Baby Grant is on the move! He has begun real crawling and not just army crawling, and he's also cruising the furniture like a champ. His current obsession is my laptop which he tries to smack every chance he gets. But it's a great opportunity to teach him the word "no" which he clearly understands but regularly ignores.

Grant and his friend Graydon on a ride to the park.

Monday, James had rock climbing and there was a local company selling climbing shoes so he tried some out and found a pair he really likes. However, they're purple so as soon as we got home he got a black Sharpie and colored in all the purple parts of his bran ... Read More »

Okay, so we're only doing highlights because um...I forgot stuff since I didn't blog when I should have.

Significant/noteable stuff last week:

Our ward book club read The Knitting Club and the author Kate Jacobs called in to do a Q&A with us, which was really fun.

On Thursday, James finished his Level 3 swimming class and his teacher said he did really well. At first, the teacher said James should maybe start in Level 2 but he could stay if he wanted. Since Level 2 was full, I just kept James in. The teacher said he would need to take it only once more and most kids have to take it several times, so that was pretty cool. He was proud of himself and we were, too!

Saturday was the Jacobson Rocktoberfest, which was so fun! We invited everyone we knew who even might kind of be nearby and lots and lots of people came. We barbecued out by the pool and had a nursery room with three young women to wat ... Read More »

 

Sunday was a wonderful fast and testimony meeting. Sometimes I kind of cringe inside when I know it’s going to be testimony day b ... Read More »

Last Monday, I took James to check out a climbing gym that Jamie told us about because they have a program for kids. He wandered around and liked what he saw so we've decided to sign him up for three months and see how it goes. I don't want to overschedule our kids and stress them out, but at the same time, it's important to me that they always be involved in one sport, although I don't really care which one. James has done soccer, tee ball, karate and now wants to try rock climbing, which is fine with me. He's done indoor climbing before both with his dad and his Uncle Jamie, so I know he'll enjoy it. We've always kind of known that James was going to be more of an individual sport kind of kid than a team one, and that's just fine.

Monday night was FHE. It's fun to get back in the routine now that James is home. He asked us about fasting on Sunday and why Kenny and I were doing it and what we were fasting for. We turned it into our FHE lesson and talked about the law of the fast ... Read More »

Ah, the lazy days of summer are done. Good bye, do nothing days....

We spent our last two free days before school started just taking it easy as a family. On Monday, Kenny worked part of the day from home and then we snuck away with James to go see Wall-E at the cheap theather. It was a cute little Pixar indictment of consumerism, but we liked it. I snuck in my own popcorn too, not because I'm cheap (although it's not a bad guess) but because I can pop the healthy stuff at home. I love me some movie theather popcorn, but MAN! is it bad for you. Sheesh.

On Tuesday I let James have a totally chill out day, being as lazy as he wanted. He watched cartoons, played Fantastic Contraption on the computer, and made lots of new Lego inventions. After Kenny got home from work, we rode our bikes to James's school to find out which class he would have the next day and found out that his best friend Raven would be in his class, which was exciting. Then that night we went to ... Read More »

Since I haven't been as bloggy as I should, I'm not going to try to go day by day over the last few few weeks. Instead, we'll hit the highlights!

At the end of July, I went to a writing conference in San Francisco and Kenny and Grant came to keep me company. We stayed at Big James's house and got to visit with Jamesie, who we had really missed! It was fun although I didn't like to be in workshops all day. But I got lots of free books, including my new favorite one, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Great read.

A few days after we got back from that, it was time to turn around and begin our Alaskan cruise adventure. (See Kenny's pictures, below). We had such an awesome time. We flew into Anchorage and took a day to enjoy the city and took in a neat exhibit at the museum about one of the native Alaskan tribes. Then we drove the next day (via stretch Hummer limo), to our departure port. We stopped at a wild animal preserve alo ... Read More »

July 21-27

This is Grant, the beach monkey.

Monday night is dinner guest night lately and this time we had Tyler and Sandra Large over. At this point, Tyler practically qualifies as an "old" friend because we have travelled through Europe together. Well, Scotland, anyway. When Kenny and I were dating, Johnny 99 did a tour of parts of the UK and I got to go for a week of it. Tyler was filling in for Ammon and that's how I met him.  Anyway, it was a fun visit. He and Sandra are laid back people. We made Cuban chicken skewers and rice. My new favorite thing with rice is sprinkling in a generous dash of chicken boullion before turning on the rice cooker. I think it works better than cooking the rice in chicken broth.

 Anyway, Tuesday m ... Read More »