Quarterly Update

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 21:07:00 -0700

Among the major highlights of the last quarter is Ashley's third birthday. We celebrated by taking her to a local establishment called the Cache Valley Fun Park. This facility has an enormous play-land area. Large enough for myself to climb around the tubes and shoot down the slides. I didn't even get stuck once. Although, my knees were grateful when it was time to grab some chicken stars and head home for cake. In the days leading up to Ashley's birthday Andrew embarked on the whole new world of solid foods. As you would expect from our posterity, Andrew likes food. He embraced the solid stuff from the first slurp, and is still eating like a horse. I feel fortunate to still be employed as the economy is taking it's toll at Utah State University. Work started getting weird when the university issued a mandatory week-long furlough for all employees during spring break. After getting over the idea that I was getting a cut in my salary for the year, I was grateful that USU gave us the time off for the missing compensation. We decided to take full advantage of the week together as a family. Our main activity was a day trip to the exotic land of Ogden, Utah. We descending from Cache Valley to visit the Treehouse Children's Museum on tip from a friend at work. Ashley loved the place. We arrived early in the day and stayed to well into the afternoon. Ashley was on the young end of many of the activities and exhibits, but she still enjoyed herself. And, I see us going back for many years to come. A price we pay for living in the paradise that is Logan is the occasional spring snow storm, of which we've had a few this year. Spring break, the first week of March, actually opened with a hefty snowfall. There was enough fresh powder to build a snow princess in the backyard. Today was actually the first time that our entire yard was vacant of snow this year. It was a nice day. Another nice day was a few Saturdays back when we met the rest of the McAllister cousins in Salt Lake for a free Real Salt Lake soccer game. The team opened up the stadium and invited the public to watch the final preseason match between RSL and a second division side. The weather cooperated perfectly, so that our three families - mine, Jenna's and Julia's - combined to nearly take over a section of the soccer stadium. On a somber note, we enjoyed gathering relatives on Amber's side of the family as we honored the life of her aunt Mary who passed away this last month. Mary always liked to have fun, and thoroughly enjoyed life. She will be missed, but we know she is much more comfortable without having to deal with the pains of mortality any longer. That's about it from us. Pictures of the described events will follow soon in shutterfly. As always, if you don't receive our shutterfly emails and you would like to please let us know and we'll get you on the list.

A Wasted Bottle of Virgil's

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:24:00 -0700

For the last several weeks I have had a bottle of Virgils Cream Soda sitting in the bottom of my fridge. The idea was that I would use it as a small reward for some accomplishment. But, when ever I thought about grabbing the bottle I would second guess whether my current accomplishment was worthy of such a reward. This thought process repeated itself on several occasions until finally, in a moment of weakness, I sipped the stuff down along side a plate of Pizza Rolls just because it sounded good. I open with this story because it's a lot like my blogging habits recently. After skipping the birth of our son in September, no other event since has felt worthy to write about in comparison. Well, now I'm over that and getting back into the habit. Plus, I even fixed some of the colors on our blog site. What do you think? As mentioned, we have doubled the number of minors in the house with the birth of Andrew in September. He's fantastic and adored by not only his parents, but his older sister as well. Of course, we figure this admiration will last about as long as Andrew keeps his hands off Ashley's stuff. Once he starts to get grabby, we foresee that the love-fest will be history. Or not. Maybe they'll be perfect children, right? We take lots of pictures and post them to Shutterfly. If you feel you are not on our email list for receiving access to our shutterfly albums - and you would like to be - please leave a comment on this post with your email address.

McAllister Family Blog - kids

Quarterly Update

A Wasted Bottle of Virgil's