Maggie the Cuddle Buddy Cat-dog

My family's dog passed away naturally while we were in town, so I was thinking of some memories with her.

 

When I was growing up, I always wanted a dog but my parents said No. We could only have small (short-term) pets. So imagine my surprise when I was in my first year at BYU and my mom tells me they inherited a dog from some friends... I lived at home that summer so I got to bond with Maggie. She was really a special dog, and I will tell you why. Usually I can't stand dogs - they are stinky and slobbery, and jump up and bark too much. But little Maggie did none of these things (with the exception of barking at the doorbell). I thought she was more of a cat-dog because she would always leap on somebody's lap and cuddle. She'd even sleep in bed with me whenever I was in town.

 

I like to think we had a special relationship. After that summer, I never lived at home again, but everytime I visited she would remember me and give me lots of attention. Probably because I treated her well, when my young brothers liked kicking her around! But they grew up too and had their individual special relationships with her. I think most of us just loved having a cuddle buddy.

 

Peter says when he came back from his mission (two years ago) he could tell Maggie was aging. I noticed last time we were here, a few months ago, how old she seems. She wouldn't cuddle so much; she wasn't active; she wouldn't bark at the door anymore. She just laid around. She lost color in her fur and all the hair fell out of her tail!

 

Over new years the past couple years we had been predicting how long she'll live. My dad exected her to be gone long ago. She lasted a good 12 years or so (we had her the past 8-1/2 years) and was never sick (my mom will say that's because they used the dairy-free dog food. As soon as they switched, she lost her stinky dog smell). She just passed away suddenly the way old people go in their sleep. I think that is sweet, so I am at peace with it.

 

(I have lots of pictures I can add when I get home but that will have to wait)

LV trip: Mt Charleston Hike/Picnic

We took a trip to the mountains nearby for a small hike and picnic. It's where I went to girls camp as a young woman, so the air just feels special there. It's cool and smells so fresh with the tall redwood trees, and the sounds of rushing water in the creek. Aaahhh!! :)

Rychen P got his mouth covered up so he wouldn't stick out his tongue like he usually does!
Another sideways picture, sorry. Rychen is showing the dam he built. My mom told warned him against damming the creek, but then he got really interested learning about it and wanted to do it. So he promised to put everything back when he was done.
If you look closely you can see my 4-month-pregnant pudginess :)
These are my two neices Rebecca and Amelia. I think it's funny how they both pulled up their skirts right when I took the picture!

LV trip: Leid Discovery Museum

Today I took Joe and Rychen to the children's museum. We have good memories there because we would always go there for school field trips growing up. So now its fun to take my kids, especially since we are homeschooling, and talk about science and everything.

Joe playing a harp with no strings

Hurricane simulator...it's loud and windy in there!!

Okay this next thing is Rychen's favorite. This is so cute. It's an air pressure contraption where you pull a cord to raise a bowling ball, then let it drop. The air pressure rushes through tubes and into the next chamber where a tennis ball awaits, and when the air hits it, the tennis ball shoots way up to the ceiling. The higher the bowling ball starts, the higher up the tennis ball goes. So naturally, if you are a six year old boy, you will want to pull that cord the very hardest you are capable of! Well Rychen has no inhibitions, he pulled it all the way to the floor. Here he is laying down, putting all his weight onto this cord before dropping the bowling ball!

This is the tennis ball shooting up to the rafters in the ceiling... its hard to see but there is a streak of lime green in the original photo.

This is the Einstein Corner which is my absolute favorite part. We watched 2 full science demonstrations and I just thought it was awesome!! I am a total nerd, but I get such fulfillment from teaching all this stuff to my kids! The first one was about chemistry. She taught us about states of matter (which we've covered at home) and then Physical Reaction vs. Chemical Reaction, the periodic table of elements, and then did some experiments to demonstrate. I had no idea you could blow up a balloon with hydrogen and then make it burst into flames. That was totally awesome! (but it scared Rychen P and he asked if it would happen again and I said No, but then she did it a second time and he gave me this death look like "Mom, You are a LIAR!") You can also put a styrofoam cup into acetone and it will totally melt away into this weird goo...but apparently that is only a physical reaction because it's still styrofoam and it can be built back into a cup, with the proper machinery.

A third thing is, you can combine hydrogen peroxide with yeast to get a huge mass of bubbles. The bag fills with air and in order to tell which gas is in the air (without doing the equation which is what we did in my boring school) is by putting a flame into the gas and testing the reaction to the flame. We already found out that hydrogen makes it explode, so I wondered what it was. I knew hydrogen and oxygen were the only gas elements in the original equation so I wasn't surprised when the answer was oxygen, which we knew because it fed the flame and the fire grew.

The second science "class" was about vision and optical illusions. This was really cool also, and it was fun to go through all these illusions with Rychen P and have him explain what he saw in it. It's so funny how our eyes get confused and miscommunicate with our brains. One crazy thing I learned was that we can confuse our motion sensors and see colors that are not there! I learned lots of stuff I have never heard before. So I really don't know why its called a Children's Museum :)

LV trip: Joseph Returns from his Mission!

The reason we came down this time was to see my brother Joe come home from his 2-year church mission in Santa Maria, Brazil. Picking up missionaries at the airport is such a fun experience, and I missed Peter's but I have gone to Erick's and Rychen's brother Whitney's. I have to say Joe is my special brother because he is the only person in the family who looks like me. Without Joe, I would be an orphan basically. So I am so glad he is back. haha!

Emily wasn't even there, but she got the first five minutes of his time. (What, resentment? No, you read too far into that.)

He brought us all back souveneirs so here is a funny picture of my Dad wearing the Brazilian hat and using his straw as a spoon for this little mug to which I affectionately refer as a coffee maker. The families got coffee makers and the boys got an authentic cowboy knife or something which they must promise to use to slaughter their own pigs (and then eat the hooves, skins, and innards apparently...more on this later)
Rychen P. was excited to wear his Brasil shirt which we just found at Wal-mart, but it happened to match Joe's t-shirt too. Awesome!

Okay so having a foreign missionary come home is the most hilarious thing ever. It's a total culture shock, and it takes some time for them to snap back into the English language, idioms, pronounciations, etc. There is this funny story about when Erick came home. When he first got off the plane he couldn't speak any English, he kept muttering and stuttering and he just ended up laughing and hugging everybody. It took him at least five minutes to say anything intelligible. Then a few hours later or even the next day, he was telling my mom a story in a broken accent with certain spanglish words. He mentioned something called "A-hen-da" and we were like, What?? We don't know that, say it in English. And he says "A-hen-da! A-hen-da! It's an ENGLISH WORD!!" and we're like, "Nope, that is not English, sorry..." but then we figured out he was saying "agenda" but with the Spanish pronounciation!

So here's what we will remember about Joe. Well of course he has a his cute little Portuguese accent. I'm sure that will get him lots of dates at BYU. But he lost a few vocabulary words, for things that aren't used in Brazil. The first thing he did was walk into the kitchen and turn on the stove and remark on how incredible that is, that it makes fire without having to light anything! He proceeded to tell us how nobody in Brazil has a drying machine, or a thing that warms up your bread, or that thing that sucks up dirt. We just busted up laughing. I said, Nobody tell him what those things are actually called, let's see how long it takes him to remember. Maybe for his chore today we'll ask him to suck up all the dirt off the carpets :)

The other thing everybody should know is that he came back with a taste for some really disgusting things. Things that belong in a grave or in a toilet and not on anybody's dinner plates. He is telling us "HOLY COW, tripe is SOOOO GOOD" and we are just shaking our heads in wonder. He wanted to go shopping to get some pork skin to cook our beans in, and my mom refused! But then we had to go to the Mexican store anyway and I saw they had tripe (cow intestines) at their deli - and clearly a popular enough menu item to keep in rotation! So I tell Joe to eat some, and I told my mom if she ate it, I would pay for the groceries. And she chows down on this rubbery intestine right in front of me. I have never been so happy and relieved to be a vegetarian. heehee :)

But in all seriousness, we are so happy to have Joe back with us. I especially loved hearing his testimony when he got his release interview and the things he shared about how his mission wasn't so much about doing what he was supposed to do, but becoming who he was suppose to be. It has hard for him to leave Brazil but he got an answer to prayer, a strong feeling that he has done well but the best is ahead of him and he must press forward in life. I couldn't help but to think of Rychen, who served an honorable mission and then came home ready to move on to the next big goal in his eternal progression (me, of course) even though the thought of dating and marriage scared the living daylights out of him. Now Joseph is a grown man and moving forward with his education and the rest of his life. I'm so proud of him. It's wonderful to see my little brother who I remember being born, grown up and spiritually mature, and an amazing example to myself of righteousness and Christ-like living. Congratulations Joseph! :)

Lv trip: Blackmail

I captured this photo to put in my back pocket for future blackmailing :) But really, doesn't it just show what awesome uncles my brothers are? They are so sweet. I still need to get them to play Pretty Pretty Princess with us.

LV trip: Third Cousins

We went swimming with some relatives which was actually pretty cool because when I was little, we would swim with my second-cousins all the time. Now that we are grown up and have kids of our own, my kids can spend time with their 3rd cousins doing the same thing! (How many of your third cousins do YOU know? hee hee)

Kadie and Elisabeth

with Mason

LV trip: Waterfight!

Well the only way to survive the heat of Las Vegas is to get wet everyday. Good thing we have access to five different pools and multiple water parks. This is a kids water play area in the courtyard of a very high-end shopping plaza (I am still making sense of that myself), but that didn't stop Grandma and Rychen P from getting into a little frisbee waterfight.





(I like the fact that holding a camera makes me immune to attacks!)

LV trip: Trucks!

There's a place here that puts on a truck demonstration for children every Tuesday. As luck would have it, our trip covers 3 Tuesdays so Rychen P is just thrilled. They've seen all sorts of trucks, including a police truck, garbage truck, ambulance, school bus, and we're hoping for some construction trucks next week. Here are some pictures from the first week when I tagged along too.

The goodie table

The back of an ambulance - the paramedic showed them all the tools and medicines, it was very interesting. Andrew isn't quite sure.

some cute girl we saw in a garbage truck!

Elisabeth is sitting in the back of a police truck, with the glass(?) pane surrounding this seat. There is a huge gun less than 2 feet away from her. Rychen loved the guns... we learned all about the various guns and tools on the police man's belt.