The boys and their peanut butter

It is so often that all Miles and Sam want to eat is peanut butter.  I have always enjoyed it on bread with jam, honey, chocolate chips, Ice Cream, and/or cheese but I am not sure that I have ever been a big one for eating it straight out of the jar with a spoon like Sam.  He sometimes will even lick it of the bread when we make him a PBJ.  

Miles and his crazy hats

I am not sure why but for one reason or another miles has always loved wearing hats.  Never would wear the ones that we wanted him to only the ones he choose. 

This one is his favorite.  One day he walked around the house saying hat and after digging in the bowls he stopped  when he found this one. 

We washed this one good when he was done

The Rocking Horse That is Too nice to use

Miles as a baby

Several years ago (fall of 2004) I had been away from doing wood work for a long time and I had a dream of carving something big and spectacular.  As I began to search for a project I found some info on the internet about carving a rocking horse. It seemed like a good project since I had done sculpturing in high school.  I ordered the packet with the saddle and all the hardware.  January of 2005 I spent about a day gluing up the head and started to carve it out, from there it got placed on the shelf  for about a year and a half.  I believe that it was the winter of 2007 that I finally took the time to glue up the rest of the body and do a bit more carving.   It seemed that I would pull it off the shelf every 5  months and work on it for a few nights swearing that I was going to finish it this time but as usual I would put it back on the shelf to work on some other crazy project.  Finally this year I could see that if i pushed it I could make it for the fair. That is what I did. Becca Thompson my brothers wife was kind enough to spend about a day of her time (She has 4 kids under the age of 7, so that was a lot of time) to paint on the details.  I guess some of the things that helped me finish it are that when the boys came out to my shop they always wanted to ride it, so i would put them up on its back while it was mounted in the chops.  I figured that if I didn't finish it soon they would never be able to enjoy it.

Now that it is done I do ask myself why I decided to build it. If you were to find one online to purchase they go for  $4000 to $7000 dollars.  It is too nice and I spent too much time on it to just let the boys use it unsupervised. The first day I had it in the house Sam got peanut butter (Sams favorite food) all over the base.  I can see my boys in the future painting it, drawing on it, swinging it into the walls, hitting it with the fire place wood poker thing,  and most of all I can see them giving it a hair cut.  The reason I can so easily see these things happening is that I am positive that I would have tried a few of them if I were their age.

So the dilemma is do I leave it at our house so it can be used by them (hope fully with supervision) or do I send it to Malad at one of Anna's grandparents houses where it would be safe from kids but never get used.
I Guess for now it is going to sit in our front room with an electric fence around it set at stun.