This Summer

Really??? Has it been since June since I last posted? Well, I guess this is the quarterly update :)

First and foremost, we found out the gender of baby #3! After spending over an hour laying on the ultrasound table and waiting patiently for the lady to just tell us the gender already, she finally told us that she couldn't tell. WHAT?? That was unacceptable. So when she left, she said I could get up and walk around and casually mentioned that the baby was too squished down and needed to move up a little in my abdomen. So, as soon as she closed the door, I jumped off the bed and announced to Scott "I am doing a handstand. Right now. Catch my legs!" Before he even knew what I was doing I was up in the air and wiggling my body all around trying to get the baby to move. Of course, as I was partially undressed, attempting a handstand, and wiggling by body, the lady walks back in the door. Let's just say she knew I REALLY wanted to know the gender.
So I jumped back on the table and voila! The baby had moved. Just enough for her to tell us that we are having another BOY! We are so excited.
The boys both said that our family is too rough for girls :) And I am pretty sure that visions of football games, wrestling, and dirt biking are constantly playing in Scott's mind, which is why he has a perma-grin! We can't wait!

I think that in order to be most effective, I am going to just hit the highlights of the past few months:

JULY
-Fun sleepover with Ben and Jaimi Thomander for the 4th of July. And delicious family bbq at the park with guacamole burgers. yum.
-my niece Lucy was baptized and so Scott's parents came to town for the event. It was so fun to be with them and with Lucy on her special day. Papa and Mimi (Scott's parents) got to see Ty at soccer practice, play ball with the boys, see them wrestle, got them ice cream, and we loved every minute of it!
-Said goodbye to some great friends, the Laytons, who moved away to business school at Tuck. We were able to head out to a yummy dinner (Benihanas) which had particular significance for us as it was the first double date we went on together when we first moved out here...what four years ago?? Ty and Leah were little babies then and they were just in car seats! Where did the time go? We did pretty much every major holiday with Maren and Ryan and we are really going to miss the sleepovers, the late night crazy games of Ligretto, yummy yummy food, Harry Pot-a-thons, and just great company. After dinner, we took them to another friends house where everyone had gathered for a surprise going away party!
-We camped in Yosemite for two nights and it was...AMAZING, wonderful, perfect...we truly loved it all. We went with the Thomanders (Ben, Jaimi, Emerson, and Waverly) and the Harmans (Ed, Lindsey, Sarah, and Kai). We cooked yummy food in the dutch ovens, roasted marshmellows, drove all over Yosemite (some of us more than others :)) jumped into the freezing cold waters of Mirror Lake, stayed up late talking around the fire...it just doesn't get much better than that. The weather was perfect and the company was even better.

AUGUST-
-Boys and I hit the SF zoo and it was so much fun. Just a nice fun outing for us! We got great seats to watch the grizzly bears eating and I am pretty sure that I loved it just as much as the boys. When we got home, it was me that was so animated in telling Scott all about it :)
-Had a delightful breakfast from my Uncle Dave who was in town just for the day. The boys are stilling talking about the chocolate chip pancakes that Uncle Dave bought them. We miss them and wished we lived closer!
-Found out that we are having a healthy baby boy!
-Left on our long trek out to SLC where we stayed for a few days with Scott's parents. We packed in those days with many, many rides on the lawn mower (which Ty always points out that he did ALL of the steering and Papa didn't have to help him) and running in the sprinklers, eating yummy food, playing with all the new toys, spending time with Hunty and Abby and meeting new little Chloe. I had such a blast spending the afternoon with Lindsay, Scott's sister, who feels more like one of my own sisters. I could have spent days on end just talking with her and letting the kids hunt for bugs :)
-Then drove up to Idaho Falls for about 10 days with my parents and Becca. Oh man. I almost don't know how I can describe it. I am always so nervous about traveling by myself with the kids. Oh, by the way, did I mention that I did all of this by myself?? Yep. I did.
Anyway, I always get nervous that the kids are going to get off and get really grumpy and I will just be so overwhelmed and then that the world will end and Scott won't be there.
But, this trip was so wonderful. The kids were delightful and I thought they were champs. (Especially given that they are 2yr and 4yr old!) We went to a water park, the zoo, made a slip n slide in the backyard, made homemade raspberry ice cream, made cinnamon rolls, went on walks and bike rides with Gus just about every day, made cucumber boats and floated them down the snake river, went the the visitor's center, went to a "music in the park" event, went to an Indian Pow-wow, the list just goes on and on. I can't believe how much we did.
I LOVED being with my mom and dad. Nothing makes you realize how lucky you were to have such great parents, like having kids of your own and still not being able to keep up with you parents!! And Becca...what can I say about my little sister?? I wish she lived closer to me. No...I wish she lived with me. I laughed and cried and teased and played with her and it just made me miss her so much. The night before we left, Becca stayed up til who knows how late putting notes all over our car and in all of our stuff. So as we started our long journey home, I found these little love notes that made me seriously laugh and some made me start to cry just because I already missed her. They were in my purse, one in just about every place in the car, in the luggage, even when I stopped to get gas the first time and popped the gas tank door, there was a little note for me. I loved my trip home so much, can you tell??
We drove from Idaho Falls and spent one last night in SLC and I was able to spend the night with my grandpa Bagley, who is just one of the kindest men I have ever known. He made fresh bread (just coming out of the oven) for us when we got there in the morning and then when we got back there that evening to spend the night he had make some zuccini bread for us to take home. He sent us back with many loaves of bread, homemade jams, green beans from his garden and other little goodies. I love my grandpa. We saw Becky and Luke and Seth and played with them for awhile. It was just enough time for Ty and Cam to keep asking when their friends Luke and Seth can come over to play at our house. And we spent some time with Candace and the kids and I was able to hold 5 day old baby Alicia. It was like heaven. And to top it all off, I was able to have dinner with one of my best friends in the whole world, Mandie (or as I still call her, Sister Hendricksen). Deborah was there too (our other MTC companion) and we were able to sit and catch up on life while the kiddos played. I really am one lucky girl to know such amazing people.
-We got home Tuesday night and I felt like I had just run a marathon or something. I was so exhausted and I feel like it took me days to catch up on sleep enough to function properly. But nonetheless, we still got up enough energy to go beach camping on Friday night. We drove just about an hour away to Sunset State Beach and had a great time. Our good friends the Millers joined us for the first night. If it wouldn't have been so foggy and kind of...wet...it would have been perfect. We still went to the beach the next afternoon and it turned out to be a great day. The Millers had to leave to go home but we stayed and put on some tin foil dinners on the fire and they might have been the best tin foil dinners I have ever eaten. We topped it all off with some delicious apple crisp in the dutch oven. I have to say...I was pretty proud of how it turned out :) We really just had such a fun time sitting around the fire with just our little family of four and the boys kept asking us to tell story after story of us when we were kids. They mostly liked the ones about "dad being naughty when he was little" and he sure has plenty of those :)

Life has been so good for us the past few months. We are healthy, happy, and feel so blessed. Life is good. Real good.