Spring Break in Missouri

We have some pretty easy going traveling kids.  They have been at it for the majority of their lives in fact.  When we decided to hop in the car and drive 9 or 10 hours to our Uncle Adam's house in Missouri for Spring Break this year, it was no biggie.

 We love spending time with Adam and Tiff's family.  They have 2 little girls that think the boys are the best, funniest, coolest kids ever.  They recently had a baby boy and it was our first time to meet him. 

 It was Easter weekend when we got to their place and of course, we were prepared for some good times hunting for eggs, not something we usually do after church, but we counted it as FHE.

 

 

Here is little Miss Olivia, she was just tickled to find one egg.  Easy to please for sure.

Check out that egg! That bad boy was the Jack Pot egg. It was full to the max with candy. Grace is just so darn cute.  She has the littlest voice and its sorta scratchy sounding.  I love it.


Since the Joplin tornado a couple years ago Adam's family relocated to Carthage, just 15 minutes away. I was really thankful we had time to go back and see their old neighborhood, which was right down the road from the hospital.

 The hospital is gone, its been relocated.  Their old neighborhood is rebuilt.  The trees are still scary looking and basically the area is barren for greenery.  All of the new homes have storm bunkers right behind them now,  it was pretty incredible to see this area and then drive over just a few miles and it wasn't nearly so devastating.

 

You can tell right away the trees in the back ground have all their branches still, this is just a couple miles out of town.

 

 

We had to brave the rain and climb down to these great little places to throw rocks and hike around.  Just a week earlier, Justin's mom and her hubby visited the same spot and they had all sorts of sunshine.  Not fair. 
 

Grace was a trooper, she totally lasted outside longer that Justin and I did.  She had to be with the boys.  As much as possible.

I was super excited this shot worked out!  I had Jeremy's little Kodak, not my Coolpix, not too shabby.  You can see his hoodie is getting rather wet, I had my trusty umbrella.

 Never leave home without it.

 

Finally their little red noses had enough and we had to go, but it was an afternoon of super, boy geared fun, dangerous rocks to climb & rocks to throw into a river; perfection.  Love my boys.

 

You had a birthday shout HOORAY!

Cooper turned 11 this April.  HOLY COW!!  These kids just keep getting older as I get more fabulous and incredible. 

For the big day he had a few birthday boy requests, white cake with orange frosting and it must be layered!  Easily done.  It was delish.

 

 

 

 

Believe the picture above, not the crazy birthday boy below.

We love you Cooper!  Happy, Happy BIRTHDAY TO YOU!!!!! 

Racer's START YOUR ENGINES!!

This years Pinewood derby was the first official one for Austin.  He was so excited, nearly about to burst.

Up there at the stage( in the dark green) is our crazy Dad as the MC.  During downtime, he asks the boys to come up and tell some jokes....really corny ones of course, its Cub Scouts after all.  Well he got a doozy this time when Scotty Gottfredson got  up to tell us all one "What to you get when you cross LSD with LDS???????? A HIGH PRIEST" can you imagine the laughter, especially after he said his mom told him that one.  Justin had to calm down to get on with the racing.

 
I tried not to get the dreaded back of the head shots, but the little guy on Cooper's right was covering his eyes!  Too funny.  Here is Austin as well checking out the action.  He won several heats and so did Cooper.

As a matter of fact, he took 2nd Place in his Wolf Den, not too shabby for his first time!  As for Cooper...

We have ourselves an Over-all Champion, which qualified him to attend the District race!!  He was just thrilled of course.  Not bad at all.

Off we go to Texas!

Thanksgiving with the Wright side of the family is just plain crazy. The sheer numbers alone can deter the faint of heart, Justin's siblings, parents, step-parents, sister-in-laws, brother-in-laws, nieces, nephews AND a dog.

 We have been married for almost 15 years, so now I am used to it.  Whenever someone gets hitched and joins the family, they come to me asking how exactly I have handled these nut jobs all these years.  It never fails.  There are some things genetically engrained in this family, they love laughing, sports, good BBQ and talking about bodily functions.  The first time I met 2 future sister-in-laws and my father-in-law, the longest story over dinner was about childhood potty talk. C L A S S Y.  Now I know, just don't encouraged them by discouraging it, and it goes away faster.



So we trekked down to "mecca" for a wedding and to celebrate Thanksgiving.  Both events were Texas style all the way.  Boots, BBQ, and lots of two-stepping.

Cooper and another of his cousins were asked to be greeters for the wedding Ethan and Austin had a more of a spotlight job.  They were RING BEARERS!

My sister-in-law decorated with lots of cute things, since I am a country girl I of course loved the boots!

Jeremy didn't want to wear a hat at all.  Lucky for me though he really didn't scoff when I wanted a group shot of my handsome fellas. 

I really felt bad for these two, they had to stand in front of the whole crowd while the ceremony took place.  IT WAS LONG.  They held that ring pillow like champs.  It was a very big deal for them though and their Aunt was so dang thrilled that they were up there with her.

 Not all of the fam made it to the big event, but hey, as Justin would say "I am glad you got to see me!" such a cheese ball.  After all the wedding fun and food was over, we took some time to play at an amazing park in downtown Austin called Zilker Park.  The boys had a ball!

Of course the whole," lets just put our feet in" turned out to be just how wet can we get???  It was such a beautiful day and thankfully, the water was shallow.

 

 

I love this man and all the crazy that came with him when we said yes. 

Oh yumm, guts!

I love these crazy, handsome, funny, boys!
I also love the Fall.  ALOT.  I love that we can enjoy a warm-ish day and a cool evening.  I love taking the boys out to go for walks here in Ohio because the trees are so beautiful.  I haven't lived this far east before and the leaves here are gorgeous.  Out west it's quite pretty too, don't get me wrong, especially in my home town where the elevation is so high it makes those cool nights come even sooner.  When Justin and I started our family, we started some new traditions all our own, like getting pumpkins and carving or painting them.  This is not something we Larsen's did when growing up.  Maybe it was scenes like these that my parents wanted to avoid....

 

For one thing, our kitchen was a lot smaller than this!  I truly think we could never have found big beauties like these out in Idaho.  These bad boys were $1.99 at ALDI.  That place is a wonder.

 

 

 Something else I love, adore and all around swoon about fall is....wearing layers.  For real, I love pants and shirts, ones with long sleeves.  I sweat and suffer all summer long in my capris and tee shirts, layered with a tank-top.  It is torture!!  But my salvation comes at the beginning of October and lasts until late May when the long sleeves bid me adieu.

I hope the boys remember this crazy night.  They had better!  the guts that came out of these pumpkins seemed never ending.  Jeremy was out of the mess because he had no desire to carve his gourd this time around.  I also have suspicions he really wanted to bash it to pieces when the time came to put the masterpieces to their resting place in the trash can just before Thanksgiving rolled around.  He didn't get the chance Justin chucked that sucker in the trash before Jeremy knew it.

This shot of Cooper is priceless!  Sometimes they all ham it up for the camera, but this time I got the money shot !!!  You can practically smell the stinky smell! I do not love the nasty innards you see here, not the seeds not the goop, nada.

 

 

 

He's a good daddy to saw through all these beastly things!  Thank heavens for a good set of kitchen knives and a patient Dad. 

One Special Kid

When we were expecting Austin, we found out pretty quick he was a mighty special kid.  He had a whole slew of obstacles  to over come even before he made it out of my belly.  The first time we saw a ultra sound of him, we weren't even quite sure what the medical language was they used...Justin was a firefighter instructor at the time and we lived in west Texas.   Rather quickly though we learned about Omphalocele and Gastroscesis.  Thankfully and a bit miraculously, we had the omphalocele to deal with and not the other, much more serious condition of gastroscesis.  His intestines and possibly his liver were stuck in his umbilical cord.  We got into a quick routine of weekend check ups with a specialist in Ft. Worth, we stayed in the same hotel so often the gal at the desk remembered us.  When he was born he was 6 weeks early, emergency C-Section, on a sunny Sabbath morning.  And now, 8 years later he has overcome pneumonias, surgeries, reactive airway disease and heterotaxia syndrome.  He is AMAZING.  Happy Birthday Austin!!

 

 

 

Not only did we have a heck of a party with friends and all the brothers, we had a baptism a couple of months later.  Austin wanted to have grandparents come for his special day and September 16th worked out pretty nicely.  It was also the weekend Justin and Jeremy ran in the Air Force marathon weekend event.  The 5k for Jer and the 1/2 for Justin.

 

 

 

Can you really blame poor Ethan right here?  I bet we took at least 20 pictures and that was just right here in the entry way!  I really love this shot though, getting a candid one like this is pretty sweet.

 

Our "Poppa" came up from Texas for the whole hoopla, we call him poppa because we have multiple grandpas to keep track of.  My dad is Grandpa and we also have a Grandpa Mike, he's married to our Mimi, who also goes by Mammi ( but only to our Texas family), Poppa's wife is Grand Ma Debbie and of course Grandma is my mom.

 

My dad is always like this!  We have words in my family he created that would describe exactly his behavior right here in this picture....boogerhead, snydekki, hawnyauck, to name a few.  My poor mom, she just wants a good shot, she was probably thinking something like "Brent Larsen!" or "For heaven's sake".

 

The reason Austin decided to with crazy eyes I just don't know, but hey, it was his day, we were all just along for the ride.  His road of life has been a bumpy one so far, it seems that we cruise along for awhile and all is well.  Then out of no where, we land in the hospital and a week or two later the docs get things figured out, which also adds another quirk or condition we didn't know he had!

 

Little, pretty and yummy.

For everyone who has known me longer than 4 years, you know that we lived a pretty simple existence while Justin was a firefighter, firefighter instructor and PA student.  The Air Force pays for the basics in life, nothing fancy going on in the first 12 years or so of our married life.  And darn it, THAT IS OKAY!!!! our simple life was a great one. 

Well, don't get the idea we are living large on the Captain pay scale.  We get to say yes to a few more things though.  Yes, we can take a trip to a water park, yes we can go to the Zoo in Columbus, yes we can save, save, save and go to Washington D.C. as a family....our very first family trip.  That might seem confusing to our family since we took trips out west to visit every so often through the years.  Well it was the very first vacation that had nothing to do with a trip to visit any family. 

So this little post today is about how a jump in the pay scale has upped my opportunity to flex my feminine muscles in the kitchen and create some darling, yummy treats for friends and family. 


For example...Princess Cupcakes in house full of BOYS!!  Why you may ask?  Ethan has a darling little friend that asked to come over and make them with me.  She had a book that we picked out the recipes from and it is a fancy little book indeed.  All the Disney cup-cakery you can handle.

 

 

These ones down below here were pink lemonade people! They tasted delicious and then funny part was that my boys just ate them up, no problem with the cup cakes being too girly.  My boys are awesome that way.  If I remember right there wasn't a single one left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These little Olympic cookies were made especially for Cooper's tenth birthday.  Since we were looking for ward to the London Olympics, he chose the Games for his birthday theme.

 

 

This was the crazy crew that inhaled the cookies after participating in their own games.  Races, archery, etc, etc,  I painted the nifty tees as well.

 

 

 

 

These  next pretty little babies I found in a fabulous book from the library.  It was all about what you can do with cookie dough, eggless of course. 

I love it when things turn out just like the pictures, the hubbie is learning to love this quirk of mine.  But really, they were perfect!!!

 





Who wouldn't love to have one of these bad boys?  Did I mention they hade a cookie dough flavored buttercream and a cookie dough filling hiding inside?  YUM.
  








I love when my Birthday boys get exactly the  happy reaction I want when they see their cakes!  this baby I have made a couple of times, this time was for Austin's 9th birthday.  It looks like a giant Oreo and tastes even better.