Adam and Heather Hayes

I thought that Heather was going to write about Tricity's birthday, but seeing as she is about ready to pop (less than a week), I figured I'd write this one.

Tricity had a lot of fun on her birthday and was enjoying the few days of sunshine we had before it started snowing on us again. She had a couple of friends over and they had a lot of fun playing barbies, running around outside, pulling the sled around on the grass??, digging around in the mud, and other little kid things.

 

Tricity was really looking foward to getting a red shirt (I think she has a favorite red shirt that she outgrew so she was looking for a replacement.

 

She wanted the game Candyland (which I had never played before).

 

She also wanted some "boy Barbies" as she calls them.

 

All in all I think she had a lot of fun. I also had the opportunity to take Tric to Kindergarten Roundup. They do all sorts of tests on your kid like hearing tests, physical fitness tests (catching a ball, walking backwards in a straight line, skipping, etc), cognitive tests (draw a picture of your mom (how many body parts did they identify, draw a triangle, square, circle), recognition tests (identify colors, shapes, letters, rhyming sounds). After everything was done, she had done great. The only thing they complained about was that she gallups instead of skips.

As a side note, Tricity and Erith have started playing chess, and Tric is really quite good at it. She beat Josh (with one suggestion from me... but shhhh don't tell. She had him 2 moves from checkmate but didn't see the move, so I suggested that she move her bishop... that was my hint). She gave my dad a run for his money as well. He thought he would just play around until she started taking pieces of his off the board. 

Well, we made it through another very busy Christmas season.

 

It seems like we spent most of December running here, there and back again. (However, we didn't do any running the week of Christmas because of the weather. Then we just spent our time digging out our driveway time after time. Luckily, Santa was able to beat the weather and make it a very nice Christmas for us all.

 

The girls had a blast with their new gifts. Erith got a doll that she could "do hair" on. Tricity got a microphone, it just happened to be connected to a karaoke machine. Vi got her very own laptop learning thing and Clara got her own care bear. Mom got the Twilight series and hasn't surfaced since. I got a sander and a jig saw as my main gifts, plus some other fun Wii stuff.

 

Overall it was a great Christmas. My sisters spent Christmas Eve at our place, which means we stayed up really late talking and playing. Everyone had come over the night before to have our "Hayes Christmas" on Christmas Eve. I'm still the leg wrestling champion and we didn't have any bruised heels or broken egos this year.

Well after fixing the pump for our well a few weeks ago, we decided that we didn't want it to have any reason to go out early. We had a leaky faucet out by the pump that had been very leaky for about a year now. I thought that I could just dig it out and replace it.

 

I soon found that it was a very, very deep pipe that I was trying to dig out of the ground. I dug for half of one day and was rather dismayed, downtrodden, and down right depressed at not having found the junction. (The hole had tons of water in it as I dug it because of the leaky faucet, so I was forced to "bail out" the water every few minutes so I could see what I was doing while I was digging. But the second day I got smarter and turned off the pump. So by the time I hit the junction I had gotten most of the water out of the hole). I called around to people in the ward that I thought might have a backhoe that they would rent. Unfortunately, nobody was home.

 

So I dug some more yesterday and finally found the junction. That was the good news. The bad news was that the hole was not even close to being big enough for me to bend over to work in, which explains the above pictures. So.... I ended up working in the hole upside down. (I had to come out every once in a while to get the blood back out of my head that kept turning very purple.) This was made even more interesting in that the hole filled up with some water after we took the old faucet out. So as I was hanging upside down in the hole with my head hovering above the water, I tried to tighten the pipe that was underwater, and thus invisible, with the pipe wrench.

 

Fortunately, I didn't drown and we have the new faucet in place. Thanks goes out to Josh who didn't let me drown and Stuart who helped me know how to replace the thing once I got the hole dug and for taking pictures so you can all laugh at me. 

 

Well my latest project has come to a close, (for now at least). We finished off the main components for the swingset recently. It was quite the project. It went through a couple of revisions as we worked on it and we added a number of features as we saw just how large a 12 foot swingset can be. 

 

We will be adding a rockclimbing wall on one side and possibly another slide and a zip line. (I mistakenly joked with Heather that all it was missing was a zip line... and next thing I know she wants one added.)

 

Anyway, we figured we should get it done before it snowed. Unfortunately it snowed on it the day we were planning on staining the whole thing. So it got snowed on once before the stain was on.

 

As to other projects, I hung two lights and replaced a ceiling fan that Heather got for our 8th anniversary. Unfortunately it included some crawling through the attic and digging through insulation so I could put in some extra supports for the heavier ceiling fan. All in all it went quite smoothly and it is giving the house a more modern feel compared to the older "brassy" lights we had up.

My next project will probably come around Jan/Feb as we tackle the master bathroom. Heather wants to completely redo it.

• New tile flooring/walls
• New deeper tub
• New cabinets
• New sink/toilet

So it will be interesting to see how well that goes. I'm hoping we'll have the money by then to do it.

Well, I've spent a lot of time lately out in our driveway trying make a path for our vehicles.

 

Yesterday morning was disheartening because it would blow in faster than I could dig us out. Luckily, the wind died down a bit in the afternoon and I was able (with the help of Stuart) to make the driveway look like a driveway again (instead of rolling hills).

 

Today was the same way. It just keeps blowing us in, and it sounds like we are in for a couple of big storms again this week. The kids are loving it though. They have their own little "mountain". They have been outside playing a lot (especially since we've had a lot of snow days these last few weeks.

 

As for now, I think I'll just stay here in my nice warm office and be glad I don't have to drive to work.