OUCH !

Claire, Claire, Claire. What are we going to do with Claire. Our family went to the Meadow Vista Park for a little exercise last Saturday. Lindsey and I were walking the track, while Stone and Claire went roller blading around the school. When it was time to leave, Lindsey went to get the kids. What she found was Claire on the ground bleeding, and Stone Laughing.

Claire had fallen and injured her knee and elbow. See photo above. But Claire has a problem with fainting at the sight of her own blood. She sat down on a bench, and then passed out hitting the ground face first.

She managed to do worse damage to herself by splitting her chin open. I took one look at it and knew it needed stitches.


So here are the stitches of which I speak. The original fall from her roller blades was not that severe. It was the fall from passing out that caused the most damage. She has done this before at school. She fell on the playground and was brought into the office. Her initial injury wasn't too bad. But when she passed out and bonked her head on the office desk, things got worse.


Here is the final product. She went to church and school like this. We call it her Santa Claus imitation.

My How Things Change

This family photo was taken 1 week before Richard went into the MTC to leave on his mission. It is interesting to see how much some of us have changed. Big Richard and I have changed very little. Perhaps Little Richard has not changed very much. It is humorous to refer to my 6'4" son as "Little Richard". He is the biggest one in the bunch. But the rest of the kids have changed quite a bit. Aiden who is several inches shorter than me, and slightly chubby in the picture, is now several inches taller than me. And very skinny. Stone came up to my chin when this picture was taken. Now he is the same height as I am, and a little thinner. Claire seems so tiny here. Just last month someone at church asked if Claire was 12 years old. No. She is only 10 years old, but she has grown quite a bit. Lindsey has a much shorter, and dark brown hair-do, but otherwise she looks the same. We will take another family photo in 7 weeks when Little Richard comes home ( can you believe he comes home in 7 weeks! I can't wait!!!), and post that one for you. It will be fun to see the differences.

I Am So Old!

UGH! It was my 44th birthday last week on September 13th. I tried very hard to just let it slip by hopefully unnoticed. But my kids wouldn't hear of it. So they went out of their way to make sure that I had a wonderful day. It began with Stone and Claire making me breakfast in bed. Richard took some pictures, but I am not about to post photos of me first thing in the morning. So just use your imagination.

Lindsey did the dishes for me to beautify our kitchen. I should have taken a picture of the empty sink instead, but you can just use your imagination again.


Claire and Lindsey then baked me a wonderful chocolate cake. And decorated it as well.


Here is Lindsey presenting me with the cake as everyone sang Happy Birthday!

Me blowing out the candles. You might notice the two bottles of Magic shell in the foreground. That was special for the occasion. For my birthday Richard, Mom and Dad, Tam and Terry, and Lindsey all chipped in to help me purchase new kitchen chairs. The photos of said chairs will be available when they arrive.

Homemade Apple Pie

The older Godfrey's brought a bushel full of apples from their tree to church last week. Someone mentioned that these apples were perfect for apple pies. I decided I would like to try making an apple pie. I have not had much success with pie making in the past. But I was willing to try again. And this time include my girls. They were excited about the project. Here is a photo of the finished pie. But now let us take a look at the process.

To begin with we had to break out the "Apple Peeler/Corer/Slicer". My kids were very excited about that. Besides the fun of spinning the apples, they like to eat the stringy apple skins.

Next, we realized that we were in way over our heads, and decided to call in the expert to help us. Other wise known as GRANDMA !

Here Grandma is showing Lindsey and Claire the fine art of shaking the apple slices in a zip-lok bag with cinnamon and sugar.


And VOILA! The final product. We did it. We made our apple pie! The photo at the top of the page shows most of the crust having been picked off. I wouldn't let anyone eat it until it had cooled. So they just picked off the crust instead. But we love Grandma's crusts!

Does It Look Like Me?

My Husband was recreating on his computer again yesterday, and found this website that allowed you to insert a photo of yourself. It would scan your face, and then tell you which celebrity you most closely resembled. I am not sure that I think I look like any of the celebrities shown here. But I did have an experience where I was actually mistaken for "Courtney Thorne Smith" at a restaurant in Lake Tahoe. Ironically, she was not chosen as a celebrity look- a-like. Richard put in a different photo of me, and then Courtney showed up. So it does matter which picture you use. We put in a picture of Claire, and it came up with all male celebrities. She was not thrilled.

http://www.myheritage.com/collage

MyHeritage: Celebrity Collage - Lineage - Free family history

Back from Brasil!

Richard and I had the pleasure of traveling to Brazil this summer. We were gone for 2 weeks. We flew first to a small beach town called Garopaba.
This is a picture of our good friends Greg and Thais. They were our hosts.

Here is a photo of the beach house. It is the house painted yellow. It is 3 stories high, so the big yellow portion is the bottom floor, and it continues up to the top yellow portion.

This is the view from the deck outside the family room, and our guest room. We were able to watch whales playing in the bay each day.

One of our favorite things to do was to take a long stroll on the beach each morning. We would walk the beach, and then go into town to pick up our day's allotment of freshly baked bread.

Here we are with Thais' father, and her two boys. The local fishermen go out fishing everyday. We walked down to the beach and purchased some very fresh fish. The fishermen clean the fish right on the granite wall behind us. I am positive that it violates some health code here in America. The fillets are in one bucket, and the guts are in the other bucket.


We decided to take a short cut through our fisherman's boat house to get back to the main road. Our fish is in the plastic bag.

We spent one week in Garopaba at the beach, and then we flew to Sao Paulo. This is a picture of Sao Paulo at night. It was taken from the top of a hotel/ night club.


While in Sao Paulo we stayed at the home of Thais' brother and his family. Here are our hosts, Tom and Luciana, with a beautiful Sunday morning breakfast.

Luciana's parents, Mimi and Vera, hosted a real Brazilian churrasca (shu-has-ka) in our honor. Otherwise known as a BBQ. They own a beautiful home complete with a separate entertaining complex, tennis court, and pool. Not to mention the coconut trees and occasional wild monkey swinging in them.



Luciana's parents also own a ranch just outside of Sao Paulo. Behind us is an orchard of bananas, nuts, and various fruits.


At the ranch, Mimi ( the owner behind me), had over 200 head of sheep. I loved playing with the baby lambs.



This picture and the narration that follows was provided by Richard. He was only pretending to be me to try and encourage me to actually get on the blog that I started and do something with it. I guess it worked.

Hubby and I went to Brazil, sans kids and loved every minute of it! Here we are in the city of Garopaba in the state of Santa Catarina. We loved it there!

Richard had been planning this trip for over twenty years. In August of 2009 it finally became a reality. The trip was really two trips in one. We spent the first six days in Garopaba. This was the relaxing part of the trip. In hindsight, it would have been best to end here.

The last seven days was spent with our friends and their family in Vinhedo, a commuter city about 30 miles west of Sao Paulo. There was nothing relaxing about this portion of the trip. We were running and having fun until midnight or one in the morning EVERY night! However, it was all so fun.



You can see all the fun we had here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/41564519@N07/

More photos to follow...