Tahoe 09'

We were lucky to have my mother-in-law fly us out to visit her at Lake Tahoe. We stayed at her house and basically played at the beach and hung out with family the whole time. Dan got to play golf twice for free and he won 40 bucks at the airport just before we boarded our plane to go home. All in all a good trip!
Grayson got to fly the airplane! He loved it. The pilot turned on lights and noises and moved the steering thingy back and forth. He was pretending with Grayson that they were really flying and at the end the pilot said, "Nice landing captain." Grayson replied, "My name Grayson not captain!" Funny kid :)
We went to Burnt Cedar Beach one day... it was cool because there were like 2 other families there so we pretty much had it all to ourselves! The kids loved the beach and loved playing in the water.
Madison isn't 100% stable when it comes to sitting up, so I just dug a little hole in the sand and put her in it and pushed sand up around her sides. It worked great. She loved grabbing rocks and feeling the water.
This is Hidden Beach. Also known as nude beach. When we got there we picked a spot near 2 naked men. One was to our left behind us about 20 feet and the other was to the right at the same distance. I thought sine we were in front of them we would have no problem. Well I was wrong. The guy on the left took the liberty of walking down right in front of where we were sitting on our towels and slowly walked his fat hairy butt into the lake. NOT pleasant. Luckily he left soon after. Maybe when I'm that old I won't care either? The water is pretty chilly, but the sun was hot and the weather was beautiful. Dan put Grayson on his back and they swam out to the rocks and climbed all over.
Look at these two handsome boys! Wowza.
Hi, my name is Madison. I'm 5 1/2 months old and apparently need a bra.
While we were there, we stopped by my Uncle's house and had a short visit. Grayson loved it, he saw dogs, cats, rode a horse, got a cookie, and played at the park. All in about an hour. That's how they do it at the Kessler house :)

Salsa

Today I put the kids down for a nap at Grandma's house and I helped/learned how to bottle salsa. She gave me the sad job of cutting the onions...Who is this baby??? This was taken about 2 years ago!This is seriously the ONLY picture I've ever taken of my dad where he is smiling good and looking straight at the camera. Way to go Dad.
I would like to call this one the Elvis Face. Tiffany will get it :)
In the movie Madagascar Alex the Lion covers his face and does happy face, sad face. This is Grayson's version of that.She is getting closer and closer to sitting up!

Toesies

It started off with Madison. I had to paint her toenails. Then, Grayson wanted his painted.
Of course I had to paint mine... then Grayson wanted to paint Daddys!
We may not have the most beautiful feet... but at least they match :)

I've got the bug.

So the past couple months my friend Kristen and I have been pretty good about working out at least 3 times a week. I am seeing a serious change in my body muscle wise. I feel great. Yes, I still have some pounds and flab to lose, but I am really focused on doing it the right way... losing body fat and replacing it with muscle. So I feel like by the time January rolls around, I will have a good amount of muscle built up around my joints so my body will be ready to start training for a MARATHON! YAY! Now I really have something to focus on. Goals always make working out more productive. The marathon bug is an interesting one to have... I know I'm voluntarily making myself suffer but I'm so excited! So I will be doing the Ogden Marathon May 15, 2010. Anyone want to join?

Big Boy Bjorn

What the crap is Grayson doing in the Bjorn you may ask... isn't he a little big for that?
Oh how we love the Bjorn. It works well for all stages of childhood :)

All moosed out.

4 mooses in one day. Or is it meese?
Well the first sighting occurred at Silver Lake. I decided since I had use of my dad's car I would take full advantage and visit the mountains with the kiddos. We were just walking around exploring all of the little side trails. We got to the back side of the lake and decided to follow a trail down to the water to try and spot some fish. Well Grayson was about 5 feet in front of me and all of a sudden a mere 8-10 feet away a huge mama moose popped right up from the vegatation where she was resting. Knowing that moose are sometimes known to charge, and not to mention I jumped because ANY huge brown mass of animal jumping up in the wild is enough to give me a heart attack... I snatched Grayson right off that trail and ran a good distance away(poor Madison was in the bjorn and Grayson's elbow smacked her head so she was crying, and my scared reation made Grayson afraid so he was crying and I was shooshing them both in hopes not to startle the moose more). Sadly my adreneline was pumping so high I wasn't able to get a decent picture. I took 5 or 6 photos but my hands were shaking so all but this one turned out blurry.
The mountain man in action before the moose sighting.
It is so beautiful up there, I need to visit way more often!
"bye mom, I'm going on a hike."

The second sighting was that evening. My brother wanted to take his kids camping to give his prego wife a break so I decided to join them. We met up at Spruces campground and a mama and 2 baby meese/mooses were hanging out in a clearing about 200 feet away from our campground. This one would have been way more likely to charge because her babies were with her. Luckily we were able to spot her from a distance so there were no surprises.
Also, while Grayson, Madison and I were waiting for the brother to join us we met some lovely neighbors. Maryann and Scott from WVC. Coctails, cigarettes, and perma-plumbers crack. Interesting people... but they absolutely LOVED Grayson. Both running around fetching rocks for him to throw in the river, giving him cookies, high fives and all sorts of compliments. Their grandkids live in Iowa, so they were loving the 2 hours (did I mention Adam was 2 hours late?) we spent witht them. When Adam got there the kids ran around, we made a fire, had smores and saw the mooses/meese. After awhile we got in the camping trailer and watched Peter Pan. I've been wanting Grayson to see that movie really bad and haven't been able to find it anywhere. Apparently it's locked up in the vault... Dan arrived at the campsite about 10pm and I drove back home with Madison. Good. Day. No. More. Meese. Please.

The Hogle Zoo

It's hard to see in the background, but this is the snow leopard... although it's known to Grayson as a Jaguar. It's just like Thai Lung in the movie Kung Fu Panda. He was sooo excited to see it.
Grayson is almost the size of an adult female gorilla.
He was pretty excited to see the bears. I made sure to tell him how nice and cute they are because he wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes saying "bear get you bear get you" and we always have to tell him that bears live in the mountains not in our house.

Don't let this happy face fool ya. She really wasn't a fan of the zoo trip.
Notice he is just wearing a sock... he lost his shoe in the orangutan enclosure.

He loved this... I hated it. Poor leopard, was nervously pacing back and forth the whole time. He was so stressed out.
No, he's not giving the gorilla a titty twister. He was a little afraid to get by him though.
So I suck at taking video with my camera. I always turn it sideways, but I took the video for the sound not the picture so it doesn't really matter. It's a Gibbon monkey and I think he was horny. Some kind of a mating call I guess... he did it for like 20 minutes straight.
This is definitely a once a year trip. I'm not too proud of our zoo. It smells, the animals are sad, and frankly it's just depressing. Hopefully one day I can take Grayson to a real zoo.