Fun In Snow and Mountains of Colorado

Max's elk hunting trip.

My favorite nature picture taken by Max on his trip.

Max is back "home". Family photo.

Mainly Samantha Reimer built this snow person and I put sheep wool on its head for some hair. The dogs later gave this snow person a hair chop...into many little pieces.

Happy kids and dad with a beautiful background.

Max giving the kids a ride on the 4-wheeler, which he took hunting the previous week.

Yay! Cross country skiing. Had not done that for 6 years and it felt really good!

We are already back from Colorado and had a fun time visiting Gramma Shell, Grandude, and some wonderful Air Force friends, the Reimers. Our kids are around the same age so they had a blast playing together for the week or so that we were there.

Max went hunting with Bob (Reimer dad) for elk about 1-2 hours from the grandparents' place. They saw some beautiful land, saw some elk on private land (bummer), and got to experience the snow also. They did not come back with an elk, but they came back in one piece, so wives and kids were happy about that:0).

Gloria wanted to be independent while riding Esau, but learned that she actually DOES need Gramma Shell leading the horse.

JB has more experience than Gloria on horses and did a good job holding the reins correctly and guiding the horse.


It's been so much fun having friends right across I-25. Bob is hunting with Max and Melissa and her three beautiful kids are here where we can have lots of play dates. JB and Gloria had their first sleepover at friends' house the other night and had a blast. Amazingly they were quiet and probably asleep by 8:30pm...playing so hard wears them out, plus the thin, crisp Colorado air.

It's also been fun having the grandparents watch all the kids and to go out shopping with Melissa. We did some damage yesterday at Kohls while the guys are out trying to provide elk meat for their families...what sacrifice! We really do hope they get elk though...good meat and they would be extremely happy, which makes their wives happy too.

Evelyn - 2.5 ,months

Evelyn and Aunt Cami!

Happy, relational girl.

Enjoying sucking on her two fingers.

Smiling at Gramma Shell.

Just cuteness! (I could be biased)

Farm Dayz

Benaiah's dream come true...getting to ride a tractor that will actually move with him in it!

Feeding the donkey and the sheep.

This makes the tractor look pretty big. BTW, Benaiah will only wear shirts that have any kind of truck or machinery on them.

Long lost photos with Evelyn still "cooking"

Actually, she didn't "cook" for very long because I had her at 2 am the next morning. At the time these pictures were being taken I was having early labor and Max snapped shots in between contractions.

Pile 'o peanuts!

At the bottom of the pile with Evelyn. Hopefully this won't cause a peanut allergy in her...or maybe it would keep her from having a peanut allergy, or maybe neither...

A nutty background...

Max part way up peanut mountain. He got to the top, along with the other guy in the picture, and slid back down, acquiring many peanuts in his pockets and underwear. No further comments on that...

It didn't really smell like peanuts in this peanut warehouse/drying plant.

Hi Evelyn!

A cotton-pickin' good time!

Irrigation explanation. The cotton field has been picked, maybe twice by the big picking machines, but not stripped...if it was stripped it would have not cotton and no leaves on it.

These are called cotton modules. It is basically a block of compacted cotton. The truck is dropping it off at the cotton gin.

These are the different stages the cotton goes through. The far right still has sticks and pod pieces in it, how it is after it goes through the picker. The second from the right one is after it has been through one part of the cotton gin and the cleanest pile is after it has been all the way through the cotton gin. The two piles on the left are the seeds, one with no cleaning, and the other with just some cotton lint on it. The cotton seeds are made into cotton seed oil at another plant.

The cotton gin. The ginned cotton goes right into the trucks.

We took a bus to all these different places in Altus and a State Senator from Oklahoma, Mike Schulz, was our tour guide and also is a farmer living in Humphreys, a town adjacent to Altus.

Tractors!

Evelyn is "standing" on 2000 lbs of weight on the front of the tractor to balance it. We brought the only kid who wouldn't appreciate this "Farm City Week" event in Altus because we didn't want to leave four rugrats with the babysitter, Evie is still nursing and the event was 6.5 hours long, and kids were not invited. It was a lot of fun, interesting, and I learned a lot about what goes on at Altus besides the Air Force aspect of it. Evie did really well -ate, slept, and hardly cried. I couldn't take her into the cotton gin because it was too loud and dusty for her. A friend's mom held Evelyn while Max and I both drove separate tractors...kind of like a riding lawn mower on steroids.

Evie likes Farm City Week!

Max and I both driving separate tractors.

The one in the forefront is a cotton picker and the other one is a stripper, strips the cotton plant of pretty much everything. These machines cost a whopping 200,000-400,000 bucks!


We took a lot of pictures since we knew the kids would have loved it, so they enjoyed it vicariously through the pictures and videos we took.

Goody Two-Fingers

She's decided that her pointer finger along with her middle finger are the best for sucking on...just like her sister used to for about 4.5 years! (Click on the "sister" link to see Gloria's years of two-finger sucking.)

Cute Cowgirl

Gloria came out wearing this the other morning and I couldn't help but take some pictures of her. We got the cowgirl hat at the Rodeo back in august. Aunt Kristin and Gramma Shell gave her the pink John Deere boots (pink on top) for her birthday and I got the "bling" boot-cut jeans with belt on clearance from Cabelas.com. This outfit soon got very dirty outside...and she wasn't even riding horses.