Jayling Crawling

These pictures are worth a 1,000 grandma words.

Happy Birthday Nater Tater

Nate celebrated his birthday with good friends and steamed Maryland crabs ..... He's still our dimpled doll 22 years later.

Nate is in Maryland, where it looks like he will finish school as soon as he has surgery on his knee (ACL) tear. It's hard to be a grown-up, but Nate's doing OK in the real world :-)

Love you big baby!

The Move Part 1

OK. We are started on our move. Getting out of town on friday night was zoo as we kept forgetting stuff and having to go back to the house. We finally left at about 9 PM. We are driving both cars and all the kids elected to ride with Crystal. Mom said it was because I was making them move and they didn't want to talk with me!

The best part of any road trip is of course staying in a hotel! The kids think that hotel breakfast is the best thing ever!

We stopped for lunch in Paducah Kentucky. The first time I ever drove through Paducah with Mom and Kristie we made fun of the name for about 30 minutes. I learned today that this is where the Ohio and Tennessee rivers meet.

Chas had lots of fun with his root beer at lunch.

This is the view from where I was sitting. We have short range radios so we are able to talk back and forth. We even have our own CB Names. I'm Moose Caboose and Crystal is Queen.

The kids all picked sea world names. Katie is Baluga1, Emma is Shamu12 and Chas is Dolphin13.We finished up in St. Louis today. The kids really enjoyed the arch. I thought it was absolute pandemonium. The top of the arch was crowded and very noisey. I asked the kids if they enjoyed the arch, they said YES, I said 'good, because I'm never taking you again!'. We actually went up at sunset and also saw a beautiful moonrise.

As I laid on the ground to take this picture we had lots of people watching me take the picture.

Happy birthday Nate

Happy birthday Nate and if my math is correct you are turning 22 today, man that's old!!!!!!! for a nephew anyways......

And the baby is.......

......healthy, growing right on track and kicking up a storm. Ha! You thought I might mention its gender, didn't you? All of the kids went with us to the ultrasound today and that was a really fun experience. They oohed and aaaghhed over each kick and movement. They got to see the baby wave and wiggle its toes and really loved watching it open and close its mouth! But all they really wanted to know was who was going to share a room with it; so the girls have been hoping for a boy and Chas has been talked into that opinion by his influential sisters. A month ago he said he would like to have a little sister because "baby girls are sweeter". It looks like he will get his first wish and remain the sole little prince in our family. I won't post the picture that definitively proves that this pretty profile belongs to a baby girl or the awesome 3D picture that Dan says looks like a creepy character in the movie, Nightmare Before Christmas!!!!

I know it seems like we have been hogging the blog but you all are being too quiet and it's a girl!

Jekyll the Freckle

We spent the second half our vacation on Jekyll Island. It was a 3 hour drive up from Orlando to the Island which is just barely in GA over the FL line. Jekyll is unique because commercial development has been stopped circa 1980. The Island is a state park. There are no new hotels on the island and no new homes have been built for 30 7ears. The result is a fabuously uncrowded island with lots of public access. We had talked about hosting the Doug Ward family reunion there the next time we hosted it. (I doubt that will happen as we will live 3000 miles away next time we host it!) We camped there on spring break as well. This time we stayed in a beach house. Our friends had a meeting there, rented a beach house for the week but could only stay til wednesday. We got the house the rest of the week! :)

Sunset. We called this the sound side of the Island. I don't think it is technically a sound as it is not very wide.

Another mighty atlantic ocean wave rolls in. At low tide the waves were pretty boring!

This is a sand bar on the island. At low tide you can walk a quarter mile out into the ocean. The tide was just starting to come in when we went out. By the time we turned around the water was a foot deep in spots. That made Emma a bit nervous.

I love this bridge. It is a massive suspension bridge that spans the river coming into the sound. I think that Chas took this picture.

The fishing peir. We went crabbing for blue crabs. We didn't catch any blue crab but we did get one hermit crab! As you can see it was kind of windy that night.

We had a lot of fun!!

Leap of Faith

Matthew's favorite thing to do in the summer is to jump off cliffs. These are jumping into lake Coeur D' Alene. We have also jumped into the Spokane river and Medical Lake this summer.

Sea World Part Deaux

We made our second trip to sea world to get the most out of out annual pass. For any of you thinking of going to Orlando in July, I have one word of advice: DON'T. It has been sort of hot here this week but we have had a lot of fun even with the heat. We have made the most of shows with splash zones and air conditioning!

In the evening they have a 'Shamu Rocks' show. While waiting they play loud music show people from the crowd on the big screen. They made our kids dreams come true by putting us up on the screen. I'm the dork taking a picture of himself (really my kids)! Chas isn't in the picture because he was on the front row waiting for the full spash effect.

Shamu in action. It is amazing to see these huge animals get out of the water like this. They are so powerful and beautiful.

After the show. We were all soaked and happy for it! The BIG Shamu came out and splashed us this show. The other show we watched he didn't come out. The trainers say they never tell shamu what to do, they ASK. He just flipped water with his tail but when he does so he sends gallons and gallons of water out into the crowd. Chas got his money's worth on the front row.

I will post more pictures later as I took a ton. Sea world is a great place to go. They really do a great job showing off the animals talents while obviously showing care for the animals.

Dog Days of Summer

Kristi made fun of me about (as she put it) my "Doggie Hammock" in the back of my car. I took out the back seats and put a platform for the dogs to ride on so they could see out the windows as we drive.

They love to go on rides and yesterday we did just that. Thought you'd like to see just how happy the hammock makes them.

That's Victoria above and to the right below. Chloe-LaRee is the one on the left below.

Ok... so Louis doesn't "LOVE LOVE" the hammock. It's a little too wobbly for him. But he's a little grump anyway, the croggity old thing. He's always been more of a destination-not-the-journey kind of guy anyway.

The Great Spud

Charlie, David and I have just completed the 2008 Spudman. We had a great time with each of us posting our personal bests....excluding David Daniel Harris Ward's time from last year. This is a post victory shot.


This is the three of us before the race, Charlie is in the back ground he was tired of waiting on David and I. We missed placing our bikes the night before as David and I were a little slow.








If you look out over the top of the dock you can see two swimmers out there waving, that is David and I "bobbing" down the river. We took the swim very easy, not pushing too hard there at all. We just tried to stay in the current the best we could and enjoy the morning. We enjoyed floating past our camp site and waving to our group as they got ready for a day of swimming.








This is a picture of Dave and I coming out of T1 you can see clearly that I am in the lead.....








Here is David sneaking by my as I stopped to have my picture taken.....


Just as this picture was being taken, David said that last time he would see me until after the race because I would be ahead of him for the remainder of the race. Neither one of us knew that David had past me at this point, so I was riding hard to stay in front of him and I would look at every rider as they past me to see if it was David and I needed to kick it up a little to keep up with him. In the meantime, David was riding hard to try to catch up with me thinking that I was in front of him. So he was pushing hard while I was holding back a little saving what little I had left.....When David got to T2 and my bike was not there, he figure out he must have passed me somewhere. When I got to the bikes and saw his there, I was demoralized not knowing how far he was in front of me after spending all the time on the bikes thinking that I was beating him. I knew that Charlie would kill us with his times, up until then I thought I had a chance to get David. So I dropped my bike off, stored the camel-back took off the gloves, put on my hat and reached into Charlie's bag to get my Gatorade that I had left there, to only find it had leaked out of the container somehow.... So the 10K was mostly a walking race for me, as I was more out of shape for this race then any of the others and I was knew I just needed to beat my last time as I was not going to beat either of my brothers.




The kids enjoyed the river while we were gone. We were mean parents and made them swim with life preservers.....

James, little Dave, Matthew, and Joe came along to have some fun together...and they did.

Team Ward from Spanish Fork that where there for the race.





Here we are on the drive home, there were a lot of tired members of the race team....the support team anyways....



Laura was a good sport and road home in the back seat so Charlie could stretch his legs after beating us all so soundly.
We had a great time this year and hope to see all 6 pigs screaming down the river with us next year!!



Times:

Michael WARD 03:36:06.9

David WARD 03:23:10.3

Charles WARD 02:47:43.8

More Spud Fun

The ride up to Idaho. Thanks for driving Mike!

The boys in the back seat.

Playing on the snake.

After the tri with Dog and Matthew.


Tired travelers.