Caught in the act

We've often said that Michelle should have named the dog currently living at my house Houdini instead of Kilo. Kilo likes to take herself for walks. Without us. Evidently she wants to make friends with the other dogs on the street and has some kind of fascination with the neighbors yard. She climbs fences and digs. We bought a chain link kennel but she climbed over that and jumped down, so then we tried perimeter training. She didn't really care for that. We bought a wireless fence which works very well, except for when the battery dies or the kids change the settings. I wanted the kids to be able to play in the yard and I'd like to be able to landscape at some point. We were watching a house flipping show and on the show, the owners had Rottweilers. They had a steel dog run and we thought, what a great idea. She can't climb it, we'll put concrete around it so she can't dig out. She's escaped several times. First, she found that she could get the panels to move just enough so she could get her shoulders through. So we screwed the panels in place with self-tapping screws. I should say Jeremy did. He's spent hours on this thing. Then, one of the panels still had a gap, so Jeremy closed that up with some lumber. Then we found that she was pushing out the bottom of the gate, so we added a latch to the bottom. Then we found her doing this: You wouldn't think that she would be able to fit through a gap that's maybe 4 inches wide but she did it. Jeremy's moved the gate lower so we'll see what she figures out next.

Sariah's performance

The second grade had a performance before the end of school. Some of the classes put on a play, but it didn't work very well because the microphone wouldn't work. Sariah's class had a musical performance on recorders. She was very excited, especially since she got to keep the recorder and discovered that she could use her piano books to pay songs on it.
I think Sariah was wondering if we were there since she was bugging me about coming for a week. Here is the video of one of the songs. You can tell at the end JD was pretty excited about his sister being up there.

I'm still here

Ok, so I've been ignoring my blog. Not intentionally, I've just been busy. Michelle came to visit and we had a nice time at my ward picnic and had ice cream and cake at home. Ben and Owen had a nice time playing in the sand. They've gotten big and the definitely have very different personalities. I think Becca had a nice birthday. In addition to ice cream and cake at home, we also went to Stockton and had a little family party on Sunday. She got a little puppet from Grammi that the kids have been having a lot of fun with and some clothes, earrings and a necklace. I was glad we could have a little party with family. If we tried to do a friend party, I don't know how well I would handle that. Maybe next year we'll go somewhere and let her bring a friend. JD had to help Becca open presents.

Becca is a happy birthday girl. She loves being the center of attention and she was very excited about her pink cake.Here she is having some fun with the puppet. The kids played with it all the way home.