Dylan on an awesome rope swing we found last weekend.

Faith on said rope swing.

You get it.

Simon and Dylan holding a geocache we found.

On Sunday we spent the day around Colville. First we went to a place called Crystal Falls about 10 miles outside of Colville. There's just a wide spot off the highway where you pull off and then walk down to the falls. There's fences all over, so you can't hike around them too much, but it's still a pretty cool spot. There is a small trail that heads downstream from the falls. We went for a walk down that to find a geocache. That's what the last picture is from. After that we went to an old army fort outside of Colville. The fort is gone, all there is a memorial for it. We did another geocache there, then called our friend Shane to come meet us for the last one. We parked in a grade school parking lot and met Shane and let the kids play in the playground for a while. Then we went behind the school into a wooded area in the middle of town to find the last geocache. That's where we found the rope swing from the top pictures. It doesn't go over water or anything, it's just in a huge opening. It was so much fun. The stump that Faith is getting ready to go off of is the highest you get, which is only about 4 and a half feet off the ground, but when you get up there it seems higher. The kids, as you can see from the photos, even jumped off the stump. Well, actually they were to small to get their feet in the loop from the top of the stump, so they put their foot in at the bottom, then I hauled them over so they were above the stump and let them go. We looked for the geocache there but couldn't find it. We went back and played at the play ground some more, then went out to pizza for dinner. It was a pretty great day.

Faith is subbing at the school all week this week. I'm only working until Wednesday, then on Thursday I'm getting packed for my duck hunting trip, and leaving on Friday. I'm driving to my friend Kent's house in Newport, WA, then we'll take Kent's truck down to Boardman, OR to meet 4 of our friends from Bend to hunt for 2 days, then we'll all go back to Kent's house in Newport to hunt some more. I'm going to stay there for 3 days, but everybody else is staying for a week I think. I'm pretty excited, it should be alot of fun. That's about it, hope everybody's doing well.

Hi, just a quick note to let you all know that we posted some videos on you tube. Just go to you tube and type CurtisFamilyRepublic into its search and they'll come up. Right now it's two videos of Simon singing and dancing to his favorite group, The Ting Tings. I've been having problems uploading videos here, so I decided to do you tube instead. Later

Simon In 1 Million Words Or Less

We got a homework assignment on Simon's first day of school. The assignment was called "Describe Your Child In A Million Words Or Less". The purpose of the assignment was to let the teacher get to know your child. I wrote it, and Faith finally read it today, and thought that I should post it here. So here it its.
SIMON CURTIS IN A MILLION WORDS OR LESS

Simon was born at 10:02 p.m. on January 9th, 2004. Due to the time zones, his grandmother in Ohio still believes he was born on January 10th, because it was 1:30 a.m. on January 10th in Ohio when she received the news. To this day, she still calls on January 10th to wish him a happy birthday.
Simon was born in Redmond, Oregon, and then taken home to Sisters, Oregon. He lived in a house on at a Forest Service ranger station, where his mom worked. His dad worked for the Forest Service in Bend, Oregon at the time. His family had a dog named Oscar and two cats, Miko and Cassidy. There was a dog door that led to the back yard, which was right against the forest. The cat Miko loved her family, and was constantly bringing proof of her love through the dog door. One night when Simon was around 3 months old, his parents were awoken by Simon screaming in a way they had never heard him scream before. They rushed into his room to discover that Miko had tried to show her love for Simon by placing a mouse in his crib with him. Unfortunately, the mouse was still alive, very scared, and had very sharp teeth. Simon was bit on his upper lip just below his nose. His very scared mom called his pediatrician in the middle of night, and was told that mice can’t communicate diseases through their bite, and as long as he didn’t need stitches, there was no reason to bring him to the hospital. Simon still has a small scar under his nose, and still claims to remember being bit by the mouse.
Life progressed normally for Simon after that. He took a vacation to Hawaii with his parents in February and March of 2005. While he claims to remember being bit by a mouse when he was 3 months old, he claims no memory of his trip to Hawaii. The Forest Service is a family friendly business, and Simon went to work with his mom for the first year of his life. This made him very comfortable around other people, as he was constantly being held and played with by people that would rather play with a baby than work. Simon’s dad’s sister is a speech pathologist and convinced Simon’s parents to teach him sign language, starting when he was about 8 month old. Communication with Simon became possible much earlier than he could talk, though he stopped using it as his ability to speak progressed. In November of 2005 Simon was blessed with a younger brother, Dylan. Remembering the problems his grandmother had with Simon’s birthday, his parents chose to call his grandmother in the middle of the day, and tell her explicitly what day Dylan was born. Simon was very enamored with his new brother, and tried to help do everything to take care of him. The cats had to go live at new homes after Dylan was born. They were very confused by the new baby, and started marking territory inside the house, something they had never done when Simon was a baby. The cats were replaced by a new dog, Moses. Simon instantly declared Moses his dog, and accepted the responsibility to feed him when he was about two years old. It took him some time to learn that feeding the dog did not mean giving him his unwanted food from meals, but he took to his new responsibilities very easily. He still claims that feeding the dogs is his job, and can get quite upset when somebody else does it.
Simon’s parents decided they did not want him raised by a day care, so Simon’s mom quit her job shortly after Dylan was born. This gave Simon even more exposure to other people, as his mother was constantly taking him to play with other children in the area. He developed a very outgoing personality, and is not scared to talk to whoever he sees, despite his parents’ warnings about strangers. He makes friends effortlessly, and has a new best friend every time he goes to the park.
In 2006 Simon’s dad took a job at a remote guard station in South Eastern Oregon. This meant his dad was gone for two weeks at a time, then home for one or two days, and then gone for two weeks again. Simon is very close to his dad, and this was a very hard time for him. His dad came home for good at the end of the summer, but had to leave the very next day on a wild land fire assignment. Simon was very distraught, and developed a minor case of alopecia. His pediatrician said it was probably due to stress of some form. While he grew all of his hair back, for the next year he would still start to lose his hair when his dad left on fire assignments. This has cleared up in the past two years, as he is able to better understand why his dad has to leave, though he still gets very upset when his dad leaves.
Simon’s dad accepted a new job in Republic, Washington in 2007, and the family moved in August of that year. They lived in a hotel for two months until they found a home to move into. Living in a hotel with two kids and two dogs that were near 100 pounds in size each was very difficult. The dogs went to stay with an old family friend in Curlew until they could find a house to live in. Todd, the family friend, told Simon’s dad one day that he had never seen a dog scale an eight foot tall fence before. Moses was a very good escape artist. Unfortunately he escaped one day and was hit by a car and killed. Simon’s parents explained to Simon about his dog, and he accepted Moses’ death as a natural part of life. Against his parents’ better judgment, they got a new dog a few months later, and named him Arlo. Simon started pre-school in 2007. Due to the fact he was living in a hotel at the time he started pre-school, this apparently classified him as homeless, and he was placed into the ECAP program. Simon did very well in pre-school, making even more friends. He stayed in pre-school for two years because of his age, and was very excited to start kindergarten and spend the whole day at school.
Simon is very close to his extended family, and is constantly trying to convince his parents to drive to Idaho “for just a little while” so he can see his grandparents that live in South Eastern Idaho. He loves playing outside, whether just playing outside at home, or going out to the woods to splash in a creek. He started playing golf with his dad in 2009, and gets very excited whenever they can go play. He is a self styled vegetarian, and his parents are still trying to figure out where he heard the word and how he figured out that it applied to him, though he uses it correctly, and very rarely eats meat. Simon may be the only boy in the world that is told he needs to eat something other than salad and vegetables at dinner time. His favorite color is yellow, and his favorite movies are the Star Wars series. He has a very active imagination, and is constantly playing some sort of make-believe with his brother Dylan. Simon is very close to Dylan, and tends to mope when Dylan is taking a nap and can’t play with him. Simon will talk incessantly given the opportunity, and answer any question posed to him. He is very analytical, and a very good problem solver. Teaching him sign language at a young age helped his communication skills greatly, and he is usually able to use his words to communicate his feelings, but he still gets frustrated at times and stops using words to communicate, and starts using actions which may not be appropriate for the situation. He accepts responsibility for his actions easily, though, and is very quick to calm down and start using words again. He loves jokes, and fancies himself quite the comedian, making up jokes almost daily at home. He loves to laugh, and his laughter is very infectious.

In other news, I went over to my friend Jay's house tonight. Jay is a retired Forest Service guy, he worked in fire supervising a helicopter and a helitack crew, then went into timber after he got sick and couldn't do fire anymore. Jay is a...I don't know, like a hobbyist woodworker that does professional quality work. The upshoot is that he builds guitars and banjos. So I went over to his place tonight and talked about building a banjo. We talked about what kind of wood to use, what kind of metal to use for the tone ring and support for the neck, and everything else I would need to build a banjo. Jay has four banjos that he has built, and one guitar, and another guitar that is almost done, and about 4 or 5 other banjos in various states of completion. I got a list of all the wood I'll need, and some metal I'll need to build other parts. I'm really excited about building a banjo. We'll start the "pot", the round part that the head of the banjo stretches over and produces the sound, as soon as I get the wood. We'll start the pot at Jay's house, then I'll bring it home with very explicit instructions on how to add the different layers of it. I'll take pictures and post them as the project progresses. Instead of a store bought head for the banjo we're going to use a real hide, which I thought produces a better sound after playing Jay's homemade banjos. After the pot is done, we'll make the neck, and I'll buy tuner pegs to put onto the head. Then we'll put a fingerboard on, that's the part with the frets on it. After that's on, we'll do an inlay. Jay has two different kinds of inlays that he knows how to do, one just round rings made out of tire stem valves with pearl inlayed into the center of them, and he also knows how to do an inlay of vines made out of veneer with flowers made out of pearl. We'll see how the cost is when we get to that point, but I'm thinking tire stem valves with pearl will probably be what I do. That's about it, hope everybody's doing well.

This picture was taken at an old silver mine outside of Republic. The tailing piles are left from all the rock that they didn't take, and you can dig through them and find crystals. The whole area around there is full of crystals, we talked to a Job Corps group out that day and one guy had found a rock about the size of a small dinner plate that had 3 inch tall crystals sticking up all over it. The kids just like to go and throw rocks while I dig around. We didn't find any crystals that day though.

Simon bowling.

Dylan bowling. He didn't fall down. He carries his ball up, places it on the lane very carefully, then lays down behind it and pushes it.

So we found the camera, carefully hidden away in the glove box of the van. Faith found it when she was going grocery shopping, and I had already told her to buy a new camera. She bought a new one anyway. It snowed here about a week and a half ago. There was about 2 inches above 4000 feet or so. I took the kids up to play in it the next morning, and most of it had melted. We drove up to a spot called Bodie Mountain, which is an old fire lookout, but the tower is gone. The top of the mountain is just barely big enough to turn a pickup around on, and is surrounded on all sides by pretty tall cliffs except where the road is blasted through. We drove up until we hit snow, but the only turn around on the road is at the top, so I drove up there to get turned around. When I got to the top and nosed up to one of the cliffs to turn around, Dylan suddenly screamed "I don't want to die!" I said "What?!" and he told me he didn't like it up there and wanted to go back down. So, death narrowly averted, we got turned around and drove back down from the top a little ways and stopped. It's too steep off either side of the road, so I just parked in the middle of the road and we had an awesome snowball fight, started to make a snow man (which turned into a "Biggest Snowball Ever" fight) and I showed the boys how to shake snow off a tree onto someone standing underneath it. Most of the rest the time was consumed by the boys giggling and asking me to "Come look at right underneath this tree." The snow all melted, but it's supposed to snow tonight or tomorrow again. The next week I went to Portland for training, and saw Mom and Dad there. Leave it to me to ruin their vacation where they "didn't want to visit anybody." It was great to see them when the circumstances weren't linked to a funeral. My training was about two steps above completely awful, but I guess it was somewhat educational. The training was on how to use a new database we're supposed to track our fuel treatment monitoring in. While I realize that's probably complete gibberish for most normal people, maybe somebody will understand it. I stayed with my friend Mark and his family, which was nice. I left my truck parked at his house and took public transportation everywhere I went, which is awesome. If you're ever feeling sorry for yourself, just go ride the bus and/or train in Portland for an hour or so, and you'll realize you're actually doing pretty darn good. I got home on Friday, right into a three day weekend (Yay Columbus showing up after a whole slew of other people and getting all the credit!) I slept and watched movies and played games with the boys the first day, went crystal digging/rock throwing the second day, and went bowling on Monday. It was a pretty good weekend. Back to work and school tomorrow though. Simon's class took some tests a couple of weeks ago to see where they're at academically, and Simon is the only one in the class to test out at where he's supposed to be for his age, everyone else in the class tested below where they're supposed to be. We were pretty excited about that. Simon sits right in the front row on the bus, and his bus driver told Faith the other day that he is surprised at the level of intelligence that Simon shows when talking to him. Dylan's doing alright in school, 3 days into him starting I went to pick him up and was asked to stay and talk to his teacher after everyone else left. He had apparently gotten mad at his teacher's assistant for not giving him yogurt (preschool eats breakfast at school, but Dylan eats before he goes, so we just pack him a little snack, which didn't include yogurt until this incident) and had backhanded her in the face during his little tantrum. I asked Dylan why his teacher wanted to talk to me while I was waiting for all the other kids to leave, and he told me right away "Umm, I got in trouble." "Why?" "I hit my teacher." "Oh. Great." The upshoot is that if he hits a teacher again he has to go home. It hasn't happened again. His teacher told us at open house that Dylan has a really hard time transitioning between activities, which is normal for his age. Other than that, he really likes going. That's about it for now, hope everybody's doing well.