july the fourth

our sisters' weekend concluded with the husbands coming to meet us at my aunt and uncle's house for a fourth of july pool party. the weather was a little overcast, which i thought was perfect. we had a bbq and spent the rest of the time in or around the pool. mostly in.

my brother, ray

my dad is going to be doing some scuba diving soon, so he brought his gear to test out and randy decided to do a little scuba diving himself. he had a blast and swam around in the deep end for a long time. 

i have to admit that it made me a little nervous at first, seeing as he has never scuba dived before, but my family assured me he was doing just fine and he was moving around enough that i was finally put at ease.

 

audrey and matthew

austin jumping off the diving board

madeleine was such a fish the whole time we were there. she always likes the water, but usually gets out after an hour or so. this time though, she spent almost three hours in the pool, happy as a clam. she especially loved having my uncle, austin, throw her. 

diane spent plenty of time in the pool herself, but not as much as madeleine, which i'm okay with because she requires constant vigilance in the water. we called her greased lightening.

diane and diane

ray did some scuba diving himself. 

matthew

dad and elizabeth

 

about an hour before we left, madeleine discovered the diving board. the first couple times, my dad dropped her off, but after that, she did it all by herself. over and over. she would get on, run off the end without even hesitating, swim to the side, climb out, and go directly back to the diving board. no fear. 

if you scroll through these next ones fast enough, it's kind of like a stop motion film of her jumping in.

my brave little fish.

 

of course, diane decided she wanted to do it, too. even though she wanted to do it all by herself and kept trying to shove me away on the diving board, i dropped her in. she even did it a couple times.

stop motion #2:

we had a great time and after a long weekend by myself, i was very happy to be driving home with my family.

across five years and a day

attempts at capturing our fifth wedding anniversary on camera with the self timer. after randy humoring me for quite some time and still not getting it right, i gave up. 

yesterday was our fifth wedding anniversary.  best described with the cliche that in some ways, it feels like much longer, and in some ways it feels like it was just yesterday. i guess many things become cliche because they are true or universally understood.

in general, randy and i don't do much for anniversaries. we usually go out to dinner. perhaps we decided to do a little more this year because it was our fifth anniversary, but i don't generally identify particular meaning with randomly assigned odd-numbered intervals. i think that number five just happened to coincide with us being a little burnt out at the end of a long semester and having two kids at the stage that they are at.

yesterday, we sent our girls up to my parents house for the night (thank you mom and dad) and then headed up to a family cabin in heber. it is the first time that randy and i have both been away from the kids for a night.

it was glorious.

we splurged and treated ourselves to an amazing meal at the stein eriksen lodge. randy says it is the best meal he as ever had and it rivals my favorites. as we risked our lives driving down the snowy roads heading away from the lodge, i noted that at least if we died, we would have had a really good final meal.

i had the first good, uninterrupted night's sleep that i've had in a long time. and even though i still woke up naturally at 7:30 in the morning when i could have slept in as long as i wanted, i felt rested (it is hard to sleep in much later than that when you are used to waking up around 5:00 most mornings).

after 24 hours all to ourselves, we headed back and picked up the girls. after excited greetings, they acted pretty nonchalant about our return. my mom must have taken good care of them.

it was a wonderful weekend with my favorite.

27!

randy turns twenty-seven years old today. i've only known him for five of them (we met right before his 22nd birthday), but i think he's pretty spectacular, even with that limited exposure. what a man. i could gush, but i won't. but really, i could.  words and words about how much i love him. imagine them and it will save randy the embarrassment of me actually doing it. i've probably already crossed that line. 

good thing he never reads our blog.

randy hikes timp

mt. timpanogos from our backyard

 ever since hiking half dome, randy says that he's felt compelled to climb mountains. since we have several around us, he picked mt. timpanogos as his next climb. a couple weeks ago, he hiked it with his friend, drew. i would have loved to have gone with him, but nursing babies kind of prevent that. they left early in the morning and made it back around 3:30. randy said it was a great hike and took lots of pictures. i'm sure that drew was annoyed, but i had asked randy to take some for me to see and he complied.

randy at the trailhead

drew at the trailhead

randy at first falls

the scramble right before the top

drew and mountain goat

at the summit

mountain goats

at one point, they had to wait for the mountain goats to get off the trail

apparently they hiked down this

sliding down the glacier

madeleine kept asking where daddy was and it was pretty fun to point out the window and tell her that he was hiking that mountain. now, she occasionally points at the mountain and says, "daddy hiked that mountain with his friend." his next goal is to climb the other mountain we can see from our backyard. we're also hoping to do squaw peak sometime soon on a saturday. not as strenuous, but a fun hike.