::grandma came, and then she left::

Isn't that how visits always go?


We're so glad she came, but we were really sad that she had to go back home. Max didn't understand why he had to go actually. I had to explain to him that Grandpa Ken wanted her to come back and keep him company. Well he didn't really feel that was necessary. But I told him he was just going to have to deal with it.

The weather all week was so nice. The temperature was cool but not cold, and the sun shone the whole time. We were very lucky. And we got to enjoy it.

We went on a few drives and had some outdoors fun. I'll post about those separately. Otherwise we hung out with Max, ate good food and played games. It was great.

We did some sewing on fun projects too.



I don't love this picture, so just focus on the apron, ok?

I always love when Kathy comes and helps me sew. I learn a little more every time.

We lucked out with an early christmas present:

Our horrible loud lame vacuum decided to kick the bucket right when Kathy showed up. So she got us a new one. It's so wonderful. It's so nice to use. I love it! And so does my son. He's been walking around with it quite a bit.

We introduced Grandma to the deliciousness of the Seven Stars Bakery, which is just down the street from our house. We made a couple of visits there. It's absolutely delicious.

Here's Max looking on as the goodies are split up.

The brownies are incredible.

Max agrees.


The day she left we tried to take a few fun pictures of each other. The ones of Max and I didn't work out so hot:

He's made of jello.

But the ones of Max and Grandma turned out adorable.

Because they're both so adorable.


We had such a wonderful time with Kathy here. We're so happy she came. It was pretty lonely the day after she left, but Max and I will get used to it.
She's just got to come back soon!

::cute people::

I have my computer back! And not only is it back, but I actually was able to restore the system from my back-up. So somehow, miraculously, my computer is back just like it was before I so dumbly dropped it. But with a new hard drive. And that can't be bad, right?

When I was going through some of my photo files while my computer was dead, I came across some great shots from this summer. I promised myself that when all was back in order I'd work these up and post them. So they're from back in June when were in UT. I have more from back then too, and sometime in the next while I'll probably post them to. But without any further ado, here are some cute people. People that I like.






(how can I not include him?)


These photos are from a trip to the Taco Friend with my cousin Bryce and his family. Admittedly, these are only the people sitting right across from me. There were other cute people at the table that didn't get their portraits taken. But I guess that's how it goes.
Here are the rest of us. Kris is taking the picture, and I think Charlotte was off doing something else, but she was there with us too.

Good times.

Oh, and nice face Bryce!

::red::

One of the benefits of living in New England:


Wow, right? Hopefully I'll get to share some more incredible trees with you. I'll see what I can do. I just need to walk around with the camera welded to my face all the time. It's probably worth it!

::more great stuff from the files::

I loved Kris's post yesterday, and it made me think of something else funny from his stuff that I wanted to share with everybody.

After we graduated from school this last May Kris got to go on a little outing in Utah with his friends Jeff and Cody. They did all sorts of exciting manly stuff like bike riding, hiking and goofing around. He posted about some of it here.

So anyway, here they were, the dudes.

Driving around, being cool and manly.

They were even taking manly pictures, like the following:

Ewww, a dead rattlesnake?


Yikes.


Oh yeah. It doesn't get much better than standing on top of your Land Rover in the desert!

They went through the slot canyons. They thought they were pretty cool stuff.





and who's to disagree?

At some point along the way they asked some guy in the canyon to take a picture of the three of them.
He was happy to do it. He grabbed the camera and went for it. As the guys looked towards the camera, Kris realized that somehow he was seeing the guys eye on the front of the camera.
Somehow the guy was holding the camera backwards and looking through the lens. Where was this guy from? Another planet where they don't have cameras?
He took the picture and handed the camera back to Kris and went on his merry way.


This picture will always crack me up.

Filler until Ginna's computer gets fixed

Well, it's sad times at our house when Ginna's computer is broken. Remember the computer in Willy Wonka'a Chocolate Factory? It's supposed to tell everyone where the golden tickets are, but it can't. Everyone watching the computer gets bummed. It's like that around here.
 It's actually not that bad since we expect that we'll have her computer back on Tuesday.  So, in the meantime, I'll (kris) put up some stuff from the "other" perspective on our life.  But, instead of using great pictures, I'll use raw cell phone pictures to tell my story. 

This is called a dens-in-dente. It's a tooth in a tooth. pretty cool huh? I found one of these growing in a kid I saw a few weeks ago. This tooth is sliced up so you can see it better. Since I spend my days trying to fix teeth in unusually poorly behaved kids, this is cool to me. I hope it doesn't gross you out too much. A little bit is good, however.

We work in an old hospital that is slowly closing down--not the dental, we're strong and busy as ever, but everything else is dying. So, we went exploring and found access to the roof. Don't tell security. This is Brian and Dan with me after we first got up there. We've started having lunch up there regularly and we've even added some chairs. Lunch in our secret garden is one of the highlights of my week.

This just gives a taste for the view we have.

When Max and dad go out he gets to do some things that Mom doesn't always allow. He loves sitting on the tractors at Home Depot. I was really proud of him on this particular trip because as we were walking through the huge parking lot, Max read the name of the store on the sign and said "Home Depot" (home dee-pot). "What's a dee-pot?" Good question, they didn't teach us that in tooth school. It's the place where daddy takes max after max breaks the chalk board dad made for him and now we have to repair it.

The other day I tried something that always fails: attempt to accomplish something important while entertaining Max at the same time. This time it was me trying to exercise. I was going to run down the bike path by the bay and Max was going to ride his bike with me. Well, it didn't work out. I ended up playing games with Max the whole time (not always on purpose) and I didn't break a sweat. But he loved it and that made me happy, even if I was less fit for it.

This is proof that I have at one point in my life caught a fish with my fly rod. Ginna's dad, Guy, and I went to the Green River in Wyoming/Utah and I caught a fish.
I don't think that I've pulled it off since then, although I've tried several times. Now, fishing is more like hiking through a river with a big stick that has constantly tangled string on it. I'm also good at losing flies to trees. I need Guy to take me out some more so I can figure this out. I mean, I like walking in rivers, but I wouldn't mind catching the occasional fish. The next pictures are shots from the Wood River in Rhode Island where I went river hiking aka fishing this weekend.


The river was very picturesque and I actually had a relaxing hike. I even thought I saw a fish.

Here is a gravestone I found when I was trying to exercise Ginna's land rover after my little fishing trip. I was driving some horse trails and I found this super old graveyard. Just think, in 1813, our church (mormonism) didn't even exist. This place is so old.

Remember this?

Remember when we were young and played strange musical instruments? I scanned a bunch of old pictures a couple of weeks ago. I like this because it reminds me of the great times Ginna and I had when we were first married and trying to live very interestingly. Here is Ginna playing Bari-sax at a restaurant at the UN headquarters in Vienna. We played in a really bad jazz band together and she was a good sport by playing the instrument that they needed even though she hates playing instruments that are bigger than she is. And really hates putting her mouth on an instrument that doesn't belong to her.
I though playing music on the streets would be romantic. Ginna helped me realize that dream that same summer. It was fun and I definitely got the urge out of my system. Don't we look cool in this picture though?

::vists are great::

We're having a really great time with Kris's mom. She came on Wednesday afternoon and gets to stay until this coming Wednesday. Kris got to take Thursday and Friday off and hang out a bit. We're so glad she's here, but nobody is happier about it than Max.

Well, actually I mean Grandma's twin is happy about it.

Here are the twins making a craft. Pretty much impossible to tell them apart, right? Or at least that's what Max said.

We've been having tons of fun. Hopefully my computer will be back in my hands repaired by next Tuesday and I can post some of the fun photos. I heard from the repair place yesterday that in the shipping somehow my hard drive quit working. So now not only do we have to replace the screen, but the hard drive too. Ahhh! But luckily I did back up absolutely everything before we shipped the machine off.

Wish me luck. I can't wait to get it back. I've never wanted to play with my photos more in my life than right now when I can't do it!

::tough questions::

Max's new past time seems to be asking me a whole bunch of tough questions, whenever he can.

He likes to ask me about definitions of words a lot. Like yesterday we were going to pick up Kris's mom at the airport. He said to me, "What does air mean?" So I told him. Air is something we breathe. Air is what's all around us. Then he said, "What does pork mean?" I'm like, pork? He's like, "NO! PORT!" Then I finally figured out what he was really asking. And that was what does airport mean. That I could tell him. For once, something I could explain.

Also yesterday he asked me the following: "Where is heaven?" Oh boy. When I told him that heaven is where Heavenly Father lives, he said, "oh, it's too bad he died." So I had to explain to him that Heavenly Father isn't dead. And why he lives in heaven if he isn't dead. The inspired the question, "So where was I before I was in heaven before I was born." Ahh!



He loves to ask me questions while we watch movies too. Every time we watch the Pixar movie Ratatouille, he asks me the same set of questions. Over and over. And I give him the same answers. It's pretty goofy.

Earlier this week we were watching an informational video on Disney World. (prepping for the december trip, yay.)
We saw something on the pirates of the caribbean ride, and saw a whole bunch of little boys in pirate outfits with swords. Max started to look very concerned and asked me, "Why are pirates good?"
So this is really a very tough question when you think about it! Why are pirates, who kill and plunder and steal and do all sorts of bad stuff, so well liked?
And I don't really know the answer. So I cheated a bit and told him that some pirates just ARE good. Like the pirates on Sesame Street who 'love to read'. He was cool with that.
But I've thought about that question since and I still don't know the answer. The kid makes me think sometimes. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.


And if you want some more fun kid question entertainment, head over to my friend Marilyn's blog for a fun post. You won't be disappointed.

::conference weekend::

So I have to say that it's really hard for me to post photos up here without working on them in photoshop first. Don't get me wrong. I don't do a lot to them, but the little bit I do makes me very happy. So in the interest of continuing to post I'm doing it anyway. I'm sending my computer in for repair tomorrow. My fingers will be crossed that all goes well!

We had a good weekend. It's so nice that we can get conference online now. We're trying not to spend money on anything non-essential right now, so we don't have cable or satellite. So it's super nice to be able to get the video feed anyway. In Kansas City we had Dish Network and they have a BYU channel, so it was easy to watch there.

Anyway, it was great that we got to watch conference, even though the sessions for us started at noon and 4! Crazy huh? And priesthood session went from 8 to 10PM for Kris!

We spend most of saturday cleaning up and grocery shopping and doing all our normal saturday type stuff. It was nice to have some help cleaning, because it seems like with this house no matter how hard I try to keep everything clean it's always dirty. I don't know if it's just the age of the house, or the dirt leftover from all the previous renters or what. Whatever it is it drives me crazy and I hate cleaning because I feel like it's hardly worth it.

Sunday was super nice. We started it out with delicious German pancakes for breakfast. Well actually Max started it off with a yucky "soup" he made in the sink out of water and yucky food leftover in the slow cooker that was soaking there. Yuck. He was proud though.


Then the German pancakes. Boy do we love them. Max could eat more than Kris and I combined if we let him.

We also had turkey sausages. Those were yummy too. We never get to have a big sunday breakfast nowadays because we have church at 10, so this was fun.


Then we spend some time tidying up our guest room before the first session started. It's been housing all the stuff we haven't found a place for since we moved. But we got it all cleared up. It's ready for Kris's mom to come tomorrow, yay!

I got out some old coloring books, and somehow they kept Max busy through most of the first session. Busy, but not necessarily quiet. He's not a quiet kind of guy. So we listened to as much as we could. There were some really great talks. Aren't we lucky to have the kind of leaders we do in the church?

For dessert at the very end of the day I made a souffle. I've never made one before. It was a good amount of work, but delicious. It was a pumpkins souffle, and tasted a lot like pumpkin pie, only lighter. Seasonal for sure.

Yum.

I'm pretty proud that it turned out well. My cooking skills are slowly getting better as I practice. Very slowly. Still, the only thing I really enjoy making is dessert, but I'm trying to branch out.
We have a lot of apples right now and I'm going to have to make some sort of apple crisp or pie or something soon. I'm looking forward to that.

Too bad conference is over for another 6 months, but it's nice we always know we have more to look forward to.

Later!

::kermit::

So what is there to do when a friday afternoon gets really gloomy, and then starts to feel really really long?
Make a movie of course!

Although I can't edit my photos right now, I can still edit movies. So please enjoy Max's and my little movie. It was pretty fun to make.


Kermit's Song from Ginna Hendricks on Vimeo.


And hopefully my computer will be fixed sometime next week. We'll see!