St George Ironman.

Saturday my brother Kent (L) and his friend Jared (R) competed in the St. George Ironman.  

He has trained for months, maybe closer to a year. You start with a 2.4 miles swim, 112 mile bike ride and then a full 26.2 marathon. He had some finishing goals he hoped to achieve and was able to meet them all!

The day started out beautiful and 2 minutes into the race the wind kicked up so badly officials stated if it had been that way prior to the swim, that portion would have been cancelled. Winds were clocked with 20-30 miles per hour with a few gusts up to 40. It was amazing anyone could swim those conditions. They've been called the worst in all 110 Ironmans.

This is the start of the swim

This is the swim finish.

They crossed the finish line together in 13:56:08!

April

Maybe I should just try to post once a month... I just finished looking at our pics from Moab over EJS. How ever was nice enough to snap this one of our family on top of Dome Plateau overlooking the Colorado River is a pretty decent photographer - Thanks!

My favorite place in Moab: where Hatch Creek meets up with Kane


The boys playing while waiting for the jeeps to catch up.

And someone turned eight! And he wanted to mini golf for his party and fortuantley it was an absolutely beautiful day and probably the nicest so far this year. Happy Birthday little guy.

catching up

So I thought last year was busy when I was covering for a co-worker on maternity and then my new job has had me out of town three times in Feb. I think it's settled down for now. I really didn't intend to just quit blogging.

Paul had a need to go to the junk yard a few weeks ago and asked if the boys wanted to go and

Andrew excitedly screamed yes - he was more excited than when we told him we were taking them to Disney last year. Sadly went they got there the boys couldn't go in, apparently there is a new law that you can't enter if under 18. Paul made it up to them and brought home distributors for them to "work" on the next week. And yes it has been warm enough all winter to wear shorts, up until last week, when we finally got enough to make a real, real snowman. Not like the pathetic thing I tried to do a few years ago. We've also made it out to the Aquarium to check out the new Otter exhibit, which was awesome - but those little guys are just too wiggly to get a decent picture.

all I want for Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone!

Got it in writing :)

Nathan kept telling Andrew not to sign this and I said no, honey sign it, it's fine. I think Nathan was possibly quite concerned. When Andrew left the room I told Nathan it wasn't like I was really going to enforce it and then Nathan let me know the date is wrong so I said see honey, it's void anyway. But I am going to kept if for about twenty years and pull it out if need be :)

MIA

I should blog more. One of my co-workers went on maternity leave the week before Halloween, and so I haven't blogged or done much of anything since then besides work. It was starting to get back to normal, oh, but then the holidays came up. I was almost of top of things. Then Paul had surgery... it did give me a chance to read in the hospital. I finished The Help, which was wonderful and then my dad loaned me One Second After. A complete 360 from The Help. The later book promptly threw me over the deep end. It's hard to be in the Christmas Spirit when you are reading a book about the end of the world as we know it (and not like the happy song about it). I think my Mormon friends are amused, I'm inquiring about food storage and cooking with powdered egg (which I tried and it really isn't that bad). It is a really good book, just wait until January to read it.

Happy Halloween

I got most of Perry done (two of them) before heading out of town for a conference last week and finished the rest of the costumes the night before the school parade (and Andrews shorts the morning of - although they are "finished" with safety pins). For the those who don't watch Phineas and Ferb on Disney, Phineas is the one with red/orange hair and Ferb has the green, and they have a pet platypus named Perry. But we couldn't have just one of those. Phineas and Ferb spend all summer trying to not waste their summer vacation and come up with cool inventions. I must admit I am proud to say that we saw tons of vampires, pirates and little red riddling hood and not a single other Phineas or Ferb (and people actually knew who the kids were dressed as). Nathans did tell Andrew at one point that he wouldn't make a good Ferb because Ferb doesn't talk (at all) and Andrew won't shut up (at all). We all got a chuckle out of that - including Andrew.

This is the result of a very messy kitchen Saturday night. In order from L to R are Nathans, mine, Andrews, and Pauls (and he didn't carve all the way through, he used the technique where you scrap the skin to let the light shine through). We were excited to say we vetoed the boys picking any design marked more than moderate on the difficulty scale and they both managed to carve their pumpkins by themselves this year with very minimal (and no entire hand off) to mom and dad :)

We also made it to the boys scouts haunted house on Friday. I was wondering when they'd be old enough to go and not get too afraid and figured the boy scout one wouldn't be too scary. We took a hay ride that broke down next to a zombie grave yard and then we went from cabin to cabin to find a cell phone to call for help. The kids all thought the cabins were scary and all of us adults were more leery of walking through the dark forest. At one point a witch (?) came down a hill toward Andrew and said she loved sweet little boys and he said "lady you got the wrong kid, I'm not sweet" and ran toward the front of the pack. I thought he might end up in our room that night but he stayed in his bed the whole night.