(Looking through my pictures from this year, I realized that I only have 2 pictures of us together. Well, I have more than one version of each picture, but these are the ones that are the best of both of us!)
Life together has been happy...and good...and sweet. I am such a happy girl!
I don't know if anyone comes to my blog these days. It seems like facebook has pretty much taken over. But, we are still here.We have been pretty busy lately, as I just finished out the ward activities for the year with a big Christmas party last night. Aaron has done some traveling for work, we have been sick with colds and general yuckiness, and we have been busy with our callings at church. Just so you know, I plan to update soon with a few marathon posts-complete with pictures, of course!
BUT, if you do enjoy a good "dumb face picture," it isn't Aaron, but I think this will do:
Love ya, Dad!
So now I post-with a few tears and an ache in my heart...missing Utah.
I miss BYU football games. I miss hiking up to the top corner-to watch the game with all the Jones family. I miss going to see who is in the Hale seats during half time. I miss sneaking in bottled waters and eating kettle corn.
I miss driving the Alpine Loop in American Fork Canyon and stopping to take our yearly family picture. I miss the vibrant yellow of the aspens mixed with the deep, dark green of the pine trees.
I miss the mountains. Oh, how I miss those mountains. They were so hard to get used to at first...so large and immovable. But then I learned to love them. I learned to see the beauty that they held...
...Like beautiful, open meadows.
I miss this face. SO MUCH.
I miss this yard-the raspberries, grapes, and all the games of bocci and tether ball. I miss laying in the hammock and sitting on the steps. I miss family gatherings here and eating till I can't eat anymore, and then eating some more. I miss playing 5 Crowns and Rummikub.
I miss this man, and all of his practical wisdom and gardening knowledge.
I miss these two and watching the away BYU football games at their house. I miss their garden and their backyard. I miss watching the birds with Emma from their sliding glass door.Although it took me a little getting used to, I learned to love things that are different. I learned to appreciate a regions natural beauty. I learned to love other people, and learned to allow myself to be loved by others. I leaned about the heritage and the ancestors of Aaron's family and began to love those who went before us and paved the way.
So, for right now, I am going to let myself be a little homesick. Yes, I said homesick. Isn't there a saying, "Home is where the heart is?" No matter where we live, no matter where we go, a good piece of my heart will always be in Utah.
The month of August has been a lot of fun for us. I am starting this post with some of my favorite pictures from this month:
I love this of the boys! They were having so much fun with the cordless phone and the headset that goes with it. I tried to get a picture of William with the headset on, but he kept taking it off. However, Jonathan would not put the phone down!
And then they showed me why we probably shouldn't be doing sink baths at this point. They kept trying to crawl out on to the counters!
If you read my last post, you know that Emma turned 4 this year! Since her birthday fell on a Monday, we had a little family dinner with cake and family present opening. We let Emma choose her birthday dinner, and she requested steak and smashy potatoes. We were thinking that she would ask for hot dogs or pizza or something, but it was steak!
Here is Emma, accompanying us while we sang "Happy Birthday."
This is Jonathan with his slice of cake...
And William after devouring his slice!
On the following Saturday, we had a birthday party for Emma. She invited 4 friends and their families over for a barbecue, cake, pinata, and fun in the back yard!
Here is Emma with her pinata spoils-boxes of Dots candy, stuffed in her pockets and lining the cuffs of her jeans. Well done, Emma!
This is Emma's birthday cake. Cinderella-her favorite!
And just for fun, I am leaving you with the latest picture of Aaron!
Emma's body seems to finally be growing into her personality. She has always known what she wants and how she wants it, she is just so vocal about it these days. She is fun, sassy, sweet, all at the same time. Emma is also very smart, and inquisitive.
She also keeps us laughing non-stop. Just this morning, she came out of my bedroom and said, "Mom, I am getting ready for my birfday. I putted on your pineapple lotion all over my legs and I put some dusting (loose powder) on my cheeks. Do I look beau-ty-full?" Yes, baby girl, you do!
Here are some things Emma has done over the past year:
First trip to the ER, complete with scan of noggin.
Last minute family trip to "Florida Destin." Emma loved it so much there and asks to go back all the time. She loves the beach!
Emma also went on her first "date." With her daddy. And her Jefe. She had so much fun!
Emma finds my camera and then runs and hides. Then she takes lots of pictures. Some, like this one, are keepers!
She loves to help cook. And it {obviously} doesn't even matter if anyone is really cooking.
She started riding dirt bikes...with her dad, of course!
She has been missing her Uncle Russell.
She has been finding her own "style."
Emma has been teaching her brothers all the things she knows. She is such a great big sister!Emma, I am so pleased with the little person you are. You bring me such happiness and joy every single day of my life! I am so blessed to be your mommy! I love you!
as supervision?
Don't know yet? Let me help you.
Now, here's the thing: Emma is a pretty tough kid. I have seen her take some pretty nasty spills and she usually shakes it off within 5-10 minutes and goes on her way. That didn't happen this time.
As soon as she fell, she started crying, sobbing, wailing, what have you. Her eyes started rolling back in her head, like she was falling asleep. But she was still crying. So, we did what any good parents would do in this situation: We got out a flashlight and shined it in her eyes, trying to make sure her pupils were both dilating, blah blah blah. They were, and we thought she would be fine. After 30 minutes, she was still crying pretty hard, so we decided to call the nurse line with our insurance company. While we were on the phone with the nurse, Emma fell asleep, which I felt fine about since her eyes were fine, and she had been awake for a half hour since the incident. Until....Emma threw up. All over the place. At that point, the nurse on the phone said to take her to the emergency room. So we called our pediatrician...who said to do the same thing. We quickly set off for the hospital.
We got there, and after getting her all checked out, and having a CT scan as a precaution, we were told that she probably had a concussion, but nothing really to worry about.
This was my facebook status the following day: Trip to Scottish Rite Emergency Room, mandatory valet parking at ER, CT scan, concussion diagnosis, lots of stickers and one balloon-$77 copay
For Father's Day weekend, we went up to Tennessee. My brother, Sampson, his wife, Brittany, and their new baby girl, Phoenix, were in from Utah. We haven't ever met Phoenix before, so it was really nice to see and hold her! The boys seemed to like her, but they were a little cautious around her, too. William kept crawling up to her, reaching out to touch her, and then he would pull his hand away. It was really sweet. And Phoenix was a little doll! She is so sweet!
My brother, Dan, took some great pictures over the weekend with his awesome camera, and here are some of those.
There is a little market close to the river called Rock Island Market. They have some of the best cheeseburgers on the face of the earth. Here are the boys getting their first taste of Market food.
(Jonathan is on the left, in the background.)
Here is William, who thinks he is starving, which is evident when you notice how much food he is trying to shove in his mouth.
Emma and Jonathan
With the boys still just crawling, we found it necessary to contain them down at the dock. The little inflatable raft did just the trick! (And just so you know, I am not at all concerned about them not walking yet. Yes, they are 15 months old. But they will do it when they are ready. Once they master walking, I could be in for it.)
And then there's Emma. My sweet, sassy, "cool surfer girl," Emma.
She loved riding the boogie board behind the jet ski (which was driven v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y!)
"Oh Yeah!" She was so excited to be doing such big things.
Here is Emma with her cousin, Noah, swimming around under the dock. (If you click on this picture to enlarge it, you can see how blue her eyes are. They are so pretty in this picture.)
Emma swimming around...
It was a fun weekend!
PS-Thanks to Dan for all the great pictures!
We went to Destin, Florida. It is one of the closest beach towns, about 6 hours away from us. The sand was beautiful, the ocean was cold, and the weather was quite nice.
Jonathan was so cute in his little hat!
Emma loved playing in the ocean. She would go out into the water with Aaron, and she would try to get him to further and further out into the ocean.
This is the swimsuit she chose for herself this year. She says that it is a cool girl swimsuit.
I think she looks like a super cute, surfer girl in it!
Jonathan was being so cute that I couldn't stop taking his picture!
He just kept giving me the cutest smiles! (William was sitting in my lap the whole time, feeling pretty yucky.)
Here are both the boys, in one of the rare moments that William wasn't on my lap!
William and Jonathan playing with sand toys.
Self-beach-portrait, with William on my lap. (I had to get a picture of myself with some sand in the background!)
We went to a restaurant called "Fudpucker's." The food was decent, extremely overpriced, but we had fun anyway!
A lot of fun!
This restaurant also boasted its live alligators. There was a "pit" in the front of the restaurant, and these were the alligators. Don't know if you can really tell here, but they were babies. Maybe pre-teens. They were all pretty small. So, we went somewhere else to see the big guys!
We went to a place called the "Gulfarium." It was kind of like the aquarium/zoo only with gulf animals. We saw these huge alligators.
They were much scarier than the baby ones. But, they hardly moved.
We also saw a "multi-species" show, which consisted of a dolphin and a sea lion. They did some pretty cool tricks, like this one (above). The sea lion is holding a fish in its mouth, and the dolphin jumped out of the water to get it!
In this trick, the sea lion and the dolphin are kissing. The sea lion could also throw trash in a trash can, which gave the gulfarium trainers a good opportunity to talk about throwing trash in trash cans and not in the ocean.
There was a dolphin show we also watched. This dolphin is jumping through a hula hoop. (See the ocean and the pier in the background?)
And finally the pier at Fort Walton Beach. People were fishing off the pier and these very large birds were all over the place. This one got so close to Aaron and Emma, so I took their picture with it! (If you look closely, you can see some of these birds standing on the light poles.)
We had a great time. And, one of the parts I am most proud of is: my "bet" with Aaron. We drove past a PacSun outlet, and we decided we could both use a new tshirt or two. Aaron bet me that I couldn't go in and get us both a shirt in under 10 minutes. And, I went in and got us both a shirt in 7 minutes! I win! (Unfortunately, we didn't really wager anything in the bet. But, I did get a new shirt out of it!)
