Happy Birthday Jarrett!

My sweet Jarrett turned 3 this week and Jordan will be 5 this next week. They're growing up so fast! The other day at lunch I was telling Jordan that I was going to be so sad when he went to kindergarten next year and Jarrett said, "Don't be sad, mommy, I'll still be here."

Here are a few pictures from Jarrett's birthday party. Not too exciting, just our little family, but still fun. My parents came up on Friday to visit and bring presents. It's always great when someone will travel to Kemmerer to see us! Jarrett was so cute and grateful for his presents and willing to share everything with Jordan, who wouldn't stop pestering him about it all day.

Yes, there really is a baby inside that belly.

A sled from Grandpa and Grandma C.

Some balloons from Grandpa and Grandma A.

And this is a little note that Jordan wrote for Josey. This writing thing has really been a long time coming for him. He has never wanted to sit down for more than a few minutes and try writing anything. And it's only been a couple of months that he would actually write his name in a straight line. This time he really wanted to tell his dad that he loved golfing with him ("except for when daddy yells at me"... unfortunately, his clearest memory of golfing with Josey was last year when Jordan and Jarrett took off down the fairway for the water stop with Josey yelling at them to come back. They paid him absolutely no heed, and they came home crying to me that they made daddy really mad.) Anyways, I love seeing Jordan so excited about learning and can only hope it lasts when the schools start squelching it out of him with all of their tests. I could hardly believe that my active little boy would concentrate for about 30 minutes on this special note for his daddy.

Kids Say the Darndest Things...

I know...kind of a lame title for a post, but I wanted to share some of the things that keep me laughing every day.

We were playing Simon Says with Jordan:
Josey: Simon says put your finger in your nose
Jordan thinks about this for a minute and his finger is getting very close to his nose, and then he says: I can't. I don't want to get germs on it because I just washed it.
(Lately Jordan has become a huge germophobe and is obsessed with washing his hands. They are raw and bleeding.)

Jarrett's nursery teacher asked who wanted to say the prayer in nursery and Jarrett raised his hand. When she chose him he said, "I'll do it to the best of my ability." She said all the other nursery kids were just staring at him, thinking What??

The other morning I sent Jordan to his room and Jarrett gets this evil little grin on his face and says to me, "If we had a locker, we could lock him in his room!" Amazing how my sweet little boy could come up with such a mean punishment for his brother.

Thank goodness these sweet little boys give me something to smile about every single day. I'm blessed to have such good kids. They have their bad days like all of us, but for the past 2 weeks, even when they were both really sick, they really have been angels and I am so grateful!

I've been meaning to update my blog for awhile, but then I never quite get around to it. This post may be a lot of talking and very few pictures, since I don't have many.

So what's been happening with us? Well, if you haven't heard by now, I'm going to have another baby (due in June). We are very excited, and I've been feeling okay - not great, but okay - and since the first trimester is officially over, I think I'll be rounding a corner any day here now in the energy and nausea department. My biggest complaint is my sore hip, which has prevented me from running more than about 3, maybe 4 if I'm lucky, days a week. I'm not 100% sure what's wrong with it because I never went to the doctor. I know what his diagnosis will be: stop running. I know, I know! I need to stop, but some days during the first trimester running was my lifesaver as it helped me feel like I had some energy and just helped me feel more like myself. My theory is that the inflammation in my hip was brought on by hormonal changes that came with pregnancy because that is right when it started and I had similar weird things happen when I was pregnant with Jarrett. It's a bummer, and eventually I will have to stop running to give it a rest, just not quite yet. Running has definitely not really helped with the weight gain thing. I'm only at 13 weeks, but I definitely look a lot more pregnant than that. And I will not post a picture.

We spent Thanksgiving this year in Montana, and during the whole four days we were there, I took about four pictures. We had a great time, as always. I'm so blessed to have such awesome in-laws.

Here are a couple of snow pictures. We've had a good amount of snow, but it hasn't been the kind of snow that's very good to play in. Plus, it's hard to find a day when it's not blowing so hard that it makes it miserable to take the kids out. One Sunday afternoon after church, it was a very nice day and the kids wanted to play in the snow so I bundled them up and bundled myself up and we went outside. Then I decided to take them on a little walk, pulling them behind me in the sled. I really haven't been up for a lot of activity since this pregnancy has wiped out a lot of my energy, and since I was feeling really good this day and actually wasn't tired, I decided to take them sledding. So we started walking to the sledding hill, when Jordan's little mind starts working and he tells me, "But mommy, we're not supposed to go sledding on Sunday." Talk about guilt and living a double standard! But I just told him that mommy felt good that day and it would be okay to go sledding. Hopefully he doesn't remember that lesson from his mommy in the future. I don't know if I would even consider us really breaking the Sabbath (Josey might), but it was nice for my 4-year-old to point it out to me that we were.

Josey has been really busy coaching girls' basketball (the team's not doing great so far, but hopefully they're improving), so we're really excited for Christmas break. I'm sure Josey's very excited to see what I got him for Christmas. Unfortunately for him, I already know what he got me and I'm going to LOVE it. See, here's what happened. He ordered a present for me the other day on Amazon and it said it would be shipped in 5-9 days, so he wasn't even sure if it would be here by Christmas. Usually when we get something here by UPS or FedEx, it doesn't get delivered until about 9 or 10 p.m., so he probably figured he would be home. Well, it didn't quite work that way. While he was at school the other day, the FedEx man made a special delivery. I was surprised when I opened the door and found a box labeled "Masseur In-A-Box." (It is a massage mat that lies flat and gives a really good back rub.) He really should have paid the extra $6 to get it gift wrapped, but he was too cheap. (And if it had been in a plain brown cardboard box, I would have just wrapped it and put it under the tree.) But now the surprise was already ruined, so I figured I better give it a try. It was awesome! He has a knack for picking out presents that I would never consider getting for myself, but I always end up enjoying them way more than the clothes I thought I wanted. I love you Josey! I promise my Christmas is not ruined, and now I better go get a massage.

Even Superheroes Pick Their Noses

We got the kids dressed up in thei costumes for our ward Halloween party the other night. Jordan really wanted to be a superhero this year, but it was really hard for him to decided which one he wanted to be. He changed his mind about a hundred times, so finally I just ordered The Flash costume for him because it seems to fit: The Flash is really fast and Jordan loves to run and be fast. He's loved it, even though not everyone knows who The Flash is. Jarrett wanted to be The Hulk. After Josey sprayed his hair black, we read on the can to be careful of using it on light or thin hair, so I was really worried that it wouldn't come out, but it did. These boys are my cute little superheroes. I just wish I could have got some cuter pictures outside in the fall leaves, but we've been covered in snow for the past couple of days. Happy Halloween!

I Have No Pictures, but...

Yesterday WHILE JOSEY WAS WATCHING THE KIDS (yes, that is an important point), Jordan managed to climb onto the roof of the house. Josey was doing some roof repair and had left the ladder precariously perched on a table so that he could reach the roof, and I guess Jordan thought it would be fun to try and climb it. He is a brave little boy, and a good climber. Apparently, he got quite the scolding from his daddy about how dangerous this was, but luckily he managed to survive with no falls. Life is always an adventure with these two.

So, next time Josey gives me a (very) hard time when something like this happens while I'm watching the kids:

I'll just remind him about the time Jordan climbed onto the roof under his care!

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.