Each time I update my blog, I tell myself I'm going to come back in a week or so and update again. I'm going to take more pictures and remember everything, but then about a month passes and I'm kicking myself for not updating more often. So I'll do my best to remember the highlights of our last days of summer, but I didn't take very many pictures.

Last week, Josey and I went down to Salt Lake to watch the U.S. national soccer team play El Salvador in a World Cup qualifying match. When Josey originally told me he wanted to go to this game, I was a little surprised, because usually we just do one thing like this each fall, and that is for a BYU football game. But he insisted, and so I don't know if we'll make it to a BYU game, but he said this was worth it. I have to agree; it was so fun and exciting, and who knows if we'll get to see the national team play live again anytime soon! I played soccer all my life, but I've never been into watching soccer that much. Josey has been following the U.S. team since a little after we were married, but lately he's gotten into it a lot more. The atmosphere at the game was unlike anything I've ever been to before, probably because we were sitting by a huge section of El Salvador fans. And they were NOT NICE! If Americans would walk by some of them, they would flip them off right in their face and yell things at them. Bad swear words. So that wasn't so fun, but what was fun was that the U.S. won 2-1. And then we rushed out to the car to find out that BYU beat Oklahoma! It was a great day overall, and a fun date.

At the end of August, I ran in the Top of Utah Half-Marathon. My goal was to beat 1:40, and I ended up running it in 1:37:27 (7:26/mile). This was 6 minutes faster than my time at this race last year, so I was really happy. It helped that I knew the course, and knew what to expect. I went down with a couple of friends from Kemmerer, who I also trained with. Kayla (on the far left) is a high school senior and one of Josey's track stars. She's a sprinter, and she says she will never do another distance race. We'll see about that. Amanda (center) has become one of my really good friends, and I think we'll continue to run together when we can. Her little boy is one of Jordan's really good buddies so that is fun. This race was going to be my last of the season, but I might decide to enter the Pinedale Half-Marathon at the end of this month because I really love races!


Just a picture of Jarrett being his goofy little self. This boy loves to be a clown, and some days I don't know what to do with him. He thinks everything is a joke. But since he's so cute, I guess it's okay for now.


One night we went with another family to catch crawdads in the Ham's Fork river. I had never seen them before, but we knew the boys would have fun. Josey says he used to catch them when he was little. He read on the internet that they eat meat and you can bait them with hot dogs. Well, this didn't really do any good because he just caught them with his hands. But while he was looking he still had the hot dog (just a small piece) tied to a string that he was pulling through the water. When they had been in the water for about a half hour or so, Josey noticed the hot dog was suddenly missing. He asked Jordan if he ate it. Of course he did, "because the crawdads weren't eating it"! YUCK!! Luckily, he did not get sick.

Jordan has mastered the art of the monkey bars. Here he is on some rings doing his thing. He will swing on the monkey bars until he has blisters. I'm very proud of his skills!

Summer Fun

We've been so busy this summer that I haven't taken much time for blogging. We've just been having too much fun I guess. What have we been up to? Just the regular summer stuff...we've gone to Bear Lake a couple of times, slept under the stars, and played in the water practically every day (Josey has spent practically our whole monthly entertainment budget on water guns for the boys, trying to find just the right ones; he keeps going back to the store for more). Josey's been working on his golf game and I've been running a lot. I'm planning on running the Top of Utah half marathon in Logan at the end of August, so I've been training for that. I've also found someone to run with. I'm so excited! I've been trying to convince anyone to run with me, and I finally found a friend who is getting back into running and is also training for the half marathon, so it's been fun to not have to run alone every day.

We spent the last week up in Montana with Josey's family. We spent a couple of days in western Montana at Flathead Lake, which was beautiful. Then we spent a few days in Lewistown. Unfortunately, we forgot our camera so I didn't get any pictures of this entire trip.

I'm going to try to take more pictures and update my blog a little more regularly, but for now, here are some pictures from our summer.

Jan managed to get some pretty cute (I thought) family pictures of us while she was visiting.

Here's Josey giving me a kiss after we got into a water fight one afternoon, and got totally soaked. It's pretty hard when your opponent is a foot taller than you. He always seems to have the advantage.

Josey usually soaks the kids when they want to have a water fight, and this time Jordan didn't want to get wet, so this was what he put on. His dad still showed no mercy.

Yes, I'm the mom who puts the white pasty sunscreen on my kids, but they don't seem to notice yet.

My buff hubby at the lake.

S'mores!

Last week Lyle & Jan came to visit for a couple of days. While they were here we decided to have a fire and make s'mores. I think the pictures say it all. (Except you might not be able to tell from the pictures that Jordan decided he didn't like s'mores because they were way too messy, and Josey enjoyed his Reeses Peanut Butter Cup s'more WAY too much.)

Warning: Picture Overload

We've been enjoying a couple weeks of summer break so far, but the weather hasn't been much like summer. It won't stop raining! I really can't wait until the sun comes out. (At least it's not snowing like it did last year in June. I remember posting about it on this blog.) So what have we been up to?

Jordan "earned" his new bike. I had really been wanting to get him a bike this summer, but he had to earn $50 by being a good boy, $1 at a time. When he was naughty, he got a ticket and had to pay depending on the offense. The idea worked really well (meaning he exhibited REALLY good behavior) for about 3 days, and after that the novelty kind of wore off. But after about a month, he earned his bike.




We also hit another deer with our old brown car. Luckily, this was on our way shopping for a new car, but it was still disappointing, especially because it totaled our car and we got ripped off by the insurance company. (If you look closely at this picture, you can see the mirror hanging off. Josey wouldn't let me take a picture of the car with all of the deer poop splattered all over the side. He thought that was gross. Also another gross sidenote: when I tried opening my car door to inspect the damage, all of the icky deer hair flew in on me. And after suffering through that, my door wouldn't even open.) Anyways, when we found the new car we wanted (actually Lyle the car-hunter spotted it at the back of a dealership - exactly what we were looking for), we decided to get rid of our old red car too. I've had this car since my sophomore year at BYU, and it has served us well, but it's just not that safe anymore for Kemmerer driving in the winter. Luckily, it made the drive to Salt Lake just fine, and we got a little play money out of it.


So what did we do with our play money? We decided to blow most of it by spoiling the kids with a day of fun at Boondock's to kick off the summer (And once we have more than 2 kids, we will probably never return because this place is a money-sucking pit).

It didn't start off being too much fun for Jarrett, who was totally exhausted.



Jordan got to ride with his daddy on the bumper boats.


Jarrett managed to wake up for the giant playground. What kid wouldn't?




Me & Arielle took a ride on a roller-coaster simulator. I wanted to be excited and a little bit scared, I really did. But it wasn't even close to the real thing.

And while me & Arielle were having all the fun, Josey got to let the boys use all their tokens on the arcade games. He was not happy about this. He kept getting so annoyed because they would choose games that were way too hard for them (duh, they're 4 and 2) and lose in about 2 seconds. Oh well; they were still having fun. They probably would have had just as much fun pretending to play the games while Josey used all their tokens to have his own fun.


Here are a few more pics of what we've been up to:

Almost burning the house down with all of Josey's birthday candles.


Picking mommy flowers. (I just couldn't resist posting another picture of this cute little face.)

Running through the sprinklers on a day when the sun broke through for a couple hours.

And finally, Daddy torturing Jarrett.

Vain Repetitions

Every time it's Jordan's turn to say the prayer (family prayer, dinner prayer, whatever), he never fails to ask Heavenly Father to help us "be nice and share our toys." He doesn't really seem to put much thought into it, so this morning I told him that today when he had trouble sharing, we were going to try to remember to ask Heavenly Father to help us. So today when he wouldn't share his precious monster truck with Jarrett, I had to intervene and try resorting to the prayer. I said, "Remember when you prayed this morning for Heavenly Father to help you be nice and share your toys...?" Before I could even finish the sentence, he interrupted with, "Yes, but I'm not going to pray for that anymore."

Happy Birthday to Me!

I guess it's about time for another post since it's been a month. In that month, we've been pretty busy. Arielle, me, Jordan, & Jarrett took a trip to Montana at the beginning of May to surprise her dad for his birthday. We showed up at about 11:00 at night as Lyle was just about to fall asleep, and I think he was pretty happy to see his grandsons and daughter. It was a fun little road trip and as always, fun for the boys to see their grandparents. We had some funny moments with all of Jordan's jabbering, but we really enjoyed the peaceful times when the boys were sleeping. Here we caught Jordan with a huge amount of drool and we thought it was gross, but funny, so we couldn't resist taking a picture. (You might have to look really closely to notice the drool.)

Josey's been busy every weekend with track. I've visited my parents a couple of times while he's been gone to try to get a dose of warmer weather. This past weekend it was the Richmond Black & White Days celebration. (That's the town where I grew up, and it's a Holstein cow show, not the most racist town in America, as Josey likes to claim.) It was fun to take Jordan & Jarrett to some of the things I used to think were so awesome when I was a kid, like the parade. I also decided to enter the Cowabunga race, just for a chance to run. I thought it was a 5K, but it ended up being only about 2 miles. I did win the female division, and took home the prize of two free tickets to the horse pulls. Too bad I had to go back to Kemmerer before the big event.

The Wyoming state track meet is this weekend in Casper, and I'm going to go with Josey and leave the boys with my parents. I'm a little nervous about this because I've never left them for more than a night, but I think it will be fun to enjoy some time with Josey and get to see some of the athletes he's been working with without trying to make sure my boys are not trying to run onto the track.

And finally...happy birthday to me. Yesterday, I turned 27. Can you believe I'm that old?

The best thing about my birthday? The beautiful weather! It was the most beautiful day of the year. I've been waiting for this, and I really hope it stays for at least a few days. My sweet sister-in-law and husband made me a delicious breakfast in bed. I can't show you any pictures besides this one because I look horrible, but just suffice it to say that it was delicious, and I didn't really need to eat for the rest of the day.

Josey also made dinner and got me some flowers. We have a little issue with flowers because one year for our anniversary (5 years ago), Josey bought me a dozen roses from this little flower shop, and I don't think he knew in advance that they were going to cost $100. Seriously, that's how much they cost. I flipped out, and since that time he's never bought me flowers. I guess he decided to try again. (I haven't seen the receipt yet.) I appreciate the gesture, and they are beautiful. My friend also made me some cupcakes. I thought that was really sweet.

I always feel spoiled in May because it's Mother's Day and my birthday. I am lucky to have a sweet husband who likes to do thoughtful things. This Sunday, it's my turn to spoil him because it's his birthday. Well, today is another beautiful day so I better stop blogging and go start enjoying it!

I Hope He's Not Allergic...

Today while Jarrett was napping, I was upstairs doing something and Jordan was downstairs where he was supposed to be resting and watching a TV show. When I came downstairs, I noticed our very large can of peanuts sitting on the couch next to him. I said, "Jordan, what are you doing?" He just looked at me and said: "Well, I was hungry, and I wanted a snack, and I thought peanuts would be a good snack." Okay, good logic. (I know this might not sound that funny, but if you got to listen to the way he said it, you would be laughing too.) I was a little concerned that half of the can was gone, and I just opened it yesterday. Later today he complained to me about a canker sore. Hmm, I wonder where he got that from.

Later he wanted a drink and I guess I wasn't fast enough because I noticed him drinking from the milk carton. He said "Mmm, it tastes good like that." Drinking from the milk carton is a definite no-no in this house, and I told him so. He said, "well, daddy does it sometimes." Oh, really? Now Josey's secret is out, and I'm not too happy about it.