mass amounts of people that this event brought in. Most people waited outside for hours for their turn to come in an meet the woman of the hour. We were among them until someone told us that there was a room inside where we could go to keep the babies out of the cold.

That’s when things started to get interesting…

First… Missy came and took our picture! It was great to meet Missy. She was a very kind and down to earth woman. We visited for several minutes before she asked us how far we’d driven to get here, how old the babies were, etc… She quickly had compassion on us realizing that the babies were getting tired and we still had a long wait ahead of us. Before long were were being whisked to the front of the line an allowed to meet PW and get our books signed.

It all happened so quickly. We were not allowed to pose for pictures with her, or visit for any length of time at all really. The staff at the bookstore were doing their best to push us through like a herd of cattle (ha, reference intentional). Ree barely had a chance to look up from her signing before we were being sent on our way. It was wild. I know that there were a lot of people to process and I am grateful that we were allowed a hint of priority (or the babies were at least), but I guess I was hoping to get 3 or 4 minutes at least to say “Hi.” Alas.

Oh… on the way out we also asked Missy to sign our books. I’m glad she did.

I’d say it was a fun evening and I’m glad I went. And I might even do it again. But I think there would be a few things I did differently next time.

Here are some more images from that night:

Oh, by the way…
If you want to witness our 5 seconds of fame on PW’s blog you can check it out here: http://thepioneerwoman.com/blog/2009/11/a_recap/
(Note: The image itself can be found on PW’s flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pioneerwoman/4088475482/)

So, I went through my pictures… Everything from late May through the end of September. And came up with 72 images representing much of what we did this summer.

Yes, seventy-two.

So, I’ve chosen to throw it all at you in one giant lump! Be prepared for one overwhelming post. After this blog post I will only be one month behind schedule.

Here we go…

This summer we did lots of fun things,

We played in shaving cream. And made a huge mess.

Did you know that shaving cream makes an excellent canvas for practicing letters.

We went hiking and geocaching on the Shoreline Trail.

Attended the 24th of July parade.

Where we collected lots of candy,

saw some pretty cool floats,

and took an occasional break on some lawn chairs.

We managed to bathe from time to time.

We even played together and laughed.

We spent a lot of time outside with friends, playing playdoh.

We attended my 10-year High School Reunion. (Man, I’m old)

Bridget took swimming lessons at the Aquatic center.

She did a pretty good job listing to the instructions.

And got pretty brave about jumping in.

We were pretty proud of her.

This summer we moved into our apartment… and had to find some creative ways to keep Spencer entertained.

Bridget got a cute new Sunday dress, and very willingly modeled it.

We spent all of 5 minutes at the Cache County Fair one day after swimming lessons. While we were there we found this carriage - surely it must belong to Cinderella.

We had many a happy morning.

Had a tea party outside.

Played on the soft play at the mall.

Ate lots and lots of Popsicles - and even shared a few.

Painted…

and painted some more.

Daddy went on an all day hiking/geocaching expedition with his friend, Craig, and found this fun tree.

This was the view from their hike.

Spencer learned to crawl. He’s quite a mover now.

We went to the Treehouse museum, where we pretended to be teachers,

ate at a Japanese restaurant,

rode a wild bull,

built some stuff,

and drove the fire truck. It was a busy day.

We did even more geocaching - a popular activity for us especially at the beginning of the summer.

And found some nifty treasure.

We went camping. Bridget set up the tent herself (kidding).

We climbed a tree while we were there,

made some new friends,

practiced a little Croquet,

ate some yummy food,

and woke up happy and ready to play!

We pretended to be doctors, listening for heartbeats,

and taking blood pressures.

Uncle Ken and aunt Marci came to visit with their family. This is a picture of Ken with Spencer and two of his cousins.

We took some pictures of the kids for grandma Ernstrom’s birthday.

Spencer wore this studly little suit,

and Bridget her cute new dress.

We did lots of art projects this summer.

We taught Spencer how to play “fingers,”

and got creative when it came to needing a little space of our own.

Spencer got some teeth (two on the bottom) and spent time eating things like teething cookies and Popsicles to help with the pain.

Our super stylish Bridget was also super good and helping me cook,

and clean up afterward.

We attended an orientation at Bridget’s new preschool,

where we met some of Bridget’s wonderful teachers.

We played in the pool at our complex quite a bit.

Often with friends.

After a short time in the water, Spencer always seemed to get a little sleepy and want to cuddle.

On September 1st, Bridget left for her first day of preschool.

We played at grandma’s house a couple of times this summer too, even tired on her glasses.

Bridget got inked at the Treehouse Museum’s “Pirate Party” on Labor Day.

Aunt Jenna came with us.

Check out her pirate hat. Its says “Bridget Pirate” if you can’t read it.

There were even sword fights involved.

Spencer showed off on the corn popper and finally got to feel like one of the big kids on a “bike.”

We sold our house, but you already knew that.

We played in the rain

with friends.

And got super wet. But it was fun!

We even got in trouble every now and then, and lost some privileges.

We went hunting for the perfect piece of land on which to build our house. We took many a drive and ended up all over this valley. We finally settled on some land in Cove (at the location in the photo).

We played a lot with friends.

And painted (did I already mention that we painted?)

And at the end of September we got together with my family for my sister’s baby shower!

So there you have it. A summer synopsis. Whew!
Now you know what we did this summer. What did you do?