No More Pesky Fruit Flies

Ever since we moved in our new house 5 years ago, we’ve had a problem with fruit flies. And every year for 5 years I’ve gotten rid of them by trying to wack them with a fly swatter. Not very effective since they are so small, and the only thing they land on are my vegetables/fruit and I don’t particularly want to smash those too. So this year I decided to try out my own devices and vacuum them up. It was a better solution then using a fly swatter, so why not. I kept the vacuum out all day and went about vacuuming them up. Well, when Duane came home that night he let me know the way to get rid of fruit flies. I don’t know why he didn’t tell me this secret 5 years ago, but I thought it was very clever and tried it out.

You put a rotten tomato in a jar filled with water to just below the tomato, and leave it out on the bar.


Then when the flies land on the tomato, you cover the top with your hand and shake it up until they drown.


So there you have it… the clever way to get rid of your pesky fruit flies.

"I" before "E" except after "C"

Danielle’s teacher moved her and one other student up a level in spelling this past week. He gave them a dictionary and told them to choose 20 words, and these are some of the words they chose: Ambidextrous, Ambiguous, Callisthenic, and Amethyst. Those are some very impressive words for a 5th grader. Some of her words I didn’t know what they meant and I had to take a second to make sure I was pronouncing them correctly. I was testing Danielle on these words the other night and Duane starts laughing because he’s trying to spell the words along with Danielle and can’t do it. I would say she's up for a Spelling Bee contest. Wouldn't you?

We are very proud of our little girl. She impresses us every day with her accomplishments. Way to go Danielle!

First Day of School!

Tuesday was Kaman's first day of preschool and today was the girls first day. They've grown up so fast. I was just looking back at the pictures I took of the kids on their first day of school.



This is Ashley going into 1st grade...(left)







And here's Danielle in 1st grade...(right)

This is Ashley on her first day of preschool..(left)

And Kaman on his first day of preschool...(right)

I love to see the comparison of the kids at their same ages.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of Ashley on her first day of Kindergarten and Danielle on her first day of 2nd grade. But here is Ashley today on her first day of 2nd grade and Danielle on her first day of 5th grade...

Our First Yard Sale

Note to self: Garage sales are not easy.

We found the most irritating part of garage sales is it takes at least one full week to get everything ready. First you have to go through everything in your storage (for us, it was a lot), get your signs ready & posted, yard cleaned, any items that are caked with dust - cleaned, and then comes pricing EVERYTHING. It was not only exhausting but very stressful. I was up until 2:00 in the morning for three nights straight. The morning of the yard sale, I had a whole list of things to do before we started at 9:00am. Duane opened the garage around 8:15am so he could get the stuff out of the trailer, and while he was backing up we had a couple people come pull up and get out of their cars, then we had another car pull up, then another, and another, and another...it was only 8:15am! They were early and we weren’t ready! I had to forget the list of things I needed to do: forget showering, no breakfast, and the kids had to fend for themselves.

We also needed to have been warned that early garage sale buyers can be very aggressive. As soon as Duane opened the trailer doors we couldn’t get the junk out of the trailer fast enough before they started snatching them. Honestly, I don’t know how much stuff we had stolen. We had a couple Hispanic ladies fighting over women’s clothing. Duane had one Hispanic man come up to him and tell him he had locked his keys in the car and needed a ride and my sister very casually walked over and said, “we can call the cops, they’ll give you a ride for free.” He walked off and found another ride. Another Hispanic man told Duane he only had $5 to spend on an item that was marked for $10, so Duane sold it to him. Then as soon as Duane turned his back, he bought an item from me for $5. We also had ladies try and convince Duane that I had told them the price was lower then was marked; thank goodness Duane was smart enough to ask me before he accepted it.

It was a crazy day, but we made some money and still had fun. I think next time we will open earlier and have someone watch to make sure nothing is stolen.


Here's Danielle getting our signs ready to post.



This is what our garage looked like the night before.


This is the yard sale at the end of it. I was WAY to busy to get a picture when we were mobbed by the buyers.

This is it all cleaned up. Phew!

Payson Lakes Camping Trip

This past weekend, we went camping at Payson Lakes for three nights with the Thompson family. Most of my side of the family was able to come except my brother, Tyler, and his wife, Brooke. My sister, Heather, has one year old twins and a husband with a broken leg and even though they only lasted one night, we had fun hanging out with their family. My younger sister, Trisha, is pregnant with her first child and only came up for dinner on Saturday. My younger brother, Trevor, and his family and my Mom and Dad are camping fools so they stayed the whole time. We were on a roll with the camping thing so we camped all 3 nights as well.

The weather ended up being really cold the second day/night so we just hovered over the fire to keep warm. And the one thing I happened to forget was Kaman’s long pants! He was running around most of the time so the cold didn’t seem to faze him – thank goodness.

We had 5 kids under the age of five and at times it got pretty dramatic. My brother’s youngest child, Briella, she’s one, would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, “owie, owie, owie.” My sister-in-law, Mindy, says she’s quite the drama queen and so when she gets upset that’s what she yells.

We were also woken up the first morning by the wild cows on the mountain. And Danielle says we had an animal scratching at our tent the second and third night we were there.

Above all the drama, cold, and sleepless nights, it was fun to go camping with all our family, and I’m hoping we can make it a tradition.

Here are pictures from our camping trip...

Lake Powell 2009

Every year we take a trip down to Lake Powell with the Howell family, unfortunately, we haven't been able to go for about 2 or 3 years, so we were excited to finally be able to this summer. We only went down for 1 1/2 days, but it was a nice break. Duane has 8 siblings and when we all get together it ends up being a REAL party. We usually end up having at least 30 people on the boat plus 5 dogs. The top of the house boat holds us all pretty well, and we do ok with staying out of each others way, so it doesn't feel like that many people. I remember one year it starting raining in the middle of the night and all 30 plus people had to cram into the family room area, and to add insult to injury, there was a mouse on the loose. Duane says those times are always fun because they give you great stories to tell. But I'll tell you I was glad when that night was over.

We had great weather this time, though, and the kids really enjoyed themselves.

Here are pictures from our trip...

Sooo....was he named after the islands? {wink, wink!}

After introducing Kaman to people, since he has an unusual name, we frequently get the response, “was he named after the islands?” And the answer to that is, “no.”

While I was pregnant, I checked out books, searched the internet, asked my husband (I gave up asking when all Duane could come up with was Duane Jr.), and just listening to other people saying names out loud. When I was about 6 months pregnant, one Sunday while sitting in church, one of the boys in my ward got up to accept an award he had earned, and when they said his name was Kaiman (spelled different then our little boy), I immediately turned to Duane and asked him if he liked it. Since both of us liked it the next step was to decide on how to spell it. We didn’t want to completely copy the boy in our ward, so we tried to think of different spellings: Kayman (that looked to girly), Cayman (like the islands – most people would know how to say it but would immediately assume he was named after the islands), Kamen, and Kaimin (this is a Japanese name and if I remember it was a well known warrior). Duane recalled the Kaman industrial distributor company on Geneva road and liked the spelling, and we agreed it was a more “manly” spelling and wasn’t too hard for people to pronounce, so hence the spelling of K-A-M-A-N.

Here’s our little man in front of the Kaman sign on Geneva Road.

It’s only at the doctors office where I get the most mispronunciations, so it looks like he’ll have to go through that in his lifetime, but we love the name and hopefully he does too.