jenny is not posting...

I have retired from posting, and jenny has not posted for a while, so i decided to come out of retirement just for a day--





I had to put on this picture:

I was at Toys R Us getting Jackson a birthday pirate ship and ran into this little scene. This chubby older brother was on one of those new TV activities that is supposed to promoste exercise. But he was forcing his younger brother to pedal the bike for him while he played the game. The poor little kid was down on the dirty ground swinging the pedals around as fast as he could while the slave driver played his exercise game. All I could hear from around the corner was, "Faster! Faster!" So I take a peek and laughed out loud (After going back around the corner of course).

I thought it was classic. Maybe even more classic is me looking around for their mom so I could quickly snap this picture.

the witches...

my sisters and mom having been going to Gardner village to see the witches for years and this year we finally made it. so fun and so worth the trip. the boys weren't really into the witches - i think the witches made them a little bit nervous, but they were in heaven surrounded by all of the pumpkins.
this was as close as they would get... :) i let them choose a treat in the candy shoppe - my favorite! and christian would not let his sour apple heads out of his hands or sight the whole time - we're talking like 2 or 3 hours - it was hard to get him to even look at anything else. so funny!

fall fun!!!

fall is soooo fun. we love it. we had a little family night up in the canyon, but unfortunatly we didn't get any good shots of the leaves, but we did get the kiddos jumping around and having fun just being in the mountains. painting! we're finally done! how come nobody warned us how long it would take!?!
these boys love donuts - any kind - as long as it's round with a hole in the center, they are in heaven.
during the priesthood session of conference, all of us girls get together with the kiddos. this year we went to jenn's house and decorated sugar cookies. i love it - lots of kids and lots of sugar, by the end of the night they were literally hanging from the chandelier

thanksgiving point

we met up with julie, jenn, my mom and all the younger cousins at the thanksgiving point farm or whatever. i was so impressed that jack and christian had no problems and were actually excited to ride on the ponies all by themselves - yeah!!!

i LOVE this picture of my mom and maren and jane. she is such an amazing mom and grandma! everyone adores her.

footbaaaalllllll!!!!!

byu football....can we ever get enough!?! we have had so much fun watching and going to games this year. we've only taken the boys to one game and by the end of the first half we were sure it was one game too many, but they got into it the second half and actually had fun. they're pretty good at the byu fight song - just the rah, rah, rah rah rah goooooooo cougars part.these are our awesome seats!!! my family has had these same tickets for YEARS and we LOVE them. nobody to crawl over, no awkward sitting/standing problems, a view of the whole field (plus utah lake, the mountains, costco...) portal XX section 146 row 33 seat 30. awesome.

jane has been my little buddy for all of the games - hot or cold, rain or shine - she has been such a trooper - i'm sure she already bleeds blue like her momma. ok - so we're usually the last to leave the stadium, partly because it takes so long to walk all the way down from the top and also because we like to wait for justin. so the boys were having fun running up and down the empty rows and jumping on the benches so i tried to catch a picture of jack mid jump. well, turns out i also caught christian mid sip - i wonder how many sips he had from left over drinks!!! gross.

my little jane was so cute at jake and lindsey's wedding and i didn't get a single picture... but emma did...

thanks!!!

I am a Ute.

Ok, so I officially started school 2 weeks ago, or something like that and now that I cannot refund my tuition, I think that makes it official. By the way, dropping 1,600 scrillas on tuition is not the funnest end-of-summer activity. I can think of at least five cool things I could have done with that money, including a cruise or a trip to some cool place I have never been. I could've bought an IPhone, which I don't need, but I am way trendy so want it. Um...ok, so maybe only two things, but still. School is ok. I miss seeing my boys on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I feel bad Jenny has to put them to bed which for the most part is labeled the worst part of parenting in my book so far. (I really do feel bad...most nights). AND I feel guilty right now because I should be reading a boring book, or writing an essay or something instead of writing this sentence.
Ok. Guilt is working. Actually, it is not guilt at all. I don't want to be up forever.
peace.
go cougs.

i love people who make rules like this:

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=4243019

since I am the biggest BYU football fan...
I want to win Frockly's t-shirt giveaway

st. george

a big huge thank you to the whalens for letting us stay in their beautiful home in st. george... while we were there, mom and dad brought us our scuba gear, and the boys insisted and begged and asked a million times for me to put the wetsuits on them, and of course once they were on, this...

jack loving every second by the pool...

so cute, he kept saying he was "surfboarding"

and he had to make sure we had a picture with the palm trees in it...(that's my boy fo sho')

jane

while we were in texas we took cute jane swimming for the first time...and of course all she wanted to do was lay out on the blue floaty (that's my girl!) ...but with david around, he couldn't resist another photo opp with our underwater camera...

...and jane jumping off the rock waterfall...so fun! i'm sure she loved it!

Jake and Lindsey's wedding

Like everyone else...I hardly took my camera out of my bag the whole trip! And the few pictures I did manage to take don't even show how beautiful everything was. (they do show how cute Suz and jane are)... We had such a fun time with everyone and our biggest CONGRATS to the new Mr. and Mrs. Palmer.

(ok, so i found a million pictures of jane in the flowers. i think david must have been a little bit bored while i was out enjoying the girls' pedicure and lunch.)

Hey everyone...I'm hosting a couple of auctions for the Christian and Stephanie Nielson family. You can check them out here.

BYU football!!!

ok...so is anyone else as excited for byu football to start as i am? i love, love, love the fall mostly for that reason. so david and i have been going to the scrimmages and a few of the practices and i can hardly wait for the games to start! last week we went to the big fall sports "cougar kickoff". it was so much fun to see our "big boys" (the boys who stayed with us this summer) signing autographs and being all cute with the kids. good luck danny, justin, iona, nate, & tonna.

poor christian...

well...it finally happend, we made our first trip to the ER. and as you can tell by the picture, it was christian, and he was happily playing again minutes after cutting his lip open on the corner of the desk. that boy...

david took him to the ER and said he was such a trooper the whole time. they did have to sedate him so that they could be sure to sew his lip back together at the right place - good thing there was a good doctor there. can you imagine having a crooked lip your whole life (minus 2 years)? his lip was pretty swollen for a few days, but the stitches are out now and he's lookin good!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHRISTIAN!!!

our whimsical birthday boy

these are his birthday cakes this year - a dirt cake and a sand cake. the kids LOVED them and we had fun sharing them with everyone when we celebrated all the august birthdays. grandpa turned 92!

christian sporting his new woody costume. didn't have quite the same effect that jack's buzz costume had. I think chrisitan was ready to take it off after about 2 minutes. (eh, bittersweet) we spent the evening and next day at timp lodge up at sundance - so much fun! we found the short cut to stewart falls and hiked that the next day - perfect hike for the boys - not too long with lots of rocks and water!
christian's birthday party/playgroup - i can't believe i actually got this picture with all the kiddos in it - (well, i'm actually holding jane so she isn't in it) it was fun, but crazy!

The Last of the 24th...well not forever

We went to Suz's house for snowcones and fireworks at the end of the day. We all love it there! We have so much fun every week and every time we go over! Isn't Christian cute?! Don't you wish you were eating a snowcone? (P.S. Best place to get a snowcone on earth--Matsumotos, Haleiwa, Oahu. Or just go down the road to Aoki's. Just as good, maybe betta, no line...and their web site has hapa haole music to dance to)

the kids played with sparklers...


and the neighbors put on a SPECTACULAR fireworks show...really...I was so impressed. It was big like stadium of fire big. loved it. Love the fourth of July and the copy cat celebrations of the 24th. (This was not a dogging on the 24th as a holiday. I love it and I love the pioneers, it just feels like another 4th of July cause it is in the same month and you might as well celebrate it the same way with fireworks and parades and watermelon. If there were another day in October worth celebrating we would probably dress up and ask people for free candy and hope there were no needles inside them like we do on the 31st. It is just what you do in October. I guess there is a day--Columbus day, right? We could be more creative with that one. I hear the rumblings of rebuilding the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria and floating them in Utah Lake during a microburst. But we would probably still dress up--like Columbus and his crew, and when we got to shore, we'd probably ask people for free candy--like Columbus did to the Indians--I think that is an acurate historical fact...I read it on Wikipedia.) :)