My kid can beat up your kid...

...or at least roll over and squash yours.

My little guy doesn't look much like a little guy next to cousin Grady.  

At two weeks, Grady is still nearly a pound smaller than what Strider's birth weight was.

I can't wait to see these two at Christmas time.

Baby Grady 1 week     -     Baby Strider 5 months

We are so happy that everything went well for the delivery of Grady

and that we have a new little cousin to love.

Mmmm Pizza

It is always interesting when we get the cousins together.  Dresden & Collin and Logan & Sydney are little characters when they are together.  Tonight we did one of our "swaps". Collin is spending the night here and Logan is with Sydney.  I'm not sure how much longer the Sydney/Logan pair will last but I'm hoping forever...not the sleepover aspect of it but the friendship part.

So tonight I have let Dresden and Collin sort of do their thing.  We went for a quick walk and then the boys have been outside pretty much the rest of the night.  We bought pizza for dinner and they used the box for a rescue mission.  It had been raining so there were lots of critters that needed rescuing. Well, I'm not sure the critters needed rescuing but Collin and Dresden were certain they would find every single one they could and save them.  I'm pretty sure a couple of the neighbors were happy to see them gone...

I think the final count was 38 before I told the boys I didn't want any more snails "rescued" and that we needed to find a new home for the ones we did have.  The new home was snail heaven after Larry fed them snail bait. I think there are lots of flowers thanking us tonight.

Little Cottonwood Canyon

I love living so close to the mountains but I never really take advantage of the beautiful hiking trails that are so readily available to us.  This summer I have tried to spend at least one day in the canyons.  Last week we walked around Silver Lake up Big Cottonwood Canyon, this week I decide we would hike to Cecret Lake up Little Cottonwood Canyon.  We drove up the canyon only to find out that the road to the trail head is still closed.  If we hiked the road to the trail head, that would add 2.5 miles to the .75 mile hike that we were planning on.  We decided we would come another day when we had planned a better pack with more supplies.  We headed back down the canyon and I decided to stop at a waterfall that I know of on the North side of the road.  It is a tiny little hike to the waterfall so we unloaded the car and went to find the waterfall.  We were really enjoying our time...

There were these Ladybug like bugs that were all over the mossy rocks.  Logan was very interested in them and told me that they couldn't be Ladybugs because they don't have black spots on their backs.

 Logan, the camera man, was playing with special effects and made my legs look extra large.  : )

We were wanting to cross the river so I showed the boys a way we could cross.  The boys had to drop down about a 4 foot boulder but I decided to take the safer approach and go around through the trees for a gradual drop.  As I stepped up from a rock to go through the trees I saw a snake.  I paused for a brief moment thinking that it was only a water snake or something and as I thought about taking a step forward I scanned the body to the end and notice that this snake had a distinct rattle at the end.  I quickly backed down off the rock and herded the boys and our little hike abruptly came to an end.  I have to admit, I was pretty freaked out.  I have never seen a rattlesnake before in nature.  He didn't coil up and looked like he was trying to make a mad dash out of my way but it really did frighten me.  All I could think about was one of us getting bit and I would have to try to make my way with a baby and a hurt somebody out to the canyon road to find help.  Dresden and Logan were both a little worried and were afraid we would run into another snake.  I assured them I have never seen a rattlesnake all my years I have been hiking.  I think I better get them out hiking again soon so this doesn't give them some sort of complex about running into snakes when hiking.

Discovery Gateway

Today we attended the neighborhood play group which was held at Discovery Gateway.  The boys weren't too interested in going until I mentioned they could each take a friend.  Spencer and Brayden joined us for the outing.  I really think the boys have outgrown this place because the only thing that really entertained them was one of the newer attractions, large foam domino's.  Of course they loved this because it meant knocking something and someone over...and they sure did enjoy knocking each other over!

Antique Car Museum...

...if you consider a garage a museum.  On the list of museums that we have wanted to visit the Antique Car Museum was next on the list.  Dresden has been very interested in cars for the last few months so when I told him I found a car museum we could go to he has asked nearly every day if we could go to it.  Finally, the day arrived that I planned for us to visit the museum.  We got up and got ready and headed for downtown.  The museum hours say they are open from 8am to 8pm so I thought our 9:20am arrival would be perfect.  We unloaded the van, got Strider into the carrier, and headed for the door but we were stopped and told that no one was there yet.  Hmmm, the neon "OPEN" sign in the window must have been left on from the day before.  NICE.  The lady that stopped us told me that she was there to work and that the owner would be there within the half hour to open up.  She did open a gate and told us we could browse around out back.  We headed through the chain link fence into a parking lot of, well, junk.  There was an old ambulance that looked like the car in Ghost Busters but it started raining so we bailed and waited in the van.  Once the owner arrived we strapped Strider onto me, once again, and headed for the museum.  When you first walk in there is a desk right in front of you and a staircase to the left.  Both were piled high with papers.  I think this must have been their filing system.  On the desk was this nasty old candy dish that had a few pieces of wrapped candy in it but the candy dish also looked like it was used as an ash tray.  Seriously, I should have taken a picture of it because it was awful!  Anyway, we moved through the office part and into a garage "museum" where all the cars were kept.  They were packed in like sardines.  The boys could see past all the filth, dust, and clutter and really enjoyed looking at all the antique cars.  I do have to say this about the museum, this collection belongs to one man.  He has collected cars his entire life and is doing a good service by letting the public come and view his private collection and donating the profit to the West Valley Boys Ranch. So, I get that this is more of a hobby and less of a business venture so I'm willing to cut the guy some slack. Also, he couldn't have been nicer to the boys.  As we were leaving he gave each of the boys a toy truck. 

   This was in a garage across the street from the museum (the less valuable cars???).

  A horseless carriage.

 

This car was beautiful.  I love the spare tire with the colored spokes and the boys loved that the trunk opened up for a seating area.

Dresden asked me before we left home if I thought they would have a limousine.  I honestly didn't think they would but I was wrong.  Here they are standing in front of one.

Another shot of them by the limo and another really neat car.

The neighbor across the street has a Corvette so Dresden thinks they are pretty cool.  I don't love them so much but this one was amazing.  It was a true beauty!  The yellow was the perfect color of yellow and the white complimented it so well.  I love the whitewall tires with yellow accent, the chrome, and especially the white leather interior.  I could handle driving this around.

I seriously think cars need to be made like this again.

How cool is the white car with the turquoise stripe down the side.

But what I really loved about this car was the matching leather interior.

Those seats are just awesome, not to mention how cool it is that the

steering wheel was also leather wrapped in the same turquoise color.

Seriously, the interior of this car was to die for.

On June 30th Larry and I celebrated our 11th anniversary.  The big boys extended their vacation with the Rudel's and spent the night with them.  Strider was with Larry's parents so we planned dinner and a movie.  We finished dinner pretty quickly and had about an hour to kill before the movie started.  The oil needed to be changed in the car so we drove past Jiffy Lube but neither one of us like that place so we drove on.  We decided to drive to the Auto Mall to see if the Honda Dealership would change the oil.  We pulled in and rolled down the window to ask one of the salesmen if the service department was open, it wasn't.  He got us talking and was complimenting how great our car looked. (It had just been washed and waxed so it looked pretty nice)  The salesmen, being the good salesmen he was, got us out of the car looking at other cars.  We asked him if they could give us an idea of what the trade-in value would be for our car, which got us inside the dealership playing the pricing game.  They actually told us they would pay us more than what we owed on the car so we were pretty interested to see what we could work out.  We were shown a minivan that would be pretty practical for our new family size but we weren't very excited about the thought of what that would mean for our lovely car that we both LOVE.  Anyway, we had an idea of what we would be willing to pay for the minivan.  They kept playing the number game and coming back with a larger number than what we wanted to pay for the minivan.  They finally got their number within a couple hundred dollars of what we were willing to pay so we finally agreed to trade in our sweet car for the new practical minivan. 

 

This would have been the car Dresden got to drive when he turned 16...

 

 

 Now he will get to drive this...

 

We should have just gone to Jiffy Lube.