Spring 2009 Adventures

I didn't include the captions for these photos because they blocked half of the picture. To see them all in a web-album with captions go to this link :
http://picasaweb.google.com/kathigh27/Spring2009Happenings?authkey=Gv1sRgCM361--M8Kz6MQ&feat=directlink

Well, this spring has been busy to say the least.
Let's see . . . right after the pinewood derby Greg lost his first front tooth (he is pictured against a brown wall).

We got to go to a cabin up in Island Park with all of Brett's brothers and their families for a weekend full of snow machining and sledding - that was really fun and relaxing.

Easter came and the kids looked adorable in their Easter clothes (I am sure you can figure out which photo that is).

Then the last couple of weeks of school really dragged for me. Finally I finished out the semester and gladly I can consider myself a senior DH student. Now I am really busy doing all the stuff that I haven't been able to do since in school, like chaperoning for field trips.

This past weekend we went to CJ Strike reservoir (over by Mt. Home Idaho) and camped for four days. The crappie fishing was HOT. The kids were catching fish at a rate that was amazing, almost every cast at some times. Two of Brett's brothers, and families, plus his best friend and his older kids came too. By the end of the first day we had completely filled a cooler with crappie (that was approx. 200 fish). We gave that away and by the second night we had filled another cooler. From then on we fished "catch and release" only :). The slide show has photos of Jackson holding a large mouth bass that he caught on our last night there. He was pretty excited about that, as were we all. He released it though so that it could get even bigger. It was really exciting to see all of our kids able to cast, catch, pull the hooks out, release and even re-hook their own line when it broke (most of the time) - all by themselves. That is pretty impressive considering crappie have sharp spines sticking out with their fins and they don't like to hold still. Brett really enjoyed seeing all of us having fun catching fish. It took him almost 3 hours to fillet the cooler full of crappie that we brought home. I think I need to plan on cooking crappie at least once a week for a while.

On the way to the reservoir we stopped to eat dinner and Jackson came over to me and said "Mom, something feels weird" and then he opened his mouth. Well, one of his front teeth were gone. He apparently took a bite of pizza and it came out and he swallowed it. It was pretty funny. Then two days later, while camping, he lost the other one. The photo of him holding the large mouth bass -face forward- shows his toothless grin pretty good.

Overall, our spring has been fun, busy and full of memories made. We are so grateful to have family and friends to make those memories with and look forward to the many memories we have yet to make this summer.