Fair and Balanced

           We love that Dallin and Landon get along and generally treat each other very fairly but these two seem to have an 'injury equality' philosophy that is getting seriously expensive.  

And painful for all of us.

Both boys somehow tore the meniscus in their  left knees last spring.

Landon  had surgery to repair his a couple of months ago.

We thought Dallin was going to get away with physical therapy but no luck.

Dallin had a flap of the meniscus hanging into the joint which (despite several months of physical therapy)  has gotten more and more painful and he also had a spot on the condyle of the femur that was smushed in (to put it scientifically...) from an  injury in a game a few weeks ago.  

So he had surgery today to fix the meniscus.  The bone will just have to heal on its own.

All day the nurses were saying "you guys look really familiar..."  

We were in the same room with the same doctor with the same knee injury and the "same" kid.

It was funny. 

He will heal well but he has six weeks of no running so football is over for this year.  We'll have to see about basketball.

In the meantime he is wearing support hose, watching netflix and eating Oreos.  

Chicken Whisperer

Jackson 'helped' my dad work on the chicken coop today.  

The chickens have a particular squawk they make when Jackson is in the vicinity.  He can catch them no matter where they go.  At least he has learned to pick them up by the body instead of just a foot or wing.

Poor girls.

They can't wait for the fence and gate to be done...

family photoshop experiments

 We took some family pictures last weekend.

Pictures with a toddler are a challenge. 

Most looked like this:

 Or this...

So I combined this picture--

and this picture--

To get a family picture with everyone looking.

I used the quick selection tool.  It took forever to figure out how to get two photos open at the same time.  I think I finally just drug them both up into the work space   Then I cut Jackson out of one picture with the quick selection tool and then I right clicked on the selection and chose 'layer via cut'  and then I used the move tool to drag him over to the other picture.  I slid the picture of  Jackson around until it looked like it fit in and there it is. 

I am writing this down mostly so I can look back and remember how I did it.  

Here are a few other favorites:

I can't wait until I'm EIGHT!

Benson turned eight on Sunday.

We sure do love this kid!

Eight years sure does fly by.

What was the most exciting thing about turning eight?  

A pocket knife of his very own, of course.  

What is it with boys and pocket knives?

Here are a few things we love about Benson:

He has the best laugh.  Ben makes us all laugh when he laughs.  It kind of starts inside his chest and just bubbles its way out.  Even when Jen and Ben were tiny toddlers I would sometimes hear Jenna mumble "I love it when he laughs" when they were playing.

Ben is a peacemaker.  He is almost always the first one to climb in the back seat of the car,  he never complains when Austin "helps" him with a computer game. (ie takes over the controls...) and he can play with anyone--brothers, sisters or friends.

Ben is a hard worker.  He is by far my favorite kitchen clean-up helper, he practices his piano without being asked and he was the first of all the kids to change Jackson's diaper all by himself.

And our current favorite feature--

His awesome one toothed smile!

Fall, twins and other random thoughts

Today is a perfect Fall-ish day.

I always feel panic when I realize that summer is coming to an end.

But then, just as I begin to despair in earnest, the mornings and evenings turn crisp, the afternoons are nice and warm (hot?), the garden doesn't need to be watered or weeded anymore, the grass grows like crazy,  I get to watch the boys play football and I can make beef stew and baked squash...suddenly I can't remember why I was so worried about summer ending!

Dallin grew an inch this summer and gained thirty pounds making both Dallin and Landon 6' 1 1/2".  Dallin is 204 lbs and Landon is 205 lbs.  How's that for being twins? They have always, always gone through spurts when one was bigger or taller than the other and then they have always evened back out.

Speaking of being twins, last Sunday everyone sat down to play Settlers of Catan and they rolled the dice to see who got to go first.  Dallin and Landon rolled the exact same number FIVE times in a row.
Hilarious.
What are the odds?
Seriously I would like to know...

Landon got to play in his first football game last week.  He has recovered from surgery well but has some tendinitis in his knee.  Wearing a patellar strap helps a lot.  Oddly enough, Dallin's knee hurts in the exact same place.  It is swollen and painful which means that he, too, needs an MRI--for the bargain price of $1500. There is a good chance that he will need surgery as well.  We have already tried a bunch of physical therapy. Is this a genetic thing?  Seriously how 'random' is it that both boys randomly tore the meniscus in the lateral left knee at the same time?!

Both boys are playing offensive line and Landon plays defensive end, strong side and Dallin has been playing linebacker.  I think.  They all make fun of me when I get the positions wrong.  I'll have it down by the time Jackson gets in there.

Austin is playing football at the middle school this year and he loves it. Of course.

Jackson and I are home during the day.  I spend a lot of time trying to keep Jack from terrorizing the chickens.  He crawls out the dog door and climbs in the chicken coop and picks them up by their tails or wings or whatever else he can grab.  Little stinker. Between Jackson's snatching and Beau's habit of herding the little chickens all over the yard, I'm sure we will never get a single egg.  But it's fun anyway.

I'll have to post a picture of the cutest chicken coop ever.
As soon as it gets its final coat of paint.
Which might be a while...

Football...

Football season is here.

I am resigning myself to the fact that the chaos has already started.  Summer is coming to an end.

I spent the better part of the morning driving: dropping off, picking up, running across town to get the sports physical that was lost and had to be turned in my 11 this morning, running to get new football cleats before the afternoon practice, dropping off again...

My house looks neglected.  I hate when everyone is busy and they leave and the place looks like a tornado blew through even though it was totally clean when I went to bed.  There's got to be a better way...

For the last two weeks of summer we have some serious playing to finish up.  The kids requests?: go to a water park, stay in a hotel and do nothing. They are serious about the do nothing part. "Mom we can't do jobs, summer is almost over! We have to play the Wii, summer is almost over..."

I have a million projects that I need to get finished before all my helpers are gone and I have no one to distract Jackson. Blah.

Speaking of Jackson...

This boy thinks he's a big kid.  When we go swimming he jumps in the water as fast as I can put him back up on the edge.  He goes all the way under and comes up laughing for more.  Sometimes he backs up and runs so he can fling himself into the water.  Dallin and Landon were like that.  We hope he doesn't follow his big brothers in the injury category.  I think their first ER visit was at 15 months when they ate a bottle of Claritin and had their stomachs pumped.

Jackson can now open the fridge and the dishwasher.  He also climbs onto the table and rips apart anything I attempt to put out as a centerpiece. Right now he is dumping out the boxes of butter from the fridge for the millioneth time today and he is trying in vain to smash the cubes back into the box saying "tatdooo" (thank you) as he smashes each cube back in place.

He also goes through the bread drawer and dumps the bread out and takes a bite out of every piece and then stacks them back up very neatly.

This morning he has also nibbled a hole through the chocolate chips, the brown sugar and the baking soda.

Good thing he is cute!

We are such city slickers...

We finally took the plunge.  I have wanted to add chicks to our backyard for as long as I have had a back yard.  This year some friends finally convinced us to take the plunge with them and become true urban farmers.  The fact that we ordered these chicks from a place called  My Pet Chicken.com gives some insight to how seriously we are taking the title of  'farmer.'  My husband and mother--both of whom grew up taking care of chickens--are rolling their eyes.

We have plans to turn our unused little playhouse into the cutest chicken coop ever.

In the mean time we have the most spoiled fowl around.

Is allowing barnyard animals into the house somehow betraying our five generations of Idaho farmers' heritage? No self-respecting farmer would allow barnyard animals into the house let alone into his shirt, right?

I do remember my grandpa riding around the farm with his dog on the back of the 4-wheeler.  And all of his dairy cows had names (women from the ward...).  He also tamed a pigeon which followed him around the farm, so maybe we come by this naturally.

We were most worried about Beau trying to turn our latest hobby into a snack but it turns out Jack is the true chick predator.  He can hardly keep himself from climbing into the brooder box.

I wonder if we will think this is fun while thawing frozen water buckets in the dead of winter.