Lori on the today show

This was Lori on the Today show with another REALLY annoying person!
Tonight she will be on Entertainment Tonight 6 pm
and Joy Beher 6:30pm
and Inside Edition 12:30am

not-in-the-know

I think its safe to say that I am not always in the know! For example about a week ago I saw this commercial (shown above)....As I watched it, I seriously started laughing because Joel has two sisters Tawni and Lori who both sleep with blow dryers. I laughed that this show was going to show someone with the same strange addiction. I also thought it was funny that the person looked so much like Lori. I actualy was going to call Joel and tell him about it, but didnt.

Then a few days ago, Joel was on the phone with his dad. When he got off the phone I asked what they were talking about, he said that Lori was getting flown out to New York on Wednesday to be on the Today show....What? Why was she going to New York? Joel told me it was because of the show she did for TLC.....me still clueless. Joel thought for sure I knew that Lori had done a show called "My Strange Addiction". I had no clue, but started laughing as I told him I had already seen the commercial and Lori!

So, this Wednesday, Lori will be on the Today show, and taping several other shows (that I dont know about right now)

And Next Wednesday she can be seen on the debut episode of "My Strange Addiction" PS. if you click the link it will bring you directly to a short spot on Lori.

Love,

Wheres Tarans head

So I have had that header at the top of my page for probably a year, and just today I noticed Tarans head..... (or lack of it)..... how funny, he is a headless boy. Not to perceptive here huh?

So here's a picture of Taran to make up for his headless one on top.

boys are great

Only with a boy can this happen....

I walked into bathroom and saw Kyler wiping the top of the toilet and wall with toilet paper

Me: Kyler what are you doing
Kyler: cleaning off some pee, I missed the toilet.

umm, thats quite a miss!

I love to read

One of my friends posted this, and though it isnt really all the type of books I read, i thought it would be interesting to write down the ones I read...I'll show the BBC ;-)

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D'urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

14 The Complete Works of Shakespeare...yeah for Shakespeare class!

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

19 The Time-Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Graeme

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown...okay this one is iffy...I didnt finish this because I had already seen the movie, but I read all of the book that is before this one, so I counted it.

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgommery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel


52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine St. Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Not too bad, some though i admit I've never heard of and at least 1 I think Im going to look up to read, how about you?

a little crazy

Sometimes I have ideas, and after I think "was this a crazy idea?"


Most of the time the answer is yes, but last weekend when I decided to load up 7 kids and just me as the only adult to head to Zions for the day, it really wasnt as crazy as I thought it may be ;-)


In fact, I think my kids like each other better when there are other people around! Im serious! When I take just my kids places, they usually fight, bicker, complain to me etc etc etc. But when I add more kids in the mix they act like they love each other (I know crazy, huh?)

So I loaded up my bus and took off to Zions and had a glorious time!

We started by heading directly to the Visitors Center to catch the shuttle, it was crazy busy two weeks prior when I went with Joel, so I was very happy to see we could park right up close. I unloaded the stroller, camera, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 kids, snacks, backpack, water bottles I packed for all 8 of us, and headed to the shuttle drop off.

I was excited to see that no one was waiting! Perfect we could easily get on and sit together as soon as the shuttle got there.

We waited.

took some of these pictures.




waited.


Read a little sign that said "In November the shuttle only runs on Saturday and Sunday" (it was a Friday)

....so we walked back to the car.

...loaded back up the stroller, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 kids, the backpack, snacks, water bottles and everything else, and headed down the canyon.

I seriously had no idea that you could ever drive down the canyon anymore!

Our first stop was weeping rock, we hiked up. It was beautiful and the kids loved it.





Then we played by the stream, and I realized that wearing a white shirt with kids while playing in a muddy stream was a bad idea. In fact that shirt is now purple, because by the time we got home it was so stained up, I figured I may as well just dye it!

We then headed up to the narrows and hiked the river walk hike. Only one kids brought a jacket this time, and I brought a blanket for Parlee in the stroller...

We stopped to get (Millions of) pictures of kids jumping in the air by the river



Kyler whacked a lot of hikers with his stick he found.



I told the kids to take a 'cool' trail by the river that would meet up with the paved trail in a bit, while Parlee and I took the real paved trial....umm, the neat-o trial I told the kids to take, obviously ended and the kids decided to hike through a marsh to get back to me...bad idea!






We hiked on, until we found this awesome slide rock, where the kids slid down many times. We did sacrifice one girls jeans and her underwear to the cause. She slid down so many times, she ripped a whole in her jeans and underwear!!! We then tied a jacket around her waist and figured we better be done sliding. Then we had to slide down one last time so some lady who was hiking could take a picture of these silly kids.

It was now cold...and we were kinda wet and muddy, so we headed back to the car, which was surprisingly far away. We had hiked about 2 miles in!





As we were heading out of Zions we saw deer grazing (do they graze?) everywhere. So naturally we stopped in the middle of the road to take pictures each time we saw more deer...naturally.



All in all a great time!

Nativity update

I have made several angel costumes (I think they turned out simple and cute). If you want to make any angels or Mary costumes, lets get together next Wednesday. You will need to buy your material. The angel looks good in a crushed panne material....it is stretchy though, which is more difficult then good old cotton. I also added a little trim (less the 1/2 yard) I think I'd keep Mary in a cotton material...but it's your choice. Im going to make my wisemen out of the crushed panne too. I already bought some. I bought 1.5 yards of 3 different jewel toned fabrics.

You can come by my house and see it before you buy material if you want. That way you could also see the patterns I sketched and try to get an idea of how much material you may want. You wont need more then 2 yards though if that helps.

If I can get Taran to take a picture with a costume on (highly doubtful though) I'll post it. I've made him try it on several time to see if I had made aprox a size 6 dress...but having his picture taken may be stretching it ;-)

Nativity

Hey friends of mine, I know I had talked with some people about making nativity costumes for my kids this year...who may be interested in making costumes themselves?


I was thinking about making some patterns up and a group of us could get together and sew for our own families (kids or grandkids) costumes. The first pattern I would write up would be a Mary and Angel costume (they would be the same pattern)

Anyone interested? If not I'm just going to make mine (which would be way faster and cheaper for me, but Id be happy to write up a few different sizes if there is enough interest, I'm thinking I'll make 3 or 4 different sizes that can hopefully fit most primary aged kids)

Okay here is the idea I made today...Doesnt my model look happy to be wearing a dress? This would be the base for Mary and the Angels. You could add more to it if you wanted or leave it as it is.

See that?

See that crack in the ground (yeah I added arrows to help you out)

That's Water Hole Canyon. It's in Zions, it's an awesome hike that starts at the end of the long tunnel, you go down a slot canyon and end up back at the bottom of the canyon.

You hike through water, and there are many rappels.

You see I used to LOVE to rappel, I have all my own gear down stairs. I used to love a fun challenge.

Now that changed when I went on this pretty hike. It's been YEARS ago. Seriously like 12 years ago. Joel and I and a bunch of his friends went on this hike.



Have you ever had a single moment when you can place when a phobia started? I can name when all 3 of my phobias started...This was when one of them became my phobia.

We were part way down the slot canyon, we had already tackled a few rappels...in other words, the only way out was to keep going down.

We hit a rappel where you climbed out over a log that was wedged in the canyon and swung down over it. Almost everyone flipped in there harness. In other words their feet where up and their heads where down...NOT COOL!

Dangling upsidedown on a rope never seemed fun to me, especially when no one was trying to go commando style.

I kinda freaked out, I remember that it probably would not have been that big of a deal, but I was one of the last to go, and the 10 or 12 before me and mostly flipped.
I was feeling dumb, because these weren't my friends, no these were Joel's friends that I was comfortable with, some I barely knew. I panicked!

That was when my fear of heights came in. Granted this particular rappel wasn't very big, but it was single handedly that moment that solidified a new fear in me.

The funny thing is that I did fine on all the other rappels, even the 200 foot drop off the water fall. But the rest of the time I felt an embarrassment over the fear I had at that rappel.

Never again has my gear been used. Sure I've done little rappels with the youth, but thats all.....


...so when Joel and I went to Zions a couple weeks ago, we hiked the Zions overlook that starts at the end of the tunnel (same place as water hole canyon) we went off the trial to peak over the cliff and find the slot canyon...and you know what?

I kinda want to go again.


We actually saw some people in their wet suits getting ready to start the hike, and that made me want to go even more....maybe time to try and face my fears? who knows.

many updates today

I think because I dont have time today, I decided to start a new project, and also updated my blog several times through out the day, so make sure you scroll down theres 4 or 5 new entries.

some bedroom updates

I FINALLY painted the boys' room. I have had this project planned for over a year, and finally got around to it. In fact Joel was here to help (never happens).

I really wanted to do blue to go with these vinyl fish I got Kyler LAST YEAR for his birthday (I told you Im lazy) The boys wanted a bright blue, and I figured why not.

We started to paint the room, and seriously after one wall I started crying, it was awfully BRIGHT.

So we mixed tons of white to it, and continued painting the other walls. When we got around to the first wall again, now that it was dry, well it kind of grew on me. So we kept one wall darker, and added the fish to that wall.

In Joelys room we made some more tissue paper balls and hung up the left over girls camp flowers, it turned out cute!

Evil Pac-Man

As a member of the Stout family you know what Evil Pac-Man is. In fact you see pictures of evil pac-man EVERYWHERE. This is Tarans creation, he loves his 'evil pac-man' some breath fire, some ride skate boards, some have horns, some sharp teeth, others with wings. Most usually have those chicken feet ;-)

Taran even makes up pages to teach people how to draw there own evil pac-men. seriously it's an obsession. So for Kylers birthday it was only appropriate that Taran would ask Kyler his request for what type of evil pac-man he would want to have him draw. This is Kylers birthday evil pac-man.

The little horn thing on one of the evil pac-men's legs I think is a new addition. I havent seen that variation before.

Halloween round-up

Heres a brief re-cap of our Halloween to-do's

We had a ward Halloween carnival...always fun and anticipated.




Another Halloween has come and gone.


We painted pumpkins. The kids spent SO long trying to get their pumpkins just right. Kylers was just layer upon layer of paint. Im surprised parts of it ever dried out.






Carving pumpkins with dad. This year we had the alien (probably the kids favorite)



The pumpkin on the pumpkin (my choice)



And a pumpkin face...Isnt he cute?



We put all the painted and carved pumkins on our bench and put our bench at the front of our grass by the road, so that they could be seen this year. We had them lit on Saturday and Sunday.

This year, we actually trick or treated in our neighborhood, which was a first in the 10 years we have lived here (I know sinister right?). We usually only walk out our block to the 'alamo' the coveted spot where you get MANY candy bars. and along the way we hit the few houses on our block that have their lights on, including the Blakes. We'll this year when we hit the Blakes Gina invited us to come back later for her homemade donuts and soup (we have had her donuts in years past and they are SO yummy). Well this year we figured why not go around our neighborhood then head back to the Blakes. And so we did.

I cant believe what we had been missing in years passed! Up in Summit Ridge it's like a gold mine of candy heaven for kids. Their were So many neighborhood kids wandering the streets, and so much candy. Kyler had me hold his bag between houses, because he claimed it was just too heavy to hold. It was the most fun we have ever had.

We then headed back to the Blakes for donuts and soup, the kids got toys the Gina had put in her hot tub (she turned on the hot tub so it swirled around and the kids could pick out fun prizes). We had to leave before the yearly 'witch burning' (how fun would that have that been?).



All in all a great Halloween!

Kylers 4th birthday

Okay heres a secret...It's Kylers birthday this coming Saturday, but he doesnt realize that....so last night we celebrated his birthday because Joel is now gone to Colorado until Thanksgiving.

Kyler and I went to lunch at the ever so tasty McDonalds.
Then after school we decorated his birthday cake with the other kids. It was a beautiful cake!



Later we got pizza and went to the park to play because Kyler requested that he could 'play and eat and play and eat' and thats exactly what he did. He ate a few bites, then played came back and ate some more.

Joel and Joely left the park early to rush home and decorate for Kyler and wrap the presents that I neglected to have wrapped previously.




When we got home, his grandmas and grandpas were waiting for him. We opened the door and they all started singing Kyler got embarrassed and quickly ran to his bedroom to hide (he did the same thing when we sang to him at breakfast)

Then we ate cake and opened presents.