{Basketball...his new favorite thing}

Jaydon LOVES playing with his daddy's BASKETBALL. He has been carrying this BALL all around the HOUSE lately. He likes to pass the ball, he tries to throw it, and he tries to DRIBBLE. He says, "ball". It is the cutest thing. And it's hilarious watching him carry this HUGE ball around. I was playing ball with him while taking PICTURES of him. I said, "Go get the ball." Instead, he spotted a little piece of an ORANGE bell pepper on the ground, picked it up, and ATE it. I guess he is still more interested in FOOD! haha!

By the way, i am frustrated with blogger. I am trying to change things around on my blog and they changed things around and i just don't feel like taking hours trying to figure this darn thing out. Anyone know a quick fix? Otherwise it might look like this forever. Is there somewhere i can go so that i can just pay someone to design and fix my blog?!

{STOP}

Please EXCUSE the MESS while my BLOG is under MAJOR CoNsTrUcTiOn!

{A new Journal, and a calling}

Well, when i was released from my calling in Cleveland the girls in my Presidency gave me a really cute new journal. I decided to use that journal as my spiritual journal. I want to record any spiritual experiences, any moments where i may feel i am receiving an answer to my questions/prayers, any new insight about the BOM, or anything having to do with any of that. For example, i just gave a talk in church and i would like to put that in my journal. I feel it can be of great use to fill that thing up with awesome experiences. Not only for my kids, but for generations to come. :) I just wish i would have started it sooner. If you haven't started a journal like this, you should try to start now. I think it's a great thing to have.

Did i tell you my new calling? I am the Acitivity Days Advisor for the 8-11 year olds. I am really excited. I am excited to be with the girls, but i am also excited to be in relief society on Sundays. The Relief Society has already put me to work though...i have a lesson i have to teach on scripture study in 2 weeks for enrichment night. I could use some of your advice or opinions on this. The women in this ward have expressed that they would like to learn new and good ways to study their scriptures. What do you do that helps you? How do you study your scriptures?
Any good websites that you know of that i can get information from? Any advice any of you can give?

{Baby Jaydon}

Our little Jaydon has got a lot of personality. He makes sooooo many faces. He has spunk, attitude, he's firey, he's crazy, he's trying to be independent, he loves to wrestle with his brothers, he LOVES his blanky, he's LOUD, he loves to run around with just his diaper on and he is doing a lot of that b/c its hot here. He is getting around VERY well. He is just cruising around the house. He walks around like a monkey a lot too. I will have to take a picture of it. He puts his arms up in the air and he looks like a monkey when he walks. We all love this boy a ton and have so much fun with him. The boys laugh at him all the time. But Gavin and Tanner can't stand when he starts yelling. They say "STOP YELLING JAYDON!!" Because he does yell LOUD and its usually only over food. He has thinned down a bit since he started walking. I can tell. He tried skyping with his Auntie Holly but it scared him to death. He didn't understand why his Auntie Holly was on the screen. It was scary to him. It was so funny. He didn't want to get close to the screen. He liked to keep his distance and just stare and watch her and if i tried to get him close he wasn't happy. He LOVES LOVES playing in the water...i just wish we could go swim every single day. Maybe we can, but we have to wait til life allows us to. :)

He is doing a lot of babbling lately. He is trying to sound like he can talk. He just blabbers with all kinds of sounds...R's, b's, g's, l's...it's so cute and funny. He understands a lot of what we say too.

Get this....we have tile floors throughout the whole house except the bedrooms. Shane put on his rollerblades and his chasing the boys around the house. I need to go get pics of this! :)

{My Baby Sister}

About 2 weeks after we arrived here in Texas i got a phone call in the middle of the night and it said on my I.D. that it was my mom calling. Calling at 1 a.m. I instantly knew something was wrong.
A few hours earlier i had talked to my sister and she told me she had a bad migraine.
Well, when i answered the phone my mom says to me that they are in the ER with Holly. My heart started racing. I was just thinking, "please no. don't let anything bad happen to her." She told me that they did a cat scan and found that she has bleeding in her brain. No way, i thought. No way. How could that be? So, she tells me that she is being flighted up to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, which is 45 minutes from the Austin hospital she was at. I thought, holy cow, this has got to be serious. But they still didn't know why she had bleeding in her brain and that she would call me later as soon as they know more. We didn't have the internet yet. My instant thing to do would be get on the internet and look up reasons why her brain would be bleeding, but i couldn't. I couldn't sleep that night b/c i was so WORRIED.
Well, the next day the bleeding was still happening and they had to try and stop it so they tried something called coiling. That didn't work. They did an angiogram too. Turns out that she had an cerebral aneurysm. I found out that 2% of the population under the age of 35 get an aneurysm. CrAzY! What are the chances she would get it?!
Then i get a phone call from them saying that she has a 50% chance of survival. Alot of people who get these either come out of it with a neurological impairment or die. I was terrified, naturally. I wanted so bad to be there. Then they call me and tell me that she is going in for brain sugery. That's when i started looking into plane tickets. I left the next morning and arrived right after they finished the surgery. She looked great. It went really well. They cut open her head from the top center all the way down behind her ear and also in front of it. They didn't have to shave her head. They only shaved a little right where they made the first initial incision i guess. She was doped up a lot of the time i was there, but the last day i was there she was talking pretty well to us. And they all kept telling her how LUCKY she is. Most people don't come out of it so well like she has and a lot of people don't survive.
Eight days later she was able to go home. Get this....She had just moved home to Minnesota about 5 days before all this happened. She was in cleveland where we lived, but decided it was no longer fun there! :) haha. So, she moved home. She is so lucky that this happened while with my parents. She said that if she had been in Ohio she wouldn't have gone into the ER and would have just dealt with it and b/c of that she probably would have been dead. But b/c she was in Minnesota, my parents took her into the ER AND she had the #1 neurosurgical department in the world working on her! No joke. What are the chances. I think someone was watching over her, if you ask me. :)
I am soooooo glad she is doing better and recovering so incredibly well. She scared all of us. I love her so much and cannot wait to hang out with her again b/c i miss her terribly!

{more updates on our time in TEXAS}

is hot. You just can't understand until you are here in it. The humidity has been really high so it makes it so sticky and darn HOT. I remember it being like this in Tulsa, but i had forgotten until we arrived here!
Some things going on lately...
1.Shane got his new uniforms that he has to wear on base.
2. We've been on base twice now and we love it there. It's like a little city. And its like watching an air show everyday. I mean, its not quite as good as a real air show, BUT we have fun watching the jets.
3. We have been busy constantly. I feel bad b/c Jaydon always takes two naps a day and he hasn't been able to for quite awhile b/c we have been gone a lot during the day.
4. We just registered Gavin for kindergarten! CRAZY! It's a great school though and its a uniform school, which i think is GREAT.
5. We just leased a new silver Toyota Prius for 3 years. We LOVE LOVE LOVE it. It may not be the "coolest" looking car BUT its the smartest car. 50 miles to a gallon. And the technology on the inside is completely amazing. That will be Shane's commute car everyday. AND if we get shipped overseas next year, Toyota has a deal with military that we can just turn our car in before we leave and thats that. We just have to show them our orders, and its done. So, we might only have it for one year, depending on where the air force sends us.
6. Ummmm...can i just say, we are actually going to be making MONEY in about a month. Yes, we are going to be bringing in pay checks. I can't believe it. It seems really weird to me. For almost seven years we have been poor and living off loans. Now we are going to be making money. It's been a long time of waiting.
7. Shane and i are both speaking in church this sunday. This ought to be interesting, since one of us will be out sitting with the kids. jaydon is an absolute nightmare, usually, during sacrament meeting. He loves to yell. His vocabulary is YELLING.
8. We keep our a.c. set at 79 degrees. I mean, when you come in from outside it is NICE, but after being in for a few minutes its not cool enough. BUT we have to keep it at that to have a tolerable electricity bill.
9.Here we have to mow our lawn twice a week and water it everyday. In Ohio we NEVER watered our lawn and we mowed probably once every two weeks.
10. The city gives us TWO garbage cans. The second one is for recycling. They come pick up our garbage TWICE week, where in ohio it was only once a week. So, you can be sure we will never be overloaded with garbage! thank goodness. :)
11. Locusts fill the air with their pretty sounds. Those are the sounds i loved to fall asleep to in Oklahoma, when it was nice enough to have our windows open. And the boys are finding all kinds of bugs that they have never seen before. They love it. They pick up the bugs and i can't be around when they do that. There are TONS of crickets. They are everywhere and in everything and are in any store we have gone into...dead on the floors.

{Jaydon..Our LOUD mouth}Lots of posts ahead

We have been finding lots of frogs in our yard. I don't mind frogs. We would get them in Tulsa and i would always pick them up. SO, i am the one that will pick up the frogs in the family when no one else will.....until i saw this HUGE frog. This picture doesn't show his size...he really was BIG and FAT. They start hoppin out all over the place when we mow the lawn. Here in Texas everything is bigger....BUGS are bigger...we have found HUGE spiders...biggest i have seen since i last lived in Oklahoma, which was a tarantula. The grasshoppers and crickets are HUGE. Instead of the big bumblebees that we got in our backyard in ohio, we now get BIG wasps. EVERYONE here owns an SUV or a truck. They are EVERYWHERE. Not kidding.

We went on base and it was awesome. The base is it's own little city. It's so cool. We drove by the housing and looked at it and it was REALLY nice and we were kind of wishing we would have lived on base after seeing it. Oh well. We still like our home. Here are the boys watching the fighter jets take off one after another and flying overhead. They loved it. They thought it was an air show.
We went to a fun pool/splash park the other day. It was 102 degrees out! Anyway, it was an awesome pool/park for kids. The boys and i will have to go a lot when shane starts working. Tanner burned his feet on the cement. He learned quickly that the ground gets too hot to walk around in bare feet. We like it here so far. The people are great. Texas is full of just genuinely NICE people. They are so nice and helpful. I couldn't believe it at first, considering where we came from. Workers in the stores actually WANTED to help me find something. They would come up to me and offer their help. I was caught off guard at first! haha! Not kidding. The ward here is fabulous. The spirit is felt very strongly and the people are just so genuine. I feel like i have known them a lot longer than we have been here. We have been there for two Sunday's and we already have callings and are already set to give talks in church this sunday. Shane was called to be the institute teacher and i am the Activity's Day Advisor for the 8-11 year olds. That will be fun. And i am excited about being able to still go to Relief Society. :) Tanner has to give a talk in primary this sunday too. They are really putting us to work right away! :) But they are all so wonderful.

Now, these next set up pictures are hilarious to me. Jaydon is by far the biggest loud mouth of the family. H doesn't know what it means to be quiet. When he wants ANYTHING he just YELLS SO DARN LOUD. Really, it is quite annoying. But it makes me laugh at the same time, laugh with shock that i have a kid who is so loud. Here is Jaydon fine in the first picture. I told the boys to go stand by him so i could get a pic of them.

Here he is in the second picture...NOT HAPPY. He wants the boys AWAY from him and doesn't want to be touched!!
Still absolutely ticked off!!!...

Still mad...

Still very mad...

He was acting this way b/c he wanted his milk. Because as soon as i pulled him out of his chair and gave him his milk he was totally fine. He has TONS OF spunk and personality. I am getting nervous about how his two's are going to be. Actually i have been nervous for awhile.

Idaho!!!

Here i am with my boys and most of my nephews and nieces. I stole this picture from my Sister-in-laws facebook page. It makes me laugh! haha! Here we are at Bear Lake. A beautiful lake. We love it here. The only bad thing is that the wind picks up pretty strongly in the afternoon, which is what is happening in this picture below. Shane's parents have a big party raft that we took out and sat on, but the wind blew us instantly to the shore.

Shane's parents rented a jet ski for 4 hours. It was lots of fun, especially when it got windy. Shane and i went out, i was driving, i made us get some air and when we came back down we dove into the water, then some water FORCEFULLY flew into my face and went straight up my nose. It didn't feel good, but it was still fun. :)

Here is Tanner enjoying an ice cream come after the 40 mile relay, where everyone ran a 5 mile leg. To Bone and Back, is what the race is called.

Here is Shane running his leg. He did AWESOME. He ran a hilly 5 miles in 38:20. It was a hard leg. All the legs are hard. We had been looking forward to this race for a year. I got sick the day before and couldn't run it. I was so disappointed, but i was still able to be there and cheer for everyone.

While we were there i was able to run a 5K called the Scenic River Classic which i did in a little over 24 minutes. And then i ran in the Freedom Run in Hyrum through the Black Smith Fork canyon. It was a 15K, which means it was a little over 9 miles. It was a great run. I really liked it.

I really wish i had more pictures from Idaho. I am sorry i don't. Scorn me later i guess. But we had lots of fun. We were able to see everyone a lot. We made a visit to Logan where all Shane's siblings live except for one. We stayed there for three nights and just had a blast. We made a trip to American Fork to see our newest nephew be blessed. We stayed the night there. It was lots of fun. We all went together and hiked up Ensign Peak the next day after the blessing. Then we all headed to ChuckaRama to eat lunch together. While we were there Jaydon completely blew out of his pants. My sis-in-law was holding him and when she put him down there was poop all over her arm...somehow poop got on my niece and it was all over Jaydon's back. Let me say, i wanted to scream. He had been having blow-outs like this for a few days. Enough to where i have to change his clothes and bathe him. He woke up at 5 a.m. one morning and i went in and his whole body was smeared in poop. It was sick. We had enough blow-outs to make me wanna lose my mind. On top of that, all three boys were sick within a 24 hour period. Gavin and Tanner were both over the toilet TOGETHER at one point. It was a HORRIBLE bug. I got it. Shane got it. Bob and Janet got it. Ryan, ashley, ethan got it. It was not fun. It hit one after another.

Then we made a small trip up to Rigby to see Grandma and somehow tanner gets car sick in the first ten minutes and starts puking. We always give him dramamine, but we don't give it to him when we are make a trip under an hour, which is what this was.

THEN the day we were driving from Denver to Texas, Gavin woke up sick again, with puking and diarrhea again. I was wondering what the heck was going on. THROW ME A BONE HERE, is what i was thinking. NO MORE PUKE AND POOP!!!! hahahaha!

Oh my gosh, then we get here in this horrible heat and our a.c. in our car isn't working. That is terrible enough in itself. I forgot how hot it gets here. Stinkin hot. Anywyay, i will save the rest of our story here in texas for another post.

This summer, so far, as been CRAZY, BUSY, NON-STOP, TIRING, but LOTS of fun too!!! Definitely lots of memories that we made and WILL NOT be forgotten. :) Thanks to all of our families for letting us stay at your homes for awhile! We loved it. :)

Some more from our time in Minnesota...

At the playground. We went to the playground this day and we also went and watched our fellow Mexican friends play soccer. There are lots of Mexicanos in Austin and they all gather together and play soccer on Saturday's. They also bring there meat wagon and cook authentic mexican food. We got some and it was pretty good! :) Tasted authentic.

Here we are at the Mall of America...I am sure Tanner will love this picture when he gets older.

The Mall of America has its own amusement park inside. The boys had TONS of fun riding the rides. They also have a lego land. So the boys made their own lego cars and would have their cars race down the track to see who's was fastest.

Here were are on the bumper cars. I am getting whiplash. Lovely. Those were the bumpiest bumper cars i have ever been on. I couldn't wait to get off.

This ride takes them to the top and drops them gradually. It basically bounces them up and down the whole way down. Tanner didn't know what to think of it. He was terrified, but laughing at the same time. He is scared of heights.

Jaydon's First Birthday... Olivia is eating up the scraps at his feet. She is a funny dog.

Loving his cake.

I took him out in my parents yard to take some pictures. He is sitting in the chair that my sister and i grew up sitting in. It's old and a special chair, so i had to use it.

While we were there in Minnesota we also went to see Shrek part 3 in 3D. It was so cute. The boys loved it. They played day and night with the dogs and the dogs loved it. They rode their bikes everyday, went fishing with papa, played on the slip n slide. It was fun.

Our True Identity

I love this! Absolutely love it. He is so true and so right. It is truly amazing and wonderful. I know who i am and am realizing who i can become. When i look at my friends and loved one's around me, i can see what they can be and when they can't see it in themselves i wish i could show them how wonderful they really are so they can gain more confidence in themselves and who they are so they can become who they are meant to be. I listen to this and i feel the truth of it very strongly. I wish we all could realize our potential and know who we are. It's a wonderful gift to have.

Really...

We are alive. I promise. Once i actually get a moment to sit down for a few minutes and actually get a moment to DOWNLOAD some pictures then i will be posting. Until then, life is crazy. The past few months life has been non-stop. I have no time for internet, no time for photography, no time for exercise. Not time for NOTHIN. Sorry YA'LL. :) haha....I will have A TON to fill you in on, but you might have to wait, at the most, one more week. Much love.
p.s. we finally made it to Texas.