A funny little math joke

I LOVE MATH! I was watching "Ace of Cakes" on the food network, one of my favorite shows and they were making a cake that looked like a scientific calulator. The girl making the cake asked this joke...

"Why didn't Trigonometry get the apartment he wanted? Because Tangent wouldn't cosine!" ha ha ha (I'm smiling at it again right now as I type it)

Okay, so those of you who don't care about math or think that Trig belongs in outer darkness, sorry. But for those of you like my me and my Dad and a few others I know read this, I hope you liked it. :)

1 Reason not to leave Ken home alone for a month...

Meet "Aminal". He's a Cockapoo. After coming to a family agreement that a dog was not good for our family, we got rid of our dog, Cooper. IN JUNE! We come home from Washington, and the kids learn that their Dad has purchased another dog. Of course the kids are extatic. I will say that he is already 10 times more obedient than Cooper ever was. The family really loves him, and he already bosses/herds the kids so I guess Ken chose well. Yes, his name is Amimal.

Goodbye Larned

We are offically out of the house in Larned as of today. I'm glad that we only have one place again, but I'm really going to miss that house. Ken and I have lived in 10 different homes since we got married and that was my favorite. I got the rest of the cleaning done this morning.

Now I have the pleasure of unpacking all our stuff and trying to make some sense of it. I was never appreciative of my Mom being able to move a family of 10, sometimes with out my Dad available, with what looked like little effort. She always appeared to know where everything went too. Now I can't even fathom it! I want to call her and ask where I can put my fabric or ask where I'm going to put the Christmas Tree this Winter. Luckily she'll be here in 2 short weeks, and although I'll have a place for my fabric by then, I hope she can help me with the Christmas Tree dilema.

I feel like a pro at moving a fam of 4, but it's stressful! Anyway, we are in the new house, everything is painted except the bathroom, and I'll hopefully do that this weekend, or at the beginning of next week. Definately before my Mom and Dad come into town. It's bad enough we have to look at the ugly bathroom. :)

I promise pictures shortly, I'm too tired to do it tonight! ttfn

What a mess!

We are living in lingo for now, all our stuff is in boxes, we have 2 houses, 1 is clean (the one we are leaving) and one is slowly getting cleaner. (the one in Great Bend) We were supposed to be in the house 3 days ago, but when we got there to sign papers, the house was TRASHED. So we have been cleaning, painting, dunging the house for the last 3 days. When we go to sleep tonight, everywall will have a fresh coat of beautiful, NON WHITE paint, thanks to the Sister Missionaries and my friend Jessica. We are cleaning carpets this weekend, and then hopefully on Tuesday we will move in. This is the reason I have not posted anything in a few days. I'll show before and after pictures in a couple weeks.

I LOVE EBAY!!

See this ugly little statue I got at Goodwill for $5.99? It sold on ebay for almost $30.00! Yeah! I think I'm just going to start buying junk and selling it to people online! Hooray for ebay and craigslist!

Kansas State Fair, Hutchinson Kansas

Today I was able to go on a field trip with Matthew's 4th grade class. It was really cool. I was in charge of 5 kids, including Matthew, and they were all well behaved.

We saw all the cows in their barn, we went into the "Pride of Kansas" building and the kids were able to try driving a combine, they did an electronic quiz with questions about different kinds of energy and natural products and the uses for some of the products. One question was How many basketballs can you make with the hide of 1 cow? The choices were 6, 12, 19 and 20. The answer is 12.

We also went to the commercial building and the kids got a ton of free loot. I've never seen such professional moochers in my life, it was fun. As a bonus, we ran into Ken there. He was there with a guy from another funeral home also perfecting his mooching skills.

Here are some pictures from our day.


You can't really have a fair in Kansas with out OZ showing up!


Matthew milking a fake cow. The boys decided it would be more fun to point the udders at each other and have a little water fight. It was funny but I had to tell them to stop.


Matthew petting a real cow.


They has the cab of a combine hooked up to a monitor so the kids could see what it was like to drive a combine in a straight line. All these kids need sobriety tests, it was funny. None of them could get it to go straight.


This is made of butter!!!

Matthew with the pumpkins.



Matthew and I. I especially like his hair. It's awesome.

All in all, it was a very fun day. It poured down rain the whole time, but we were only outside for 30% of the time. I'm almost dried from the day. I felt bad for the kids with shoes that didn't protect their feet. For this reason, I'm an advocate of Skechers. Matthew and I both got back to G.B. with dry feet. Hooray for that.

Where were you on September 11, 2001

7 years ago today, I was a pregnant stay at home mom with a 2 & 3 year old. Ken has just had emergency surgery the week before and this was his first day back to school and work. Our morning routine was breakfast, baths, and then a movie. (I know that isn't very productive, we've improved since those days.) Anyway, the movie for the morning would be Tarzan. I rarely turned the TV on for my own watching pleasure, so when I realized the movie needed rewinding, I switched to regular TV while it rewound.

At that point in my life I wasn't really interested in history. On the TV was a picture of the Pentagon, after it was damaged. I thought it was some history show because I had the volume turned down and didn't listen to the comentary. As soon as the movie was rewound, we watched Tarzan.

A couple of hours later, Ken came home from work early, he wasn't feeling well. As soon as he walked in the door he asked me if I heard happened in NYC, to the Pentagon and in PA. I told him I didn't know and he informed me of the whole thing.

At the moment I felt sick to my stomach for not caring about the history of our country, or the VERY current events. I felt scared because we had 2 small children and one on the way. All of the sudden I wasn't so sure that I was ready to have children and raise them in this world. It's a good thing my doubts started after it was too late to turn back.

I found a tribute on you tube that I think is lovely. I'm not sure how to put it right onto this post, but if you get a moment, click on this link and take 5 minutes to remember that tragic day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZV2L0EM08I

Ken

After my post yesterday, I realized alot of things ARE blog worthy! Ken is by far the most blog worthy person in my life right now. Here are some videos from our trip to Utah/Washington. He went with us the first day and at around 14 hours, he was producing some great stuff. You may want to check our second blog, http://apicisworth1000words.blogspot.com/ if you want to see his dance that goes along with Chiquita Banana...Enjoy!

This and That...

Although life is busy right now because we are moving next week, it seems like we have nothing "blog worthy" going on. So I'll just tell you what has been going on and then share some funny pictures that don't relate to my stories! Welcome to my life.

Last night I went to Enrichment at the church. That is when all the ladies from church get together once a quarter, have dinner together and then discuss things that help us be better homemakers, teachers, women... Last night we learned about Pressure Cookers. It was awesome! The dinner we ate was all made in pressure cookers, even the dessert, and it was all delicious. I learned alot, including that I can make more than rice and mashed potatoes in my pressure cooker...who knew?! As a bonus, I was talking to Gloria Seifkes after the class, and telling her about my ancient pressure cooker that I got at a goodwill for $1.00, and she gave me one of her newer, safer ones! Thanks Gloria! What a surprise that was.

While I was in this class, Ken and Ben Draper were the priesthood holders in the bulding and they were watching the kids. During the class, Ken told our kids if they would be good, we could go to ice cream after we left. Of course they were good with an offer like that, and after church we went to Braums with the Drapers and Jessica Zink. It was so fun! We just talked and laughed and enjoyed good ice cream. When Ken and I were on the way home with the kids, we talked about how fun that was and he commented that we haven't gone out with friends in a few years! We hope to be able to do it again sometime.

Now for a random picture....this is Ken and I at our Graduation in 2006. As I have been packing our house, I have come across old CDs of pictures that I have lacked to print out and scrapbook. This is one of those pics.

Nicole came home from school on Monday and announced that she was selected to be a part of the Great Bend School District Youth Choir. Last week she had a 5 minute audition with come of the music teachers. They had her sing scales, a couple of popular songs, and tested her to see if she knew any of her notes. (which she does) Then they had her sing the same songs again and tried to mess her up, but she kept going. Her determination paid off, and she is now in the choir. She is very excited and so are we. Be assured that when they perform in December, there will be a post with video.

Now another random picture...this is Nicole and Matthew 2 or 3 years ago playing on our washer and dryer when we lived in the apt. in Troutdale. I remember this day very clearly. I told Nicole to unload the dishwasher and Matthew to rotate the laundry while I was going through old clothes. I didn't hear work in the kitchen and I hadn't seen a new load of laundry in a little while, so I went to find them and here they were...funny little kids. I just took the picture, told them to finish their game and then get their jobs done. How often do you get to play games in a laundry closet. haha

Ironically, this picture might now be as random as I originally thought! Take note of the lovely washer that Nicole is sitting on. The blasted thing died last week!! Ken and I are the proud owners of a brand new set. We didn't get anything fancy, but we sure love the new ones. The capacity is a 1 1/2 times bigger than the old ones, so I got all the laundry for the week done in 5 loads instead of 8. That was good news. The other good news is Nicole LOVES doing the laundry right now because of the new set.

Random picture #3...One day I was checking my email and Matthew was trying to get my attention. He was saying, "Hey Mom, look at me! Take my picture. When I turned to him, there he was smiling, and hurting my face because I didn't know how that could possibly feel good... For fun, it will probably show up on my other blog too, because this picture is truly worth 1000 words!

As for another news at the Cheney house, We are thankful for all of our friends and family. We love all of you very much and hope that you are all doing well. Thanks for reading my blog.

Last random picture is actually a video. 3 years ago at Christmas Ken, Matthew and our friend Kevin were talking about how hard it is to eat 10 saltine crackers in 1 minute. There are actually world wide competitions to accomplish this. So we decided to try it ourselves. This video is full of alot of giggling and cracker crumbs flying, but I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. I watched it this morning, and I laughed as hard as I did the day I videoed for the first time. My favorite part is at 1:17 when Kevin spits cracker crumbs all over my Mom's kitchen floor. Luckily she was in her bedroom when we did this.

We are Moving...

It is finally official. We are moving to G.B. in 3 weeks. I am going to reserve the truck for 9-23 and we will get it all done in one day. I will be done packing by the time the Elder's Quorum shows up and we can load and unload the same day.

We get the house on the 15th and I'm going in to before we take our stuff so I can paint. Something about a house full of off-white walls is really depressing to me.

So that is the only news I have to share. It feels like life has stopped since we got back from Washington and them school started. We are just too busy and I know all of you are too.

I'll keep you posted if anything fun happens. Don't hold your breath though. :)