Watch Out Chuck Norris

I started taking karate in Santaquin at Elite Yoshukai-Karate. I LOVE it! I am getting ready for testing and can't wait.

This is my first time breaking a board.

I did so well on the orange one I tried for the harder green one.

I'm still working on this one.

My mom is taking karate with me too now and she broke her first board too. Way to go mom!

Thankful 5K or How we spent our Thanksgiving

Ya, we got up early Thanksgiving morning and this is what we did...



We ran the Thankful 5K together.











Wait a minute!!!!
How did I end up being the turkey?!?!








Grandma D came to cheer us on.













It was cold!!! But the hot chocolate and pumpkin pie after were worth it. I had at least four pieces.

 You could say I "gobbled" them up.

My New Pet

Look at this spider I found in our basement. I picked it up with my hands and carried it out to the garage to put it in the jar. Then when mom looked it up online she found out it was a Hobo Spider which is poison and likes to bite people. Yikes!!!

     Mom says he is    
        UGLY!!!

1000 miles is a long way to go for seashells...

Yeah, Mom's favorite picture to get of us is when we are sleeping. Doesn't matter where or when, if we fall asleep, she's running for a camera. Thanks Mom!

Grandpa Lee's House

 This was my mom's grandma's house, now it's my grandpa's house. He helped his dad build parts of the house. Our family has lived there since the 1950s. My mom used to come up here and spend her whole summers playing on the beach and riding the ferries around the water with her brother and her cousins.

How would you like to wake up to this view every morning?

Looking out from Grandpa Lee's front porch

Or this one...

Looking out at Blake Island from Grandpa Lee's front yard

Or this one....

Looking at the ferry dock from Grandpa Lee's front yard

  It's hard to tell what my favorite part of the trip was.

         

I loved throwing rocks on Grandpa's beach. Looks like he'll never run out.

I loved spending time with my grandpa.

Grandpa Lee is showing me how to read a ships compass.

I loved finding strange monsters on the beach.

We found this cool red jelly fish on the beach in front of Grandpa Lee's house.
This is the kind of jelly fish that can sting you. Remember Finding Nemo?
Yeah, that was real. These monsters can sting you bad in enough to make you pass out,
and if enough of them sting you it can kill you.

I loved exploring the beaches.

This is the beach on the other side of the ferry dock from Grandp's house.

Look what the tide brought in.

Yes, my brother is a dork! But he's a cool dork!

Skipping rocks with my dad.

This is Blake Island... My grandpa and his friends, then my mom and
her cousins grew up rowing out to it and camping on the beach.
You can only get to it by boat and there isn't any town on it.

Here are the aircraft carriers in the Bremerton Naval Shipyard.

Manchester is a town right by where my grandpa lives. There is a boat ramp and if you look out you can see Blake Island.

It's so wet up here... moss grows on the rooftops.

There were lots of white jelly fish in the water around grandpa's boat.

You can touch the white one, but stay away from the
orange and red ones, they sting.

Grandpa Lee has lived around the water his whole life.
He knows a lot about the sea and the animals who live in it.

He named it the Meagan M after my sister.

Here's Grandpa Lee's tug boat.

I liked going up in the pilot house with grandpa and learning
about how he steers the tug boat when he is on a job.

Mom says I like living on the edge... guess she's right.

Climbing downing the engine of the tug boat was way cool.

I had a blast going to see my grandpa's tug boat and all the other boats with it.

I couldn't decide what was more fun

Hanging from the trees...

Climbing on the trees... 

Or taking pictures of the trees.

We also loved watching the ferries come into the dock right next to Grandpa Lee's house, so we took lots of pictures of them.

That big yellow ball in the middle is not a light, it's the moon.
How crazy is that?!?!

Here it is up closer, see??? no pole to it. Just the moon
hanging in the middle of the picture.

One day we rode the ferry over to Seattle to go see the locks and that was WICKED!!!!

This is my grandpa's house from on the ferry.

My brother make being a dork cool!
This is a double decker, so some cars go
on the main level and other drive up the
ramps to the top.

My grandpa has ridden on ferries his whole life.
He loves to show up places as we are riding on them.

This little fellow followed the ferry hoping it would stir up
some fish for his lunch.
He's a seal and we saw them almost every day in the water
around my grandpa's house.

We're pulling away from the Vashon Island ferry dock.
Look how much the water is bubbling up.

The circles in the water are from the ferry's
propeller stirring it up. So cool!!!

The locks go between Puget Sound (salt water) and Lake Union (fresh water).

Since they are different levels, the boats need to be lifted up or lowered to be able to go from one to the other. It is really cool how they do it.

See the boats behind the giant gate?
They are waiting to be lowered to be able to go out in the bay.

LOOK... those crazy Ute fans are everywhere. We even saw one in Seattle!!

The Locks keep the salmon from swimming up
to the freshwater where they lay their eggs,
so the people built a salmon ladder for them to
swim up.

See that bridge?? It's a train bridge. First we got to see a train go over it and then they lifted up the bridge so a sailboat could go under it. My mom even got video. Way Cool!!!

Did I mention my brother's a dork?!?!?

We lit off fireworks from my grandpa's beach.

It was so cool to watch them going way up in the sky.

We went to see my grandpa's friends, Sam and Joy Comstock.

Sam showed us his 50 caliber gun.

We saw another of grandpa's friends.
He has this stream in his back yard and
 the salmon swim up.

Its hard to tell, but the salmon were huge and they jumped up
the rocks and over the logs going up the stream.

Wouldn't you love to have this in your backyard? It would be like living in the jungle. The river sounded so cool.

This is the street my grandpa lives on. His name is Lee Sebring. Notice anything?
Yep, that's right, the street is named after our family. My great-grandma, Pat Sebring, lived here before there was
really even a road and our family's place is right at the bottom of the hill.
Not just everyone gets to go on vacation to a place named after their family.