Can you hear me now?!?!

Do you ever feel like a broken record? I swear that is all I am. I repeat myself at least four times a day. "Sterling, get dressed." "Sterling, get dressed." "Sterling, get dressed." "STERLING, GET DRESSED!!" And then he has the gall to ask me why I'm yelling! I'm sooooooooo sick of repeating myself, so today I told him from now on I will ask him to do something one time, count to five in my head, and if said request has not been accomplished I'll just tell him to go to time out. I don't know if this is going to work, but I am so tired of repeating myself!!!

Any other suggestions?

Necessary Heavenly Decrees

Ok, so since I have become a mother I have felt that there needs to be a heavenly law preventing mothers from getting sick. All you moms out there know what I'm talking about. And this last week I decided there needs to be another. Pregnant women should get to bypass their birthday if it falls during the third trimester of pregnancy. It's not bad enough that you are the size of a twelve passenger van (as my husband so kindly kids me), you have to add insult to injury and turn older as well?!?

Would someone please put in a petition? I'll be happy to sign up.

Brandon and Rob's ping-pong "match"

My buddy Rob bought a pretty nice ping-pong table from Target for like $35 or something like that. I can't remember how he got such a good deal. Anyway, he's been practicing all night and all day and was ready to prove he was like Forest Gump on the ping-pong table. He challenged me to a match. Only, it didn't turn out to be much of a match.

In a first-to-11-points type deal, I won the first one. Then I one the second. He decided it was going to be a best of five. So I won again. Then Rob decided it was going to be a best of seven. So I won again and then the wife kindly reminded me it was time to quit beating up Rob and time to take our kids home.

We could have gone best of 9, 11 and so on and so forth... I would have kept beating him to a pulp.

Have the pictures to prove it...

Sarah turned old today!!!

Today was Sarah's birthday. I can only joke about her age because she is older than me. Mind you, it's only a month and a day older, but still, I married an older woman (choo choo!!!) :)!!!!

So, we had some people over. Some friends of ours, Sarah's parents, my sister and one of her son (husband stayed home to watch some of their sick kids), my dad (my Mom for some reason didn't show up... not sure why).

We had a yummy cheesecake and some ice cream. Good times were had by all.

Without further ado, some of the pics:



Holy Smokes Batman! Did she swallow her present?



Sterling is really smart. Still, explaining to him that this isn't HIS birthday but MOMMY'S is really hard :)!



Yes, this IS how I wrapped her present. Nice Clark. Real nice.



Initially surprise leads to...



... epiphany. "Baby, I love you, but I think you got the wrong one!"



Not gonna lie, we all like Sarah, but the real reason everyone came was for the cake... and to watch these two try and blow out the trick candles. There's a 43 percent chance Sterling didn't end up shooting a goober onto the cake.



Lloyd. Where there are sweets, there's Lloyd.



Cousin McKade (Brandon's sister Brook's son) wearing Sterling's Power Ranger suit.



Brook with demon eyes. Brook is looking awfully dark. Wait! She must be getting ready for her trip to Hawai'i in six days.



My father, Storman Norman



This is our friend Bob (sounds like an Enzyte commercial... "Here's Bob!" :).



Here's Bob's wife Marlee. That's right. Bob... Marlee... Bob Marlee!!!



Sterling now won't be able to wait until his birthday in July.



Hyrum after eating some cake, ice cream, more cake, more ice cream... and almost getting some of it IN his mouth :)!

- Brandon

Visit to the Capitol Building!

I'm a state worker. So I had the day off work. As my dad says, I'm "in the trough now!" Hey, I was going to take advantage of it. So we all decided to go the Capitol Campus and partake of the energy. Since we're in the Legislative Session there was a lot of people. Today, it was mostly union folk (SEIU was well represented).

Anyway, I love Capitol Campus. Not only is there energy, it's just so darn pretty.



There she is! A few earthquakes have almost brought her down. But now it's been stabilized.



Sterling is just the cutest child. Comin' out of the chute, I wasn't so sure that would be the case since I was supplying half the genes. Kid got lucky, though!



This is look UP one of the pillars on the front of the Capitol building. Most people look up when they're inside the building and can look all the way up to the dome. But there are several beautiful places that most people don't bother to look at. This is one of them.



This must have been one heck of a router :)!!!



From one of the levels inside the capitol building, looking out over many of the people lingering below.



Sometime in the 70s, this World War I statue was painted a hideous gold color. At a great cost to taxpayers - but worth it if you saw the gold paint - it was finally restored to its original bronze.



Me and Sterling.

- Brandon

Just a quick note...

I love my wife.

- Brandon

Game Night!!!

So, we had our friends over for a game night. We played two games, the first of which was Mad Gab.

Rob and I had our butts handed to us by Sarah and Heather. But, in some regards, the fact that we were so bad at Mad Gab was what helped us keep our dignity.

The girls were really good but at what cost? Sounding ridiculous! Don't believe me?

See for yourself:



Anyway, it was really fun. Rob and I got a kick out of watching the girls make up their own language :).

- Brandon

It's a small world

We made some new friends at church. The Yorks. They invited us to their house for the Super Bowl. Rob got a new high-def TV and high-def cable to go with it. If it weren't for the fact that he didn't have it set up right, I would have never seen this, because the picture was SO small. But because I went to go help him look behind the cable box, I saw a small picture. In fact, I did a double-take. It was our friends from Pullman, the Holmstroms!!!!!

I asked. Sure enough, Megan Holmstrom is Heather York's sister.

Here's Megan:



And here's Heather, with Hyrum and my beautiful, pregnant wife Sarah:



The last time we saw the Holmstroms was 2004. So five years later, without even knowing, we were friends with another part of the family. You can totally see the resemblance.

Too weird. What a small world.

- Brandon

Point of Clarification.

My wonderful wife is not my infallible wife. She needs ginseng for her memory or something. While I DO have snow pics, I don't have pics of the kids in the snow. How quickly she forgets that those types of pics reside on her parents' camera and not ours. If we do not have pics of the kids in the snow, it is because she has not requested or subsequently obtained the aforementioned photos, thereby and in conclusion vindicating me and laying any and all blame squarely on her shoulders.

- Brandon

Hyrum is so cute!

Snow + Western Washington = Bad roads

OK, so I realize I was a pooper when it snowed (see previous entry). We're just not equipped to handle it here in Western Washington. Give us rain any day!

Anyway, here were some pics:






So, the pics aren't too bad because this was just day one. We would end up getting a couple more feet. But you can see how bad the roads get.

– Brandon