Fred Tadje

Fred Walz Tadje

January 1, 1923-

September 20, 2012

My amazing grandpa passed away in September. He's one of the kindest men I've ever known.  I'm so grateful I got to see him and talk with him before he died. 

My amazing Grandma asked all of us granddaughters to sing this song at the funeral.  It was one of their favorites while she was waiting for him to get home from the war. 

Blue Skies 

Blue skies smilin' at me 
Nothin' but blue skies do I see 
Bluebirds singin' a song 
Nothin' but bluebirds all day long 

Never saw the sun shinin' so bright 
Never saw things goin' so right 
Noticing the days hurrying by 
When you're in love, my how they fly 

Blue days, all of them gone 
Nothin' but blue skies from now on 

Try as I might, there was no way I was going to get through that. In fact, I'm pretty sure that there was probably only a handful of the 13 of us were singing at any given moment.  

Christy and Max :) 

The four of us siblings. We missed Scott--but YAY that he's serving the Lord!

Grandma and the Winn boys who were there.  She's so great. She smiles all the time. Love her!

All the cousins oldest to youngest.  (We did this growing up but on the stairs during our trip to Sun Valley for our family reunions every year.  Aaah, the good old days.)

Special :)

So....I love this crew :)

Nikki got to stay a few extra days. Here's a goodbye hug. 

Clean VS Dirty

We got to take the boys to the Brigham City Temple open house.  It was lovely and beautiful :)

We went to the Dedication with Kaden and, since Andrea's a doll, she volunteered to watch the younger three.  She and Aubrey drove down that day. We had a great time with them.  They're great.

While Jess, Kade and I were waiting for the dedication to begin, he was noticing all the kids around that he recognized from his class and school. Then he said the funniest thing. He told me how cool it was that so many of the kids were Mormon at school. That only 1 kid wasn’t—he told me his name and that this kid had another church but didn’t really go. 

I asked him, ‘how do you know all of this?’ 

Kade said, “I took an inventory” 

HA!  I asked him what he meant. I guess he asked everyone in his class if they were Mormons and what ward they lived in and where they lived.  He said he wasn’t sure if Mrs. Bromley was or not but that she’d heard of the Mormons.  Seriously. I love him!  Oh, and also we had a man with an eye patch sit next to us at the dedication. Kade thought that was pretty cool.

 Rhett. Complete with his stink face and cape!

 Aubrey--not messing around on this game of backyard soccer, and Andrea with her hand-me-down cape.

Luke.  

Here's a video from that day....I should note that Rhett was the last one with my camera and it took me 2 weeks to get it off this crazy fast blurry setting....kids are silly.  (OOOH, and the last second of video clip should also be explained....Kade has a deep hatred for Justin Beiber for some reason.  So one day Jess bought a Justin Beiber poster and taped it up in his room....ahh, good times)

Rhett wanted to catch the leaves....so Jess made it happen.

And dirty.  I could just mention here that we have 4 boys.  Most things are dirty with them through regular 'boy activity'. But the 'dirty' I was referring to this time came from playing in a certain pit in our backyard, spiced up with a little water. :) (Rhett was way worse--i should have kept his clothes on for this...but i was getting them ready to get hosed off! HA!  That's the part that is always fun for us!)

Here is a little of our comings and goings from the past couple months...nothing huge or noteworthy..just things that make me smile from the Winn clan :)

I love this face so bad!  Rhett is POTTY TRAINED! WOO WOO.  One day I bought two giant boxes of Pull-ups from Costco, and the next (literally) he was in underwear and sleeping through the night with no accidents.  He's a champ turns out like that.  He's such a sweetheart. He holds open my doors (which is hilarious sometimes because of the angle he has to hold his body at to keep heavy doors open), he knows most of his letters, he FINALLY has started to sing (he always listened but never sang along). His songs are: I am a Child of God, I Love to See the Temple, Popcorn Popping, I Like to Look for Rainbows, and the last third of the Alphabet song :)  He is just such a sweetheart and loves his brothers and likes to help out in anyway possible at home.

 He LOVES trains, this one. He made this one mostly by himself.

Kade was making Rhett crack up one evening (by running up the slide and pretending to fall back down it)...it made me smile.

" I thankful for shooting out candy" Rhett has added this to his prayers for the past couple of months because of the picture above.  We went to a Pleasant Grove Heritage Festival right? Well, they have this fancy Candy shooting machine! It was awesome!  This man would shove candy into this potato gun type do-hookey hooked up to an air compressor and then WHAM!  All the candy would explode out into the air and just rain down on all the kids. It was so awesome and the kids LOVED it. Especially Rhett apparently :)

Kade is LOVING scouts! His leaders are so great!  (he was on his way to walk to one of their houses to make dinner over a fire in this pic)  Let's see, what's new with Kade.

Playing Red Rover before pack meeting (if I could have played Red Rover EVER recess in elementary school I would have! Such a fun game!)

Kade received his Wolf! Woo woo!  He's such a great kid! I love this one.  He's such a responsible, kind, loving kid.  Tonight he put Rhett to bed so that I could read Harry Potter to Luke--he's nice like that.  I get to teach his primary class. It's a class of 10 boys and I LOVE IT! They are such a great group of future missionaries!

Kade also just finished wrestling which he LOVED and was really good at. Twice a week for an hour he'd go to PG High and the coach there would instruct the kids, and then they'd all separate into smaller groups of 4-6 kids with the PG High School Wrestling team. It was so awesome.  I don't have any actually "good" pictures on account of I never remember to take any with more then just my camera--but there you go :) (He's in the red shorts)

At the PG Heritage Festival again--here they are sawing a log--after it was done, there was a man there who branded them. It was super fun.

Ha ha--this picture makes me laugh. At the festival there was a tee pee set up for everyone to look at.  We all went inside and there was a legit mountain man....turns out legit mountain men can talk and talk and talk--and not necessarily about things that may be interesting to non-mountain-men.  The boys had these 'fascinating' expressions on the whole time...just waiting for us to get them out of there.  ha ha--funny.

We had extra pudding and pie filling in the fridge...so dad decided to learn how to make a pie crust that day. I just liked that...and the boys are doing their reading for school....(amidst the squashes that were harvested that day.)

Ahh, our happy little Max-y!  We love this guy!  He's 7 months now, and just awesome.  He's our happiest baby by far, and so calm and easy and...just great!  He's sitting up, and gets onto his belly all the time which he doesn't so much love.  He's starting to try and stand up on things and he's starting to take bottles occasionally again which is nice, and also is waking up less in the night to eat which is rad....I love him. 

His brothers love him, and take such great care of him.  

Rhett was potty training :)  Hence the undies...but I loved how he is looking at Max like, "hey buddy!"

wo-wo-WO! (falling backwards)

Luke is SUCH a domestic kid! He loves cooking, and is always the first one to tie up an apron and help out in the kitchen! Here he is making zucchini cookies with Grandma.  When we asked the boys what 'extra-curricular' thing they'd like to do, he picked "Chef Class". I loved it! They've made such cool things too. It's still going on, but the first day, they made, Carmel Popcorn, Root beer Floats, and Sloppy Joe Pie. But get this--they made their own crusts and everything! Woo woo! I'm way impressed.

The next week he made a mummy calzone, hot cocoa with eye balls (marshmallows with chocolate chips in the center) and frosted a Frankenstein cake.  (he has two weeks left.)

Along with his 'domestic' side, when we were watching conference he saw me sewing patches on Kade's scout uniform and asked to learn how to sew. I loved it! (I love that I get to pass along skills even though there are no Winn girls. :)  

Kade asked to learn as well, what makes me laugh is that Kade said, "don't tell any of my friends I'm doing this." Right after Luke said, "mom, tell my friends about this for sure!" ha! Silly boys.

We love living so close to our families!  Here's some pics from one of our trips to Jess' family!

George flying kites with the kids.

Julie giving Rhett loves.

Saturday night it was raining a ton!  Jess said since it was raining so much, they may as well shower outside.  They took him pretty serious.  (Luke may or may not have ran outside--in the nude--with a bar of soap. Rhett stayed a little more modest.)

Julie has been giving Kade mini lessons while we're there.  He loves them.

Picnic of lunch-ables.

We went to a parade up there--and it was A MAZE ING!  Because of one main reason--CANDY!  When was the last parade you went to that you filled a plastic grocery bag.  Look at Kade's face below--ha ha--love it!    Those clowns were spraying kids and throwing out otter pops. Good times!

We all made a little stop at temple square on our way back.  Aren't they so cute!