Ashton/Yellowstone/Island Park

For any who have been waiting...here are some pictures from our trip to Ashton/Yellowstone. We had a great time going to Logan, Yellowstone Upper and Lower Loops, Mack's Inn Playhouse, Rexburg, Playmill Theater, Mesa Falls, Johnny Sack's cabin, Harriman State Park, and Idaho Falls. We stayed at the Red Barn where there was room for the whole Christensen clan. Thanks Grandpa and Grandma for great accommodations and a wonderful time.

And yes...we did see a bear. The second to bottom picture on the left is the proof! :)

July

I'm starting to see a trend here in my posts...one a month. As always, I'm trying to do better. Well, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are a bunch of pictures and few words to hit the highlights of the month. In addition to the happenings in this post, we did go on a week long trip with the Christensens to Ashton/Island Park/Yellowstone, but, with tons of pictures and lots to tell, it warrants it's own post, so... stay tuned. Our nephew, Brandon, received his Eagle Scout. Congrats, Brandon!! It was a great Court of Honor.We got to go to the Oquirrah Mountain Temple Open house with Aunt Karlee. Kenzie has a deep love for temples and continually asks to go to the temple. She now knows, "I Love to see the Temple" word for word and we have to sing it multiple times a day. Linzie liked trying out the Bjorn at the temple---a test drive for the Yellowstone trip. On the 4th, we went to the parade and Freedom Festival stuff in Provo. Kenzie loved the parade; Linzie slept. I took a ton of pictures of Linzie that day and in almost all of them, she's asleep. She really enjoyed the day!

Linzie turned 6 months old. She is 14 lbs. 7 oz. She is a tough little girl and barely cried when she got her shots. She rolls all over the place and is starting to sit up by herself.

Cousin Jackson (Bonnee and Kyle's baby) was born. He is so cute! We loved getting to see him.

Linzie started eating rice cereal. The first time, it wasn't a hit, but now she eats it up.

Kenzie made the move from her crib to a toddler bed. She was soooo excited. She even helped Jared put it together. A do-it-yourselfer at 2. Can't beat that! She loves her bed and has done extremely well at staying in it. She can't wait to climb into it all by herself.

We went to Morgan for the weekend of the 24th. One of the highlights for Kenzie was going to the dry farm and feeding grandpa's cows the pea plants he had pulled from his garden. She couldn't get enough of feeding them. She also loved riding in the truck with Grandma and Grandpa. Once again, Linzie slept through the experience.

June

Oh my, where does the time go...??? We are still alive and well if anyone is still reading our blog! I could give you all our travel log, but maybe I'll just go for some highlights and then get to what we really care about...the kids!

• BYU Museum of Art Day-LOTS of people but totally fun and even better because we got to go with my cousin Amy's family
  


• Jared's mom's retirement party--congratulations, Linda! We know you were a wonderful teacher and will miss it, but we are excited for this new adventure

• Jared's 15th high school reunion--life has changed dramatically from since his 10 year reunion. We hadn't even met then. Fun to get together with the Morgan friends.
  

• Father's Day--we got to spend time with both of our fathers and I got to spoil the wonderful father of my children. Glad that we get a day to celebrate dads.



• Tour of the Springville Fire Station--fire engines are pretty intimidating until you see every other kid in the ward climbing on them, then they don't look so bad. (You can tell she was nervous from the look of her face, but she wanted on the seat).






• Annual trip to Seven Peaks--thanks, Jason for always throwing such a great b-day party. Happy Birthday!





• Bonnee's baby shower--baby Jackson is due in three weeks. Yeah for another nephew.
• Adams family campout--no actual camping as it rained again, but we sure had a lot of fun
• First day of boating--it finally quit raining. Weather was perfect, but water is still cold. Way to go Karlee and Jared for being brave enough to get in and wake board.



• Garden-harvested first spinach, peas and cilantro. Love it!!!!
• Neighbors-we are finally getting neighbors. Someone is building in the lot next to us. No more weed patch/dumping ground! Sorry to all of you who wanted to live next door to us. :)

Linzie

Linz will be six months old this week. She is so much fun. She laughs and smiles and has started to roll. She isn't very consistent in her rolling, but can do it both directions. She loves to hear her name and loves attention in general. Her bald spot is filling back in and I'm thrilled about that. She is quite "talkative" and can be really loud. It's pretty funny until you're in a silent place like church or the library. We moved her to her own room at the first of the month and she has done very well.

Kenzie

Kenz is becoming more independent every day. She now insists on sitting on the bar stool instead of in her seat to eat, she picks out her own clothes, and pretty much tells us what she does and doesn't want (actually getting what she does or doesn't want is a different story). She loves to sing and is constantly learning new songs. Thanks to nursery, we now know the clean up song and the monkey in the tree song. She sings the ABC's very well and is now speaking with multiple sentences. We laugh every day at the funny things she tells us. Some of her favorite phrases are "actually...", "should we...?", and "don't" Just this morning she told me, "Actually...I need a tookie (cookie)." She loves playing with the neighbor kids and is always asking if I can call her friends' mom for them to come play. Kenzie reminds me everyday that we need to play and she has made the bottom of the stairs a favorite play spot. It is good to have a reminder that chores can wait, but playing and enjoying the moment only happen now.

Please forgive how ugly this post turned out. The bullets were having problems and the spacing kept going crazy and by the time I got it published and saw how ugly it was, I was too frustrated with blogger to fix it! :)

May

Once again we have gone too long without a post. I kept waiting for Kristee to post something, but she has been pretty busy so I thought if I didn't post something today, we wouldn't have a single post for May. May has been a pretty busy month. I finished up our backyard project and got a swingset built and installed (with my nephew Jacob's help). If anyone is thinking of building one of these, be warned it's a pretty big pain. But Kenzie is outside every day playing on it and absolutely loves it, so it's worth it. We put the playground bark around it with a little sandbox underneath the fort, and I think Kenzie's favorite part is the sand box, and she is also really good at tracking the sand in the house. Kristee and I debated about whether to put sand in or not, but we decided we both loved having a sand box when we were little, so we didn't want to deprive our kids of it, but we may change our mind as the sand builds up in our house.

Kenzie also loves to push Linzie in the swing, and Linzie loves it too. Linzie pretty much loves having Kenzie around any time, she is always laughing at her. Kenzie has also gotten into wearing her sunglasses this summer. She'll come in the house and tell us it's bright and needs sunglasses and her hat.

It was also my birthday this month and Kristee made me an amazing BYU football field cake and I had a great birthday. Kristee got me some nice presents and I got to go see the new Star Trek movie, which I thought was really good.

Linzie is growing fast. She has moved up to the next size diapers, so she and Kenzie wear the same diapers now. It's kind of nice so we don't have to carry two different sizes. Kenzie better watch out because Linzie might be bigger than her soon.

Here are some random pictures from our Memorial Day weekend. We spent half the weekend with the Adams clan and had a fun time eating smores around the camp fire, easter egg hunting (there was still snow on the ground in April so we had to wait until May), and visiting the Morgan cemetaries. Then we spent the second half of the weekend with the Christensen clan and went to the Salt Lake cemetaries and hiked to Timpanogas Cave. Most of these pictures have Kenzie wearing a headband she got from Grandma A at the easter egg hunt, which she is pretty much obsessed with now and wears it about every day.

And finally, Kenzie is getting to be quite independent these days, and likes to do everything herself. This morning she insisted on picking out her own clothes and accessories to wear, and this is what we got: