Fun at the beach

We had a fantastic time at the beach in Delaware this past weekend. We thought our family would enjoy some updated pictures. Enjoy!

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I wanted to add a DIY post.  We love DIY projects, and they usually have something to do with furniture rehab, a household project, or something decorative.  As we are the parents of 3 boys, and their walls in our house in Utah were bare, we decided to do something about it.  Though to be fair, it was only Liam and Nolan at the time.

Tools and Materials needed:
- Felt
- Paint
- MDF
- Vises/clamps
- Wood glue
- Brad nailer and 3/4" finish nails
- Jigsaw

So this was a few years ago.

Chrissa found a blog with a picture of super hero emblems made out of MDF.  She thought they were really neat so we decided to take some SVG logos of Captain America, Superman, and Batman into Kinko's and have them printed up - black and white - on a size picked.

SVG files are scalable, meaning there's no fuzzy inconsistencies to the edges of the graphics when you scale them up or down.  You can manipulate them (if you want) in Inkscape (totally free!) and Kinko's will be cool enough to print them if you can convince them it's not for commercial use.  Since we didn't want to sell our stuff, and the kids at Kinko's in Logan were duly convinced, we had each one printed on paper.  It cost about $15 for all 3.  (By the by, this is not so for Wal-Mart.  I once used Lego Batman as a template to print up some fake tickets for Liam's Birthday party as invites, and they were clearly such, but Wal-Mart refused to print.  Kinko's got my business there.  I swear I made no money off the likenesses, so I'm pretty sure it was kosher.  Anyway.)

Here's an example SVG:

Compared with a JPG:

The above is zoomed in on Batman's ear as a JPG.  Not so clean.  The SVG would still be sharp.  Anyway...

Then we went to Home Depot, got some .5" MDF, and took that home, too.  In the garage I setup my two saw horses and straddled two 2x4's across, and laid the MDF down flat on them.  This way I could flat on the MDF with a jigsaw and the blade could go through without damaging a bench below me.  

Before any cuts for the emblem, Chrissa and a background piece to the rectangle size we wanted.  Then we took another sheet of MDF, taped our cutouts to them, and traced the edges.  Cut away or keep the black/white as you want; it depends on what you want to end up with for your final product.  We discarded the black and kept the white, as seen below.  The trace wasn't perfect, but it's good to make it as clean as possible, because your jig-saw cut will be imperfect enough as it is.

It took a lot of positioning and me constantly blowing on the blade to keep the dust away, but, at the end of a few hours I had this:

After a few more cutouts, traces, and cutting, we had this:

With that all being done, it was time to paint, glue, and nail...

To attach to the background piece of MDF and provide further color, we cut out pieces of brightly colored flannel.  It may not be clear from the pictures, but everywhere the emblem piece of wood has space in it where it would let the background piece show through, we sandwiched felt in between.  When it was time to do Superman, we needed several layers of yellow felt because the blue background was too dark and the yellow too thin.  Unfortunately this meant that the sandwich wasn't perfectly flat.  So I got out a few pieces of  scrap wood and some clamps, put glue between the pieces of MDF, and sandwiched ALL of it in the scrap wood and put down the clamps to hold it overnight.  I did that for all 3, just to keep the pressure applied while the glue dried.

When done:

And one last one:

(Yeah I had enough left over and the cutouts from the Captain America, so I freehanded a sort of Iron Man.  Not my favorite, but the kids recognized it as such, so that was that.)

Enjoy!  :D

DMV, Virginia: Thou art useless.

It's officially been 3 months - to the date - since we moved here.  Naturally, are are naturalized Virginians now, replete with driver's licenses and license plates.  It only took 2 trips, 5 total hours on location at the DMV, and a plethora of paperwork: birth certificates, 2 years' worth of Chrissa's car's registration, a bill of sale, a passport, a transcript of driver's record for Chrissa...

Thanks to Emilie for babysitting that second time.

At least we're locals as far as the commonwealth is concerned.

DC Update!

So I thought with our big move to Northern Virginia, I'd start blogging again. Hopefully I'll make it stick. We've been in the DC area for 3 months now and have had a lot for fun. Here's some pictures to prove it. :)

The Rogers' went camping?!

That's right, we went camping!! We bought a tent about 7 years ago, when we were first married, because I grew up camping and loving it. I thought I could convince Chris to go, because we live near tons of awesome camping sites. However, Chris' idea of camping is sleeping with the window open. Needless to say, our tent has never been used. That is until this last weekend. And here's the crazy part: it was Chris' idea!

About 2 months ago I convinced Chris to take Liam on the Father-Son Camp Out our ward does every year. They packed up and left for their Guy's Night, and Nolan (too young to go) stayed home with Mommy. Nolan and I had a fun Girl's Night with friends, pizza, nail polish, and cheesecake. Chris and Liam had a ton of fun, too. Chris was on the computer looking at camping equipment within minutes of getting back from the camp out! Here are some pictures of all the fun they had.

Father-Son Camp Out 2011 with the Snow's

Chris and Liam tagged along with a friend/neighbor and his 2 boys.


Timmy, Spencer and Liam eating dinner.



They slept in the Snow's very nice tent.



Liam playing in the tent.




They went swimming in a hot springs pool that had a slide (jealous)! I guess Liam had no fear when it came to the water and would run and jump into the pool, even if Chris wasn't around (scary!)!

The Hot Springs Pool




And cereal for breakfast.








Camping with the Martins July 2011


Our little family.




We decided to stay close to home (just in case things went bad) and invited some friends to join us.


The Martin's




Mommy and Nolan.




The guys making a fire.



Liam and Daddy roasting hot dogs and cheddar wursts (yum!).



For dessert we had Smores (of course) and roasted Starbursts. I'd forgotten how much I love Smores (so, so good!). Roasting Starbursts was a first for us and we really liked them too.

Liam liked the Smores too!



Nolan trying to eat graham crackers with his friend Annie. She only wanted to eat his. :)



Bedtime = The boys went to bed really easy and we were hoping they would sleep-in. Haha, what were we thinking! We stayed up until 1am talking, not very smart because the boys woke up at 4:30am! Nolan finally went back to sleep at 5:30am, but Liam wouldn't lay down at all, so I took him on a walk. We hiked about a 1/2 mile when I thought I smelled a bear (I've heard they're very smelly). I started to freak out, so I grabbed Liam and we headed back down the trail as quick as we could. On the way, I realized I was holding a very smelly baby bear in my arms. I didn't get attacked but I did have to change my little bear's stinky diaper. Haha.


We made a hot breakfast over the fire. (Chris says: This was seriously my favorite part. The fire was kinda dying down, so we had to add little strips of wood to get it going again and some of Chrissa's really nice pot got melted, but it wasn't damaged too bad. Cooking over a fire and having hashbrowns, egg, and bacon in a tortilla was super good. Seriously. My favorite part of camping.)



Nolan trying to escape our tent.



All in all we had an amazing time. Though we'll probably be investing into a bigger tent and an air mattress before we go again.

Chick-Fil-A and cooling off!

Last week my friend and her 4 kids came over to our house while our husbands were working so we could make cow costumes. Yes I said Cow costumes. We all dressed up like cows for Cow Appreciation Day at Chick-Fil-A. If you dressed like a cow you got a free meal! Free food = one happy mama. Chris joined us for lunch and they even gave him a free meal (he just happened to be wearing black and white that day). He's not in the picture though. Our lunch tasted even better since it was free!!!


After our very yummy lunch, we busted out my friend's kiddie pool. We set it up in our backyard and let the kids get wet and have fun. You can also see my tree we won at our HOA 4th of July party.


There was a glider that had been flying around all day and the kids saw it, so I snapped a good one of them looking up at it. It was really cool, there was a plane that would drag the glider to a high altitude and then let it go, so we would watch the whole thing. Very fun!

New dinners and Veggies please!

So, I have decided that our dinner menu is in a funk. I make the same meals over and over and over... They're good meals but they're starting to get old. So, I've decided to start making new and exciting meals especially for dinner. Our lunch may just end up consisting of leftovers and sandwiches but I'm okay with that.

My sister and I went in on a bountiful basket (a co-op for fresh fruits and veggies). We got some vegetables that we don't normally eat such as; asparagus, zucchini, spinach and sweet potatoes. Chris and I aren't a fan of sweet potatoes but luckily Nolan loves them. Now, when it comes to zucchini, Chris wont touch them with a ten foot pole! But I've gotten him to agree on trying them my favorite way: fried! I want to try and be a little more healthy and change up our diet. It'll make things more interesting and hopefully a little more healthy.

So tonight I started our revamp on dinner. I made stuffed chicken, roasted asparagus, and a sweet potato casserole. Chris thought the chicken was great and I was really proud of how good they looked. The asparagus didn't turn out like I wanted, but it was good and Chris enjoyed it. We both had a little of the sweet potato, but since we've never really eaten it I didn't know how much sugar to add. I probably added a little too much! So tonight was a success.

Can't wait to try the fried zucchini tomorrow.