Happy 7th Kaleb!

This guy turned 7 today...LOVE him!

Here's a clip from his dancing in SeaWorld.

Pictures!

This is Kaleb after receiving his award at school from his teacher.


Last Thursday we had a wedding shower for Liz who will be marrying my brother the end of this month. There was plenty of yummy food!

CALIFORNIA
The day after arriving we went to the beach at Coronado. I applied sunscreen a little too late and we still ended up burning.

The next day was spent at Sea World. The boys loved all of the animals and I'll have to get a video from my dad of Kaleb dancing with one of the characters. That was the best part.

We went to the tide pools but it was high tide so we didn't get to see anything but we had fun walking around and exploring. This was the beginning of my swollen eye/face experience.

A couple of years ago they remodeled the Mormon Battalion. It was a huge improvement from what it was before. They take your picture, you watch a movie traveling through different rooms on the way, and at the end you can pan for gold, make bricks, and wash laundry.

Disneyland (all 6 days of it) was a blast! I'm not sure how it couldn't be. We all have so much fun together. The group picture is only part of our group. We had 26 of us in all.

Blogging...I'm slacking in this department...hopefully I can get some pictures of our Disneyland trip up soon. Although maybe I'm not rushing to put them up because I had an awesome eye infection for a good portion of the trip and I would wake up everyday to my eye(s) swollen shut and my face was pretty puffy. But I didn't care and we still had a blast anyways. Ashton loved everything and he even braved the Matterhorn and liked it, except at night so I had to tell him the "monster" was sleeping and covered his eyes whenever we passed him. Kaleb loves everything except some of the big rides (Space Mountain, Tower of Terror) and they even managed to get me on the tea cups. (never again) We had such a great time!

Ashton is potty trained! I gave up on potty training him since we were close to our trip and didn't want to deal with that in Disneyland. Funny thing, we go on vacation and he doesn't want to use his diaper anymore, just the toilet. Maybe it was all the time in the car at the beginning, who knows. So after we returned from our trip I knew he could do it and I was almost out of diapers anyways so I put him in underwear only and after 3 days off "training" he's done awesome. It's only been a couple weeks but he's doing great, sometimes he doesn't want to go and the kid either has a big bladder or something because for example yesterday he went in the morning and all day kept saying he didn't have to go and finally 9 hours later we convinced him to go. But no accidents. And he's been dry at night for months now we don't use pull-ups or diapers at night and he hasn't had any accidents. No more diapers, wahoo!

Kaleb was selected by his teacher for a special award yesterday at the awards assembly so I was invited to come. Each teacher chose 5-6 kids from their class and Kaleb's award was for always being a good example to the class. He was so proud standing in front of the school on the stage. He's had such a great teacher and he's learned so much this year. Tomorrow is his last day of 1st grade...then it's 2ND GRADE! And Ashton's also excited to start preschool in the fall, he's requested a Diego backpack.

We've been trying to finish up the small odd/ends house projects the last couple weeks. Matt's parents were here for a couple days right before our trip and his dad helped trim down the closet doors for the basement and hung them. Now we have to put the handles on. We took down the old homemade basketball backboard and painted the existing pole and tonight we'll put up a new one. Last Saturday we changed out and/or capped all the sprinkler heads in the front yard, after 7 hours of digging 25 holes and a couple trenches I was worn out. But now we have 6 big sprinklers for the front instead of 25 and hopefully no brown patches that have to be hand watered unlike in the past. We still have some yard work for the backyard and more dejunking in the storage room but things are coming along.

June is a busy month with my brothers wedding, wedding showers and Kaleb's Lego Star Wars birthday party. I'm attempting to make these, I'll let you know how it goes. Until next time...which I promise won't be a month away!

1/2 Marathon & Fun Run

I wasn't exactly excited when I woke-up on Saturday morning at 5:00am and it was snowing and we already had 10 inches on the ground. Not what I was expecting but Matt and I got ready and drove down to Thanksgiving Point where luckily there wasn't very much snow. The boys came later with Matt's parents since Kaleb's race wasn't until 9:30.

We stayed in the car until 6:50 to stay warm as long as possible. There were just over 1,000 people running the 1/2 marathon. Here I am waiting to cross the starting line.



I started the race keeping a good pace but unfortunately I wasn't prepared for all of the hills there were. My runs are usually pretty flat and because this wound through the golf course and grounds there were a TON of hills, and even the small hills were steep. For the first 6.5 miles I kept my pace running up the hills but it ended up draining my energy quicker than I expected. And even the downhill parts made my knees hurt sooner than they usually do. But even with having to walk here and there I made it through. This is what I should have looked at before I signed up for this 1/2 as my first race. Everyone said how this isn't a race to set a personal record on because it's challenging with the hills but at least I finished it even if I didn't run it as fast as I thought I would have. To give you something to compare it to this is the elevation chart for the Ogden Marathon I signed up for, which I'm hoping to run 1/2 of.

Here are a couple of pictures that the photographers from the race took. This was at mile 2.

This was mile 5 or 6ish.

And this was the very end of the race.

Here's a picture Matt took at the finish.

It was a difficult course and colder than I had expected (which is why you can see my birthmark on my forehead in most of the pictures) but I had fun and it's amazing to see how much you can do if you can push yourself mentally.

Kaleb ran in the 1-mile kids fun run. He was so excited for his race. I was on the last couple of miles of my race so I didn't get to see him race but Matt, my parents and Matt's parents were there to cheer him on.

He did really good and was just over 11 minutes and that was with stopping for a cup of powerade at the aid station. He though it was cool that they had a place to grab a drink on the way.

He wore his medal all day on Saturday.

Ashton had fun too even if he wasn't running in a race.

After I finished the boys played on some of the bounce house toys and slides and as we were leaving they called my name from the stage where they were doing awards so I ran back over to claim the prize I won. It was a gift basket with socks, water bottle, an iron man watch, gift certificate and more. What's funny is I forgot to buy a watch before the race and we had looked at Target and I really liked the iron man watches so the night before I made Matt run to Target at 10:30pm and then the next day I won one of them. But Kaleb is enjoying the watch since it's technically an iron kids one.

Kaleb and I had a great time and Matt's even thinking of running the 5K next year!

Easter

We had a great Easter! The day before Easter our ward had a breakfast/Easter egg hunt and the boys had fun running around with the other kids. On Easter it was also my birthday and so we had everyone over for dinner at our house followed by an Easter egg hunt. The boys were spoiled and have more candy than after Halloween!


Tomorrow is my 1/2 marathon! Wish me luck, and hopefully no snow!