Happy New Year from the Rimingtons

We want to wish all of You a Happy New Year, seeing as how I didn't quite get this out in time for Christmas.

 

We send all of you our wishes of love and thanks for your friendships.

  

 

This year has seen some significant change for our family.

We uprooted and said goodbye to our house where we lived for 14 years.

 

 

We moved just a couple miles east into a 1977 Cape Cod home with more wiggle room and a lot more land at .56 acre, the biggest reason for our move. 

Now we are back to square one with household projects. 

 

 

This summer, John and I enjoyed a weekend getaway sans kids to Zion's National Park and St. George. 

 

 

As a family, we went tubing down the river up in Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, went jet skiing at Bear Lake, and camped at Mirror Lake. 

 

 

As for our kids, here's what they have been up to:

 

Kimberly (13) received her Young Woman's Medallion. She is in her second year of Orchestra, her fifth year of playing the piano, and is a part of the Science Olympiad Team at school with the astrology group.

 

Alicia (11) is in her third year of piano lessons and is a part of the ballroom dancing team at her new elementary school.  She quickly made a lot of new friends.  Alicia is also excited to have caught her first fish this year.

 

  

Natalie (6) is getting better at reading and loves to play in our backyard making forts, climbing trees, jumping on the trampoline (which came with the house), and collecting all sorts of acorns, sticks, and bits of nature.

 

Megan (4) is the only one left at home with Dana, and enjoys playing with her dolls, painting pictures, or playing games with mom during the quiet time.

 

John said goodbye to being scoutmaster for the boys in our old neighborhood, and hello to the boys in our new area as the Varsity Assistant Coach for the Team up here. He is currently flying his Peregrine and working on the myriad of projects in the house, including the massive family room remodel.

Dana continues working for the Standard Examiner as a correspondent, enjoys reading in her spare time, and is learning how to use her new technically-challenging camera by forcing herself to use it in manual mode.  The effort is paying off though because the pictures sure turn out great!

We hope you all have a wonderful 2014,
Love, the Rimingtons
John, Dana, Kimberly, Alicia, Natalie, and Megan



 

Welcome to Mountain Territory

You know you live close to the mountains when you see this creature greeting you on the deck.

Alicia was the lucky one who discovered it.  Yuck. 

 

 

 

We spent Sunday afternoon as a family out flying Rhea and walking some nature trails.

 

Kim took control of the camera and took some fun shots along the way:

In other exciting news, we have finally moved in enough that we can now fit BOTH cars into the garage - a mere seven months later - but still, definitely a day to celebrate!

I got it! I got it!

John and I took a photography class on Saturday, and I finally understand the workings of our new DSLR camera! 

I fearfully turned the camera over to manual mode, where you have to adjust EVERYTHING, which meant A LOT of trial and error to get the pictures to turn out just right.  After playing around, here's a few I came up with yesterday while we were out flying Rhea:

 

 Alicia is sadly not included in these photos because she opted to stay home.

What you don't see here are the dozens of pictures I took prior to these ones trying to get the settings right so the picture would look good.

 

 

 I also learned our camera has this cool continuous mode that means it keeps taking pictures while you hold down the shutter button, which allowed me to capture Rhea in flight:

 

 Food, here she comes...

 Until at the last minute, she decided to bypass it...

 Here she is turning around, thinking maybe it might be a good idea to snag her food after all... 

 In for the kill...

 Okay, so her food was already dead, but you get the idea... 

 One happy bird gobbling up her quail.

I would never have been able to capture all that with my point and shoot. 

 

I also learned how to take indoor pictures, though again, through much trial and error.

We lit up our fireplace last night for the first time in this house, and believe me when I say it took 20 tries of adjusting the camera settings to get these shots:

 

 

Kimberly played around with the camera too.

To give you an idea of what a DSLR is capable of, I was impressed with these photos of hers:

 

 Just snapping a photo without focusing on anything is imaged above,

then the same shot, this time focusing on one thing, gives you this:

 

 

I am in love with my camera, and all of its confusing functions that are now becoming less confusing. I can see why photographers say once you figure out the manual settings, you will never go back to the auto-mode.

 

Also, I figured out how to pull up these pictures I took of the basement wall and ceiling demolition (this doesn't include the rock fireplace demolition)

 



Poor John's reaction to the new mess.  :(

Happily, as you see in our previous post, we are well on our way to making it more like a family room.

January Blahs? Not Here.

 

John got Rhea trained up enough to take out to some bigger fields.  Since the fields he has been taking her to the last couple of years is now getting filled with houses, we had to find a new location.

 

I like to think she enjoys stretching her wings on her weekend flights.

Not to mention the fun it is for us watching her careen across the field and listening to her wing tips slicing through the wind as she aims for her food.  It is truly fascinating.

 

We were asked to do a family home evening at the local senior center, so we took Rhea.

Suffice it to say, we were told it has been their best family night to date, with the most interest from the residents and the most questions asked.

 

With the glum weather and smoggy air, we took to the hills nearby with some sledding.

I didn't get any pictures of the older girls because they were a little further off on the bigger hills.

 

Now I am just impatiently waiting for another good round of snow so Kim, Alicia and I can hit the ski slopes.

In other news, we've been busy this month with construction. 

I finished painting Alicia's room over Christmas break, so she is enjoying her very own room again, and might I just add, the peace level in our home has increased dramatically.

As for the rest of the basement, as John was pulling down the ceiling in the family room, he noticed some massive electrical issues, aka fire hazards, which meant pulling down nearly all the walls in the basement family room and pretty much starting from scratch down there.  Not what we were expecting, but we have learned to expect the unexpected when it comes to projects like these. 

Photos of the mountainous pile of demolition we had down there are on my other camera, the one I don't know how to pull pictures off of yet, but to give you an idea of how much debris we had to get rid of, it took us three VERY full loads to the dump to get rid of it all. That doesn't even include the countless dump runs of rock, brick, and cement from the old fireplace.

John has completely redone nearly all of the wiring, has finished framing, and is in the midst of running the speaker lines for the surround sound, and then it will be onto insulation and dry wall and the DREADED mudding and sanding.  I vowed to never do that again after we finished the basement at our last house, so we were going to hire that out this time, but given the unexpected expenses we've run into down there, our basement funds are getting low, therefore, we will resume the dreadfully painful sanding fest shortly.

Expect some great sand-covered photos of us.

 

Coming out of Hibernation

Happy New Year!  I have come back from the 19th century, having lived the past two and a half weeks without our laptop while it was being fixed...something about a broken fan, thankfully covered under warranty, which meant sending it to headquarters.  I can now function - back to operating our budget on Quicken, writing my stories on an actual computer, versus the tablet that had this fascination of eating my stories, and most importantly, back to updating my blog!

Much has happened...I shall give a brief review of the last several weeks in pictorial format:

We had our traditional making of gingerbread houses with graham crackers.  Of all the traditions we have at Christmas time, this is perhaps the most beloved by all the family members.

 

 The final products:

 

Unbeknownst to me, Megan headed upstairs with her frosting bag and had a little fun decorating her
closet doors.  Yum.  Good thing she's good at cleaning up too :)

The first day the girls had out of school, we made a boat-load of treats to share with all of our new neighbors. 

Christmas Eve, we made our usual trek out to see the Christmas lights at Layton Park.

Christmas morning was heavenly.  We made the girls wait until Natalie was awake before they were allowed to wake us up (Natalie is our latest morning sleeper).  Lucky for us, Natalie and Megan didn't wake up until 7:30 a.m.!  Not so lucky for Kim and Alicia, who hung out in the den watching Netflix on the tablet and kindle beginning at 5:30 a.m.!

By the way, if you are wondering about the picture quality, we fiddled with the new camera over the holiday, but we are still learning, so until then, I am still using our old camera.

This is perhaps our best Christmas tradition to date.  Each of the girls is in charge of one of their sisters, rotating each year.  They are required to hand-make something in the $5 or less range.  They spent several weeks planning what they were going to do, and then the next couple of weeks making their projects.  I love watching them learn how to serve one another in this manner - truly what Christmas is all about.

Above, you'll see the penguin Alicia sewed for Megan.  She actually ended up making one for each of her other sisters too. Alicia spent many hours locked in the den secretly working on them.

Kimberly spent a weekend up at Grandma Rimington's house where she made this quilt for Natalie to use with her dolls, along with a sewn Barbie dress to go with it.

Natalie and Megan (with the help of their mother, and the idea from Marian), made these darling bubble gum jars.

 

Kimberly and Alicia both got bows from Santa. John got back into archery last year having purchased a used bow, and hasn't had much of a chance to pursue it, but the girls have been admiring his bow and desperately wanted one of their own for Christmas. 

 

He set up an archery range in the backyard and the girls have been having a blast, spending hours out there with John. Those several acres behind our property line comes in real handy.  We've only lost two bows into the no-man's land!  

 

Here they all go...

(John has a left-handed bow)
 

We had Christmas dinner at our house with John's parents and his twin siblings. 

 

New Year's Eve, we had our traditional Monopoly game night and fun snacks with our girls and some of their friends.  

 

Afterwards, we headed out to a party with some old friend to ring in the new year.

A fun holiday indeed.