Halloween preview

I found these black shirts on clearance at Walmart for $1 and they just screamed "make a Halloween shirt out of me!" So I did.

fun fun.

and we had a Halloween party at church, so we had a trial run with our costumes. It went great!

"arrgh!"

Payson temple groundbreaking!

Okay so we did not have tickets to attend the actual groundbreaking, so the next day (Sunday evening) we drove over there to see it at least. To our surprise there were 30-40 other people there, and the shovels were still at the site (guarded by some official church guy!) for us to participate and take pictures and stuff, so cool!

The girls really liked shoveling, they could have kept going all night!

We also walked all around the temple site and talked about how the girls could get married there someday, and about where they would put in a waterfall and plant trees. We're so excited to have a temple 8 minutes away. :)

PS this is my new haircut and I made the skirt I'm wearing!

babies

The two most important babies in our life right now:

#1, our little boy at 22 weeks, whoa buddy! slow down there! and no my behind is not nearly that big, my pants are just baggy. I am in full-on maternity clothes mode!

I'm now 23 1/2 weeks and I chopped off my hair. :)

#2 our cute cousin Lydia. She and Whitney really like each other, it's so cute! And even Eric held her last time we saw her, he was so cute playing with her. As much as he says babies are useless until they're at least 9 months old, he is really good with them and has fun with them when they're not crying. :)

Goblin Valley again

We enjoyed a trip to Goblin Valley again this year. Next year we are going to a forest though! I need some pine trees around me to really feel like I'm camping.

As soon as we got there the girls started climbing around on this formation which was about 3 feet from our campsite. (I love having 3 and 5 year old children that I don't have to worry too much about!) Eric joined them as soon as we got things set up! He lives to climb (and jump around on) rocks.

The three of them up on a ledge that made me nervous- although lots of things make me nervous in my pregnant state. I didn't climb around too much because I don't have great balance right now!

The next morning we went exploring in the valley of the goblins, and found our way to some cool parts we hadn't seen last year. One of our favorites was this turtle!

Some of the coolest things we found were caves! This is in the back of one cave, so fun! It had a tiny whole with light coming in so it wasn't totally dark in there.

In the mouth of the cave

Me and Whitney and my little belly!

I love camping- sleeping in a tent, singing around the campfire, cooking delicious beef and veggie kabobs over the fire, obviously making smores, and star gazing! Me and Katelyn saw a shooting star, and Eric and I enjoyed looking at constellations and planets with the help of his stargazer app. :) Good times together on our last time camping without a baby for a while. :)

BYU Homecoming Races

For the third year in a row, the Saturdays before and after this race were beautiful 60 degree+ days, and the day of the race was a high of 45 and raining. Awesome. But still fun! The girls were sick during the week previous so we didn't get to practice on a track beforehand and it showed! Whitney was super cute and ran the whole way no problem, but you could tell she didn't really know where to go and she just jogged it. Usually when she would run around with Eric during Kate's soccer games she would really sprint! But that's okay.

She kept telling me after how she wasn't even scared of the starting gun- this starting line picture looks like she might have been a little concerned!

plugging along on the home stretch of her 200 meter race!

happy with her ribbon afterward

And then Katelyn really surprised me by starting off fast in the 400 meter race! Here she is coming around the first curve in the middle of the pack (#28)- she looked like she was actually running fast! ( I guess I was just used to her silly runs in soccer!) She looked happy and excited and it was so cute.

But by the end she was really tired, she barely made it the last 50 meters and got passed by a bunch of girls. She didn't stop though, she finished it all the way. :) And had fun! I forgot to take a picture of her with her ribbon. We're already excited for next year!

dance

whitney's loving dance again this fall!

She loves to pick her outfits for class each week, such as this old recital costume of Katelyn's.

Here she is in class on parent day doing ribbon dancing. She is one of the more obedient children in her class, and has fun with the 6 or 7 other girls.

whitney's loving dance again this fall!

kate being silly in her soccer game

our first team sport- soccer!

Finally the soccer post. Katelyn had a fun season, so we were successful in the first team sport our children have played!

Here she is in one of her first games taking a corner kick- I don't think the ball went much farther! She did improve the strength of her kicks a lot during the season.

Here she is doing her silly run (#27)- half the time she was running around on the field she would flap or circle her arms or swing them crazily! So funny. This is towards the end of the season when she learned to follow the ball more.

doing a throw-in. I didn't really get a picture of her kicking the ball ever, since she never really dribbled it, just kicked it whenever it happened to come to her. :)

lined up before a kick-off. They played 4-on-4 on a tiny field! And I love this picture because she was the tallest on her team by far.

This is her team with their trophies at the end of the last game- 3 of the kids weren't there that night!

So she started out the season halfway paying attention and asking to be put on defense (I think because she understood it better and she's not that aggressive so on offense she hardly touched the ball!) and after the 2nd game I asked her what she liked about soccer and she said "well, it is good exercise." I was not convinced that she was enjoying it! Oh and she told me "if another kid on your team is trying to get the ball, you can let them have it." (so this is why she never really "went after it"!) But she improved and learned a lot during the season and it turned out good.

And it was so cute, she had the nicest coaches. In the last game, she was the only kid on her team who hadn’t scored a goal all season. We didn’t care at all, and we never stressed that with her at all. She was just out there to have fun. But the second half of that last game, her team was dominating like 10-1, and so her coach decided to try to help Katelyn score a goal. He kept telling her to run towards the goal and then he told the boys to kick it to her. Several times it worked, and she had a couple of good shots and a couple of assists (she would kick it toward the goal and then one of the boys would kick it in- then we were all like “great pass Katelyn!”). She didn’t score a goal, but I could see she understood the game better after that, and it was so cute of her unselfish teammates to keep trying to help her. I love 5-year-old kids, they are so cute and accepting of each other. She had fun playing with the kids on her team and I'm glad she liked it overall!