Family Night Skating

Jarom and I took Bryson roller skating for the first time the other day for Family Night.  He got pretty frustrated with it at first, but by the end when he just held on to the wall or Daddy's hand and pushed on his own, he did alright.

Dress Like A Cow Day

Yesterday if you went in to Chick-Fil-A dressed like a cow, you got a free meal. So Bryson and I had fun dressing up and eating our free food.

4th of July 5K and fireworks

We had a fun but low-key 4th of July this year.  We'd just returned from vacation two days before, so that was fitting.   We woke up bright and early so that Bryson and I could run the 5K with Molly and Randy and Jarom could cheer us on from the sidelines.  Bryson was a champ!  I'm so proud of him for completing his first 5K sans-stroller.  He finished with me in 44 minutes, 20 seconds, which is more than three minutes faster than when we did it with the stroller in September.

Bryson kept telling me "Come on, Mom.  Let's go!" and ran his little heart out, especially the first mile and the last ten feet to the finish line.  He told me when he was ready to slow down to a walk and asked me to hold his hand at times so that I could help him along.  He stepped out on his ankle, so I had to carry him for a few stretches (uphill each time), but he made it!  I'm very proud of him!

For the second year in a row, fireworks in most towns in Colorado were canceled because of wildfires.  So after the race and a look at the parade coming down the Parkway, we went home for a nap.  We had great barbecued ribs with Randy and then Bryson stomped on some Pop-Its and pulled some party poppers to make the night complete.  We love our country and the people who have continually fought to give us the freedoms we enjoy.   Happy belated Independence Day!

Sunny California and Levi's Wedding

We just got back from beautiful and sunny California.  It was glorious!  The first few years we were married, Jarom and I made a yearly trip to Cali, and we took Bryson twice, but we hadn't been back in three years.  So when we heard that Levi was getting married near Lake Tahoe this summer, we used it as an excuse to rent a car and take a road trip to California.  We visited friends and family in Southern California after stopping in St. George the first night.  We can't thank Leslie, Jason, and Jordan enough for providing our home base!  From there, we traveled to Sugar Bowl Ski Resort for the wedding, which was a lot of fun.  Levi and Chelsey know how to throw a party! We had a total blast going to the beach several times, surfing, swimming, and eating at In N' Out and other great restaurants.  We also enjoyed touring Downtown Disney with one excited five year old, seeing my sister Monica who also happened to be vacationing in Cali at the same time, taking in the scenery atop the ski lift at the wedding, and hanging out with awesome people.  We had a great vacation, and I can't wait to go back to California.

Enjoy the pictures as they are the only ones that were still on my camera before our hard drive with YEARS of photos and other files on it totally crashed.  So heart-breaking!  We took the hard drive to the Geek Squad at Best Buy, but they were not able to recover any files.  They sent it off to their tech lab, so hopefully they will be able to work their magic on it and we will get back as many videos and photos as possible (anything else on it isn't as important).  You might have thought we'd learned our lesson when all of our 2008 photos were erased the week after Bryson was born, but we only backed up our files and photos until 2009 until the last hard drive was full.  We never imagined we'd have a hard drive fail, but it does happen.  Now we'll be buying another hard drive, doing back-ups on all files, and uploading as many photos as possible to the Internet so we'll always have them.  Thankfully we have our blog for "the best of the best" photos and videos that we can save on a new hard drive, but it's still a tragic loss if the hard drive with so many photos and videos on it is not recoverable.  Unfortunately I had just dumped the trip pictures from our camera to the hard drive when it stopped working, and I was only able to recover a few of our trip photos.  So many thanks to Jordan, Staci, and Randy for giving me some of their photos to supplement my small collection.  Enjoy the photos we do have in our possession of our 2013 California vacation.  I just wish we had more!