eat sleep and farm

After leaving Jason's parent's house Saturday afternoon, we headed out to where my parents live, to surprise my Dad. My Mom was supposed to be getting the surprise as well, but due to some scheduling conflicts, I ended up having to tell her we were coming a couple weeks beforehand. We knew my Dad would be watching the Seahawks/49'er game, so we planned to have Ethan walk in and very casually say "Papa, I wanted to watch this with you." and see how long it took my Dad to get the surprise... or have a heart attack, which we were worried might happen ;-) His face got white as a ghost and he just stared at Ethan in disbelief. He told us later he thought he either had a stroke or had fallen asleep on the couch and was dreaming Ethan there. Shortly after the surprise, watching football.      the girls took about 2 minutes to go get the dress-ups on :)    after watching football, you have to play football.     my parents ...

Back in August we began tossing around the idea to go visit our parents for Christmas and it quickly turned into a surprise visit. We thought it would be perfect since we knew none of them would expect us to come, since Jason's work schedule is typically so busy that time of year. So we took off bright and early Thursday morning {4:30AM} and headed down to California! The ride down was lovely and uneventful, in a good way. We were shocked at how dry and summery Oregon looked! The state everyone told us was sure to be covered in many inches of snow, had barely a hint of snow anywhere! The water levels in all the lakes were super low, giving evidence of the dry winter we've all been having. **to answer a popular question about gifts : our moms sent their gifts here, not knowing we'd be going there. So as they arrived I wrapped them and put them back in the boxes they came in and then we brought them back down with us for our visit, so the kids could open them in front o...