Evening Pigs In a Blanket

Tonight we went to a beautiful park 20 minutes from our house north in one of the many valleys that people are flocking to. We ate Pigs in a Blanket (hot dogs wrapped with crescent roles) and our kids had a blast playing on the toys. It was a small moment that is becoming one of a number that make us more fond of Reno. It is wearing on us slowly and we are daily learning to like it more. The breeze cooled things down to the 60s and the sky was full with the amber rays of the sun and it felt like a bit of the home we loved in Meridian.

Caleb is our little climber


Ellie is ever so dainty


And Sarah is becoming a Tried and True Die Hard Mother & Wife - what a babe.

Levi is a Big Boy

Levi is getting to be such a big boy - wow and he reminds us so much of little Caleb when he was this age except that he had a lot more hair. Perhaps Levi is showing his high probability of being a peladito one day "baldy in Spanish"

He has started babbling so much more and has taken his first few swipes at the toys we hang over his head. He smiles all the time and hardly cries - he is truly an amazing baby and Sarah says if we could have more guaranteed babies like him we would have another 6. Uh, that won't happen. We are 1 for 3 and I am not much of a gambling man.

Here is Levi taking a bath. What a cutie.

Lake Tahoe - Take 2 - Wow!

We went to Lake Tahoe again this Saturday - it was our second trip and we just can't get enough of it.

I put 22 pictures plus captions together in a slideshow. Here is the auto feed.

All pictures are beautiful but you have to look for the picture of Caleb in the foreground and the laughing girls in the background. Caleb had just entertained them with Lion growls, pirate sword fighting moves, jumping and prancing in the sand and that "confident set of gestures that are germane to our little man.

The guy on the beach sitting next to me asked if he could rent Caleb for a few minutes to go meet some girls. The guy couldn't get over how funny it was to see a little Mr. Man. If it wasn't for his occasional tyrant, I would believe we had a 16 year old in a 5 year old body. Crazy funny!

Hot August Nights

Reno has this cool 12 day festival of classic cars. Sarah and I went on our date night and was amazed at the time, effort and expense these hobbyists put into their cars.

The owner of this Mustang spent 3 years and about $60k restoring this vehicle. He said he was offered $150k from a buyer in Vegas. Nice return but I'm not sure it is worth 3 years of nights and weekends. ;-)

We loved the realistic flames on this car.

This was a Rolls Royce - I've neverseen one of these and for fun, the owners hooked on a window tray with Grey Poupon and a fancy knife.

Keller Kid Photo Shoot

On a lazy Sunday afternoon, I found myself taking 50 or so pictures of these cute kids.




Dad finally made it into a photo only after he allowed Ellie to snap a few. I had to duck to get in the picture.

Our crew of chefs was made of one producer and two food taste testers. Sarah has told me that they often volunteer to help cook when they are really hunger and 1/3rd of what is cut up goes in their mouth before it hits the bowl. - they loved their aprons too.

Pioneer Day Celebration

I need to start taking some macro pictures but my cute kids just keep my camera so busy. We went to a regional festival today and celebrated Pioneer day with free soda, watermelon, Popsicles and ice cream.

The kids like always loved the playground and Caleb was so funny to watch in his zone. He loves the big kids and runs around meeting and greeting one and all and he always seems to find the cutest teenage girls.

Here he and Ellie were sliding.



Ellie is Ms. Pink



Levi is Mr. Content - almost always

Saturday Brunch

We had a great day today. We hosted our great friends, the Edwards on their way through to San Francisco from Meridian. We had a fun breakfast brunch and invited two of our other great friends, the Andros and Clawson family. All combined we had 14 kids between the four families and they had a blast.

Here are a few pictures

Easton and Caleb back together again



Edwards [yes, I think I beat you to the blog on this one]



Clawsons



Andros



In the afternoon, we went to look at a couple rentals and ended the evening with some good story telling. Doesn't this photo capture one of the small moments that just matters. . .



What cute kids



Funny enough, I could not get Caleb to look at me which is true to his serious ability to focus and Ellie's challenge of focusing.

While the World Stayed Up with Harry Potter Sarah stayed up with . . .

So, I had to capture a photo to showcase this moment. Those who know Sarah knows she becomes a different person after about 7 or 8 o'clock and she hits the sack as soon as she can to gain back some sanity from a day with crazed kids. Well, tonight, after I spent way too much time on all of your blogs and doing some camera research, I popped up to go to bed and was amazed to see Sarah up reading. Yes, she stayed up reading a book in our room until almost 1 A.M.

Yes, it was crazy. The last time she did this was never and what book would you guess she was reading. Nope, it wasn't Harry Potter like millions on the 20th but it was Come Unto Me, the fictional novel of people living at the time of Christ. Lund does write quite a great book and I don't blame Sarah at all for doing something she loves way past her bed time if only she ever did it. Well cheers to Sarah - oh and she finished the book by that hour and had read over ~500 pages in 5 days. Crazy!

Crazy Reno Fires

The last 3 days have been crazy here in Reno. We have had a massive fire on the southwest side of town burning more than 1000 acres of brush and forest and burning north to the road edge and even burning a few fences. Luckily no homes were burned but I was startled to know that two of my co-workers live in the neighborhood that was evacuated and for the first 36 hours, thick smoke boiled over the homes and waffed throughout the Washoe valley. We are far enough up on the foothill and North from the fire that we weren't too affected but I grabbed a few photos from our upstairs balcony of the fire.



Here is a zoom photo of the flames



Later that night I captured the flames under the dark sky - it was a bit spooky to see the bright orange flames

Is this what Leperousy might sort of slightly look like

Last weekend while at the water park, I thought I would go without sunscreen for a few minutes to get a little color so Sarah wouldn't call me pasty white for a moment and . . . well, I think I went too long and boy have I been paying for it all week.

The top layer of 1/3rd of my back has peeled off in the last week and flaked off everywhere. Sarah loves it, just loves it. ;-)

Caleb had fun picking flakes off for me. What a pal, what a buddy.

Slip n Slide

As if we couldn't get enough brutal burning sun we broke down the house doors to get out on a super slick 100 feet of plastic to break a few noses.

Heather kicked things off with a sweet Pete Rose [if you get that reference you must have been born prior to the 70s]

Here you'll see an embedded slide show but feel free to click on the photos for the somewhat larger files.



Further, I can get you the high res file for any of these. Just email me at kellerchch at gmail dot com

Day at 7 Peaks

The next day, Friday all the Beckstrands and kids went to the 7 Peaks water park. It was a ton of fun. Here is Sarah's grandmother, Norma Beckstrand and Sarah's mother, Joy.



Here is our precious Ellie in quite the catwalk stop and turn pose.



This is Uncle Aaron and 1-year old Landin



Here is Shelly Sommer (cousin with our kids)



Here is Derek Sommer



What a cute woman and chubby bubbly almost 15 lb. 3 month old Levi



Here is Isaac Dansie (Tiffany's cute kid)



And Tiff in a half blinking pose



And Dave with his fresh RM tan/sunburn line



And Doug, Heather's husband



And Cameron Dansie's shriveled hands from a long stay in the water

My Favorite Argentine Family

I flew back from Reno to Alpine and went that night to see one of my favorite families, the Rodriguez's. It had been 2 years and their kids were so grown up but still so very cool. I took Caleb and his cousin Jacob and Ellie. We talked, had empanadas and facturas and a bitter Argentine drink (can't remember the name right now) but it was fabulous.

Here is Jose and Joaquin and Caleb and Jacob.



Here is Eduardo and me

2nd of July Week

Here are some pictures from our 2nd of July week. We went to an outdoor drive-in movie and thought it was tons of fun.

We spent the afternoon on the 4th outside in 106 degree weather = bad idea, but you don't have to tell me twice that I'm stupid and should know better, though the pictures from the log ride show us having lots of fun except for Caleb on his first ride. He didn't like the big drop, but we were super surprised when he wanted to go again with Sarah for her second ride. You see he went but still wasn't too excited.

Lastly, there are some pictures of us in Alpine. We made a quick decision to drive out there on Saturday. Levi is lying next to his 6 month old cousin Isaac. Lastly, Ellie, poor Ellie was sick with an ear infection and her cruel father took a picture of a snot bubble she happened to blow. She wasn't too happy as you can tell, but I thought it was super funny.


Love ya,

We tried to be spontaneous

Well, we have had a super busy week the last 2. I'm back-dating this entry to the actual day we traveled. If you can believe it, Sarah surprised me with a very spontaneous request to leave early to Utah to see her brother home from his mission in Brazil. She landed the request on me at 3 pm on Friday, the 6th. Well, needless to say hers and my best efforts to be spontaneous were met with serious challenges.

First of all, all of us were battling with a cold that we didn't want to take and give to others in Utah and secondly, Ellie on Friday had started to become very whiney and appeared to have strep or an ear infection. So, as we wrestled with the idea of travelling that night, we decided first to take her to urgent care to know what she had. Yes, that was our third urgent care visit in 4 weeks. Someone it always happend on the weekend.

She turned out to just have an ear infection so we packed up that night and drove bright and early the next morning and arrived in Alpine at 4:30 pm after 8 hours of driving.

Keller Video has hit the Blog

Hi everybody. We sure do miss all of you and we were checking out your blogs today and no we don't seem to post much text on our blog because we like the media - well we've delivered it = a 7 minute 17 MB video from yesterday and today.

HERE IS WHAT IS ON THE VIDEO - 2 MINUTES OF SWIMMING, THEN A GOOD MINUTE OF LEVI BABBLING AND SORT OF LAUGHING AND THEN FUNNY SHOTS FROM TODAY OF THE KIDS, SARAH AND I

I really didn't do any editing but our kids sure wanted to get on video and say hello to all their cousins on the Keller and Beckstrand side. Now that we feel a little farther away from family, we are staying even closer to all of your blogs to see new pictures and read funny stories.



I'll go ahead and start to add some stories - this weekend was good for us. Yesterday, I started the morning with a mountain bike ride with our local bishop - it was great fun. Sarah went to the gym and is very very grateful to have that part of her life back, as she says it. She feels invigorated again and she loves to stay in shape - what an example.

I took Levi to the Urgent Care facility - he had been sleeping very poorly the last two nights and we thought he had finally received the Keller ear infection curse - as it turned out he had a very clean bill of health and weighed in at just over 14 lbs - quite a lot considering two months ago he was 6 something. How would you like to increase your weight by 130%. Also, the nurse was a bit funny. She started the visit with the regular checks and informed me she was a pee magnet and was peed on by a kid yesterday. Well, I chuckled but thought nothing of it and as if on call, the second I pulled his diaper down he shot a solid stream of pee that hit the nurse smack in the face and hair and down her entire left side. She pulled back but not far enough and the arcing stream still got her on the feet. It was something else - I stopped the spray and we couldn't stop laughing for like 5 minutes straight. It was something else and made my day.

Later in the afternoon, we went swimming. Caleb got some new goggles that he really likes and he is really enjoying swimming



Here is a picture of all of us except Sarah and Levi



Then Sarah and I did a little R&R once the kids were in bed. We think it is super cool that Netflix started offering downloadable movies and we watched one of those this week - very very cool.

Today, we shot the video and played with the kids here at home and went to a beautiful park that covers a good 30 acres - biggest in all of Reno - very nice.

Oh and here are a few more pics. You can see a full-out smile from Levi.



Now a wider shot of the same bundle of joy



Oh and I forgot about this story - earlier this week when I posted all the pics with the captions, Sarah got so into looking at pictures that she forgot about lunch. Well, needless to say the kids didn't eat the burnt offerings and they sat out on our back porch for several days for the birds and cats. After 3 days, something scraped them off the pan and surely tasted how horrible it was and still left it only feet away from the pan. We sure are rednecks leaving burnt food out on the patio. Not even the ants were willing to take that on.



And her are two shots of our rental house - you see the front from the culdesac



And here is the back - notice the patch of grass and all the gravel - $20k worth according to the landlord and do you notice my four wheeler tracks - I had to get my fix since I haven't been able to ride for so long



And finally here are two shots of the kids - they love the culdesac more than we thought and run around and ride bikes around it - we never realized what we were missing before. Now if we could only find one with some cool families to play with - we have zero in this culdesac



Caleb is cool - can you tell!



And here is our beauty queen in pink - surprise. Notice the bare feet. Tiffany, I took your good idea and am now probably as fanatical about wifing feet of when they come in barefoot. Sarah hates when I check her feet but black asphalt makes their feet so stinking black - duh

Pictures and Update from Levi at 5 weeks to Caleb's B-Day to our Reno Move to Tahoe to my Work Party

I know this is not quite how a blog should work but due to time constraints and not getting more of it to put each picture on our blog, I put captions on them and uploaded them.

Go to:

Pictures from Levi's 5 Week Mark, Memorial Day in Logan, Our Move to Reno, Lake Tahoe & Work Picnic

and view the slideshow mode.

Chris