Our own author

Kristianne has decided that she is going to be an author. Every few days she writes a new book and then sits me down and insists that I must hear it. They're so cute and it's best to hear it from her, so Kristi, take it away.

Among Kristi's other books are titles such as:
What are we doing? (a book on exercise)
I love Jimmy
Little Bear and Emily
I love Mom
I love the plants
I love books
I love Julie
I love Richard
I love primary
I like to finde fethrs
I love the USA
I love my dad
I love toys


She has some interesting spellings, as you can see in "I like to finde fethrs."
kumpuotr- computer
wadr- water
joolry- jewelry

Happy Feet

As some of you may know, Mom has enrolled Jimmy in tap dance classes. For mom this is less about dancing and more about socializing, learning that it's okay if Mom isn't holding his hand all of the time. But it's still pretty funny to see what he's been learning. Here's a little sample:

Back To School and Back on the Road

Well, it's that time of year again. The smell of new shoes and freshly sharpened pencils is everywhere. In our house, going back to school has certainly been an adventure. With students in four different schools, juggling cars has been interesting. This has only been intensified as car after car has fallen apart. First, on our way home from our hiking trip to The Subway (see post on the Subway for details) the tire on one car went out and all kinds of problems were found. Next, another car wouldn't start. Not lastly, the catalytic converter was stolen off of another car. Lastly, the second car was found to have a leak in the brake system. But we still have one stalwart and brave car left without problems... knock on wood.
Other than that, we've been doing pretty well getting back to school. Amy's finding her AP classes are very time consuming. Julie's finding her Senior year as social as ever. And I'm feeling completely overwhelmed by my Freshman experience. Kristi is doing best of all. Whenever asked about school, she will respond with a report of her lunch. Although, now that she has had some time to go to the fun classes (e.g. art, music, pe) she is making sure that we all learn everything she is. It's great fun to see her get excited for school, though.

How many wigs can one Linda make?

I've been growing my hair out for at least a year in the hopes of donating it to Locks of Love. I figured with as much hair as I have, they could make two or three wigs. And I finally decided it was time to do it. Your hair has to be at least 10 inches for them to be able to use it, so I've had to wait a while to get that much length. It was really weird when she first cut it. I kept thinking, "What am I doing? This is a huge mistake!" But once it was all over and I got to see how much hair I was able to donate, I felt really good about it.




BEFORE















DURING


My hair looked like a little squirrel sitting on the table.












AFTER

It was a big shock to lose that much hair at once, but I've really enjoyed it. You can do so much more with short hair and it's really quick and easy to style.
Hooray!

Summer Vacation

For our summer vacation we always visit Grandma and Grandpa and Becky. This year we made a couple of extra stops on the way.
Hogle Zoo:
Jimmy and Kristi both loved the zoo. Here are a couple videos of Jimmy just shortly after we got there.

The Subway

Dad and I hiked the Subway this last weekend. My greatest accomplishment was that I did the entire hike without a rappelling harness. (Mom scoffs at that, but for me that is huge.) It was amazing! As you can see, besides just canyoneering, there was also swimming.







Also should be mentioned in this blog, our trip home was about as eventful as our hike. While driving home, we suddenly found ourselves with a splitting tire. Having had some experience with this last summer, I thought it would be a quick job to switch tires and be on the road again. To our chagrin, as we removed the lug nuts, two of the lugs snapped off, as depicted here. Luckily, we had two angels that lived nearby and happened to be related to us that by some miracle were able to find lugs and lug nuts and made them work so that we could make it home.

Here is our mishmash of lugs and lug nuts.

Summer Activities

We've been pretty busy this summer (that's why I haven't been updating this blog as much as I should). Mom and I have been teaching Sunday school classes- Mom has Gospel Doctrine and I have Gospel Essentials. Dad's been hard at work at the office and in the Stake presidency. We had stake conference a couple weeks ago, and Elder Robert D. Hales and Elder Martino came. So we all got introduced to them since Dad's got an in. Here are a few other things that have been going on:

Learning Spanish (he's trying to say 'pantalones')

Swimming
Jimmy learning to jump off the diving board/swim

Kristi diving. It was really fun to watch her learn to dive since she couldn't really grasp the concept of your feet going in last.

Here are some other fun family pictures of swimming: