Fall

From the beginning, seventh grade has been the grade to start playing football. We like practices after school instead of evenings, games on weekdays, and boys bodies that are a little bigger and ready to sustain the injuries that will certainly come from playing. Much to our dismay, 7th grade football was cut due to lack of money. Enter cross country. Hey, I love to run. Running is less painful and cheaper than community football leagues. Thankfully, Gabe did really enjoy running and had a great season. I love this picture and don't know how I took it.
My grandparents and mom came for a visit and we took them to the pumpkin patch complete with wagon ride and corn maze that we did not get lost in.

I love my grandpa trying to pull off the Grump of the Year.

Andrew and Kimball loved showing off for the camera as I tried to catch them in mid-air.
Bales of hay are so much fun!

Halloween came and went. Gabe was sick and his Jack-in-the-box costume is still sitting in the garage. Caleb is a crazy (angry??) BYU fan, Kimball is a Jedi Knight (made mostly out of Duck Tape. Don't you love that stuff?), and Andrew is Indiana Jones complete with whip made out of brown flannel so he can whip people and not cause welts or tears.We had to have a picture on the all ones day. Gabe took it one step further and decided we needed it to be 11:11, but we'd already missed 11:11 a.m. Mike took it even further and decided it had to be 11 seconds into the minute. It was late! That explains the sleepy zombie like looks from all, except Gabe.

I'm only 1/2 crazy

The summer before I was a freshman, my parents got a divorce and I moved with my mom to Rexburg, Idaho. I was mad about the move, mad about the divorce and knew nobody in the school. Somehow, Celeste and I became bestest of friends over the next year. Honestly I don't know how sometimes, we are pretty opposite. I tried to get her to play sports all of high school and she tried to get me on the speech and debate team. We had so much fun together, though, and always competed over grades. We were crazy and were roommates at Ricks College for a year, graduated at the same time, and when I got married she was my one and only bridesmaid. We never ran in high school, except to run away from some unsuspecting neighbors home after leaving cookies on their doorstep. (That ended badly a few times.)
Now we're all grown up with lots of boys to love (she has 3 and I have 4) and we're at the stage that they don't need us all the time. I think that's why I've started running more lately. In February, we had a crazy idea to run a 1/2 marathon, and when I say we, I mean she. Celeste lives in Arizona and is so happy to be there in the sun and heat, but she volunteered to fly up so we could run in Leavenworth at the Oktoberfest 1/2 marathon. My training was sporadic over the summer with all the boys home, but once they went back to school, I got serious about it, and I really loved it.
We went up to Wenatchee to stay the night before the race on Saturday. It is so beautiful in Leavenworth with the trees changing colors and the mountains in the background. It was freezing cold the morning of the race, but our adrenaline was pumping.

We both did so good. Celeste had never run over 6 miles before and she made it in under 3 hours. I was a little mad about my time because of the hills I didn't train well for and at mile 11 we ran in the sand for over a mile. My legs didn't want to lift up well by then and I was sure I was going to trip on my face, but luckily I didn't. My time was 2 hours 18 minutes. We did it!

Jars of Sunshine

Although the weather has been gorgeous and sunny the past few weeks, I've lived here long enough to know that the gray and dreary days will come. I call my canned peaches my jars of sunshine for that reason, but also because I had such two fun and happy days with my friend Daniell "teaching" her how to can peaches. We experimented with jam, chutney, and peach-mango salsa and I'm so proud of how it all turned out. This is just half of what we accomplished! My friend Daniell has really been a ray of sunshine in my life.

And then there were 5 Chickens

I really need to post an update on our chicken adventure. So much has happened since the beginning of March when we brought 12 chickens home and I will be the first to admit that we still don't know what we're doing. Mike built this amazing coop complete with roof doors that you can lift to retrieve eggs. Of the 12 original chickens, 1 died the first week, 7 were roosters and 4 were hens. Of those hens, two got caught by the neighbor dog and died. It was traumatic, especially for me, because our hen Chewbacca lived for a day after the attack and then died. I decided we needed to replace the two hens so we bought two more week old hens in June, Katara and Zorro. Zorro was caught by a hawk in the first week when I left them in the garden for a few minutes. So we replaced Zorro with Twenty bucks and so far our 4 hens have survived and one of our oldest, Skittish, is laying a lovely brown egg every day. The last hen is totally black with a greenish sheen. She's always kind of been the
"ugly duckling" but we love Darth Vader anyway.
As for the roosters, having 7 roosters was not fun. They started to get mean and too much testosterone (do roosters have that hormone?) in one pen. We convinced the boys it was time to kill some roosters so we killed 4 of them. It was harder than we thought, even for my emotionless, hunter-man husband. They had become pets. Sorry, no pictures of that.But we survived and it seemed better, but really one rooster is more than enough. Two of them were mean and they would travel in packs like bullies and corner the little ones. Really, there just wasn't even hens to keep 3 roosters happy. Last week, on two different days, the two roosters we were going to get rid of disappeared amidst squawking. We realized that we really do live in the sticks with plenty of predators; a black bear has been sighted, coyotes, bobcat, cougar, raccoons. We followed the trail and couldn't figure out what had been so sneaky.
Maybe we should have just got a dog.

Science Center Trip

I found some pictures from a trip to the Science Center over Spring Break two months ago. It's amazing what mirrors can transform your body into.


Some of our favorite friends were at the Science Center, too, like Han Solo and Chewbacca. . .

R2-D2 and C3P0

And even Mace Windu and Yoda.

Five months ago we knew hardly anything about Star Wars, but thanks to a Lego Star Wars game we got for Christmas, we are now quite the fans.

13 year race

I've hit that place in my marriage where I can't remember what it was like to be single, like it's always been Mike and I, and I mean that in a truly happy, wonderful kind of way. I mean I love this guy and can't imagine not having him with me always.
So we decided to run a race for our anniversary again. It could be symbolic of our marriage somehow as in sweaty? or red in the face? or achy all over? endurance? Most of all it's just an excuse to do something together in a competitive way because I'm all about bragging rights. It's too bad this year that neither of us trained as faithfully as last year. In fact I think Mike only ran 10 times this whole year and with that as an excuse he changed his entry from the 10K to the wimpy 5K (not for my running friends who are really fast and good at the 5K, just wimpy for Mike). Then he cheated by cutting through bushes got sent the wrong direction and ended up running 2. 3 miles instead of the 3. He came in 6th place and he walked half of it. Yea, he's a cheater.
I stuck with the 10K and my route ended up being lengthened by mistake instead. I didn't have a watch or gps to gauge my distance or time but I was tired and achy and so close to walking. But, I didn't give up, I persevered and I found out after that I ran 7.8 miles instead of 6.1. That was definitely my farthest run all year, but it was all good. I was only mad that I didn't beat my time from last year.

Happy us!

A birthday and visitors

Gabe wanted to try rock climbing for his birthday party this year. He took a few friends and went to an indoor rock climbing gym and had a blast trying it out for the first time.
My mom, step-dad, grandma, and grandpa made the long drive and came to visit, play, and celebrate Gabe getting the Aaronic Priesthood. Mike gave him a wonderful blessing, saying that as a deacon he would have the opportunity to help others feel the sacredness of the sacrament. I think it is amazing what we ask our young 12 year-old boys to do and become.Gabe is an amazing young man who is growing up too fast. I just feel very blessed to be his mom and be a part of it all. Not only is he super smart, a leader, and willing to try new things, but he loves the Savior and wants to be like Him and he tries to live like that. Happy Birthday, Gabe!

Our hot new chicks

Monday night we became the proud family of 12 four day-old chicks. What started as maybe 3-4 laying hens somehow escalated into 12 unsexed chicks when we visited this nice families farm with more chicks than they knew what to do with. And they were just so darn cute.

This is Saturn named by Andrew for her rings.

Gabe is so gentle and can't wait to play with them with them when he gets home from school.They sleep huddled up in a ball, each trying to get under all the others.Some of the other names are Chewbacca and Yoda. As you can see, we have become Star War fans, at least of the Lego variety.

Mike has named them all chicken tenders or chicken stew, but as you can see he really loves them, too.

Teeth

By the time Andrew was 5 months old he had two teeth. The dentist told me that since he got his teeth early, he would lose them early. So Andrew turned 5 then 6, waiting patiently to lose his first tooth. Recently, an adult tooth came in, but still the baby tooth in front of it was stubborn, not willing to release it's grip on his gums. After even more patience, wiggling, and eating hard crunchy foods with his tooth, it was loose enough to "shoot" out. A few years ago we tried this with Caleb, tying one end of floss to the loose tooth and the other to a dart loaded in a gun. Well, the video speaks for itself. He lost the tooth, literally! The video does not show that two weeks later, I found it. Does that tell you how much I clean?



Then last week, Andrew woke up with a fat lip that continued to swell up more all day. He complained of stomachache, then his tooth would hurt, and he had a low fever. He was miserable all day and I couldn't tell what was wrong, but he looked so weird with his fat lip. Last year Andrew had hit his tooth hard enough to kill the tooth and the dentist had reassured me that it would fall out eventually and should be fine. When I took him into the dentist the next morning she told me it was infected, put him on antibiotics, and scheduled an extraction when the swelling went down. So, Andrew lost his second tooth the hard way, but he didn't seem to mind, until the numbness wore off.