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!

 

 

 

 

When Is Summer Over?

Since the day that school got out a week and a half ago, Bryson has been asking "When is summer over" or "when does kindergarten start?"   I guess he's already bored staying home with me and I'll have to make him a calendar to mark off the days until school starts.  But in the meantime, I decided I'm going to encourage him to like summer by doing a couple of activities every week.  This week, Bryson and I went on a 1.3 mile hike, attended summer reading programs at the library, and did the Build and Grow clinics at Home Depot and Lowe's.  Jarom and I also took him swimming at the rec center.  He enjoyed himself and also likes continuing reading and other learning activities with me, but he's so excited for kindergarten to start that he prays that he can "go to kindergarten soon."  But I figure that if we continue fun summer activities like we've done this week, it will make the days until school starts go a little faster.

Last day of preschool

Today Bryson had his last day of preschool.  Today he got the flower he planted last week with his teacher and a certificate for completing the year.  It's amazing how much he's learned and fun to see how he's grown in the course of the year.

September 18, 2012                                June 4, 2013

Field Day

Bryson's ECE class had field day last Tuesday. He had a blast at all the events and won lots of ribbons. Bryson even won a few blue first place ribbons, one for the 50 meter dash. My school always had field day when I was a kid, but Jarom's didn't, so he especially thought it was a fun day for the kids. Jarom and I enjoyed being spectators and rooting on the kids and Jarom was able to use his new Go-Pro camera to get some cool action shots from the day's activities.

 

 

 

 

 

I Can See Clearly Now

Bryson just got glasses, and boy did he need them.  When we went for his physical before the beginning of the preschool year, the doctor doing the vision screening couldn't tell if it was because he didn't know his shapes and letters well enough or if the fish really looked like a duck to him because of vision problems.  Well apparently, the fish DID look like a duck because we just got the results from spring vision screening at school with a referral to a pediatric ophthalmologist for "high far-sightedness."  It makes sense now because he sometimes has difficulty seeing things right in front of him like the board at school and has been having trouble reading because he said "it's hard to look at the words," and there are multiple vision problems in both sides of our family, but I had no idea his eyes were in such bad shape. 

Upon our visit to the ophthalmologist, we found out that without glasses, the poor kid is nearly blind.  Bryson is EXTREMELY far-sighted, so much so that he was the most "high far-sighted" child the doctor had ever seen -- though she was relatively young.  She gave him the maximum prescription he can have at his age (+4 in each eye . .. he was supposed to have 6 in each eye, but the doctor said she'd try these and work up to those if necessary).  He has some vision loss in both eyes after trying to focus his eyes for so long without vision correction, but hopefully he's young enough and we caught it in time that he can regain some of that vision back with the use of glasses.  If not, there may be some eye therapy in his future.  It almost made me cry when he put on his glasses and exclaimed, "Mom, I can see.  Everything looked little, and now it's big!"  Here's to hoping his cute little glasses solve the problem and he gets used to wearing them 24/7 here soon and that he doesn't have too many headaches with them (literal and figurative ones).  I think he looks quite sophisticated and handsome in his new glasses.

Every Once In Awhile

Every once in awhile I decide to be "that mom."  You know, the one who is creative, extra patient, and has milk and cookies for you when you get home from school.  So today I made a Cinco de Mayo muffin tin lunch with Bryson's help.  He loved eating it out of the tin and we had fun making it.  I'm just going to go on the record to say today I WAS"that mom."