new park

checking out a new park in Liberty Lake, which is an area we are debating on moving to soon.  We love our house we built 12 years ago.  We love our backyard, which is like our own private park.  We love our neighborhood, which is close to several lakes, bike paths, lots of outdoor activities, parks, etc.  We love the friendly neighborhood deer.  But we're tired of commuting to Spokane Valley for everything.  All our main shopping is 30+ minutes away.  The gym is 30 minutes away.  Jason works in Liberty Lake, which is a 30-40 minute commute everyday.  He's really tired of the commute.  And we are quickly acquiring too many toys for our yard space.  We have a boat on one side of our yard (behind the vinyl fence due to our HOA) and our 4-wheeler trailer on the other side of our house, a shed in the back corner with 2 4-wheelers and another parked on the side by the boat.  Now we're thinking about possibly buying a motor home for camping and road trips, but we have NO space to store it.  We're not real fond of the idea of paying money to store it somewhere every month either... so we're looking to possibly move to the valley to be closer to everything and to have some land and a big shop to store our toys.  Toys that we enjoy using as a family and don't want to give up.

First day of school

Connor's first day of 4th grade!  I'm still working on 6S cardiac transplant unit at Sacred Heart.  I work evenings 3:00pm - 11:30pm, which means I get home around 12:20pm and everyone is asleep.  This is what I usually come home to find.  Kaiden in the top picture and Connor in the bottom picture.  Both boys surrounded by stuffed animals.
For Connor's first day of school I offered to drive him to school, but he wanted to ride the bus so he could see all his buddies.  I walked him to the bus stop though.  Dinner was his choice, so of course he chose hamburgers.  He loves hamburgers.

Park upgrade

Our local park that is only a block from our house got an upgrade recently... doubled in size and now we have some new equipment!  Below that is a picture of "Big Boy."  He's a local deer with a huge rack that hangs out in our neighborhood all the time, walks on the sidewalks, crosses the road IN the cross walk and has just been an all around friendly local deer (although he is wild and we give him his space). We see him, along with a half dozen doe's all the time wondering through town or relaxing in someones yard.

camping

Our last day of camping...  Kaiden (mini Connor) drawing Pokemon pictures in his notebook.  Then me and Kaiden cuddling in the hammock.  We sure love relaxing in our new hammocks!

 

 Exploring more beaches.  Connor and Kaiden found 2 frogs.  On this camping trip I got stung by a wasp, Kaiden got stung by a wasp and bee.  Amazingly Piper didn't get stung at all... even with her curiously checking them out all the time and snapping at them.

camping

Today was smokey from all the fires burning in the area.  We had a relaxing, lazy morning, played some Corn Hole and then Paul went home.  We stayed the night and left the following day.  Piper has her own camping chair and loves to sit in it.  Connor spends quiet a bit of time swinging in the hammock.. usually with his note pad drawing pictures.  Kaiden tried out our air loungers.  They weren't really full since it wasn't windy when I set them up and they are only suppose to hold air for 6-8 hours and I inflated them a few days prior...  Then we took a drive to play at the park just down the road.  We would have walked there except you have to cross a vehicle bridge with no area to walk.  After the park we stopped at the store to get some ice creams too.