The kindergarten through second graders put on a Christmas carol show, including such hits as Nuttin’ for Christmas, and a bunch of others sung at scream level. It was fantastic.

Christmas cookies!

Thanksgiving in Minnesota – A quick trip overall but we got a few days in with my folks, saw Sarah and Jeff, Kari’s folks, Jarrett and Mel flew in, and finished it off with a party at Bridget and Tim’s. Whirlwind.

It happened – Oct 31 came around, kids got dressed up, and candy ensued. Pics of the Halloween season:

We headed down to Moab for an extended weekend of riding, which included a day on Slickrock trail. Tory wanted to give it a try too, and ended up riding the entire practice loop. He had to walk much of it, of course, but rode a whole lot more than we expected. Here’s a little […]

A new addition to the garden was a potato condo… or perhaps high-rise. I built 5 wooden tiers, the theory being that as the plants grow, you continually add a tier and bury the plants. Then potatoes grow up with it. Unfortunately that’s not how it worked out. Grandpa and Grandma H, and Jenny were […]

Grandpa and Grandma Hoffman purchased a Volkswagen RV earlier this summer and headed west to visit us as well as Uncle Loren and Aunt Audrey. They were here for a week and we had a very nice time seeing the sites around Park City, hiking a bit, and playing in our garden.

Here’s a few pics of getting ready for the first day of school. Tegan is back at Keystone Montessori and Tory is now in Kindergarten!

Tory played soccer again this fall, loving every minute of it and making new friends. Here’s a quick video of Tory scoring:

Tory drew up a plan for a platform style bird feeder after seeing it in a book. So we decided to build it.

Quick weekend trip to the Uintas with the DeFords, Lesters, and Mark & Seneca.

Our covered garden, year two. Or was it year three? No… two.

If you’re going to visit Minnesota, do it in the summer. The 4th of July is always the best time of year there, and this year was no exception. Beautiful, hot weather, swimming, boating, ice cream, bowling, and parades. Kari even snuck in her 20th high school class reunion.

Kari and the kids few home to Minnesota for a weeklong trip to see Marcus graduate and leave for the Air Force. The kids were excited to spend time with family and loved flying. Kari, you should add a few notes here since I wasn’t along on this one…

Fathers Day, 2012 – Salt Lake Bees vs Fresno. Bees lost, but it was really great to get out and see a game with Kari and the kids. Brad Bath and his family were there too.

Here’s a quick video of Tory and Tegan in an early summer swimming lesson. They were in different classes, but in the same area so the video shows them both:

Camping and biking in Brian Head! Neither Kari nor I had ever been to Brian Head, so we headed down there with the Lesters and our bikes to explore the acclaimed mountain bike trails and get the kids outside. The biking was actually very good, although it was extremely volcanically dusty and hard on the […]

Here are some early pics from waaaaay last summer when I stopped posting for some reason. If you’re wondering about me keeping up this year, see this post.

Getting the kids to keep their rooms (somewhat) clean is a constant for us. Today Tegan’s room was what’s referred as a ‘disaster pit.’ I asked her to clean it up and two minutes later she comes out saying she’s done. Uh huh. So it’s to be the old, behind the door trick, eh? No […]

Earthday 2012 wasn’t much of an event for us this year, but Babbie and Brad stopped by (and Tai and Aspen of course) and we all got to plant something, at least. The Chicks and Hens that were in the backyard got planted in the front!

My first job as a kid was a paper route. The thing I got up so early in the morning for? A 1/10 scale RC car called The Frog, by Tamiya. A couple of friends and I saved up for months to buy these cars (Eric had The Hornet, and Steve had The Ultima) and […]

For the most part, it’s been a pretty disappointing winter. You know this is so when people start talking about spring skiing when winter never really started. Anywhoo, it has been warm enough to think about going to the park. We met up with Heather, Josh, and Serisa at Willow Creek park for some park […]

While we thought it took a long time to get to Tory’s first haircut, it was over three years until Tegan’s. But she’s a girl so it’s different, and she’s got her mom’s awesome thickness too. Not much was taken off so you can hardly tell, but apparently doing this makes hair healthy. Tory got […]

Tory has been asking all season if he could snowboard. We finally caved and rented one for the afternoon. I was hoping that he wouldn’t like it*, but turns out he really did. Even though he just rode heel edge all day, I was still amazed at how quickly he picked up the balance. Here’s […]

Bowling was all the rage for this years Tory and Tegan Birthday Week™. Tonight we went to Jupiter Bowl in Park City. Josh, Heather, and Serisa showed, as did Sam and Sophia. Jarrett and Mel were there, and Uncle Nate too. Watch as Tory nearly picks up a split:

We’re still holding combo parties for Tory and Tegan’s birthdays. At least until they scream uncle about it. This year we headed down to Heber City’s Holiday Lanes for a little bowling session. Gutterballs and $2 everything ruled the night ($2 shoes, $2 games, $2 food). Lot’s of friends showed up, and I only got […]

Tegan turned three in January, and after a fun night at the Kamas pool came home to find a new penguin in her cache of gifts. She requested pizza for dinner with a cookies and ice cream chaser.

High Meadow is the bunny hill at Canyons (still have a hard time not calling it The Canyons) but we’ve been skiing there quite a bit with Tegan. Here’s a video of Tory top to bottom:

Very excited to post this about Tegan skiing on her own for the first time. Top to bottom on High Meadow all by herself. She’ll turn three in a week, but technically, she’s skiing on her own at two. My little girl.

It’s becoming somewhat of a tradition in our family to make sugar cookies for Christmas and let the kids paint them up. Tradition as in, this is the second year in a row we’ve done it. Sugar cookies happen to be my most favorite Christmas cookie so I can see this continuing. The kids had […]

We haven’t got a lot of snow yet this season, but I don’t mind as it gives us all a chance to get our legs back under us riding the groomed runs. Here’s a few pics and videos of this early season.

I picked Tory up on Wednesday and his teacher, Miss Sylvie, asked him to tell me what he did today. Typical kid, he’s says something like, ‘What? I don’t know.’ Turns out he read his first two books. They’re Bob Books, Mat and Sam. Pretty simple of course, but Miss Sylvie was pretty excited, saying […]

Just a few photos of the Tegers hanging out with her Daddy.

It’s that time of year again, where kids get crazy with the clothes and run around sugar crazed. Too much fun. I missed the Doggy Parade this year, but (thankfully??) Halloween is more of a ‘season’ than a single day.

Here’s a walk along Scarecrow Lane by the White Barn in Park City with Aspen and T’ai, Heather and Serisa, and Tory, Tegan, and Kari. The kids got to make their own scarecrows afterwards.

Fall means canyoneering around here, so we headed down to the North Wash area of Southern Utah. It’s located between Hanksville and Lake Powell – essentially BFE. Heather, Josh, and Sirisa, as well as Babbie, Brad, Tai, and Aspen showed up too – But the first morning was just us. We took the kids through […]

Growing up, soccer wasn’t available in my home town. Here in Park City, though, it’s as big as football in Texas. There’s Spring and Fall kids leagues (and probably Summer and Winter too, not sure) and we finally got Tory on a team this fall. He was lucky enough to be put on a team […]

Rather than try and go back and separate out each event that happened over the last two months, here’s a bunch of photos from that time. The main reason I’ve missed so much is our camera had a series of unfortunate events… but we’ve got it back now so I’ve no longer got an excuse […]

Potty training is one of the milestones I’ve been looking forward to the most. With Tory we experienced a long, drawn out process that required much bribery in the form of ‘potty prizes’. It was never meant to be this way… we’d started him sitting on a mini potty from about 5 months and were […]