Yellowstone Rocks! and animals

This past weekend was a blast in Yellowstone. We headed up through Idaho to stay in a Cabin with The Candland Grandparents and The Jones (Beth’s sister). The park blew us away not only because of the varied wildlife we saw, but just the sheer size of it all as well. It seemed like we were driving the good majority of it. We basically got to see the entire park, Old Faithful, the geyser basins, Mammoth Hot Springs, Entrance Gate, Yellowstone Lake, The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and all sorts of things. Besides the innumerable buffalo, we were also graced with the presence of chipmunks, squirrels, ravens, coyotes, deer, elk, moose, pronghorn sheep, falcons and bald eagles. Despite the effort we put into fishing the Madison and Gibbon rivers, grandpa Candland was the only one to catch a fish. A 4 inch trophy trout…whoopee! Here's to Yellowstone, enjoy some of our trip!
Lower Falls and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Climbing Sheepeaters Cliff

At a geyser basin (yes, that is blue steam)

The deer could care less how close I got

The rain ponchos made the bouts look like Hobbits on a quest

Playtime at the Cabin

Ice crean break at Old Faithful

Old Faithful

There were ravens everywhere either waiting for us to leave food, or die

Mommy and Baby


A Cool Tour Cab

Mommy and Baby

New Favorite

I needed a spring/summer project. I know you're thinking what about your garden! Well, it rained for the past two weeks and I was staring at my furniture and thought, why don't I refinish the piano. Of course this is during naptimes, otherwise I wouldn't have the time.

Anyway, on my trip to Home Depot to look for some refinishing things, I came across this product.

It comes in tons of colors and said it was basically a rub on restore product and since I have no experience at refinishing pianos, I thought I'd give the easy way (and cheap $7) a try first before really jumping in.

Well, I have to say that this was what I needed! All the scratches and even the teeth mark from the dogs my parents have had (this was my great-grandmother and then my mother's and now mine) - all the blemishes are gone! No kidding! It looks amazing!

After that fix, I was taking this product around practically our whole house fixes scratches on wood. I will need to sand and officially refinish our coffee table, but it completely renewed our door to our garage as well that the previous owners dog had scratched badly.

Seriously, this would work on restoring cabinets or anything if they are not really deeply scratched. Happy refinishing!

Summer is here

We enjoyed quite a few nice days of weather before the rain set in that is currently helping out a garden.

Memorial Day was a lot of fun with roasting smores with cousins and camping in our backyard. On Sunday we visited Chad's grandparent's grave in Provo and then stayed down there for Memorial day with Chad's brother and his family to go fishing and play in the water the next day.

Grave of Eugene and Rita Roth

The catch of the day - catfish.

Daddy was nice enough to do some face painting. Here's Kayden's pick:

Here's Boston's pick for Daddy to paint on him:

McCoy and his cousin Mikelle splashed the day away.

We've also played in the yard a ton, had picnics in the park, fished in the ponds with no luck, played and visited with friends and also one day we met up with my sister and her kids at the zoo for an afternoon.

Brothers! You can feel the love!

This past week was Kayden's last day of kindergarten. We celebrated by having his best guy friends over from school for a little water party. The rain only came for about 5 minutes and then it was nice. Saturday we celebrated Chad's birthday with a fun yard party with family and friends. Lots of food, good conversations and once again the rain only visited us for about 5 minutes, but we weremostly sheltered under the deck eating dinner.

Here's a picture from the beginning of Kayden's cute program. I've been trying to dig some up of Boston's program, but we just took video. They both had great school years and were both very ready for summer break.