Baby Remy

Garrett and Rachel had their baby and she is this tiny, precious little thing that we already love so much.  Remy, welcome to the family!

 

Christmas card

 

Christmas Tree

This year we had our own personal helper when we went to pick out our Christmas tree.  Rease was awesome showing us around the tree lot and showing us where the Charlie Brown trees were located.  We picked out the perfect one and she helped strap it to the top of the van!  It's so fun to have the house all ready for Christmas!

 

Candy Day

I love candy day!  It's a day that we can all work together on a delicious project that we know will bring lots of joy to our neighbors and friends!  We've been doing this long enough now that certain people know that their treat box is coming this weekend and they always mention how much they look forward to it.  It's a fun tradition and we have a great crew to work on it together!

 

Thanksgiving

We had a small-ish Thanksgiving group this year as some of the family were a little nervous to gather because of covid.  But we hosted whoever wanted to come and we ate a most delicious dinner with even better pie afterward!  Rhen made 6 pies for her Cupcakes on the Corner customers and we made 4 others just for us.  We spent some time playing basketball and football at the church and watching movies and playing games into the night.  It was such a fun day and we are so grateful for the family we have!

This week we've been working on a "Give Thanks" board leading up to Thanksgiving.  It has been great to remember all that we have been blessed with and remember to be thankful for it.  Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Working the tree lot

Rease started working at the Christmas Tree lot this week.  For a couple years now she's talked about being able to work there when she's old enough.  She followed up with the owner and he said this is the perfect year for her to start.  Her and Josh went to the DI and found these old overalls and some boots for her to wear and bought her some new gloves.  So she had her first weekend of working and realized that it's good, hard work and she's learning how important it is to talk to and be friendly with everyone that comes to the lot.  She is adorable and told me that she earned $40 on tips just tonight!  Love this girl - even though she's growing up too fast for my liking...

 

Rease and her friends

Rease has the cutest group of friends and they are good girls that I totally trust and love having them around.  Tonight they went to Mountain View Village and ate dinner and shopped.  They took these cute pics trying on clothes at Old Navy.  The best girls night thing to do...

 

Desh

Desh is my guy and is the only one that is home with me for a few hours during the day.  He goes to preschool twice a week but the rest of the time we're home together.  It's so fun to have this caboose by my side for now!

 

Rhen and Tilley

This silly dog loves each of the kids and the love that they give her!  

 

Sunset

We had the most beautiful sunset out our back deck this evening.  We love our unobstructed view of the mountains and the many sunrises and sunsets that we get to enjoy!

 

Crimpy hair

Rhen and Rease did tiny braids in each others hair this week and it came out looking so cute and crimpy!

 

Desh preschool

Desh has been having such a fun year at preschool and was just recently the Star Student of the week.  He comes home every day and tells me all about the songs they sing, the letters they are learning and loves when he gets to be in charge of the lollipop drum.  It's so crazy that our caboose is off to school and growing up just like that!

 

Beck 1st grade

Beck is loving 1st grade and LOVES that he gets to eat lunch at school and stay all day with the big kids.  He has the nicest teacher this year, Mrs. Johnson, and she had great things to say about Beck.  She absolutely loves having him in her class and says he is the nicest and most respectful boy and works really hard at what he does.  I know that about him! So glad he's treating everyone the same way at school!

 

Keen 3rd grade

Keen is in 3rd grade and has Miss Kelly as his teacher.  He is the sweetest boy and she had such good things to say about him and how he is in class.  She said he's very helpful and always kind to those around him.  And he's doing amazing with his math facts and wants to be the first in his class to become a Math Fact Ninja.  I know he can do it!  Love this big boy of mine!

 

Liev 4th grade

We did a zoom conference with Liev's teacher, Miss Buckley, tonight and she couldn't say enough good about this boy.  She said he works hard and is doing awesome with his math and is nice and respectful.  All good things that we want to hear!  We made goals to do better reading at home (20 minutes a night) and he wants to pass off all his math big rocks.  4th grade has been great for Liev so far!

 

Rhen 6th grade

Rhen is in 6th grade (king of the school) and has Mrs. Keller.  She has loved being in Mrs. Keller's class and mostly because JT is finally in her class!  They've been hoping for that every year and finally got the chance to be in a class together.  She does great in school and works really hard.  And she hasn't even minded wearing her mask much though she does hate that she can't sit by her friends at lunch.  They have assigned seats because of covid and contact tracing, blah blah blah...so she's stuck sitting where she's at until Mrs. Keller decides to change up the order.  Other than that she is loving that they are back in school!

 

Rease first quarter grades

Rease has done so well this year and is loving 8th grade so far.  And despite what the report card says, she actually did get all A's (one was changed later and hasn't shown up on the report yet).  She had to do some talking and negotiating back and forth with a couple teachers to get them to realize that some of her assignments that had been marked missing were actually there and deserved to be graded and up her grade.  She was awesome getting this done and knew there was a dinner out with mom and dad on the line!  So proud of this beautiful girl and her hard work in school.

 

Shopping

I took these crazy girls with me to Hobby Lobby tonight and they were so hilarious trying to find the biggest flowers they could!

 

Family bike ride

The weather has been soooo nice lately, especially for this time of year, so we took advantage of the warm night and went for a family bike ride.  We rode around the lake at Daybreak and it was so fun and really a pretty nice place.  I know these warm days are limited so I'm glad we got out tonight before the cold weather comes.  

 

Drawing blood

Josh had to have his blood drawn today and took Desh with him to the doctor's office.  The nurse was so cute and let Desh have his own gloves and help with the blood draw.  Desh thought he was so grown up helping out!

 

Halloween

We had a house full of crazy creatures this Halloween.  The boys all wanted to have a morph suit and be creepy just like their dad.  That's about the easiest costume possible so I was totally on board with that idea!  Rhen and her friends were M&Ms and planned a party at our house before trick or treating.  And Rease was busy at state band and says she's too old for trick or treating anyway.  So...we had a pretty great Halloween night just strolling around our neighborhood with the boys.  The big boys took off on their own after the little ones were done and came home with bags and bags of candy.  These are the times that we love that Papa Pumpkin comes to our house...

Happy Halloween everyone!

 

Marching band season

We have loved watching Rease this year in her marching band.  They started their competition season the middle of September and had 4 competitions this year.  They have done incredible especially since this is just the 2nd year Mountain Ridge High has been a school.  They have improved so much each time I see them and it has been so fun to watch!  Rease is completely into it and has been working so hard.  Each time they have a competition, she is determined do do better for the next one.  They have place 1st in a couple of the competitions and 2nd in the others.  They were one of the top teams going into the state competition.

State this year was at American Fork High and was on Halloween day. These kids have done so much to get to this point and I'm so proud of each of them. 

Their performance at state was AMAZING! It was by far the best they had performed all year and I knew they they had given their all in those 7 minutes. We watched a couple other teams in their division perform and they weren’t near as good or precise with their performance as we had been. I was so happy that they did so well! It wasn’t until later that evening that the results were announced and the team was together to hear the announcement. Mountain Ridge High took 1st place! Rease and her band are state champions! She was so excited and called me immediately in tears of joy. The team celebrated together and celebrated some more as the bus pulled back into Herriman. They got a police escort as they drive down the street and pulled into the high school because they were state champs  they got to take pictures on the field with their trophy and Rease has been on cloud nine ever since. We’re so proud of her and this amazing accomplishment!

 

Delta

The kids were out of school today so we took a road trip down to Delta for the day.  It was so fun to be there and just bum around the town for a few hours.  We stopped at the rock shop and found lots of cool rocks, threw rocks into the Res, ate at Leo's, and stopped and Justin and Steph's new building out on their property.  It was a fun little day trip and the kids and I had a great time hanging out together.

 

Move, no-move

Josh had this crazy idea to take our fall break and do a "move, no move."  The idea was to move everything out and clean and de-junk while we were at it.  And if it was something that we wouldn't put on a moving truck in a real move, then we got rid of it.  I was on board cause I knew we had to de-junk and this was the perfect time and way to do it.  So we took a week and moved everything out of our house including beds, dressers, couches, toys, tvs and cleaned walls, baseboards, vacuumed, and washed windows.   Each night after we worked, we had an activity together.  We went swimming, ate Crumbl cookies, had a movie night, ice cream sundaes, you name it.  We worked hard and we played really hard too!  After the week was over, we had a huge pile to take to the DI and another pile of things to sell.  We scheduled to get our carpets cleaned and Josh surprised me with the chance to get new couches!  Overall it was such a successful week and I'm so glad he came up with the crazy idea!  Now we have a clean, orderly house with no extra clutter.  It feels so good.

 

Grand Canyon

Shelley, Stephanie and I, along with a group of family members, have been prepping and training for a hike in the Grand Canyon.  Our hike to Timp was one of the training hikes that we've done and I think it was a good one to get us ready for Rim to Rim Grand Canyon hike we were about to embark on.  It has been a bit of a mess trying to get it planned and details figured out, but we did actually make it there!  Because of covid and all the regulations that are going on right now, the shuttles back and forth through the canyon are not running.  We waited throughout the summer kind of hoping that they would eventually open back up by October and we would be able to use the shuttle.  But a few weeks before our hike, they called and said that they will officially not be opening for any shuttle service for the rest of the year.  So we went to work finding another service that would shuttle us from the north rim (where we were planning to park our cars) to the south rim (where we would stay overnight and then start our hike back to the north rim).  We did finally find a river rafting shuttle service that would do it for us and since there were 19 in our group we ended up with 2 big vans to take us to the south rim which was about a 6 hour drive.  We made it though and got settled in at our hotel for a quick sleep before we got up early to start our hike.  We figured the hike would take about 12-15 hours so we wanted to get on the trail before it was too late that we would be hiking in the dark the next evening.  We got up at 2:45 and were at the trailhead by 3:30 ready to roll!  

It was fun hiking in the dark for a while and it seemed like the miles were going pretty quickly.  As the sun was coming up, it was amazing to see how far down we had come and the incredible views around us.  

I hiked with Bryson for most of the morning and we chatted back and forth keeping each other company.  I loved seeing the different foliage around and could not get enough of the views of the canyon all around us.  

About 9 miles in we got to the Colorado River and it was so cool to see that big river cutting right through the canyon.  It was big and deep and so pretty to see!  We walked across the river and got to Phantom Ranch which was a good place to stop and rest and refill our water.  We took a bit of time at the ranch hanging out and renewing our energy, but we knew we had to get going before too long so we didn't get stuck in the middle of the canyon in the hottest part of the day.

After Phantom Ranch the next stretch is known as "The Box" because it's basically walls straight up on either side of the trail.  We wanted to be out of the box before the sun was straight overhead and the heat would get pretty intense.  We made great time and didn't have hardly any sun on us, even towards the end of that part of the trail.  It was a warm day, but in the shade it was totally comfortable.  We were logging lots of miles and getting tired, but we kept on!

The last stop that had fresh water to fill up our packs was Manzanita and we rested there for a bit as well.  By this time, I was tired and my ankle was getting pretty sore (I had just sprained it that week and it was still pretty tender).  So I didn't stop too many more times after that, just because it hurt more to stop and start again.  I kept a slow steady pace and the others would catch me and then we'd walk together again.  Overall, our group stayed together the whole way which was pretty amazing!

As we started our ascent up the north rim, the trail was so fun and cool to be on!  We traversed along the side of the mountains and crossed bridges, climbed switchbacks and went through tunnels.  It was sooo cool to be there and see all the different stages of the trail and how the plants and geography changed depending on the elevation we were at.  

And the view....Breathtaking.  Really.  It was incredible.

We were tired and sore and hot and sweaty by the time we finished the 24 miles from one rim to the other.  But what an amazing journey and so fun to see the canyon from top to bottom to top again!  We had the best group and such a fun time and I would do it again in a heartbeat!  I mean...after a few weeks of recovery that is...