Summer of 2011 - Round 2

Happy 10th Anniversary to us... 8 months early! We have talked about visiting New England for years where Jason was a missionary (New Hampshire Manchester Mission) and thought about making it a 10th anniversary trip. And then we found out Carter and Jen would be married in Buffalo so we combined the two. First BEAUTIFUL Buffalo, NY then on to Boston...

where these wonderful people put us up. Thanks cousins Joe and Jen!
A BIG thanks to their adorable and brilliant sons Ian and Blake who gave up their room for us. Also seen here Jen's little sister Natalie whom Rachel adored.

By the way, Rachel pretty much looked like this the entire trip:
And why not? She had mom and dad all to herself for 10 days!

Boston was amazing! And rainy.

Rockport, MA (tip of Cape Ann)


Little lobster shack where we ate...
lunch!
Loved all the clap board buildings! We ate at this little shop too in Gloucester, MA (where The Perfect Storm was set).
Portsmouth, NM
There goes the bridge! Up, up, up to make room for the tug boat.

I repeat- happy!
We went to church in Portsmouth with Nori, someone Jason taught as a missionary.
And lastly... some cute little billy goats gruff that we thought the kids would want to see as we headed to airport on our way home. They were cute. And a HUGE thank you to Grandpa and Grandma Jackson for watching the older 3 kids!

Summer of 2011 - Round 1

Oh, where to begin?! For many of you, this is a review (since you were there). Our big trip this summer, ok this year, ok maybe for a couple of years, was Buffalo, New York! Carter and Jen got married! HOORAY!

Right before the ceremony- the baby girl cousins:
(There is a secret baby boy who crept into this photo; he is making bunny ears).

The beginning of the public ceremony- Carter walks around Jen 7 times. I loved watching Carter's face during the wedding and really the entire day. You could see how much he loves her in his eyes and written all over his face. I snagged these photos from Krista- thanks!


Niagara Falls:




We rode the Maid of the Mist. Can you see us waving way down there?!
Family photo with the horseshoe falls behind us.
Lindsay sent us this photo. She called it is the cover of a Harlequin Romance novel. We laughed and laughed over that! Yes, the damsel in her sexy blue gown... wait, what? Is that a plastic bag she is wearing?!

Palmyra, NY
The printing company that first printed The Book of Mormon.



Do you see the cases above? Each little slot had a letter that they would carefully place on the page? to then roll the ink and print the page. The capital letters were in the cases above. The lower case letters were in the cases below. Thus we have "upper case" and "lower case" letters. Cool, huh?!


The Scared Grove
Very special. Wish we could have spent more time there.

paynejandj@gmail.com

Ok! New email since we got locked out of our old email and Yahoo seems to be in no hurry to help us out. I cannot express how very frustrating this is especially because of all the information I have stored in my/our old email account. I have had that for over 10 years! Aargh! We need to slowly rebuild our old contact list (makes me shudder to think about that) and so if you don't mind leaving a message with you preferred email address in the comments. Or better yet, just shoot us a quick email.

Will our technical difficulties ever end?!

Hello... helllloooo out there?

Many of you may already know but we have been in a black hole of 'incomunicado'. No phone (old dead unchargable phone) because we had no internet. No internet which we finally narrowed down to a bad modem. Turns out prepaid cell phone doesn't work well at the house and is really expensive as a house phone even when trying to limit your calls to the necessary.

So now- new physical phone, new modem, reconfiguration with the computer and wiring, new cell phone (kind of- new to us) and hooray we are back and trying to catch up. However, we have been locked out of our email which is another battle (because it would have been too good to be true otherwise). Some friends have actually suggested carrier pigeons to help us in our woes.

We are anxious to blog about life in the past two months and hope to do that soon. We love you (because if you read this blog you have been invited to because we love you).

Moab Trip

I have a lousy :-) assignment at church right now. I work with the 16-18 year old boys who decided they wanted to go to Moab last week. We were joined by the 14-15 year old boys as well and had a great time. These photos are thanks to Bill Erikson who led the 14-15 year old gang and thankfully used his camera more than I did mine. The boys hiked, biked, rafted, swam, and generally tried to come home deceased.
I was the water boy logistics guy for most of the trip which I enjoyed (we went through probably 20-30 gallons a day it seemed- I got a lot of use out of the Cartesian well spigot at the Lion's park along the river)...

Hiking Negro Bill Canyon:
Water was pouring out of this crack at the end of the canyon- I used a straw to take a drink directly from the spring- yumm.
We also rented a few rafts and floated down the Colorado upriver from Moab. My sister Erin and I have floated this trip twice so I was the designated expert and Captain of my raft.

I was not a good Captain. All of the commercial rafts and the second of our two rafts (with the photog) read the instructions and didn't go through these more advanced rapids (the river is higher than it has been in almost 30 years). Super fun- I lost my voice yelling. The water was 53 degrees- the boys that took a dip in the calm sections got back in pretty quick.
My brother Taylor was nice to drive down to prepare a Dutch oven meal the last night of the trip (so so good). We went on a short hike up a nearby canyon after dinner and while a cobbler was cooking. Taylor gave a great talk which the boys all remembered. One boy bore his testimony the next day in church and talked about Taylor's message.

The canyon near the campground we hiked up was beautiful, had lots of water pots and made for a great setting for Taylor's talk:


Thank you Taylor for helping us out!

(Erin, by the way we took the boys on the short hike to Corona arch which you and I also hiked- a lot of fun. In fact the entire trip I thought about all of the fun Labor Day Moab trips I have had with some of my siblings).

My own size shower...

End of the School Year Wrap-up

Allie was so excited about the field trip to Shady Lakes at the end of May. She was so worried it might rain. It didn't rain much, mostly SNOW. Weird huh?! But I guess the weather down by the lake wasn't too bad to keep them from "having the BEST day of [their] life!" Shady Lakes is a very large pond that they stock with fish. Allie caught the second largest fish of the day so we were told.
Guess who was not afraid to cut off her fish's head?
Yes, we did eat it for dinner. It was actually really yummy.


Allie's first grade class also put on a musical "The Bremen Town Musicians". She was the rooster.
She is doing her cock-a-doodle-doooo in the above shot. Apparently she changed it up a bit for each performance to make her audience laugh. And yes that is a skirt on her shoulders. It was her idea and when she "roosted" down for the night, it really worked as her "feathers" covering her little rooster body.
We love our little fish catching poultry (now that is a funny phrase)!