February

This last week we had a lot that happened.
 Joseph graduated from ALS training school.  It was an adult only dinner and ceremony.  I got a friend to watch our kids while we went.  It was formal dress and that is a little hard to find something formal when as pregnant as I am but I went in nice Sunday dress that worked.  It was an interesting experience.  The first hour was open bar and people just standing around drinking there huge mugs of beer and then there was me and Joseph just sitting at a table talking but half of that time he was doing other things he had to do to prepare for the ceremony.  So me alone in a bar, pregnant...weird.  Anyway, they finally rang the dinner bell and we found our assigned seats.  Joseph looked really good in his nice blues military suit.  My friend took a picture for me but still has not sent it so maybe someday I will post that here.  When there graduation ceremony finally happened after some speeches every department or squadron had there own cheer and every single one of the cheers had swear words...Nice.  Anyway, it was fun getting to know some of the other people at our table and having the experience but now I understand why Joseph has not had us go to military functions.  It is just not worth it.  But he graduated and we are proud of him.
We have been so spoiled the last month with him in school.  He is gone during the day but always came home for an hour for lunch and then usually always got home by 4:30pm and then he had weekends off and was always around at nights too.  It was a REALLY nice month being together as a family more.  Now he is back at work where he goes off in the wild blue yonder and works for four days away from us.  We look  forward to when he gets back.

The boys and I went to the dentist this week.  Bridger had no cavities, Gideon had one and I had.........wait for it......10.  Yep you saw that right 10!!!  Not cool.  I haven't been to the dentist since before we went to Germany and the last dental work I got gave me issues and now I have more issues.  But I might have found one of the reasons, Lemons.  I LOVE lemons and lemon water all the time or Limes.  She said the acidity level in lemons eats away at the teeth a lot faster than bacteria.  So that might be one reason for my mouth full of cavities. BLAH!  Though I have always been one to have cavities my whole life.  I think there has only been 2 times I have ever gone to the dentist and not had a cavity and growing up I was a regular.
Anyway, So hopefully I can at least knock out the bad ones and just try not to eat so much citrus (that will be hard :)

I got my 'Creating Arcadia blog and Dirt Roads Photography photo gallery up and running last week and it feels so good to have a project to work on and keep my brain thinking about different things or touching up my photographs I have taken over the years.  I have recent posts you should check out and more pictures.  You can go here to see the new changes.

For Valentines day I got up and made yummy heart shaped pancakes with pink sprinkles and buttermilk syrup and decorated hearts and gave the kids some goodies.  We had the missionaries over for dinner that evening too and made tin foil dinners in pie pans with tin foil over the top.  I made These Brownies for the second time adn I think they are my favorite.  So Yummy and easy to make.

 Arya got sick last night but seems to be fine today.  She loves to go out to the horse on a daily basis and pet her and ride her and just play around and explore.  She got really mad at me this morning because I had the kids stay in the car because it was so windy and cold and all I did was just feed her but we will go back this afternoon more bundled and play with Haidas.  She Loves horses.  She is going to fit right in.

Bridger is accident free at nights now which I am very proud of him for.  He has always been such a deep sleeper that it has been a problem but now we are doing pretty good.  He is sounding words out now and starting to gain more of a desire to read.  He is great with math and loves to color and makes some really nice pictures.

Gideon is really liking to do Multiplication.  He brought me the math problem 9,786 x 9652 and so we spent a little bit breaking down the different steps and he figured it out.  Times table charts were a help to him as well but it is fun to see him understanding it and it making sense.  We went to a baptism of a boy in his class at church and so now he is pretty excited to plan his baptism this summer.  We have been spending our family Home evenings breaking down the different parts of the gospel to help him better understand it and the covenants he will be making when he turns 8.  I love sharing the gospel with my family and seeing light and understanding come to them through that.

Joseph went to the recruiter this last week and we hope to get the ball rolling in the direction of palace chase.  That means that Joseph would transfer from active duty to the reserves.  Why we would choose reserves over Guard is that they have a program where your one weekend a month and 2 weeks a year can be bunched into one month so you can get it all done at the same time and you can be from a different state.  So we are looking into the reserves in Spokane Washington and being able to start that out come mid June or Early July.  That is when we hope to move back to Idaho as well.  We are looking forward to change and our new adventure.  Hopefully we will find out more as we go through the paper work and process and know more of how and when we will do all this.

We got a quote back from my house plans I designed and we just might be able to make it work.  Our goal is to 'live within our means' we will be just starting out new and we don't want to risk much at this point so we are looking into making things work on a very tight budget :)  Hopefully we can.

So that is the update in our life thus far and we hope you all are doing well.  Your all in our thoughts and prayers.