soooooo long overdue

my last post was May 31st....nearly 3 months ago. that is just pathetic. so i obviously am not going to be able to remember all the events that have taken place during that time, and if i do remember, i will not remember many details....so i will resort to listing the highlights of the past 3 months.

• tucker's hip has been healing after his TPO. he had been confined to our office with a baby gate and was escorted outside to use the bathroom. He had to go out on a leash and since we have wood floors that are a little slick, we were taking him out to the front yard so he wouldnt have to walk so far. we also bought some cheapo rugs to cover the wood floor from the hallway to the front door so he wouldnt slip. this was such a pain in the booty, but he has gotten stronger and stronger.

  please, just let me out!!

  we took him back to the vet a few weeks ago. they took new xrays and said that one of the areas on his pelvis was not totally healed and that we needed to keep him on restricted activity for 3 more weeks. august 7th was his release day and we have to now gradually increase his activity. he is released from the confines of the office, we are going on longer walks and we let him go out in the backyard by himself (he and yoda together would get too rowdy). he is doing really well and is so much happier! he still slips on the wood floors if he gets too excited, so today we thought it would be funny to put these boots on to give him better traction. I am pretty sure he hates them.
• sometime in may we went camping with daniel and canaan. Canaan had never been camping before and it had been several years since daniel has camped. we went down to the wichita mountains for the night. we made smores, breakfast burritos, hot dogs and more smores. we took the 3 dogs hiking (this was before tucker's surgery so we had to take it easy on him) and andy and daniel got to play with their cameras for hours. we had a lot of fun and canaan actually enjoyed the whole trip with the exception of hiking. we hope to go again maybe in september when it cools down just a little.

  setting up camp

  

  good morning!

  

  making breakfast burritos. tucker seems interested in the sausage.

  

  view from mt. scott

  

  prairie dogs are so weird

  
• andy and i were helping out with the youth at church and each wednesday night during the summer we had a different activity. dodgeball, ultimate frisbee, waterpark at will rogers park, wakeboard park and my personal favorite...the regatta competition. we went to a church member's house and used their swimming pool. the kids were split up into teams of 5 or 6 and they were given sheets of cardboard, masking tape and duct tape and were supposed to make a boat. they had an hour or so to make it and then they had to put them in the pool with one member of the team in the boat. surprisingly, all of the boats but one actually floated and didnt take on any water. so then to make it more of a competition they started to add additional people to the boats. they ended up with 6 people in one boat and then everyone just started trying to sink each others boat. it was very entertaining. unfortunately, we did not take pictures at any of these events.
  
• daniel, canaan, andy and i drove down to falls creek to spend one evening with the kids while they were there for the week. andy and i had never been to falls creek. we were overwhelmed with the number of kids there! we got to experience the campwide evening worship service in the new huge tabernacle and then went back to NWBC cabin. they have their own worship service in the cabin later in the evening. they had the dutton band which is a band from the same church as david crowder band. they were great but we decided that we are getting too old because as we left, we all said "that was too loud!" isnt that sad?
  
• we havent really traveled much this summer because tucker is a gimp and we dont want anyone to have to take care of him. normally we go to owasso for the 4th of july but we stayed in OKC instead. we went to see the fireworks in Yukon. The OKC philharmonic plays beforehand and it was a really good fireworks display. we had a group of 20 or so people from church that met up to watch the show.

a family sitting near us at the fireworks display had these two little schnauzer puppies. arent they cute?!



the philharmonic played from this gazebo




• andy's parents came to OKC in mid july. josh, sara and jake came down and luke was already staying with us. [sidenote: Luke had shoulder surgery in june and came to stay with us to do his PT with me. He is searching for a job and has an interview at a church in Enid on Thursday.] While the Froese family was here we showed them the house we are going to build, went to POPS, watched tv, ate, and watched jake chase the dogs.


• so...we decided we are going to build a house. we have put money down on a lot and have selected our floorplan. it is in a fairly new neighborhood in edmond. we are really excited about it. we will probably start building towards the end of the year and hope the house will be ready next summer. we will live 6 houses down from our friends justin and kelli! [see justin as jett dean]


• we are working like crazy on our house. we had a list of things we wanted to fix up, but now that we know we are going to be moving we are working double time. we are still working on the front yard. we pulled out all the ivy and built a small flowerbed around the holly tree. while we were out pulling out the ivy a couple guys drove by and asked if we wanted them to grind the stump from the big tree. we told them they could and they came back later in the week to do it. they did not grind it down far enough so when they called to see if they could come pick up their check andy told them NO, they had to come finish the job. we havent heard from them since, so we still have to finish grinding the stump. BUT, they did most of the work for us and we didnt pay them a dime. we will do that and then put in some sod and it will look so much better! this weekend we are replacing the countertops in the bathrooms and repainting the vanities. on our list to do....retile bathrooms, get rid of peach toilet, crown molding in the front living room, new kitchen countertops, and then just all the little touch up things....fresh paint on trim throughout the house, etc. we are not sure when we will put our house on the market, but if you know anyone that needs a 3bed 2 bath house in OKC, send them our way!!


notice the ROLL of ivy. we literally cut the roots as we went and just rolled it up like a carpet



exhausted



we found this ball of yarn within the mass of ivy. other things we found: a screwdriver, toy grenade, several tennis balls...



some friends in our neighborhood rented this bobcat to move some dirt in their yard. we borrowed it for an hour or so and cleared out and leveled the dirt under the ivy bed. it made the work sooooo much faster and andy had fun driving the bobcat.



• I water skied for the first time. We went to Arbuckle Lake a few weekends ago with Justin, Kelli, Marcus and Kristin. Kristin's parents have a boat and live near the lake so we went down for the day. I made 6 attempts and got up all 6 times!! I couldnt stay up very long until attempt #6 and then i lasted maybe a minute or so....it was super fun and it made me want to buy a boat and ski every weekend. andy tried to wakeboard but couldnt quite get it....he skied a couple times and is way better than i am. next i want to wakeboard....maybe next summer.
  
• August 7th was our 4 year anniversary! We went to dinner at the Melting Pot. it was delicious and we had a good time mostly laughing about how bad our waiter was. he spilled Andy's water all over my skirt and then didnt really help us clean it up. it was still a fun experience, but we forgot to take pictures!!! I cant wait to go back, but i will probably skip the meal and just go for the chocolate!!
  
• Andy and I have changed churches....sort of. we are still going to northwest, but we are now going to the north campus location. long story, but i will summarize briefly....justin (aka jett dean, see above) was the central campus youth pastor. our church has lost lots of staff over the past year and we had an opening for north campus pastor. justin took that job and he mentioned to andy that we should think about coming to the north campus. andy and i had been praying about getting involved somewhere other than our sunday school class...we were considering teaching in the youth ministry or somewhere else. when justin told us to think about it, we did and felt like we should go. so last sunday was our first sunday at the north campus. we are not quite sure how we will be serving there. there are not any young married without children. this campus is primarily young families, so hopefully we will be able to help get the young married department or group started.


• i have been teaching luke to cook! banana bread, snickerdoodles, peanut butter cookies, turkey loaf, lasagna, stroganoff, taco soup, sausage potato bake, spaghetti sauce....just call him emeril!

  banana bread with chocolate chips

  

he even cleans up after he cooks!

this picture is not related to anything i have written about but a few months ago while andy was home for lunch, he let the dogs out in the backyard. after a few minutes he realized he didnt hear any noise from them, which is unusual. he looked out the back window and saw the dogs staring at this young little bird that was sitting on the fence. he said they were just staring at it for the longest time and then tucker licked it a couple of times and walked away. guess he didnt taste very good.