Rockin' Thanksgiving

First off, let me just say that is shocking how much weight you can gain over a 3 day period. Shocking. But it is OK, all of that weight just went into my belly and face--hardly noticeable.

Thanksgiving was fabulous as usual. We spend the evening before Thanksgiving as well as Thanksgiving at Brodi's parents house where we make our stuffing (bread, sage and about 14 cubes of butter) and then we spend the rest of the time eating and eating and eating. I want to feel the pain of being full and trust me, I felt it. I felt it real good. The kids love this because they get the full attention of their grandma and grandpa as well as hanging out with their Gubler cousins. The kids had a contest of spelling different words at the dinner table and laughing their heads off at some of the words they had to spell. Lets just say that the older cousins did a bit better at this game than the younger ones.



The next day we head down to our family ranch down in central Utah where we spend a couple of days eating and playing hard. The ranch is beautiful and lodging is awesome. There is a bedroom and a bathroom for every adult couple as well as another bedroom and a bathroom for ever family's kids (14 bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, yes, you read that correct).





Carter and Beckham could not get enough of it all. Carter calls it: Grandma Kate's Desert House. We then spent the next 2 days hiking to see Indian art, riding four wheelers over thousands of acres and riding horses. They especially liked the hike. What could be better than having hilly desert land in front of you, a nice trail, all of your cousins and few rules? Beckham did have one of his silent tantrums. This tantrum consists of him getting angy over something, laying face first on the ground (or dirt as it was, as we were on a hike) and not moving for a couple of minutes. When he decides that he has won the argument, he gets up and acts like nothing happened. Adorable, unless it was your kid. And Beckham is my kid.



Carter rode the horse all by himself. In fact, he asked that Brodi not steer the horse for him after a while as well. Beckham loved it as well, but he wanted Brodi to sit with him (though he has also ridden a horse all by himself).







The four-wheeling was fun as it was open roads every where you went. The kids just sat in the four-wheeler, clenched their teeth and hung on, laughing and talking the whole way.








Dinner was massive as every family made it their duty to bring lots of food. Plenty of food. And overall the trip was as fun as expected even though Beckham was a bit confused with me sleeping in his bed with him (he wouldn't sleep in the crib or on blankets on the floor, so he got to join me in the bed...Carter slept with Brodi) so we spent about 3-hours in the middle of the night hanging out with my trying to convince him it was time to go to sleep and him trying to convince me that I was wrong.

Overall, a very nice weekend and it is back to the grind of school, work, etc...

www.internetconnectionaddiction.com

I remember getting home from mission in 1995 and going to my sister Eden's house to check out this internet thingy. We turned on the computer and logged on and the computer slowly but surely chugged and chugged and spit out an early version of espn.com. It took about 5 minutes to open up the page but I was in heaven. I could get all the sports info that I wanted, even if it took me several hours to check out a few websites.

Now, I wonder how we ever lived without it. You remember trying to find business phone numbers? If it was out of state, you were in a lot of hurt trying to track down those numbers. Now, everything is at a touch of the finger. Movies...videos...toys...jokes...it is all there and you can find it in seconds. I stay connected, for better or for worse, at all times. I check my work emails at 2am if I happen to wakeup (it is easy with an iphone). We check our websites and our emails on family trips. I check out the latest sports news at 6am or at midnight. No doubt, it is an addiction.





To be honest, I do this blog for myself and Brodi. But it has been fun to document useless things, things happening in our lives and anything that has caught my fancy. I have family and friends that can stay connected to us by simply typing in our web address. It is pretty cool. Thanks to any of you that read this blog and find something interesting or funny here.

Apples Apples Apples Apples Apples Apples Apples Apples

I have an apple tree that every other year it decides it wants to grow lots and lots of apples. Sometime in early October, these apples start getting ripe and we eat a few here and there (cute Zoe will snack on them all year) but for the most part, I just wait for them to fall.






They do fall. Sometime in November. Sometime in December and sometime in January. But this week, we had a windy night and they came tumbling down. Hundreds fell (don't get me wrong though, we still have hundreds left). As you can tell, our lawn is littered with them. The cool thing is that our driveway is as well which leads to some tasty rotten applesauce coating our driveway.





If any of you want fabulous apples for an apple pie, come to our house and pick our apples. For free. Please come. Come and get it. Now.

the blog of Brodi

My babe of a wife has her very own writing blog. This is a blog dedicated to her experiences of writing a book, searching for an agent, finding an agent, etc. Check it out. It rocks.

www.brodiashton.blogspot.com

Rascal-ly and smart and creative

I don't know where to start with Beckham. The kid is a troublemaker. The terrible twos are hitting him right now before he hits 3 years old. He is very independent and he takes no crap from anyone. He makes you want to pull your hair out and the next minute, seriously, you want to hug his guts out. He is an absolutely maddeningly wonderfully crazy awesome little boy.








The other day for breakfast, I offered him some cereal that Carter was eating. He didn't want it and for some reason, he thought I was going to cram open his mouth and force feed him this cereal. So, he jumped off his chair, came around to me and grabbed the box of cereal. He then took it into our family room and put it between two bookcases. He then ran over to the couch and grabbed two pillows and stuffed them between those two bookcases to hide the cereal. He then sat down on the floor with his back to the pillows...and then crossed his arms and didn't move. Beckham seemed to be daring me to try and get the cereal away from him.



Well last night, Brodi and I headed out to Traverse Mountain to pick up a bunkbed we just purchased for the boys. After we did that, we visited our friend Joey and his family at his spectacular home. Well, we were about to leave and I put Beckham in his carseat, turned on the truck and closed the door. Well, you guessed it, it was now locked with the engine running. So, Beckham in his carseat, car is running and we are all outside looking in at him. He was not pleased. We ended up calling the Sherrif's office to help us get into our truck. In the meantime, Beckham somehow wiggled his way out of the seatbelt and his carseat and next thing we know, he was in the front seating just looking at us. After some yelling and pointing to him on what buttons to push, he finally rolled down the window. Our kid is a freakin' genius.

Yes Beckham is a troublemaker, but he is an adorable and smart troublemaker.

Ahead of their time

When I was growing up, the Brady Bunch was the coolest show on tv (at least for a 6-year old). I loved to think my family was the Brady Bunch, with our 3 boys and our 3 girls. Who doesn't love the Brady Bunch?

What you may have forgotten was...not only were they all very talented actors and actresses but they were musical geniuses. Add their singing to go along with the spot on choreography and you have an instant classic on your hands. If you are toe tappin' by the end of these numbers, then you must not have a musical bone in your body.



I got this next number from List of the Day. This song includes great lines such as "Phones never rang till I met you"..."Wise men never knew"..."Clowns never laughed before"..."Ponies never ran before" till I met you.

Trees and its Leaves: A Love Story with lots of hatred mixed in

One thing that I love about where we live is the number of trees we have in our neighborhood. Big, majestic, mature trees. It gives our area a great look. Our front yard, with the large trees, is seriously probably 20 degrees cooler in the summer than it is out in the street thanks to the leaf cover the trees provide.

But this love of trees really only happens from March until early October. Then it turns to unabashed hatred. Why would anyone hate a tender innocent tree, you may ask...well, those innocent trees drop leaf after leaf after leaf after leaf after, well, you get the point. My trees are mocking me. They drop some down in early October, then they drop a few more in early November...all the while waiting for big snowstorms. Then a big snowstorm hits and they dump even more leaves. Then the trees wait. Well, let me rephrase--my trees wait. They wait until December and they unload some more. They wait until January snow and then dump some more. They clog my rain gutters. They layer and suffocate my perfect lawn.



I am picking leaves up from mid-October until sometime in January. Last year? 85 bags of leaves. That is not a misprint. The year before, 90 bags of leaves. This year, it is up to 24 bags and as you can see from the picture, my trees still have 70% or more of their leaves. Good times. If you ever wonder where I am during the Fall and Winter, good guess is that I am in my lawn cursing under my breath as I fill up another clear plastic bag with leaves.







And don't get me started on that abominable apple tree of mine. Those freakin' apples will hang on for dear life until they start dropping rotten apples from the tree in the middle of February. Free applesauce in the middle of winter for any of you that want it. Rant over. Carry on.

Pictures of the Past

I just received these pictures from my cousin Marc. These were pictures from up in Bear Lake and I am assuming that they were taken around 1980 or so.

As you can see, I am wearing a very stylish tank top in the picture. Don't get me wrong, I am very comfortable in my metrosexiness but tanktops are rarely a good idea even on a shockingly adorable 5-year old boy. As you can see as well, my cousins had the nerdiness vibe going on, but they all turned out to be very un-nerdy. I am on the bottom left next to my brother Josh. My brother Christian is in the yellow next to my grandpa. All of the other boys are the Pinnocks (Larry, Marc, Nate, Jon and Roger).



This is a picture of all of my brothers/sisters and our Pinnock cousins. I am on the front row, 2nd from the left. My sister Martha is the middle of the front row, my brother Josh is next to her. My mom is ont he top row on the left, right behind my grandma. My sister Emily is the brunette on the back row and my sister is partially hidden standing next to my grandpa. I was the youngest by a couple of years but it was nice because I had all of my cousins looking out for me. We usually spent a few weekends a year up at Bear Lake...though my uncle Hugh always seemed to find time for us all to spend a few hours working on the cabins.

obligatory Halloween pictures

So we showed Carter different costume options to see what he wanted to be. He wasn't sure but he happily looked through all of the different costumes. He finally found a Pumpkin costume which he thought was pretty cool and we thought we had a winner...until, he found another costume. A dementer. Yes, a very creepy Harry Potter dementer. He had his heart set on it. And we as parents caved in on it and decided to go for it. Let me tell you, that was one spooky costume and he could not have been happier.







Beckham also got very lucky and was a cow. I tried to say that he was a Pakistani cow, but in reality he was just a good old american one.







They both loaded up on the candy. Too much candy. Cool thing was that I could go thru their candy and take out the good stuff (Dots--oh yea, they were gone the minute they went into their bags...swedish fish? Same thing, gone in 10 seconds). Let me just say that I have managed to evenly distribute the extra 5 pounds of weight that I gained all thru my thighs and other regions.