Dragon Boat Festival

Well, I have two weeks of stories to talk about since Monica guest posted last week... and you can't double post!  Anyway, first item of note is that sometime my lunch got invaded by a pack of Sandwishosauruses!  There were delicious.

Last Saturday (7/18) Denver had a Dragon Boat Festival.  It happens every year at some park in the middle of the city.  There are a bunch of boat races all through the day and they also have an Asian market and a whole bunch of Asian food places come.  Here's a picture of a group in a dragon boat.

They did all kinds of cool Asian things.  They had a dragon dance... or whatever it's actually called.  It was a lot of fun to watch.

There was a large Asian market, at which we found some great hats!!  Just check it out.  We also got a book of Japanese children's stories to read to our kid(s), an umbrella (seen soon) and some candy.

Here's Monica with the umbrella as promised.

We even watched the boat races for a while.  It was a little funny looking back on it.  I thought the event would be much more about the boat racing, but being there it seemed that all the focus was on the food and the shopping.  The people on the PA were mentioning that the boat racing get's more heated up toward the end of the day when it's on to the final groups, so maybe we just weren't there for the prime race time.

While it was a lot of fun to be there, there was also not a ton of shade.  It was a pretty hot day too.  Monica got real hot and felt like she might pass out so she sat down.  One thing led to another and BOOM!  Here we are in the air conditioned medical trailer.  It was nice to get out of the heat.

All in all the Dragon Boat Festival was a lot of fun to go to, and we may go again in the future, though it might be hard next year what with a 6-ish month old.

This last week I was able to start running again!  That's great!  It's been about 2 months since I've really run, I had Ragnar and a 5K in the last 2 months, but 2 months since I've been able to train.  I ran inside on the treadmill so that if my leg started hurting again I could just stop right away so I didn't re-injure my leg.  Toward the end of the week I got sick!  So I started taking a nap every day and with work that basically fills an entire day.

Friday night/Saturday morning out CO alarm started to go off...  This same alarm had gone off the other day, and Monica thought the batteries were just dead cause it was beeping pretty intermittently, so she changed the batteries.  So once is started going off we took out the batteries and went and grabbed the new CO monitor we bought recently from the basement.  The new CO monitor has a little screen on it and will tell you what it measures the CO level at.  0 ppm... pretty high right?  Monica and I sat in bed looking up carbon monoxide alarm manuals trying to figure out what our other alarm was trying to tell us.  Well, after some digging into the manual it turns out it has 3 alarms.  One for CO, which is described similar to what we heard (except it should have beeped more frequently), one for low battery (which is different than what Monica heard the other day), and one to signal that the CO alarm is about to die and you need to buy a new one.  It never tells you what this alarm should sound like, but by the process of elimination we decided this was the culprit.   Total worth being awake from 1 to 2 in the morning.

By the time that whole thing got sorted out we were to hungry to sleep so we had to go have breakfast before returning to bed for a "nap".

Then on Saturday one of the families in our ward was trying to clear out furniture because they're moving soon.  We bought their kitchen table (mostly because kitchen chairs are expensive) and the great news is that the chairs match our table quite nice!

Monica's friend Katie came over most of the day Saturday too.  Her husband is in flight attendant school with Southwest and is down in TX for a month or so.  Turns out it's really challenging to become a flight attendant.  If you're ever late for class you're out of the program!  We're hoping he'll make it through, and from what I heard it sounds like he's doing a great job!

Things went well at church today.  I taught the teachers quorum today and they weren't even as crazy as usual.  Also, one of the teachers gave a talk in sacrament meeting today and started it off with the following: "My parents told me if my sister went into labor before church we'd go to the hospital and I wouldn't have to give my talk, so me and this baby aren't off to a very good start!"

I think that's about all that's happened around these parts other than our lawn dying... hope everyone is having a great week!

We're having a......

Hi everyone! This is Monica this time. I'm writing a guest post about how we found out the baby's gender because I told Alex he would not sufficiently convey our (okay my) excitement at FINALLY finding out if it's a boy or a girl!
I was actually supposed to write this almost two weeks ago....but well, you know, I'm just so busy hanging out at home right now!
So, Monday morning was the ultrasound. That weekend I was so anxious to just go and find out! I couldn't wait any longer! The night before I told Alex that he should wear blue the next day if he thought it would be a boy and red (he doesn't have any pink) if he thought it was going to be a girl. I decided that I was going to wear blue- not exactly because I really thought it would be a boy.  It was more because the week before I had been looking at little girl clothes and they were so adorable that it made me really want a girl! But I still wanted to be excited if it was a boy, so I wore blue to help me be more excited. Alex wore blue too!
So we went to the ultrasound and guess what?? We were wrong! We're having a baby girl!! I was so excited to be able to buy all the cute girl clothes, and do her hair, and you know just all that girly stuff!
Here's a picture of our little girl. (Alex posted this picture last week....but it's just fitting for this post)

Everything looked good so far and she's just the right size she should be so due date is still November 28th.
Later that day we did a video chat with my family and decided to fill up balloons with pink confetti and then pop them to tell everyone. Unfortunately it didn't work out as well as we had hoped. And then we took a picture of that to announce it to everyone else, and that also didn't work as well as hoped. Thanks Pinterest. But after about 43 attempts to get a good looking picture of it (using the timer on Alex's phone camera) I decided it was just good enough! You could see a little pink.....so it got the point across right?? Here's the picture. Oh and now you know why we're both wearing blue in this picture too.

So there you go, it's a girl and we are SO excited! Alex can't wait to have tea parties and play dress up with her :)

Busy Beaver

As you may have guessed from the title I chewed up a lot of wood this week!  Not really, but I feel like I was working on projects all day Saturday!  Also, I missed a week because Monica wanted to write a guest post.  She said she'll write it soon :).  Anyway, I've got a little more than a week of fun to cover, and I'll still end my tales at the end of last week so I've got a full fresh week of stories next post.  So back on July 2nd SEAKR Engineering had their 4th of July party (because we got the 3rd off and the 4th was a Saturday, so they held it after work on Thursday).  They had lots of food, a bike parade with decorations for the children, and a car show!  Our favorite car can be seen here:

That's right, that baby has a sink in it and standing room!  It's almost a camper, but still just a car.  In addition to the items mentioned above the company also does fireworks every other year (or at least that's what I was told).  This year happened to be the year they had fireworks, so that was awesome!

Monica and I had a great time at the event.  It was a great event, especially for a small company to put on.  I really like SEAKR Engineering, it's a great place to work!

Well, on the 4th of July Monica and I decided it was time to go camping... in our back yard.

We had a fire and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows for smores.  It was a very healthy dinner!

After dinner it was time to go to sleep.  Unfortunately the neighbors a couple houses down are huge into fireworks and at 10:30 we gave up on sleeping outside and came back in the house.  I had to wake up at 4 the next morning to drive a friend from church to the airport, so 10:30 was plenty late enough to be kept up.

The rest of the weekend went great.  On Monday we went to the baby doctor again for another ultrasound.  I have confirmation that this is indeed a picture of the baby's head.

In the ultrasound anything that showed up and looked roundish I was sure was a head.  I'm pretty sure our baby has at least 7 heads... That's normal, right?  Eventually I admitted I knew nothing when I saw the head again and the Doctor said "and there's the pelvis!"..  Pretty close though... right?  Anyway, there will be more about the baby later.

I don't remember much of what happened through the rest of last week.  Probably just a bunch or work.  But at the end of last week was the weekend, and that's when I got super busy.  Upstairs in the two bedrooms we don't currently use there were switched outlets but no ceiling lights.  The attic access was also just outside of what will be the baby's room.  Well, a trip up to the attic and some rewiring later I installed two ceiling lights for the rooms upstairs.  Now all of our rooms have lights except for the basement which is unfinished.

Once I finished putting in the lights it was time to play with the new pole chain saw we got!  It attaches onto our weed wacker (you take of the weed wacker part first).  We took that out and cut down a bunch of dead branches that were on our trees.  We're also going to trim down the tree in the front yard with it, but we need a taller ladder and to do some small branch pruning first.

Here is the pile of soon to be firewood in the back yard.

It's not a great picture because the shadow, but there were a lot of branches back there.  It took me quite a while to break them all up and sort them into piles, but eventually I finished.  At that point I was quite tired and it was time to call it a day!

We went to Tyson and Tina's house for dinner on Sunday because Celeste, Michael, Oriah, and Jonathan were out to visit.  It was a lot of fun until Oriah harassed me for not posting (and again this morning... which worked better apparently).  It's always nice to see family, especially those who don't live around here since we don't get to see them very much.

Well, with that I hope everyone out there is having a great week!