Last night Rachel and I talked about treating our children better. I suggested that we set a goal of not yelling. We’ve had similar talks before and it seems that when we do the Lord likes to try our commitment. This evening Rachel went to the store to get a wedding gift for Sam. I was out mowing the lawn. Nolan went inside the house. When I went in to get him I found in covered in fingernail polish and it was all over our bathroom floor,...

I stayed home from work today because Emily came down so we could look at a house in Alpine. Time was of the essence because the house just came on the offer and someone else placed an offer on it yesterday. Ken & Laura also came and looked at it. I really liked the house. It has been remodeled throughout. It is 4500 square feet, so it is pretty much double the space we are in now, plus, it’s on a half acre lot and has a 3 car garage....

There was a new house added to the market here in Alpine today. It was actually a house I had seen before but we hadn’t looked out it because it only had 3 bedrooms and had extensive water damage. Someone purchased it for $220,000 in a foreclosure and just put it back on the market for $350,000. Emily is coming down tomorrow to look at it and we may be puttin in an offer if we decide we like it. We talked with Ken & Laura tonight about...

They started spot-lighting families in the ward newsletter. We were the first to be spotlighted. We mentioned that we love baseball and named our boys after baseball players. The newsletter was passed out with the sacrament meeting program. It made for a lot of conversation today. It also brought up a lot of questions about our house. We would like to stay if there was a home in our ward for sale that we could afford and that met our needs. Who...

The past two days I have been working with Gehrig to learn to ride his bike without training wheels. It was his idea because recently Brigham has learned and Gracie learned earlier this summer. He made some decent progress yesterday, but today he really made some progress. He can ride by himself now. He’s still pretty wobbly and lacks confident, but I’m sure with a couple more days of practice he will take off.

For family home evening tonight we taught the kids a little bit about money. I printed out a bunch of little pictures representing different areas in which we spent money. I don’t know that the really "got it" but hopefully we can help them be a little more conscious about closing the door, turning off lights, shutting the fridge, etc. I think they came away with the idea that everything costs money.