Spring Break!

Last week was Blake's Spring Break and we had a blast! We finished the bathroom, fixed the whole in the ceiling and wall in the kitchen, hung the ceiling fan in the kitchen, finished the back of the bar/island and did the rest of the finishing touches in the kitchen. It is nice to not have any more huge projects. Well, we are going to refinish the dining room floor, but that doesn't seem big anymore compared to the other projects we've done.

Tuesday we went to a place called Lake Farmparks, which was a blast for all of us. We all got to milk a cow:) Broden didn't want to, but the rest of us did. We also got to see baby pigs, sheep and also horses, rabbits roosters, cows, alpacas and llamas. We also go to learn about making maple syrup. It was quite a process. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup.


On Thursday Blake's mom came in to town. We all picked her up at the airport, then came to our house for an hour or so, then left for Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh we went to Phipps, botanical gardens. Swam in the hotel pool, then Friday we went to the zoowith a side trip to the sports fields on the way, dinner and swam some more. Saturday we went and rode on a little thing like a train car up the mountain. It was an awesome view of the city! Then we came home to spend some time at home playing games and seeing some church sites and other things around Cleveland.

Broden excited to see grandma in the airport!



Remi excited to see grandma!





Grandma excited to see us!

This is the view that all of a sudden comes in to view when you are driving into Pittsburgh. It was amazing!

View from the top of the incline!

Awesome Movie!!!

We watched Fireproof last night and it was AWESOME!!! It has such a good story and point and really makes you think about the way you are living your life and treating the people you love most. I think everyone should watch it.

I have also realized how many blessings my Father in Heaven has given me. Not that we all of a sudden are rich, or we didn't get any miraculous cures of any kind of sickness, but the money is there when we need it, we are healthy for the most part, we have a nice home, nice cars, but most of all we have each other. Blake and I were both blessed to come from amazing families who would do anything for us and we would do anything for them. We have made great friends here in Ohio and live in an amazing ward, which has become our "family" here in Ohio. Remi, Broden and Alissa are such huge blessings to us. They have taught me so much and I love being able to stay at home with them. This is another blessing that we enjoy. I get to stay home and see everything they are learning. They are so smart and learn and grow so fast. I am constantly amazed and grateful for what a good baby Alissa has been. She hardly ever cries, and loves to smile and watch her older brother and sister. She has even started falling asleep in her bed by herself. I rock her lay her down and turn on her mobile that plays music. She sings along with her high pitched giggle she does, then falls asleep. It's great. I'm grateful my Father in Heaven blessed me with an easy third child. It has made the whole transition so much easier.

Anyway, thank you everyone for being there for us and supporting us in all of our adventures. I count you all as my many blessings.

Just yesterday....

It seems like Alissa was just born yesterday, but she is getting so big! She is 5 months and 1 week old today. She is pretty much growing out of all her 3-6 month clothes and she ate rice cereal yesterday for the first time and loved it! Remi fed her some and Alissa took the spoon from Remi and they both thought it was pretty funny. Remi was rolling on the ground she was laughing so hard and Alissa was giggling at Remi because she thought she was so funny.

Alissa also rolled over for the first time yesterday from her belly to back. It was kind of scary because she was laying at the top of the stairs watching Blake and I work on the bathroom. She rolled towards the stairs and hit her head on the floor, but was stopped by our stair rail. We'll have to be more careful with her.

When I was in Idaho she was a little fussy, so I thought she had a cold or something, but on Tuesday her first tooth came through. She makes the cutest faces trying to feel her new tooth.

She is the cutest baby! I can't believe what a good baby she is. She amazes me every day. I really don't want her to grow up like I did the other two. Not that they were bad at all, I just love her as a baby, but she is growing up anyway.

Welcome Home Elder Davis

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to go home to Idaho Falls for my brother's missionary homecoming. He served in the Mexico, Merida mission. I only took Alissa with me and had a blast!

It was so fun to see how much Tyler has grown up. You can tell how much his testimony has grown and how much he loves the people he served for 2 years. He was amazed by how "rich" our family is. I think it was a humbling experience for him to live in a third world country and see how much we take for granted here. I am also amazed by how much we have here. We take so many things for granted, tons of clothes, shoes, electricity, cars, water heaters, nice homes, jewelry, dishes, refrigerators, freezers, computers, drinkable running water, garage doors with automatic openers, bathtubs, furniture, beds, and the list goes on and on and on. We do have so much to be grateful for.

Our family has a tradition for our 2 missionaries so far that all the nieces and nephews wear shirts when they come home that have a message on them. Since Remi and Broden didn't get to go we took their pictures ahead of time in their shirts.

We do love you SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much Tyler.

WAHOOOOOOO! AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHT!!!

Well here is my second blog in a row! It is too late to call anyone to celebrate so I will BLOGIT for ya'll! My wife won't take any pics right now cause she is ready to "go to bed" J/K about the quotes! BUT in DEC '08 this crazy thing happened, we lost all our power to this one breaker line - which included the entire upstairs, the bottom of the stairs the outside light and the kitchen and dining room! Luckily we finished our kitchen and put in some more lighting and did all the work on a different breaker! BUT LET ME TELL YOU WHAT - LIFE STUNK AROUND HERE CAUSE IT WAS ALWAYS DARK UPSTAIRS - WE HAD ORANGE AND WHITE EXTENTION CORDS RUNNING EVERYWHERE WITH DESK LAMPS ON THEM FOR LIGHTING! Just imagine for a second having no power to your only full bath and all your bedrooms!!!!! (Jenny thinks she needs to write about no power) THIS IS A BLAKE POST ONLY THOUGH!

Well no time to fix much during finals and Christmas vacation so we simply took out the ceiling fan in the kitchen cause it was still needing replaced and we thought this might be the first stop on the line! NO LUCK and a partially destroyed cieling. We went home for Christmas and had to come home to what we thought was NO POWER again and a major project! Much to our suprise we had power again! A MIRACLE! But little did we know it blew again in two weeks! If you know anything about power you are probably diagnosing right now, but I give ya it all and we'll see if you figured it out from the start!

1 - Here was my thinking (with a little help from Daddy Jones, Stan (broinlaw), Devon (ward friend), and ... Well maybe there is a loose wire! - so I opened all the outlets and switches ( how many =20+ ) NOPE - maybe a loose one in the upstairs bath but it didn't solve the problem!

2- Maybe the breaker is bad! - replaced the breaker!

3- Maybe the GFI - take it off

4- Well it must be early in the line cause everything goes, not just a segment, but everything - so I tell Jenny that I need to see where the wire that leaves the box goes and then trace it from there! NO - She was very protective of our walls, which is a very good thing cause I am a much better destroyer than I am a constructor and she does all the taping and tecturing! So each day I would convince her to let me extend the hole in the kitchen cieling one more truss over and then I would see how the wires ran toward the box! Well it is now 3 weeks from lights out and I reached to wall next to the breaker box and saw two wired going behind our upstairs bathroom sink - BUST OUT THAT WALL BABY AND SEE WHAT IS THERE AND WALA! A WHOLE BUNCH OF WIRES! (we still have to finish that bath so I didn't feel that bad!) But not much showing here!

5- Today I had enough, got some encouragement from family to keep looking, and FINALLY GOT THE BOSS' PERMISSION TO CUT A HOLE IN THE PAINTED WALL IN THE KITCHEN TO SEE THE WIRES LEAVING THE BREAKER BOX! And what a mess - but found the problema!!!! We have Knob and Tube (which we knew but don't fully understand) and any how they separate the white from the black using a funky box and it was causing a problem, so I removed the wires from it, and found the white wire was taped up like crazy, took off the tape to find the white wire was broken in half!!!!! - FINALLY A DIAGNOSIS!!!! "THE KEY TO A PROPER TREATMENT PLAN IS AN ACCURATE DIAGNOSIS" - NOT SO EASY WHEN YOU DON'T HAVE X-RAY OF YOUR HOUSES WIRING! Well we placed the wire NUTS and wahoooooeeeee! THE lights work and I have an alarm clock, can see in the closet, shower, shave..................................!!!

Well now I'm more calmed down - I must say it was quite a thrill to have it working --> Jenny was a good assistant, she helped a ton tracing the wires, and she was the one who has had to deal with the NO POWER more than me. What a trooper she has been, and it was a good thing she kept me under control! Now we have to sheet rock a 6'x1' area and a 8"x6" area instead of our whole house!!! The other thing is - what a miracle of the tithe. This has been a blessing of paying our tithing! - For the first year or so we were tight - paid a full tithe and you know what we didn't receive money from the windows of heaven but we didn't have any home catastrophe's that we had to pay for!!!! Now we are military, have an extra buck here and there, and I'm active duty this month so we have the means to fix problems like this! What a pain it has been but what a blessing for it to occur now rather than then!!!!

Keepin' it Real with the GLORIOUS OUTDOORS - Blake

I LOVE THE OUTDOORS - Boy oh Boy! I think I can live in place where it snows as long as I can get out and enjoy it and not just stay indoors and wish it were warm outside. Jenny and I have had a great time finding things to do this winter! We went cross country skiiing while we were in Idaho and loved it, so when we got back to Ohio, we searched like crazy to find a place to rent skies and go on a groomed trail. IT was tough but we finally found a cheep rental shop at a county metro park in the middle of the woods of Kirtland, OH. Instead of cross country skiing we decided to rent snow shoes and pull the kids in sleds. We left home in the middle of a blizzard, packed up our kids, loaded the sleds and warm clothes and ventured into the outdoors. Unlike Idaho - we didn't see any wildlife, but we did get out of town and into the sweet outdoors! Then we had a three day weekend so we took off again into the outdoors but this time an overnighter! We stayed in a cabin in the middle of the woods (Hocking Hills - OHIO). We got a sweet deal on a cabin rental and took off. We went sledding, sat in a hot tub, watched some NFL playoffs, ate good food, and RELAXED IN THE WOODS!- all the while the snow fell on our cabin and neighboring woods.
I love having a wife that is so willing to drop everything for outings like this, and she loves every minute of it!

SLEDDING AT HOCKING HILLS

CABIN RELAXATION

SLEDDING

CABIN FROM THE OUTSIDE

SNOW SHOEING

CRUISING ALONG!

YUMMY HOT CHOCOLATE

PULLING THE KIDS ON SLEDS WORKS GREAT!

CROSS COUNTRY SKIING BEHIND KELLY'S

SHE IS BEAUTIFUL ISN'T SHE!

Fun with the Davis'

With my family we enjoyed lots of hide and go seek, games, volleyball, an adult night out and tons of hot tub time.

This is my 15 year old sister and I after sitting in the hot tub. The picture doesn't do our smeared mascara justice. We were pretty scary looking.

This is a more natural pose for Davis girls. We just don't look right not smiling.

Hide and go seek at the Loftus house. The kids hid in the closet on all the shelves. They thought of it, but I think Blake helped them climb up.

The kids were pooped at the end of the day.

My family has a tradition to go sledding on Christmas Eve. We left at midnight, so technically Christmas morning and Sledded for about an hour. We just went to a little hill, so we were creative with our sledding. We went backwards, Cindy and I sitting on Eric laying down and all kinds of other creativity. Cindy, Eric and I were the only ones brave enough to go.

Christmas morning!

Mom and Dad peeking at their present.

Mom and Dad's greatest gift ever! Eric and Blake built them stairs to get into the hot tub! It really was to them, but it really benefited the whole family.

Remi and Broden opening presents Christmas morning.

Christmas morning we got to talk to Tyler AKA Elder Davis. He is serving in the Mexico, Merida Mission and will be home in 2 and a half weeks!!! I even get to fly home to see him.

Uncle Eric with the Babes(wrong kind of babes Eric)

Hide and go seek New Year's Eve in the dark with flashlights!
My mom hiding.

Julie and Kyler hiding in the closet.