Philadelphia, PA Fall 2009

This was the long awaited weekend for our family fall get-away. The weather was nice on Friday for most of the day. Towards the end of the day it started raining and we made it back to the car just before the rain truly started. Heavenly Father was kind to us since we didn't bring any umbrella's with us. We would have gotten very wet had we not made it back to the car in time. We will surely post some additional pictures later of Ruthie's wedding.

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Yellowstone 2009

The Ray and Laura Bowler family drove to Yellowstone for a long weekend at the end of July 2009. We met up with them and went camping. We had an amazingly great time. The kids went repelling and rafting. Ethan still owes me some pictures so I can include them in our albums. The weather was perfect and the company great. What more do you want out of life?

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Il Silenzio- silence

Not sure who this young lady is but this is an absolutely beautiful musical peformance. Can you just imagine sitting in a music hall with absolutely no noise and hearing this trumpet?

First Babysitting Job

Elisabeth had her first "real" babysitting job last night because all the teenagers were at Prom. She was tickled pink that she could babysit. She earned a whopping $20 for a mere 3 hours of work. She had to work hard though because the 2 year old was very tired and wouldn't go to sleep. Mannie stayed with her just as a safety net. Mannie watched Marley and Me with the 8 year old girl. Marley and Me is a cute love story between the owner and their dog. However, the ending is heart wrenchingly sad.

Elisabeth is saving her money so she can buy herself a new nintendo handheld unit that should work like an mp3 player? Who knows. She will be saving her money for a while since it should cost about $150. That would be her first "large" purchase on her own. Her target date is by her 12 th birthday- October 28th.

A Wyoming Spring

Monique had her friend Andy from AJ (who is stationed at an AFB in Rapid City, SD) come over for the weekend. He came to go skiing with the family. The day he left a storm system let loose on his base and they received several feet of snow over the weekend. He left just in time so that he could be here when it started snowing.

It snowed all of Saturday. The kids went to the mall and sled and snowboarded on this fabulous hill right by the mall for FREE. The official ski slope closing is on April 5th. So, the kids really wanted to go skiing one more time. Early this morning we checked road conditions and the road up the mountain was closed. BUMMER! So Tony and Mannie went to check it out. It appeared that once a plow would go through the road would be opened. They went back home and told the sleeping army to stir up and get ready.

Once the kids were finally in line for the trek up the mountain it took only 30 or so minutes until the plow showed up. The plow was a welcomed sight by all those waiting in line to get up the mountain to enjoy the last day of skiing 15 minutes from home. Winter is in now way over since there is another storm forecasted to come through next week.. oh joy! The skiing conditions were absolutely amazing. POWDER, POWDER and more POWDER. In some spots the powder went up to Mannie's knees. Monique said that a snowboarder fell and completely disappeared in the powder!

Locals were heard saying that this was the best snow they have seen on this mountain in years and that it rivaled Steamboat Springs and other fancy Colorado resorts but with less traffic. We are excited that Spring may soon arrive here so we can launch our raft and enjoy the water.

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Fall Break 2008

Well, I owe you large apology for posting these so late but it has taken me a while to find all the pictures. The camera wouldn't charge on the trip and eventually we realized that the camera was dead. Somehow we lost the pictures even though there is an SD card. Not sure how.

So, here are some of the pictures we gleaned off of the various telephones. Thank goodness for alternative technology. Enjoy.

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Visit with U2

We were so thrilled to have Uncle Ruthie and Uncle Joe(hence the U2) stop by in Casper on their way east about a week after we moved in. We know that they had to drive out of their way to see us . They were officially our first visitors. They even did us a favor. There is this stop sign by the school down the street. The stop sign is actually a little out of line of sight, if you are new to the area, and Alex and Monique a week earlier had said "do you think there are any cops that patrol this sign?" and we concluded that there is never a cop there. Well, Uncle Joe met one of Caspers finest. We learned from Uncle Joe that all you have to say is "roger that" and you can get out of a ticket. We will try that next time and see if that works. We think that Joe got off the hook because it's another one of Ruthie's snorkels (good luck things that just happens to her).

We were thrilled to meet Joe and we like him and he really seems to like our Uncle Ruthie. It's a good thing since he is marrying her. She loves him too. We had a nice time ice skating, ate lunch with the whole motley crew (including Tony) at Subway and for dinner we had stuffed shells and a very colorful salad that Ruthie and Joe made. Thank you for that. Oh yes, let's not forget desert... peach cobbler. Yummy!

It's too bad that they will live so far away so we won't see them very often. Didn't get very many pictures so sorry. We will do better next time. We had a few pictures of Uncle Joe playing Guitar Hero but we can't fnd them right now. We will post them when we find them. He did very good and we were quite impressed with his progress in a matter of a few hours. We hope we have trained him well so that his other nieces and nephews will have be able to play more with him.

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Casper Mountain

It was yet another perfect weekend of sunshine between the Spring snowstorms. I guess Casper gets most of it's moisture during their March snowstorms. Well, we can attest to the fact that is has snowed a lot in the past two weeks. We deal with slush/snow covered roads and scraping off windows during week and on the weekends it's like this. During the week everyone suffers and we've even had to go buy better outerwear! It is a treat to have the weekend weather be as beautiful as this one has been. Today we decided to go skiing for half a day. The joys of living 15 minutes from a ski slope.

Tony broke his binding to his snowboard after the 3rd run and was grounded at the lodge the rest of the time. Bummer that Mountain Sports didn't have a binding for sale on the mountain otherwise we could have just repaired it and sent him on his way. Instead he kept the lodge warm for us and played chess on his telephone.

Monique didn't join us because she had athletic training today. She however did call while we were up on the mountain saying "can you bring me some gas...my car ran out of gas". Yeah right. She ended up having to fix that problem on her own. Life lessons learned! We missed her. As is usual Elisabeth and Mannie skied together. Mannie "spilled" more today than in a long time. She actually saw some beautiful blue skies with white puffy cotton candy looking clouds whiz by. It was a good thing that snowpants repel moisture because today one kid yelled from the skilift "did you fall?" and she said "No, we are snow girls instead of snow men" as she stood there covered head to foot in snow. Quite funny actually. Elisabeth didn't think so because it took her nearly 30 minutes to get her boot back in her binding on on a very steep incline at the top of a black diamond. Her skis kept wanting to slide down the mountain every time she wanted to put the snap the boot in. Frustration did set in.

Everyone was tired when they came home and we had the yummiest homemade Aspargus soup. Amazing how three hours of skiing can do you in.

Mount Rushmore

On Friday we left for our first family outing since traveling 1100 miles in February. We drove about 3.5 hours to Custer, SD where spent the night at Days Inn. We got to Mount Rushmore around 9 a.m. where we found out that they charge $10 for parking and don't take credit cards. Go figure! They are not part of the National Park Service so our Annual PArk Pass was of no value. It was beautiful and almost empty. By the time we left at about 11 it was pretty crowded. We met up with Monique's friend Andy and his mom. Andy is stationed at the AFB outside of Rapid City, SD. Andy had not told his mom that we were meeting up so she was completely surprised to see Monique. It was fun to see her expression once she realized who she was looking at. We met them for lunch in Keystone. We only went for the day so we could figure out what we liked. There is a lake named Sylvan not too far away and it is absolutely breathtaking. It's about 9 miles off the main highway on a small paved road about the width of the old Apache Trail and probably just as windy in some spots. We spent several hours there rock climbing and slip sliding on the frozen creek. We decided that we wanted to go back again. The Black Hills are enchanting and worth seeing. We can't wait to go back.

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The City of Casper has a wonderful indoor aquatic center. Not sure that the outside water temperatures will ever get high enough to truly enjoy an outdoor swim. That remains to be seen. We purchased aquatic passes and as you can see the slide is a huge hit. Alex is working on his personal fitness merit badge and is using swimming as one main way of getting exercise. He swims laps and then gets to play around. We love water sports and so even while the weather outside is frightful the water inside is delightful. We go swimming right after school for about an hour or so almost every day. It has been quite fun.

Welcome to our Wyoming Home

This house is definitely much smaller than our Phoenix home but we are glad to be a united family once more. Tony did a great job picking out a place for our family to live. We are on the outskirts of town in a very quiet subdivision. We are very close to the river and we can't wait until summer time when we can launch our rafts and travel on the water. We are located about 15 minutes from the ski resort and the kids have gone skiing several times since we have been here. We bought a yearly swim pass so we can go swimming all we want at the indoor swimming pool/hot tub. Our driveway can barely accomodate our 4 cars but we have figured out a way to get 'er done. Visitor parking is on the street!

We hope you will come to visit us and enjoy the great Wyoming Outdoor Activities with us.

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We had wanted to climb Silly Mountain for quite some time. The kids would like to climb the Superstitions again before it gets too hot so we thought we would start small. We had fun and it wasn't even too hard. As you can see from the pictures we had absolute beautiful weather for an hour or so hike. It was a great way to get everybody out of the house and doing something on Alex's actual birthday.

Enjoy the picturebook.

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Happy 14th Birthday Alex

Alex's birthday celebration began on Friday the 23rd with several of his friends coming over to hang with him. In true Alex style he invited only the friends he thought who would attend. When some didn't show he relied on his good friend Kelcie to drum up additional party goers. The gang ended up staying nearly 5 hours and having a blast. They played guitar hero/rock band, capture the flag, and watched you tube videos while freezing their little glutamus maximus off on the back patio. Then on Saturday night he was able to attend his first church dance. This is a rite of passage in the Mormon faith since you are not allowed to go to church dances until then. He was quite thrilled that the bishop allowed him to go a day early. You may know that Alex and Monique have been taking Ballroom Dancing classes for about 5 months now and he was eager to go dancing. On Sunday he received a white boutonniere from his family to wear with his suit so that everyone would realize he was special today. To make this weekend even better was that Tony was home. Alex was also interviewed by the bishop and advanced to the Teacher's quorum.

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D'siblings growin' up

Can't believe that our family is growing up but from these pictures it becomes quite evident that we are all growing older - hopefully wiser too.

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Sisters

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Sisters are an important part to our lives. As youth we fight over whos is mom and dad's favorite, closet space and clothes and yet as adults we learn to appreciate one another's strengths and learn to tolerate the weaknesses.

Elisabeth's Class webpage

Occassionally her teacher creates a scrapbook page of fun activities they have recently had and adds it to her class website. I am giving you the link so that you all can check it out. They do some really neat stuff. The most recent one shows Elisabeth's team's presentation of their solar system hands-on activity. They painted different sized styrofoam balls and arrangements in the size of the planets in our system. Then painted a box black to create space. Then they took their arranged solar system and inserted that into the box. I think they even added sparkles for space dust. It was a very well thought out and constructed project. Elisabeth and her friend Brooklyn are seen in the picture on this scrapbook page explaining their project. Go check it out!

http://web.mac.com/tracywatanabe/iWeb/Mrs.%20Watanabe%27s%20Class%20Home%20Page/Welcome.html

Happy 2009

The Bowler Family got together in grand style at our house for New Years! Nearly everyone was there. We definitely missed Marvin, Laurie and Priscilla and their respective fan clubs. We had pizza and munchies all night long. The teenagers went to the Stake New Year's Dance while the "old people" played Wii. Ben knows how to sing. Priscilla and Ben would make great lead singers for the Bowler Band. Amazing how much hidden talent lies within the depths of our family.

Brooklyn and Addison (Elisabeth's friends) came over for a bit as well and really didn't want to leave. We even roped their dad into playing rock band with the guys. The rest of the old geezers played Golf. Ronnie looked like he was winner with -2 par. Uncle John and Aunt Becky came over. They brought with them Becky's brother who was hanging with the old married farts. :)

The kids all stayed up until about 2 a.m. playing UNO and scrabble. We did little sparklers and noisemakers at midnight. It was just a very nice evening and we are so glad that we have the opportunity to live close to our family so we can get together at the last minute and have fun. Many lasting memories have been forged. Family is truly the spice of life! Thanks for sharing life with us.