April 5 - Dad's Birthday

 Well when you are three hours from the nearest Walmart, and more to the main shopping town, you tend to bundle a whole bunch of stuff into one day, so then you go long periods of time collection activities, lists, and needs until the much awaited day when you go to town. You leave very early in the morning and are lucking if you make it home very early in the morning of the next day. Today was such a day!
Now while these days tend to be strenuous, but they always include lots of laughs and memories!
For today's agenda we are hauling some steers for the Ranch that dad works at, delivering the last pup from the litter, and best of all, celebrating my wonderful Daddy!

Dad, when asking for a day off, told his boss that we wanted to take him someplace special for his birthday. His boss paid for our trip by having us drop off the cows and as a birthday gift for dad, he bought our lunch! 

This is where the pup rode all day, he did great! It sure is fun to have a pup along! 

At the thrift store he "helped" with the shopping.

 Lunch was at a family favorite, Olive Garden.
But before we went in, Dad got his gift.

Gabe, Shea, and Garrett keeping dad from the van while the girls got it ready for him. 

I love this face! It isn't often that we can surprise dad! I think he likes it!

He actually came home and broke it in by running his new weed-eater all afternoon. The pasture looks amazing now! 

I so love these two!

 Dad's boss made the joke that we needed to take dad to a Mexican restaurant so he could wear the sombrero. Well we went to an Italian Restaurant, so this was the best he could do. 

 We ended the day with some shopping and the opportunity to meet some wonderful people who were excited to get their puppy!

We are daily blessed with the Daddy that God saw fit to design for our family! I am so proud of him and all he does, it is so wonderful to have a day set aside like this for such a special man!

March 10-12 - Puppy Deliver Trip

Early on the morning of the 10th, Shea, 9 pups, and I headed out to Portland. Most of the buyers for this litter live nearer to Portland than they do to us, so it made sense to meet there... or so I thought. This trip really taught Shea and I about how to work together as a team better, and to handle emergencies far from Mom and Dad's ready help. A huge thank you to a family friend who were just amazing through all of it! But I'm getting ahead of myself.
If you've ever driven through East Oregon, you will know that cell service is questionable to say the least. Heading from Kimberly to Portland, the windmill farm is always a mile marker, one of the first reliable places to contact home and let them know how we are doing. Zach answered when we called, and in a goofy conversation with Shea, he requested that we "take a picture of a windmill for him..pwease." So we took a picture of every type of windmill we saw just for him.

We arrived without issue in the park where we planned to drop pups off. One pup went off the 10th and the others would go the 11th. Both humans and dogs were desperate to stretch their legs after a 5 hour drive that we played in the park for a bit.

Shea, in a moment of mania, wanted to climb this pipe. And do you know, it was full of water!

He had more energy than he has a right to.

 So now the fun starts! The reason Shea went along is because he bought a part car on craigslist to fix up the one he already has. After we left the park we headed over the U-Haul place to pick up the car dolly. We arrived at a very run down gas station manned by two very...um...how shall I put this...unprofessional young men. They hadn't rented out a U-Haul vehicle in a while, and when we saw the dolly, chagrin set in. The lighting cable was nonexistent, the wheel guards were in bad need of something, like duct tape, lots of it. The gas station attendant told us where to go and walked off. I asked him after we hooked up if there was some sort of checking out we needed to do. And he said that not only did he not know how to check us out if needed, they didn't even have the computer facilities to do it.
So, probably foolishly, we headed out on the road. We were headed toward a part store to fix the wheel guard, and lights, when another U-Haul driver drove up next to us on the busiest highway we had been on all day. And he started yelling something at us. We were pretty freaked out as you can guess. For a while we tried not to look at him, until Shea saw that he was pointing toward the trailer. Thinking something was wrong with it, we started trying to read his lips. Or I did, Shea firmly kept his eyes on traffic, finally after he repeated it several times, I realized what he was saying. "Your trailer is stolen!" Immediately I knew what he was talking about. We found a place to pull over with him following us. It turned out that he was a manager of U-Haul, had seen the state of the trailer, and called in to see what was going on. He was super nice about it all, and sent us to a new place to swap out the trailer. We still made it to the place to pick up the car on time too. We kind of figured that this was going to be our challenge for the trip, little did we know.

Beautiful Sunrise that our Lord painted for us!

We planned on staying at a friend's house that night. They have a farm out in the country, so we could have a place for all the pups to stay. It was a 2.5-3 hour drive to their place, and we didn't get started until about 6pm (we were way over on the other side of Portland at this point picking up the car). We stopped to get supper on the way, and by the time we got to the town they live near, we were exhausted. That's when it happened. We were coming up to a sharp corner on the dirt road leading to their house. Shea forgot about the corner (as it really is no issue in the daylight) and I was pretty drowsy. By the time he saw it, it was too late. With the added weight of the car on the back and the bad breaks of the truck, we slid through the corner and totaled 3 mail boxes nailed to a post!
There is a huge bumper on the truck, so when we started coming out of the stupid shock that this caused Shea said, "Well, the front is okay at least." Ha, the cooler for the transmission had been sliced by a piece of metal...you've got it, on the bumper. Praise God, other than the damage to the cooler and the mail boxes, we were okay. The pups, in a kennel in the back, didn't even wake up.

We walked to our friend's house as we couldn't move the truck. The dad and two of his sons came down to help get us out. By then it was nearly midnight, and I had a early appointment for one of the pups, so we went to bed.

Early the next morning, while I was taking care of the pups, Shea was taking off the cooler. Our friends let us borrow their car to head to the Dalles for parts.

My hero! He has such an amazing ability!

Little GemmaPearl riding to meet her new family, through all of this, it sure was nice to have puppies to cuddle!

After the meeting, and a very fruitless search for the right part, our friend called and offered to let us use the car to deliver the rest of the pups. They truly went above and beyond the call of duty in all of this! We are so honored to have people like this to help us out!
So off the Portland again we went. The rest of the day went off well, and everyone was thrilled with their new babies. Though I was having a hard time letting them go. Shea said that all the stress may be God's way of keeping me from crying in public...I guess that could be so....

We had planned on shipping one of the pups by air on the 10th, but due to a mistake on the paperwork, it didn't work out. As bad as I felt for his new family that was waiting for him, it sure was nice to have him around all day!

We headed to the hardware store to pick up some more mailboxes, and supplies to fix them. To the car wash, to wash and vacuum our the car. It was fun for the two country bumpkins in the big city.

The pup slept through the whole car wash, I guess he was as tired as we were. 

Back to the parts store to get the parts we ordered to fix the truck we went. By this time we both were pretty much whipped out. We got back to our friend's house at about dark, and Shea, being the mechanical genius fixed the truck that night. It meant another "past midnight" day, but the truck was running, and we were ecstatic!
The morning of the 12th we were up long before light to take care of those mail boxes, and we were nearly done by the time the sun came up. After a thankful Good Bye to our friends, we headed home at last! We made it home to the loving arms of the rest of our crew at last at about 2 o' clock that afternoon.

It truly was a magnificent experience, where we had to continue to move forward even with the mistakes we made along the way. I tell you what, our God blessed Shea and I immensely through the whole trip. 

May 4 - Gabe's Basket Ball Tournament

With a sad, excited heart, we come to the last day of peewee basket ball for Gabe. He has improved so much over the last year, and did fantastic! Ever kid on the court played their hardest and did an amazing job, this was easily the best game any of them had played.

The climax of the day started in the 2nd half of the last game. Blue (Gabe's team) was nearly 20 points behind purple, the kids were so tied and there was lots of emotional stress on the court. Gabe asked his coach if it would be alright if they prayed over the game, his amazing coach went ahead and called a timeout so Gabe could pray over the rest of the game. His prayer wasn't for the Blues to win, but for everyone who was in the gym would go away knowing that this was the best game they had played and that this would be a memorial in the hearts of all the kids. He prayed that God would protect them and give them the drive to do better than they had done all day and for Him to do the same thing for the other team. 

Blue came out with a whole new energy to play and they very quickly made up those lost points, everyone watching was on their feet cheering for both teams! 3 more seconds to the end of the game, Blue had just made a 2 point shot, purple had to make a 3 pointer to win. This little boy who hadn't made a 3 point shot all season had the ball, he was headed back to his basket, but there was no way he could make it to the basket. Someone yelled, "SHOOT!" And he wound up and with one hand catapulted the ball from 3/4 of the court away.

He made it, nothing but net! Easily the best shot I had ever seen. Purple won! And just like Gabe prayed, it was a memorable game! What an amazing way to end peewee basketball!

April 21 - Missoula Children's Theater

If you have never watched or participated in the Missoula Children's theater, you are missing out. We watched it when it came to Spray, OR last October, and it was so much fun! Garrett especially was intrigued by it all, and when we found out it was coming to Monument, Garrett decided to join it. He tried out and was hoping for at least a medium part and got handed one of the biggest parts. The play was a very big spin off of Gulliver's Travels, only in space...and including the force...and stranded with only a computer to help...and teleporters to other planets. It was a lot of fun, Garrett got to play the role of the Computer JCN (pronounced Jason), he did an excellent job. JCN basically was a computer system that broke down at every important moment.

The whole cast did a great job and the play went off great, it was so enjoyable. The two people who put it on from Missoula, Melissa and Terri did an amazing job teaching the kids. They all had a wonderful time!!

JCN and Gulliver just crash landed.

When asked for directions, JCN is computing, computing, Com..pu.iwheerrr.

JCN trying to come up with an answer.

Garrett's Group, JCN, the amazing back stage director and Gulliver.

Thank you Terri and Melissa for all you did for Garrett, he absolutely loved it!!!

March 31 - April 3 - Trip to Seattle

Since orchard work is about to start with a vengeance, we took a long weekend trip up to visit friends in Washington, originally we planned to go to the tulip festival, but the season is quite a bit later than it normally is so we played to tourist for several days. Now I thought that we had seen just about all there was to see locally when we went up there in August, boy was I wrong, we could fill several visits with things to do there.
The evening we arrived our host took us for a beautiful walk in the wood by their house. At the head of the trail there is a huge stump of a fallen tree that had been logged off. It had holes carved into it for the loggers to stand on. It must have been absolutely magnificent when those trees were standing, and I can't even imagine how much wood came off the tree.

Along the path there was lots of rope course obstacles hanging from the trees, Shea had lots of fun with some of them.

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Our hosts very generously played tour guide and took us to go see some daffodil fields which were in full bloom, and Janessa got some amazing pictures!\

The next morning, so April Fools day, they took us up to Seattle and we spent all day playing the tourist. Just about everything you can do for free in Seattle we did. It's absolutely amazing how much you can see of one of the most historical cities in the West United Sates for practically nothing! We had an awesome time! The first stop was Seattle Center, and the Mo Pop museum, which we didn't actually go in, but we had a great time walking around the Center. The first things we saw were theses weird poles that had absolutely no rime or reason to them, but they made a great Photo prop.

 In the center is this huge rope made playground, we had just had a couple of long drives under our belt, so we all jumped in and played in and around the playground for well over an hour. For a couple of us, this was the best part of the trip and for all of us it was in the top 5 best things we did.

And of course, towering over the entire center was the Seattle Needle tower. WARNING! This made a great photo prop, so you'll see it a lot.

We rode the Monorail next, for us country hicks, we all got quite a kick out of it. Gabriel was fascinated with how it drove and asked the driver a million questions.

We had a nice, long walk down town to the library, and Janessa took lots of pictures of the ornamental work on the outside of the buildings.

We walked past a building and staring right at us, was the very odd building! This ladies and gentlemen is the Seattle Library, easily the weirdest building I have ever seen. If any of y'all end up in Seattle, you can't leave until you see the inside of this building.

Janessa took lots of picture of the inside, but I'm only going to use a couple, for two reasons. One this blog post will probably be putting you to sleep by now as long as it is, and two ya'll will just have to come see for yourselves. In one of the many rooms of the library is a map room with the cool globe. We spent quite some time looking at the geography of the history we've been studying in school. It is so neat when you get to see how the shape of the rocks can effect history and often do.

 The colors in this place are absolutely amazing, and the many escalators to get up to the top floor were painted in this poison green color.

Back down to the Center after that to see the Fountain and eat lunch. When I was told we were going to watch a fountain, I had the idea of a classic fountain in my mind, let me tell you, there was nothing classic about this fountain. It had the most random way of spraying, and everyone was trying to time it so they could touch the fountain without getting wet.

We were all running out of gas about now so we slowly started back toward the car, but we did take time to get some pictures of the group at the base of the tower.

 At the base of the tower is a museum and the 4 corner posts of the museum are the legs of the tower. Shea made a really nice effort to unscrew the 12 inch bolt of the tower, but even with all the leverage that he has, it didn't do any good, made for a funny photo though.

 On the way out, this man waylayed us with his constant banter and balloon creations. He had us all mesmerized for quite some time.

Such a fun day, filled with memories!!