A visit to Temple Square

We had fun taking a little trip up to Salt Lake City last weekend. Dan was finally home for a weekend, after five straight saturdays on the road, and we had a great family day. We had a picnic by the fountains and walked through Temple Square. We saw all of the children's artwork in the Church History Musuem, and then played in a fun Book of Mormon exhibit. It was a beautiful day, which we haven't had too many of lately, it seems, so it was really just a great day.

Rylie has always loved to pose - I guess she's choosing the "little angel" pose here.

And Olivia thought it was hilarious to tease Tate while we were trying to take the pictures. She was laughing pretty hard through the whole attempt.

And naturally we had some wet hands and feet after sitting by the reflecting pond here. No matter how breezy it was outside, they could not stay out of the water!

Cute little Taters kept singing "I love to see the temple" while we were sitting here so I had to get a picture of that!

And here the girls were trying their best to look like saints or angels or something.

That's Tate. Just chillin. Like usual.

The snowball fight.

Here is a short video of the snow fun in our front yard. I hope it works. :)

The first post of 2011 in APRIL?! Sorry, folks...

So it's kind of daunting looking at a blog that hasn't been updated in about 8 months, but I know I need to do it. I want to do it! We'll see if we can get this updated more often, but as for now, let me just get the basic details of our lives down.

We moved back to Provo right around New Year's, and the first four months in our new house have been wonderful. We have great land lords and we're close to school and church and everything we need. Plus the house has a basement! So we have room for the kids to play and they love it and we love it. We miss Athens, especially now when it *should be springtime here. We had such wonderful friends in Georgia and such a great ward. We'll have to go back to visit soon.

I haven't taken very many pictures, but we did get out into the snow in the front yard several times, so that's what I've posted pictures of here. And I promise to try to get more up soon. (Do I end every post with that promise? Probably so. Sorry, family!)

Love to you all.

Olivia vs. The Monkey Bars

The weather has started to cool off here, at least in the mornings, and so we thought we'd take advantage of sunny and 80s and meet some friends at the park. We hadn't been there 5 minutes when Olivia came to me crying (followed by several adults, which made me nervous) and saying her arm hurt. As soon as I looked at her arm, I knew we were headed to the hospital. There was a "dip" in her forearm, above the wrist, and it just didn't look right. The adults who'd seen it said she lost her grip on the monkey bars and fell, and they heard a popping noise. Poor girl.

So I left Tucker and Rylie at the park with Amber and Shauna (and all of their kids too, of course) and headed to the hospital. Unfortunately, we were leaving the park downtown in the middle of gameday traffic. I pulled to the side of the road when I saw a police officer directing traffic and he rigged the stoplight for us and we headed to the hospital. Luckily, Bro. Dunford was working in the ER today, so we got in to see a familiar face. Both he and the nurses were all impressed with how brave and cheerful Olivia was for enduring a broken arm. She got a temporary cast and we'll head back to the doctor some time on Monday to get a permanent one. Do they make waterproof casts these days? I surely hope so. The plastic bag on her arm during the bath tonight was cumbersome...

She really did great, all things considered, and by this evening she was playing with the kids outside - a little quieter and more careful, but playing all the same. And now she's sleeping her first night with a ginormous left arm.

What a day. Of course, I told myself. Of course we have a broken limb to add to a house that won't sell and a dad that lives far away...

But then I got phone calls from both women taking care of my children, then phone calls from each of my visiting teachers, then dinner and happy conversation with a dear friend...Of course. Of course, I reminded myself, my wonderful ward and good friends will always be here to help me, and my Heavenly Father will never forget about me.

Rylie's Birthday

We had a great time at Grandma and Grandpa's house! We went to Aiken's Makin' and the kids got balloons and cotton candy (which they decided wasn't nearly as delicious as they had dreamed it would be.) Then we went miniature golfing. Rylie couldn't be persuaded to place the ball anywhere but a few inches from the hole each time, so we got to see a fabulous hole-in-one-victory dance at every hole. :) Tate was proud to have his own ball and club, and Tucker was proud to be golfing with Grandpa and Uncle Q. Olivia remained surprisingly calm through the frustrations of mini golf, and eventually decided it was more fun to experiment with rolling the ball, rather than focus on "the rules." Good job, Livvy.

Then there was a super fun trip to Burger King and opening presents back at the house. We tried to take video of the present-opening, but it was too dark in the house and the camera was doing some strange things, so we didn't get video of that.

But we took some videos of other parts of the day, hope you enjoy them honey!

This one's for dad...

A tale of 2 Sundays!

You want to talk about contrasting Sundays for me (this is Dan by the way), let's look at Feb. 14 and Feb. 21, 2010.

Feb. 14: Returned from the worst trip I've had since coming to UGA. Got home around 2pm and still had not received my luggage the whole weekend. It had snowed several inches the day before and was still cold with quite a bit of snow on the ground. Tucker thought it would be fun to have a snowball fight and how could I pass that up. It was so fun to throw real snowballs and just play. Shell and I shared Valentine's, she made a sweet card and I had mailed mine on the day I left being sure it would surprise her and get there before Valentine's Day but the weather did me in and it didn't arrive in time. My bag finally arrived at 9:15pm and it was nice to finally have all belongings back. It was a fitting end to a long week! The week ahead would require buying a new car and playing catchup at work.

Feb. 21: What a difference a week makes! We bought a new car and then the weather decided to turn good. It was 70 degrees outside today and blue skies. We grilled out with Shell's parents who were visiting and played outside most of the afternoon. Shell's brother Cam and his wife Kym are on hiatus from the Peace Corps in Ghana for the wedding of Kym's sister and they have come to visit for a couple of days. It's amazing what a little sunshine and warm weather can do for you!

We're doing well and are looking forward to the coming Spring! Check out our picasweb link for pics.