School Awards Night

I just have to brag for a moment!  My Lydia won the Christian Leadership and Service Award for the whole elementary school!  Way to be a great example of excellent Christian qualities at the Lutheran school, Mormon girl!  I am so proud of her!  

First belly picture

Ta da!  I guess it's probably time for a pregnancy post.  27 weeks.  We are excited to meet this little girl in January!

Monster Trucks!

We borrowed the Robins' idea of camping in the backyard this weekend!  Except this time we set up the small tent and tossed the older three out to sleep there by themselves!

  Mike and I had great visions of a good night's sleep in our own bed, but instead were up all night with Bridget who had croup.  So it worked well that the kids weren't kept up by her coughing.  In the morning we found them up with the sun reading books together.  A truly rewarding moment.

After happily getting Bridget some meds at the doctor, Saturday evening we headed down to the Gladstone showgrounds to see a Monster Truck show!!  It was awesome!  We found a good spot to watch and even though we didn't stay for the whole thing we saw some awesome stuff!  This pink monster truck leapt over piles of cars.

The big crane in the back lifted a car way up high and dropped it!  The crowd went wild as it smashed!  It was so cool!  It still makes me giggle how much fun we had!

We were grateful for the kid ear muffs our friends lent us.  Evelyn wore them part of the time, but Bridget surprisingly kept hers on the whole time and she did well.  Stashing a bunch of McDonald's hamburgers and cucumbers in my bag kept the peace as well.  Far better than standing in line for carnival food. 

No pictures of the BMX bikes, but that was probably the coolest event.  Stunt riding off a ramp, doing flips and crazy poses on their bikes mid-air!  Happy we got our thrill fix and were home in time for bed! What fun!

Walking Gladstone with Oma and Opa

We were so lucky to have my parents visit us here in Gladstone!  It was so fun to have them come!

(Just a word to Oma and Opa, most of these are your pictures.  It was great that you two were so eager to take pictures, I hardly took any at all!  It was like hiring a photographer!)

Thank you for the great books and the time you spent reading to the kids.

And fun coloring pages.

It was nice to have an extra pair of hands around.  Especially to do things like Bridget's hair.   Amazing how she could sit still for Oma to do it, but not for her mommy.  She's 2.  Enough said.

We got to share with them the beauties of this rural Australian town.  Feeding bush turkeys at the botanic gardens.

Enjoying cool trees at Spinnaker Park.

We spent a lovely day at Tannum Sands Beach.  Look at my cute parents!  Oma even got in the waves with us and tried out a boogie board.

The wildlife was fun to share with them too!  We saw wild kangaroos and bats, but the coolest thing we saw came to visit us!  Our next door neighbor's dog, who is usually very calm, went crazy one morning at 4 am.  Our neighbors were out of town so Mike and I went to see what the problem was.  An echidna had burrowed himself right by their fence!  Mike and I tried with no luck to dig the little guy out.  We gave up and convinced the dog to quiet down.  We got some more sleep, but at 5:30 the dog went crazy again.  This time Opa unearthed the echidna with the shovel and Oma grabbed a leg with leather gloves and yanked him out!  Huzzah!

 What a crazy little critter with some wicked spines!

We plopped him in a bucket and (after letting me get a little more sleep, thank you!) drove about 5 minutes away to release him out in the bush.  Notice Bridget is not in this picture.  She didn't want anywhere near this thing!

Our neighbor brought over a poisonous cane toad she found in her yard.  These things were introduced several years ago to erradicate cane beetles (which they didn't do) and are now a bit of a pest.  Friends who are native Gladstonians told us of childhood cane toad hunts and bonfires.  Now that sounds like high society fun!    

 Sending my own wildlife off to school.

And the Pizza Goblin came while they were gone!  

My parents even got to see the not-even-here-yet Johnson wildlife.  They came along to a dr appt and got to see an ultrasound of Johnson child #5 who will join us in January.  That was pretty special!  

The highlight of the whole visit was Isaac's baptism, which, lucky kid, happened to be on his birthday!  It was a great day!  

Two handsome men.

 We were so happy to share this special day with Oma and Opa.  Thank you for making the trip!  We love you!