No more training

This past week we took off Eli's training wheels from his bike. This video is from that very day. He is excellent! Much better than we anticipated. The only problem is that he doesn't have confidence to start himself. So we have to barely hold on to him, to help him get started, but that he just goes straight for it! Go Eli!

John Deere Fall Fest

We heard about the John Deere Fall Fest and decided to ride our bikes and go see it. It was really fun. They had so many tractors there, smaller trackers, huge tracers, one-of-a-kind tractors. It was great and the boys loved it!

The Pacifier Fairy

Last Tuesday, (Josh's birthday) we decided to finally have the pacifier fairy come. Morgan was taking the boys outside to play so we put all of the pacifiers in a bag and left it on the bookshelf for the pacifier fairy to take away while they were outside. The Fairy came, and left Josh with a new Elmo doll.

Joshua's Birthday

We celebrated Josh's 2nd birthday on Labor day since we were in Chillicothe with our family. We had a great day. I did presents in the morning so Josh would have time to play with them before nap-time. He got a frisbee, a bunch of toy cars (which he loves!) and his big present was a new tricycle. The first thing he said when he took the blanket of the trike, was, "My bike!" He new exactly what it was and that it was for him. He's not really into sharing it yet, but he loves riding it around.
His birthday cake was a rhubarb upside down cake made with strawberry cake mix. It was great!

Kid-Free Weekend

Saturday morning Shannon took the boys with her to Cedar Rapids and then on to Chillicothe to Grandma and Grandpa's house.

So with our free time we ran some errands, birthday shopping for Josh, and a trip to Lowe's. It is so fun to go shopping without little kids wanting to touch everything. I wanted to go browse through many stores, we had other things to do.

We ended up going on a 3+ bike ride (one way) to our friend's, the Evans' house and helped them paint their basement. After we made it home we mowed the lawn and Morgan used our new edger to clean up the sidewalk areas a little bit. After a shower and dinner we headed back to the Evans and listen to the BYU football came on KSlradio.com and played some ticket to ride. It was a great evening.

Sunday we went to church without our boys and didn't have Eli dragging one of us to bear testimony with him. I taught the Primary Sharing time lesson and had a really good lesson. Junior primary went well, and Senior primary was amazing, the kids really discussed our lesson and the Spirit could be felt. (That is not always the case!)

After church we went to a house warming party for one of the attorney's at Morgans firm and had a really good time visiting with everyone and just relaxing. Afterwards we made our trip down to Chillicothe and Monday has been spent relaxing with family and having a little birthday party for Josh. I'll do another post on that later.

Hard Work

We've been working hard on our house. Here are some pictures of the work we've done in the basement. We've had to scrape out the loose mortar between bricks then fill the bigger holes with "great stuff" gap filler. And finally we will cover that with mortar mix. We are actually almost done with the mortar mix part.
After that we'll scrape the extra mortar off the walls, clean up the basement, and eventually we'll paint all the walls and possibly the floor a white-ish color so that when we get heavy rains again we will be able to tell where there are other leaks. Hopefully there won't be any! :0)

Saturday our friend Michael came over to help us with the basement, we were able to finish all we could do pretty quickly. So instead of resting we pulled the carpet out of the dining room and cleaned the floor. As you can see we've got nice oak floors. I was a little hesitant of doing it now, but Morgan did a wonderful job. And as usual, he was right that it is much better than the carpet. I've got a smart husband!