Category: Our Family

For Thanksgiving this year we went to Laurel and Roine’s. Laurel just had foot surgery and is in a cast and didn’t want to have to go anywhere, so we all went to their place. Roine had cooked two turkeys. He smoked one, and the other he deep fried. Laurel’s friend Tanja was visiting from Germany and was there as well. The kids had a great time playing with cousins as they always do, and Kyle and I had a tough time trying to keep Lydia in the living room. She did get out once, and just as I asked Kyle to go catch her before she gets to the stairs, we heard a loud thumping going down the stairs, and I just knew that was her. She was fine but it really scared her (scared me too…). The food was all good, and everyone had a good time and we left to come home entirely too late. 🙂

Today we did our own turkey dinner. I like to do our own thing, despite what we do with the extended family, because I feel like we need to be establishing our own family’s traditions and make sure we keep them. I don’t want to always rely on doing something with the extended family, because what happens when we, or they, move too far away to get together for every holiday? And besides, I really like having the turkey leftovers to make other meals out of. So we had a feast of our own tonight. Earlier in the week Debby mentioned that they would come out to visit on Thanksgiving. I told her that we weren’t going to be home, that we would be at Laurel’s, but that we would do our own thing on Sunday. So they came out tonight to visit and feast with us.

I am grateful that we were able to spend so much time with family this weekend, and I am grateful that we had plenty of food to have a feast to celebrate the season of giving thanks. 🙂

We decided we were going to go on an adventure today, but we hadn’t decided where when we woke up this morning. I talked about going to Zion National Park or to Snow Canyon, and Kyle threw out the idea of going to Antelope Island. We got a later start to the morning than I was hoping so we kind of threw out the idea of going to southern Utah. So we talked about hiking to the Y instead and I showed Kyle another park that I found and the map to get there. It took a road going by the west side of Utah Lake and Kyle said “Hey I’ve always wanted to drive on that side of the lake.” So we decided we would go to this park called “Little Sahara”. And then maybe hike to the Y if we still had time afterward. We packed a picnic lunch and got everyone dressed and out to the car and we were on our way.

The drive on the west side of the lake was beautiful. We drive on the other side all the time, but we almost never see it, aside from at a distance as we come over the mountain out of our valley. We got closer to where the GPS system on Kyle’s work phone was telling us we should be going. And then we passed the sign for the “Little Sahara”, but the GPS said that we had a few more miles to go before we got there. We decided to go to where it said we should go, and if we needed to we would turn around and head back for the road where the sign was. Well we got to where the GPS told us we wanted to go, but there wasn’t a real road there. So we decided to turn around and go back to where we saw the sign and that’s when Kyle told me about how there have been many complaints about that GPS program leading people on wild goose chases.

We started out by going to the visitors center to get a map and to let everyone make a potty stop, and then we went to one of their picnic areas. The park seems to be more of a place for people to bring their four wheelers and dune buggies to play on the sand dunes. I was hoping for something more of a nature exploration. There were a couple of areas fenced off that were off limits to vehicles and that’s where we spent our time. We had our lunch first, and then after picking up our stuff and reloading it into the car we took the kids over the hill to explore.

It was weird to see a landscape similar to the valley where we live, with the sage brush and the tumbleweeds, and then to see huge amounts of natural sand right there next to it. The sand was very soft and fine, different from the sand that you would find at the beach. The weather was just perfect for playing in the sand. I can’t imagine going to Little Sahara in the summer time when it is really hot. That would just be pure misery. But here it is almost the end of November and it was warm enough to be playing without wearing sweaters. You might notice that Jeremy is in shorts and a t-shirt and Kyle is wearing short sleeves as well. The kids really had a good time playing in the sand. Dinah decided she wanted to make sand angels:

Adam just hung around on his first day trip adventure:

The kids ran off and decided to slide down the sand hill:

Lydia loved being let loose in the sand, of course her favorite thing to do was to throw the sand. Thankfully it didn’t get in anybody’s eyes.

Daredevil Dinah was the first to climb the super tall and super steep hill:

Then the others had to prove they could do it too:

Kyle even helped Lydia climb partway up the hill, because Jeremy climbed up most of the way and then flipped out because he was stuck!

I was up towards the top of the hill on my own (I didn’t go up the steep side because I was wearing Adam) and there was sand untouched by foot prints. It was so pretty:

The kids had a blast, but once they got to the point where they would run off and not listen to what Kyle and I were telling them we decided it was time to go. We drove back to civilization and went to Applebee’s for dinner. Debby was working tonight so we saw her there. Then we came home and gave everyone a bath! I think I’m going to need to give the whole house a good cleaning now. As the kids pulled their shoes off in the entry way sand came out. Then they walked all over the house in their sandy socks before going into the bathrooms to pull off their socks to get in the bath, so more sand in the bathrooms. Lots of sand for me to clean up now. 🙂

We’ve been really anxious for getting our basement finished this year. It’s been “in progress” for the last… well, practically since the first year we lived here.  It’s either been an issue of not having the money to spend on the supplies to progress on it, or finally when I was working two jobs, having the money but no time to put into it. The main floor was so crowded with the stuff of life, that I had made a decision to just move it all down into the basement so we could have a decent living area on the ground floor. Then, when I finally went down to one job, we had so much stuff in the basement that we couldn’t start working on it.

Now that we seem better able to handle our cost of living, we have been able to get some money saved up for home improvement, including working towards finishing the basement. So this year, we have put a lot of effort into emptying it out, and once we were close to ready, we started getting quotes from professionals. The quotes were more than we were hoping for, but we figured the cost was justified, and finally picked someone that seemed to have an eye for detail that I could respect.

When we had the house built in 2004, the base price of the home did not include a basement. Most of the models by Tuscany Homes cost $10,000 to finish the basement, but we selected the “Stillwater” plan, that would only be $7,000 extra for an unfinished basement. Then, we added other upgrades, including air conditioning, windows in the upstairs bathrooms, an upgraded bathtub in the master bathroom, an island in the kitchen, upgraded the shelves to pull out like drawers in the cabinets in the kitchen, and linoleum in the dining area. On Rebecca’s father’s advise, we also asked Tuscany to finish the bathroom in the basement for $4,000 more, as it would cost much more than this to actually finish it after the house was done.

As we initially got a permit to finish the basement back in 2005, it had long since expired past the extensions the city gave us. Our contractor called the city to ask about getting a new permit, and contacted us to inform us that the city had no record of the bathroom in the basement ever having been finished, and this could add complications to getting the work done, from a time and money aspect.

This really frustrated me, and I went into the city hall to find out more information.  According to Beverly, the lady in the planning department, their documentation showed the basement as “unfinished” during the initial inspection of 2004, with no indication of the bathroom being inspected. I explained that the basement was technically unfinished, as most of it was still raw foundation and framing, but we paid Tuscany to finish the bathroom. She continued to push that the inspector made no record of this during the final inspection. I found this annoying, as the bathroom would have been impossible to miss, so either the inspector purposely ignored it (which I think would be illegal) or simply failed to record details regarding its inspection. She explained that they no longer had the floor plans from 2004, so they could not verify it was part of the initial build of the house. She went on to explain the people who worked for the city back then were no longer around, so there was no way they could verify the bathroom was finished. I mentioned it was listed on the floor plan we submitted for the permit, and those floor plans were the same we submitted back in 2005 to get the initial permit.

Fortunately, she had a record of the original permit request, and was able to pull it up and verify my claim. Even though it was listed there, she was still determined not to bend on claiming the bathroom needed to be inspected, and the rules for 2004 had changed three times to now, so things that might have passed previously could pose a problem. Unfortunately, I don’t see any other way around this, so we just need to wait and see what happens when we go through the inspections.

At least we’re finally moving towards getting the basement finished! He originally said we might be done by Thanksgiving, although with the delays on the permit, that is looking less likely. I just hope we can have it done before Christmas.