14 Years of Bliss

It's crazy how fast time flies. 18 Years ago Stacie and I went on our first date. She wore a faded denim button up shirt with a white banana republic t-shirt beneath, worn out boy style jeans and brown boots. That was a super cool outfit back in the 90's and she rocked it. She smelled of everything lovely, had a rad personality and I was hooked. Four years later and 14 Yrs ago today, Stac and I got hitched. Seems like yesterday and all of the sudden we have 5 kids. Seriously, I just double checked by counting them on my fingers - we really do have five.

Being married to Stacie has been like the perfect cup of cocoa when its really windy and cold outside. You know how it is when it's just a really good cup? Right from the first sip you know you got a good one. It instantly puts a smile on your face and makes you feel safe, warm and cozy. You forget everything cold, windy and lousy outside and you just feel great - that everything is going to be alright. Every chocolaty smooth sip gets a little bit sweeter as you go. I'm going to savor this one for as long as I can.

Love Ya Cakes. Happy Anniversary!



This is Stac sipping her own cup of cocoa on the Ferry early one frigid, windy, cold morning off the Isle of Skye, Scotland.

Layla is the most loving cuddly smiley girl there is. She will hug or give head bunts to just about anyone. She now stands up to things and thinks she is a big girl, and I say no not my baby. I now no why youngest kids are said to be spoiled, because I don't want her to grow old. When the other kids stood up or crawled I was so excited they accomplished this step, but with Layla I was happy but a bit sad, another thing for her to check off her list that I wouldn't have another child do. I watched Pretty in Pink on TV yesterday while running and one of the lines said," Oooh I wish we could start old and grow young." How true, and especially when it comes to kids. I wish I knew then with the first kids, what I know now. I would do things differently and would do more things (such and video camera more often (and longer) so I can hear their sweet voices. I would know nothing lasts forever, those tantrums finally will end (not soon enough though ha ha), they will eventually will go on the potty, if they are shy and don't want to go to birthday parties or talk in front of people, they eventually will, they will stop sucking their thumbs, they will start being more clean, in more ways than one :). This knowledge has helped me greatly. And although the things we do want to last forever, like keeping them young babies, every age has fun things to look forward to.
So to Layla, I wish you wouldn't grow old but I am happy to see more of your personality. Love and kisses to you!

halloween 2010

yee haw dude. Rhen was the cutest cowboy I have ever seen!
I wished I could find the elephant costume that chloe, elsie and rhen wore when they were the same age, but I couldn't so Layla was a sweet punk rocker, just like big sis.
Elsie the vampire. She was super excited this halloween to get candy but more excited to come home to sort and share with her sisters which they do every year.
Addie had her last year as a cool punk rocker. She was excited to go to the "big" houses on the hill to she what awesome goodies they gave out :). She scored lots!! She went with a few of her friends, this is Emily the gypsy. They had a lot of fun!

Once chloe was in costume she went MIA and wasn't back until late. We didn't get a picture of her as a ninja.

2010 Pumpkin Carving / Painting

We held our annual pumpkin carving and painting family night tonight. We let the little kids paint their pumpkins because it is safer and more fun for them, probably just as messy though. We gave them each a title this year which was new for us, but seemed appropriate since some of them are a bit unconventional.

Addie went out on a limb when naming her pumpkin, but i think if you really think about it for a minute, it makes sense.

i puked again

Lazy raining sick kids sunday means movies and relaxing (when we aren't cleaning up throw up, that is). Our kids are having a hard time kicking this throw up thing. The other day Elsie threw up twice every hour in the night, I went in to see how Rhen did and he was lethargic lying on his pillow and said, "I puked on my bed." It was pretty funny but not so funny when it was gross to clean up. We thought it was a 24 hour thing but last night they both threw up again. So this morning when we were cleaning up Rhens he said "guess who can't go to wyoming." :) He was planning on going up with Jake this weekend. He says the funniest things, and a pretty cool boy. This past two weeks have been very long and exhausting. I went through the house lysoling (is that even a word?) everything so maybe maybe this can be done!

Cheers to Kael!!

We have met some amazing fighters while Chloe was in treatments. The Leak family is one of them. Kael finished his treatment this month and we were invited to celebrate and have rootbeer floats in his honor, here is our cheers to you Kael...

whew...

A very long, two year decision has been made and hopefully by this time next year this will be the entrance of our new abode. We are moving to "the house with the trees" (as Rhen puts it) in Star Valley Wyoming! A lot of prayer and concern went along with this decision, health insurance, moving the kids to new schools, building out of state and just where we want to be and should be weighed on our mind a lot. We know this is where we need to be and love the beautiful piece of land that we found. The first picture is our entrance...

and this picture is from the back porch of the cabin that is already there. We have gutted it and now will be adding onto it. It has been a long process to get the addition drawn, foundation ready and finally the framer should start framing in a week or two! It is such a beautiful peaceful place and our dream property with full grown trees and great views. When I found out this spring while we were still renovating it to be a cabin that Jake planted wild flower seeds around the house without me mentioning anything about it, I knew this was more than a piece of property to him.

And although it is 10 miles to town, we only have few neighbors, and it snows a lot, I feel peace in my heart that we need to be and are suppose to be there. To be honest the past five years or cancer battling, having to stay home alot and be in hospital rooms has changed me and I am more of a home body these days. Plus there is internet and UPS DOES deliver here :).
It will be our dream house and we feel really blessed to be able to move here. We will miss friends and neighbors here very much, I can't think to much about it right now or I will break down, but you are all welcome to visit anytime. We have a guest room specifically for this reason (wink, wink). We won't move until next summer so our neighborhood is stuck with us for a little bit longer but we just wanted to document our major decision, and let our friends know you will be missed.

Happy Hunting

I love this time of year! Hot chocolate, hot nog (for Jake anyway) the soups and stews, rolls and pies I can finally cook without it baking us in the process. The beautiful fall leaves I can see in my back yard, the cool fall nights,the spooky doors with spiders and webs, and of course picking out the perfect pumpkin...

Elsie picked out 4 or 5 (it seemed like 10) pumpkins before she found the right one for her.

Chloe was feeling under the weather but was able to pull off her beautiful smile, and also was able to pick out a great pumpkin!

This is the first time Rhen has been into getting a pumpkin, last year her could care less, but he had a good time this year and even smiled for the camera (wow)! I love the blonde locks.

Layla loved the pumpkins and informed us that she can't wait until she can have some pumpkin pie! (ps she is feeling MUCH better, yay) Yep there is her tongue, she can't keep it in her mouth. It is really cute how it tips upward on the tip.

Addie, apparently camera shy, so the only picture I got of her is in mid action with Chloe of the major decision if this perticular pumpkin is the one, I guess not :).

I informed them before we went that picking the perfect pumkin is serious business you can't just walk off with any one. She was up for the challenge :).

will Layla ever get better???

Layla has not been feeling well all week. Monday she started throwing up and hasn't stopped. Luckily she has not thrown up today(sunday). I was really concerned about her on thursday. Wednesday night she went to sleep at 4:30 in the afternoon, and didn't wake up until 8 in the morning. I kept going in to check on her to see if she was still ok. Thursday after her nap she woke up with purple and cold hands and feet. I gave her a bath hoping to warm them up and called for a doc apt. Everything was better than I thought, she was just really dehydrated. She didn't have a wet diaper all day and wouldn't drink formula and threw up gatoraide. so I got some pedialite in singles with a straw and she finally would drink out of a straw. I bought new formula wondering if it was the new formula I got for her (her stomach is so sensitive) her tummy is getting better but man she just cries and that is all around stressful. She is not herself, I don't know what else to do. Her feet are better she has had wet diapers but she still is in pain. Addie said she wasn't looking forward to being a mom to soon, and although that is a good thing right now :) I told her being a mom is the best and most challenging thing in the world.
Rhen, frustrating, stubborn, sweet boy that he is just yells, LAYLA be quite!! He won't listen when I tell him to leave her alone she is sick, so she is screaming and he is yelling. Wow, it has been a week.

Yellowstone

Yellowstone, a place when you first drive through the park you are going at 5 miles an hour pace to see one buffalo or elk, so it takes you hours to get to where you want to see hot pots and whatnot and realize there are plenty of wild life to be seen.
We were excited to go with Josh and his family and grandma and grandpa to Yellowstone and spend sometime together, eat sandwiches, walk a few thousand stairs, and have buffalo eating out of your palm, not really cause that would be scary. The hot pots in the first picture made me want to paint. The colors were so cool and inspiring. Someday I will go there with an easel and just paint.

Here is the beautiful mammoth hot spring. It is really cool and worth the thousand stairs we climbed (ok not really a thousand). Actually it might have been a thousand.



A buffalo who wasn't in the mood for the jerky we had in the car. We didn't really try to get him to eat it but he was so stinking close we could have. This is the first of three we saw.

Who cares about the buffalo or the elk for that matter, there was in the middle of the walkway a red caterpillar! 8 England girls in a huddle.

Josh and Stacy's fam with a guest appearance by Grandma and Grandpa. They were looking at Josh's camera not ours.

Jentry looking at Jake! She is always too shy, but she looked at him for a picture! and posed! Very rare indeed, we are glad we got it documented!

My only blue eyed kid. They get bluer and bluer everyday. She had lots of fun, so much so that even and 1:00 am she wanted to play and play and play some more.

We were so glad that grandma and grandpa came with us! We don't have too many opportunities to go on trips with them. Elsie got to ride in the car with them a couple of times and mentioned that Elsie is a totally different person when by herself. Pretty mellow. I will say that our ride was much calmer too :) She likes to push tease her sisters and Rhen until she gets a dramatic reaction. gotta love Elsie!

Layla loved riding in her backpack. She just laid her sweet head on the side and watched everything that was going on around her.

Jake made fun of me for taking picture of him and Rhen looking in the same direction and not at the camera, well Jake, the reason I do take those shots is because that is when you two look the most alike, and to be honest Rhen won't look at the camera all that much, he takes after Jentry.

Towards the end of the month

Running after 5 kids isn't enough for Stac so late fri night she decided to run a 10k in the Morning. Rhen had fun watching her from the road side after which Stac dated herself with this sweet 90's 'hang loose' hand sign. Wait.... Maybe she's a Texas longhorns fan.

About 9700 Ft.

Three yrs ago, a week or two before we found out cancer came back for Chloe, my brother Josh and I took our girls on a backpack trip up in WY. The girls had so much fun (we did too) that they have been begging us to go again ever since. The next backpack trip was the subject of many late night talks I had with Chloe in the hospital as she would often ask where we would go, when her doctors would think it was OK or what we would do. I think talking about it helped Chloe escape from the present or something because she asked me about it all the time. Unfortunately, because of her transplant and all that comes along with it she couldn't go for quite a long time. Addie and Josh's girls have waited patiently for Chloe to be able to go with them [Thanks, to all of them. It meant a lot to Chloe]. Just this spring Chlo's docs gave her the go ahead and we were finally able to find a weekend that worked for all of us. Backpacking with 6 little girls (sorry Ads, still my little girl) is very entertaining, and several people we passed on the trail thought we were a bit crazy for bringing them up there but we all had a wonderful time. Here are a few pics of the adventure in no real order of importance or hierarchical sequence.

This was our view when we woke up. Well actually Josh and I never fell asleep. I can never sleep the first night out of my own bed. It was completely peaceful on the east side of the peak, so we laid there under the stars and listened to the cool sound of the jetstreams in the wind coming up over the peak.



Elsie, taking a much deserved break to eat some fruit snacks. She had a lot of fun and the backpacking was a nice focus for her fun, energetic personality. She did great, and it was a hard trail for a seven year old. She liked to wait for me on the trail to point out something cool or tell me [specifically] how I would die and she'd never see me again if I fell off some cliff. I don't think she asked me once to carry her pack for her. She is already talking about the next trip, hoping we can get the same dry mix cobbler we had at dinner and "Warm Chocolate Memories" brand hot chocolate. We sure created some warm memories with it, and they were chocolaty.
Chloe was always by my side so I had quite a few pics of her. I chose to upload this one and I feel pretty good about my decision. As we walked along she told me how pretty she thought the scenery was and how she was so glad we were able to come. She is always so appreciative of the good things around her. I like that. Her muscles are still pretty weak from all the treatments so she struggled to keep up with the other girls. She had a hard time especially on the steep hills, but she only asked me to help her with her pack on the flats. Considering everything she has gone through, I think she did very well. She loves to hike and see the scenery. She commandeered Josh's binoculars so she could watch the many Mt. Goats we saw on the cliffs as we hiked.
Ever wonder what it looks like at midnight at 9712 ft? Here you go. Josh, Jill, Jamie and Joni aren't always there at midnight, but the rest is pretty accurate. Unless you are looking North. Well, any direction but south including but not limited to NE and NW.
I don't have many pictures of Addie close up because she and Joni were always out front leading the way. Addie did awesome this year, carried all her own stuff and never complained about how heavy her pack was or how hard it was to climb the steep rocky trail. I think she likes the adventure. I heard her several times counseling the younger kids on how to be safe while climbing the steep hills. In this pic above they are about to pass a rattle snake in the rock without realizing it. Josh found him a few minutes later when we got to the top. Luckily, none of us woke him up.
This moutain side should be very familiar to my Fam. Growing up we spent a lot of time biking, hiking, camping and horse riding in the mountains just down to the right of the peak. Good times. In fact, it was here and only here where I rode one of my Dad's horses and didn't get bucked off. Dad had great horses, i'm just a lousy rider. This particular day is so vivid in my mind, seems like it was yesterday. I rode this horse that was probably a mare, or maybe a gelding or stallion. It was for sure one of those three. I forget the horse's name, but it had a beautiful shiny coat of brown. It might have been black though, or white or a combination of any of those three colors. Man that was a pretty horse. I'm not really sure what time of day it was, but the temperature was probably nice for riding. I'll never forget it.
Here are six of nine girls Josh and I have between us. From the left, Chloe, Jill, Joni, Elsie, Jamie and Addie. They are all great hikers and had fun singing silly songs and collecting pocket fulls of 'special' rocks. My girls love hangin out with Josh's girls. They can't get enough of them.
Sunset at the Peak.

The Josh Englands. Josh always makes trips like these adventurous and luckily everything I forgot he brought and visa versa. Though I think I forgot more than he. His girls were all troopers and characters, just like their dad.
The Jake Englands

We all had a fun time and the girls are already asking about where we might go next time. We're looking forward to when The Stacie's(y's) can join us when our little ones are older.

A Little Dirt in His Diet

Moms take a terrible risk sending their kids off to camp alone with their dads. Wait, maybe he's just wearing gloves. Luckily someone lit a latern so we were able to identify the contamination. It took a good half box of whipes to clean this kid up - after we took some pics of him enjoying that monsterous treat, of course.

What we've been up to.

Not much really. Summer has been great, but passing quickly. My sister Kell came up the other week and took some pics of the fam. I think she gets better every time she takes our pictures. Thanks a lot Kelly! We really appreciate it, even more since you shouldn't have been up and about. Our kids are growing so fast it's scary.





I asked Kell to take some pics of Stac so I can have a pic of my Lady on my desktop. I might just wallpaper the long wall in my office with this pic. I'm sure Stac would like to see herself billboard size when she stops by.


In other news, we continue to do things from time to time. The other day we took the kids on a walk by the river.

Then we went camping and forgot to take any pics of our kids having fun in the forest, but managed to take this one of the sunset one rainy night. The pic didn't turn out, but the scenery in person was very nice.

While camping we stopped in at the [very happening] Star Valley Fair. Elsie and Rhen hit a bunch of exciting rides. Chloe was very disappointed because the little rides were boring, and she is just shy of the height minimum for the bigger ones so she was pretty bored with the whole thing, and quite irritated that she hasn't grown more. Dang chemo.


Thanks to Addie's willingness to babysit from time to time [thanks Ads] I've been able to get Stacie out for some fun. This is her riding her bike on a trail. The are also some trees and sage brush nearby in this photo.

She likes to go fast.

At home we've learned an important lesson that buying a swingset and spending 2 days assembling it wasn't really necessary. All we needed to do was take the top of the old FJ40 and park it in the garage. They have gotten way more use out of the fj the last several weeks than they ever have in the swingset. They never want me to drive it to work because they want to play in it during the day. Rhen and Elsie spend hours in it playing and swinging on the roll bar. One night I found Addie relaxing in the back reading a book. Rhen is especially attached to it. The other day when I was leaving to work he was yelling at me, "Daaad, don taka my FJ40!" I thought i'd pass it down to him eventually, but at 2 yrs old? He's a little optimistic.

And finally, just a few months before he is too old for nursury at church, he decided he'd go the other day and didn't put up a fight. I did have to bribe him with a dewskie which I've been reprimanded for doing... but it worked. Even still, I don't have a whole lot of confidence that he will go as easily next time.

He also learned how to put on his belt by himself and was very proud.