Garrett's broken arm

My brother Garrett plays soccer for BYU. During one of the last games this season, he collided with one of the other players and broke his arm. It doesn't look too bad from this angle...

But you can definitely see it this way.

This is the x-ray. Both bones in his arm were broken all the way through. He ended up have surgery the next morning and two plates were placed to hold the bones in place.

Even though they told him no soccer for a while, we know he'll find a way to get out there as soon as he can!

St. George Marathon

Last week I ran the St. George Marathon. What a day. I can say now that I'm glad I did it and I'm glad it's over. This was my 5th marathon but the 1st one I've done since have kids. Plus I turned 30 this year and both of those factors made it the most difficult one I've done so far. But I did it and I'm happy about that!

Back in April a group of us signed up to run it together - dad, Caleb, Steph, Garrett and me. Slowly, for one reason or another, everyone dropped out but me. So for the first time doing a marathon, I trained by myself - which ended up being much more difficult than I imagined. I ended up doing most of my training runs during the week at the gym on the treadmill - ugh. But it worked out best for me because I have an hour and a half each day to leave my kids at the daycare and was able to run, so that's what I did. Saturday runs ended up being my favorite since I was actually able to run outside in the cool mornings. Two months of running mostly on the treadmill went by and I started to feel like I would be able to do it. By the time the marathon came around, I felt really good about my running times and was hoping to finish under 4 hours.

This is a picture bright and early Saturday morning right before I loaded onto the bus. I caught one of the first buses around 4:15 and got up to the start line around 5:00. (Thanks to Josh for getting up so early with me and dropping me off!)

The race didn't start until 6:45 so I had about an hour and a half to prep before the race. It was actually a really great time to just relax, stretch and enjoy the marathon atmosphere. They always have about 50 bonfires going and probably at least 150 port a potties lined up. And people everywhere getting excited to run! While I was sitting the music was loud and motivating and the announcer came on a few times and told us some of the marathon stats. I jotted them down so I could remember them:

This year was the 35th annual St. George Marathon

65 degrees at the starting line (and ended up at almost 90 degrees by the time I finished!)

It's the 13th largest marathon in the nation

The first year of the St. George Marathon was 1977 and 57 people registered to run. 38 of those 57 finished the race

This year 7200 runners ran

During this year's race the 100,000th runner will cross the finish line (she crossed just a few minutes after I finished)

57% male runners, 43 % female runners

80% will finish the race

48 of the 50 states had runners in the St. George Marathon - Vermont and Delaware did not

28 runners were 14 years old or younger

1 man 80 years old ran this year

1 lady from St. George has run all 35 years

They went through 4250 gallons of water, 2000 gallons of gatorade and 155,000 cups

I thought those were kind of fun stats to remember. Anyway, a lady that was sitting next to me around the fire took this picture of me just before the race. It's a really fun atmosphere and I loved having time to just hang out with all the runners.

The race went well. I didn't finish under 4 hours like I had hoped, but I felt good for finishing. I had a little bit of a stomach ache during the race and wasn't able to drink any gatorade or eat any the goo that I packed along. I didn't have quite as much energy as I had hoped and hit the wall about mile 18. Like I said - my first race since having kids and turning 30 really did me in this year! But I finished at 4:36 and am happy about that time. Most of all, I feel like it's an accomplishment and I'm proud of that. Josh has been so great being patient with all my crazy Saturday runs and taking over during these three months of training.

I don't have any pictures of me at the finish line because Josh had a crazy time with all 3 kids and we missed each other when I crossed the finish line. Rhen was freaking out and Liev was hungry and Josh was trying to take care of all of it while also watching for me. Anyway, we missed each other while I was running but found each other afterward. I am going to buy some of the pictures the marathon people took but haven't done it yet. I will post them as soon as I get them. Anyway, that's that. Marathon done!

Pile of Laundry

So don't mind the messy state of this room in the basement. What I'd really like you to focus on is the mountain of laundry in the middle of the room.

Yes this huge pile. Does anyone else feel overwhelmed with laundry? I certainly did today...

Making Bread

My girls love to cook and bake with me. Last week when I made bread, they asked if they could help.

I let them each have their own little pile of dough to make a little loaf of bread for themselves. They were so excited!
I showed them how to roll it and knead it and tried to help them put flour on their hands to keep it from sticking...

Rhen got a little stuck.

So she decided to just eat it off her hands.

Rease did pretty good keeping enough flour on the table and her hands.

This is how their loaves turned out - pretty darn good if you ask me!

Delicious!

Potty Trained

We have another potty trained kid at our house!

It took long enough, but Rhen is officially potty trained - hooray! For the longest time, she was just not interested in going potty on the toilet. I've been asking her for months and months and she always said she just wanted to keep wearing diapers. I didn't push it because frankly I did not want to fight her on it and didn't want to have to clean up accidents if she wasn't ready to do it. Finally one day Grammie bought her a pair of panties to just try and that did the trick - once those panties were one she did not want to go back. So voila! She was potty trained. She had an accident or two but really for the most part went on the toilet from then on. It was the easiest thing - she just had to decide she wanted to do it. So now we have two panty girls in the house and it is awesome! Good job Rhenner!

Canning

This past month we have been doing some canning. Last year I didn't do any, so now I am almost completely out of a few things - tomatoes, peaches and pears. So Josh's mom has kept me in the loop about where to get produce and we have canned and frozen quite a bit.

The first thing we did was corn. Josh's cousin usually has extra corn so we took him up on his offer and picked about 7 dozen ears. We worked that night with Josh's parents cutting the corn and bagging it to freeze. We ended up with quite a few bags of corn for our freezer. Yay!
Next: tomatoes. Jeanie and I picked about 3 bushels of tomatoes each and then spent the whole next day canning them.

Rease wanted to get a picture of me working on the tomatoes. She was a big help during the day - she was in charge of washing all the dirt off the tomatoes.

I ended up with 55 quarts of delicious tomatoes!

Pears. No befores or durings of the pear day, but there is this after picture of the quarts I did. One of the bottles didn't seal so I let the girls open it and eat the pears. The bottle was gone in less than 5 minutes. We will definitely use all these by the time next canning year comes around!

Asleep on the job

Baby Liev is the sweetest, most lovable, most calm baby I've had. He is content to just hang out and play with toys or play in his bouncer. Josh found him in the bouncer the other day just like this...

Asleep on the job. Just bouncing away and then...he's out!
What a sweet face!

BYU Football

One of my favorite things about fall is BYU Football. My dad has had season tickets since I was a kid and there are always extra seats for us to use. We make it to almost every game and love it. We took Rease to one of the night games with us. Though it was cold and late she had fun.

We try and make it there early enough to be able to see the band march into the stadium. While we wait, Rease always like to climb on the cougar. I'm sure I have pictures of me doing the same thing when I was her age! She had fun sitting with Aunt Hayley. Cute little pair!

Bell Canyon

Last night for Family Night we decided to take a hike up Bell Canyon. We have been wanting to do it for a long time and finally decided we needed to get it done before the weather turns to not so nice. It was a perfect night for a hike. I had Liev in his little pouch, Rhen was on Josh's back in the carrier and Rease was on her own as a lone hiker. Uncle Greg and Jax came with us and he was a big help to Rease. (She did great on her own, but on the way back we were glad Greg could help out.)

Rhen was in the best seat by far. She had fun just looking around and didn't have to spend any energy to get to where we were going.

Rease and Greg were a good pair - they led us the whole way up.

We wanted to show the kids the trees that are starting to turn colors. We found this amazing red tree and had to grab a picture. Rease loved the leaves and thought they looked more pink than red.

The hike up to the lake took us about 30 minutes but it is a pretty good hike uphill. We were happy to make it to the lake. It was beautiful!

I love Rease's red cheeks - she did so great and made it all on her own!

The girls promptly started to play in the water. (I didn't get any pictures but they also found some ducks and threw their whole dinner to them. "These ducks are so hungry" they kept saying. )

Eating some dinner before it disappeared to the ducks.

We had such a fun time and the setting was perfect. Great family night activity!

Rhen's Burn

Last week Rhen burned her little hand on the iron. Poor girl. I felt so bad for her - she didn't know what to do but just cry and let me hold her. I wasn't sure how bad the burn was until the next day when I took off her bandaid and saw this blister.

Since then I have been really diligent about keeping it clean, putting neosporin and a new bandaid on it and wrapping it in an ace bandage for extra protection.

Rhen was very excited about her "special bandaid." She has been so good about keeping it on too.

I should get an after picture because now almost a week later it looks awesome and the blister is almost completely gone. Sweet little thing has been so good about helping mom take care of her burn.

Playing in the DVDs

I came home one Saturday after one of my long runs and found out that the girls had been busy making a masterpiece in the basement. A DVD grid!

They were very proud of their handywork.

Showing the now almost empty DVD shelves.
This prompted a project of going through the DVDs and finding out which were in the wrong cases (many of them) and which were lost (a few of our favorites - Star Trek, Enchanted) and which ones just needed to be thrown out due to scratches, breaks, etc. We now have organized, marked DVDs thanks to Rease and Rhen's masterpiece!

First Day of Preschool

Sweet Rease started preschool this week. She has been talking about school for months and her day finally arrived. I have to admit that I cried a little bit when I dropped her off - I can't hardly believe she's old enough for this! Good luck at school Rease!