Oscar Mayer Thrill of the Grill House Party

I won the chance to host an Oscar Mayer Thrill of the Grill House Party! Oscar Mayer sent me tons of coupons for free hot dogs, frisbees, baseballs, plates, napkins, tongs, and other stuff with their logo on it. We bought chips, soda, watermelon and other stuff and invited some friends to party with us! Lauren and one of her twins (if I guess it will be the wrong name!) who is wishing he could have a hot dog instead of "vegetable beef" baby food.

Time to get the dogs!

We grilled so many hot dogs and Joe won the award for eating the most dogs!

We set up chairs on the lawn and the kids loved running around playing and then grabbing a bite to eat when they felt like it. The weather was pretty warm since we started the bbq at 5pm instead of later. The shade in the backyard was really nice, though.

Here's the spread of our bbq table. The funny part about my pictures is that I actually never took a picture of the Oscar Mayer hot dogs even though they sponsored the event and I have to post pictures from my party. Oh well...

The playhouse makes for fun seating and every time we have had a party it is a popular spot (especially with the yellow jacket nest gone from that tree to the left).

I made corn on the cob cupcakes- it might be hard to see in the picture but they were fun and pretty realistic looking.

I kept wiping Michael's face but he always managed to get some frosting on his nose. He ate SO much food, he was eating for 3 hours straight and always had food in his hand. I have no idea how much watermelon he ate!

Nicole and Liza ready to paddle away while eating their treasured cupcakes!

Getting ready to play ball!

We discovered the huge ball worked much better than the little baseballs and the kids had fun taking turns.

Michael enjoying one of the weenie whistles from Oscar Mayer (he made a high-pitched squeal trying to imitate the sounds the other kids could make with their whistles).

Family, Markers, Snakes...

Joe and Megan came to see us after they had a scorching time at the beach for their anniversary (bad sunburn!). We sat on the front porch and talked, played some tennis, and somehow managed to give poor Joe the stomach flu which didn't set in until they had gone home. The flu made a nice run through a few in our house but it spared Jim, Michael and Jacob. When Nicole got sick in the middle of the night she was practically inconsolably worried about ruining her "blankey," poor thing. But anyways, we had a wonderful time with Joe and Megan and have discovered it's a shorter trip than the AZ to UT run we used to do all the time when we lived at BYU....so we're hoping to see more of each other!

Sunday afternoon nap for Nicole and Daniel.

Daniel bought a raft to try and fish in, but apparently the "one man" raft gave him quite an adventure trying to fit in himself and his fishing gear without tipping...so it is now our backyard pool! The kids have used the oars to help Daniel in his yardwork as you will see later...

Nicole playing while soaking wet!

Somehow on Sunday morning Nicole got a hold of a black dry erase marker, so when we went to get them out of their room we found poor little Michael looking like this.

Somehow, though, I think he didn't mind all that much when he saw himself in the mirror.

Daniel has deforested every branch hanging low in our attempt to decrease the bug population. He has also raked up all of the leaves and pines straw that also housed yet another wasp nest and some snakes.

Our TV doesn't even get all of the normal stations (and to be honest we haven't tried that hard to get them anyways) so they watch the NBA finals on the Internet. Jacob thoroughly enjoys it too.

The city allows you to put all of your grass and clippings out front and they come by to pick it up. The normal truck couldn't get the big branches Daniel had clipped so they sent this big truck with a crane on it to gather everything up.

Jim's half sister Lara came from CA to visit and stay with Kristen's family (Jim's other half sister). They all came to see us yesterday and we had a fun time playing ladderball, eating Papa John's pizza and German chocolate cake!

Daniel caught a snake in our back yard- this little critter kept trying to nest in each of the piles of pine straw Daniel was raking up! I know they eat bugs and stuff, but I told Daniel to get rid of it. That is NOT the kind of surprise you want hanging out in your back yard. We also have lizards- a blue one that I see on our porch every afternoon; and a green one that makes appearances. Those I don't mind so much and the kids LOVE them. Every night Nicole begs for a story about a blue lizard.

Yellow Jacket Nest, the LAB and the First Patient!

At the farewell party, someone got stung by something...and it turns out we had a full hive of yellow jackets at the base of a tree next to our playhouse. NOT what I wanted to find out after the kids had been racketing around the backyard with sticks for a week! So Jim got this foam spray, bundled up like a snowman to prevent stings and sprayed the foaming bee nest destroyer (I made up that cool name) all in and around the hive and tree (it was a hole right at the base of the tree). The spray and foam kill on contact so by the end of the day the nest was a pile of bees. You can see the foam in the background if you look carefully at the pic. All that day we told Nicole she couldn't go in the backyard because there were millions of bees that could sting her. So today she came screaming to the back door that a bee was going to get her. I reassured her that the little gnat she was pointing at was not going to sting her.

The LAB is done! I couldn't believe the transformation of this room from carpeted and partitioned to a lab totally organized and ready to do everything. Daniel built EVERYTHING and he did a very good job!

As I looked at this room I could see part of the reason why Jim loves his job- look at all of the cool and dangerous toys he gets to play with every day! :-) And it doesn't even have to be in a garage!

Daniel in his lab- you can see the insanely large and hot oven, the vacuum system they installed, saws and other tools. I could not believe they installed and constructed all of this in just a few days.

The patient room is finally ready to go. Jim hired a receptionist who is giving her work two weeks notice and then will start. She will do a great job and it seems everything is really falling into place. And the biggest news of all-Jim has his first patient today in eighteen minutes! We could not be more blessed with our family and work and are so grateful to have the chance to help others and pursue a dream.