The Jon Wadley Fam

Our First Grader

wadleyfam — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:37:58 +0000

It is crazy to think that Katelyn is already in first grade! We aren’t quite sure where the time has gone. A long time ago I made Katelyn promise that she would figure out a way to stay little forever…and she hasn’t found a solution yet…nor do I think she’s trying too hard…nor do I think she should. But, still.
Anyway, she was lucky enough to land in the class of the teacher that EVERYBODY wants to have. No kidding, apparently every year there is a sort of drawing held to see who gets to be in her class, and the other teachers get the rest of the kids. I had never heard of anything like that before.

Well, needless to say the gate was a hit. I wasn’t about to miss the big arrival, so I came home early from work and we all waited excitedly for her to return:

Ethan was so excited he couldn’t stand it. We weren’t sure how he would react to Katelyn being in school all day and he seemed to really miss her.

Here are Katelyn and Kennedy!

BriAnne and Kira had planned a fun after school movie for these two as well as another girl from the ward – a movie with Miley Cyrus – so I promptly went back to work for the last hour of the work day. The day was a resounding success and Katelyn is going to love school this year.

Cake

wadleyfam — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:03:42 +0000

As a follow up to Katelyn’s birthday, I freely admit that I have never had a hard time cutting into any birthday cake in my life, even the really cool ones growing up that were painted camouflage, etc that Dave and I had. But I had a really hard time cutting into this one last night:

I literally felt like I was destroying a piece of art. My cousin Jenny made this for Katelyn and in the end it was fantastically delicious and everyone loved it…but still, it was almost fulfilling enough to sit there and look at it!

Katelyn had a few friends over and pretty much just had a girl’s night with them…a girlie movie along with some nail painting, pizza and of course cake and ice cream.
(btw, I took the picture with my phone camera so of course I was crooked and not the cake…it was perfect. Also, Jenny made everything in and on the cake, including the bow – and everything was edible).

Happy Birthday Katelyn!

wadleyfam — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:51:35 +0000

It was 6 years ago today that our lives were forever changed when we were blessed to have you join our family. We can’t even imagine what our lives would be like without you! Your spirit is like a ray of sunshine in our home, each and every day. Happy Birthday Sweetie!!!

Our Little Smoker

wadleyfam — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 05:20:33 +0000

As much as we don’t want him to (or want him to have to, rather) Ethan just can’t seem to kick the habit:

Alright, alright, so he’s not a smoker per se – until the little asthma bug comes around and he’s forced to spend some time inhaling Albuterol via the trusty nebulizer. He used to hate that thing, but now that he’s a little older, and the attacks don’t come that often, it seems to be a bit of a novelty and even when he’s not sick he says he needs his ‘machine’. At any rate, we’re hoping he outgrows asthma…sooner than later!

Little Red Corv…Wagon.

wadleyfam — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 02:58:28 +0000

I recently laid claim up an old Radio Flier Wagon. Old, like this thing is probably 50 years old, so old that the years spent in the sun had turned it from red to a very light dull purple and the inside was full of rust. I remember it being old and rusty when I played with it as a kid, like 25 years ago.

Wanting our kids to be able to enjoy it as I did – without the whole tetanus thing – I decided to take it on as a little Saturday afternoon restoration project. Ethan couldn’t wait until the afternoon so we actually got started in the morning sometime. Well, what should have been a couple hours turned into most of the day Saturday and a good chunk of a couple week nights the following week. But, I’m proud of the results:

My Kind of Math

wadleyfam — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:36:24 +0000

A few days of “flying solo” + $160 spent at home depot + 220 ounces of diet coke (to combat the heat) + Youtube tutorial videos =

I’m not sure what BriAnne was expecting, but upon seeing it for the first time she said something to the affect of “Wow, I mean…it looks like you actually knew kinda what you were doing.” I’ll take that! The internet is awesome.

Now our kids can take one step and technically be ‘at school’, and when the time comes to go to high school they’ll be able to take 20 steps and be there….the junior high is about 2 miles away…that’s going to be rough!!

Two months

wadleyfam — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:58:07 +0000

Since we’ve updated this thing…we’re bad. Not REAL bad, just…bad.

But it does seem like we’ve been traveling a lot lately. I guess since we bought a van we decided we’re going to put it to good use. Since the last update about our trip to Tucson, we’ve spent the better part of a week up at a timeshare in Brighton with some of BriAnne’s family, a week at TWO family reunions at Bear Lake with my family, and now BriAnne and the kids are going out to visit her Grandma in California for a week. Throw in a couple trips to Tooele and down to Spanish Fork to play with cousins and bam, summer is flying by. We’ll likely also be going up to a cabin in Southern Idaho the first week of August with the YSA in our ward as part of BriAnne’s calling.

None of the trips so far, even the shorter ones, have been as good Brooklyn-wise as that long trip to Tucson…I guess that’s the difference between a one month old that sleeps all the time and a 3 – 4 month old who only sleeps about half the time. Oh well, we still manage to have fun!

We’ve got Katelyn and Ethan signed up for swimming lessons which start next week, both kids are over the top with excitement about that. Otherwise, when we are home they’ve been spending their time playing in the park next door, riding their bikes on our AWESOME dead end street, swimming in their own little backyard pool, and writing letters to their missionary Sean from across the street who just left a couple weeks ago for the Lima, Peru mission.

I haven’t managed to do as much as I’d like around the yard, but before the summer ends I’m planning on installing a gate in the chain link fence in the backyard so the kids can walk right into the school yard, and I’d love to finish the vinyl fencing across the south end of the yard to fully enclose the back. We’ll see if it all happens this year!

Katelyn on the beach at Bear Lake

Tucson Trip

wadleyfam — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:55:11 +0000

Call us crazy (I would), but we decided to venture out with our 4 week old on a little “trip”. Little, meaning it was kinda big. Like, 12 hours down to Tucson, AZ big. Going into it, I was pretty nervous how it would go but BriAnne was all kinds of confident that in our new van, with a DVD player and tons of DVD s for Katelyn and Ethan, that it might actually be in her words, “fun”. Well, now that we are back home I have to say that she was right again. It was a blast! It was fun to be with everyone for the weekend and to get to spend time with my Sister’s family and see how they “roll” down near the border of ol’ May-hee-co. And the driving? Even though we were on the road for a total of 24 hours in a period of 72 hours total, I can honestly say we’ve had worse trips to Salt Lake. The kids were absolutely great…they watched DVD’s, colored in their activity books and only asked “are we there yet” a couple times….when we were actually almost there. The baby cried for a total of about 3 minutes during that entire time – as it turns out 4 week olds love to sleep A LOT on road trips.

Even though it was a lot of driving in a short period of time, we enjoyed all of that great family time together. Congrats to my nephew Will on his baptism, and thanks again to you Sis for putting us up and putting up with us!

(Brooklyn isn’t missing. She’s in the lower left corner of the group…sleeping peacefully.)

Katelyn’s Diorama

wadleyfam — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 01:33:46 +0000

Well, we’ve reached that critical point in a young student’s life when they have to do a diorama. I remember making diorama’s when I was in 4th or 5th grade, so I was a little surprised when BriAnne mentioned that Katelyn came home a few days ago with a note saying she needed to make a diorama. I thought “Ok, we can do this. If we can buy a house, transfer the sprinkler system over to secondary irrigation and raise kids we can certainly do a diorama”. I asked Katelyn what the theme was and she said it had to be about polar bears. She seemed a little bummed though as she explained that the other kids got better animals and she got stuck with the Ursus Maritimus. (I added the Latin because admit it, you didn’t see it coming). I thought she might get excited if she could watch a polar bear in action so we went downstairs and looked up some videos of them on Youtube. Turns out polar bears can be somewhat violent (see HERE). I hurried and shut this particular clip off but not soon enough for Katelyn to wonder why the bear was all red when it is supposed to be white. I assured her it would have gone to Burger King if there was one available.
Anyway, this is what we managed to throw together. Not bad considering we didn’t realize it was due THE NEXT DAY:

And in case you didn’t notice the “water”, Katelyn was sure to include anything that looked remotely like a walrus:

I was hoping that nothing she saw in the video would have stuck to her memory but according to BriAnne, who went to a special “presentation to the parents” today, she announced to everyone that her polar bear could eat a walrus in “just one bite”.

Maybe a real one could, but not that sissy looking thing sitting in the corner there.

Goodbye Old Friend

wadleyfam — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:45:37 +0000

Today is a sad, sad day at our house (actually, our garage/driveway) because it is the day that we said goodbye to an old, trusty friend…namely, our 1996 Nissan Altima GXE (aka, “Sally”). In appreciation for her 9 years of faithful service, I decided to go ahead and write a blog post in her honor.

Sally joined our family before…well, before we were a family. I bought her very shortly after returning from the mission in early 2001. She was there to take BriAnne and I on our first date…actually, before our first official date she gallantly carried Chris Finken and I up to the Conference Center fireside where I met BriAnne for the first time. Then she took us on our first date a few nights later. Sally was gleefully willing to put on the thousands of miles and many trips between Pleasant Grove, where I was living, and Sandy, where BriAnne was living, to make sure we could spend every possible minute together. She was the only invited guest on our honeymoon and even offered to take us to our destination (I know, nice of her). Sally made sure I could get to UVSC and BYU when that time arrived, and that BriAnne could get to work each day at the Bank of American Fork in our first couple years of marriage. Even when she was banged up a little (and insurance totaled…who needs airbags anyway?) she was right there ready to drive that next mile. Sure, every now and then one of her parts would wear out, or the oil would need changing, but after her needs were met she was always right there, ready to go again. Sally was there to bring the two older kids home from the hospital, provide comfortable drives to destinations such as california and Arizona, and get us from A to B thousands upon thousands of times. She’ll be missed!
In an effort to minimize the impact of her loss on our family, I found it appropriate to get up a little earlier than usual so that I could pull the car away while everyone was sleeping. She wasn’t legal, or insured (I know, bad) but she seemed content as I drove down our street and headed to work, knowing this was going to be her final drive as her destination would insure that she would rest peacefully in a yard full of cars of her own make, some of which are her own model. You see, as much as I would have loved for her to be of service to some other young family, or old man somewhere (and believe me, her heart would be in it) her body was plagued with problems that would not have been a favor to anyone. Her airbag situation was questionable, to the point that I didn’t want to be open to legal liability if someone crashed and they didn’t work. (I was sure enough they would work that I was Ok with us driving it, but not selling it). Passing safety inspection there those last couple years became a bit of an art. She needed new rear tires, had an oil leak that grew progressively worse as the days wore on, and would die at really inconvenient times, like in the middle of an intersection while BriAnne was 9 months pregnant, with her mom in the passenger seat and kids in the back. I know it wasn’t Sally’s fault, her age was catching up to her.
So, rest peacefully old girl, and know that I’ll probably stop in and say hi every once in a while since Japanese Auto in Lehi also carries Toyota vehicles, and the Tacoma may need a few things here and there.