Introducing Baby Conner!!

My sister had her baby on Monday morning July 23, 2007 at 3AM, his name is Conner Ray, 6lbs 4ozs 18inches. He came in to the world like a flash of lightning, 4 hours of labor and boom he is here! I think Christie must have done something special to make it go so fast, otherwise she is just one lucky lady! He is super cute, but that wouldn't be from a proud Auntie point of view.

So with out futher delay may I present our new nephew Conner Ray!!!!

He is so handsome!

One Proud Auntie!

One Proud Uncle!

And this is Conner with his VERY EXCITED new Big Sister Taylor!

Congratulations Mark, Christie, Taylor and Conner! We Love You Tons and Tons!

Shoshone, for Leadership Training

I was gone for about 4 days as a chaperone for one of the girls from our youth group who was selected by the congregation to go to Leadership training. The training occured up at Shoshone Basecamp on the North Fork of the Couer d'Alene River. We learned how to be a leader in the church, and how to serve in the church. The hope is that the youth go home with a sense of empowerment to lead those in their youth group and encourage them when it comes to Sevent Leadership. We were given the opportunity to serve at the camp through servent projects such as re-staining a deck, getting tee pees ready for kids, and building a trail. What a wonderful experience for Claire (the youth) and I, we learned so much, and had fun doing it!

Claire in her small group doing Knots (a group building game).

This was the helium pole (another group building activity), as hard as this group tried to get the pole on the ground, it kept going UP!

My small group we were the "Hot Rock Bootie Bombers!" Hot Rocks is for the rocks we moved during our servant project...they were SUPER HOT!

Hurray for the the whole LYO/YELS Group! What fun we all had!

A Happy 4th of July!

We had a wonderful 4th of July, it was my (Erin) Birthday! We spent the day on the boat with my family and had a wonderful time! We played in the water, ate yummy munchies, and just enjoyed being together! That night after a great meal back at the boat slip we headed out to the lake again and tied up with a few other boats and watched the Coeur d'Alene fireworks from the water. The most exciting part was that our niece Taylor actually stayed awake for the fireworks, last year she fell sound asleep about 5 minutes before they started and we couldn't get her to wake up again! It was pretty funny, but this year she got to enjoy every minute of them! We really enjoyed our day and look forward to doing it all again next year!

This is a picture of Maggie the day before, she had to go to the kennel for a couple nights so she celebrated a day early! She LOVES her pretty scarf, she's smiling!!!!

By the way there are no pictures of us because we were all to busy playing to remember to grab the camera!! Sometimes you've gotta live and let live!

Our House!

Some of you are wanting a few more pics of our house so here are some pics that we took of the inside... Its a bit small but they are pretty self explanitory.

This is our Living room, the couch to the right of the picture is new! I wanted a nice couch in our new home. No more man couch! Yippee!

Living Room from a different agnle. A little messy but thats life in our home!

This is our little kitchen, the table actually is squeezed into the corner on the other side of the stove. The refrigerator is to the left but you can't see it, the basement door and door to the back yard are to the right.

This is looking from the living room into the hall way that leads to 2 bedrooms and the bathroom. We recently did a bathroom makeover and it turned out great! James, Bary and Jeff did a great job of ripping out tile, vinyl flooring, and old wallboard, then putting it back together and most of it was done in about 2.5 days! They worked really hard! And now it looks great! I will post pics of that soon once the tools are out of the way!

Thats about all I have of our house right now but stay posted and we will put more up! Hope you are all having a great week of enjoying your freedom in a land that offers so many opportunities, you just have to go out and find them!

Blessings to you all!

Happy Maggie!

What a happy water lovin dog we have! She loves to jump at that hose whenever we turn it on! We think shes pretty funny and cute! She also loves to romp, thats right not run its more of a romp or frolick! So here is Maggie enjoying a good romp in Bonners Ferry!

Storm of the Century!

James, Maggie and I headed up to Bonners Ferry this weekend to spend some time with Linda, James' mom, for her birthday. We drove up through Sandpoint and just before we got into town we got hit by this HUGE storm! There were tree branches floating through the air like feathers, we watched 4 trees blow down, not to mention tons already down, we watched 2 electrical explosions, and we saw 1 hawk get blown out of a tree and he could hardly recover! It was so amazing, there were branches in the road and cars pulling over, but we just kept plowin on through! Then we came up on slow moving traffic and we got the the cause of the slow down there were tons of trees laying on the power lines. The power was out in about 3 counties, thats about a 70 mile stretch North and South.

This is one of the pictures we got through the car window.

Maggie very much enjoyed the wind from the car window, the weather report later said there were 75 mi/hr gusts! Feel the wind in your hair!

I think she is smiling under the wind blown fur!

We got where we were going and we had a very nice visit with Linda... James and his mom spent quality time fixing here Bronco!