FaMiLy

You will have to forgive my "slowness" but I'm just not getting stuff on the blog like I used to. Last Saturday Brett and I, The Maynards and Craig (Brett's sister Emily and her family and Brett's dad) went to the USU vs Idaho football game and believe it or not Aggies actually won! Yep, it's true... check out the score board above (42 -17)! It was a fun game and it was fun to get to hang out with the family. Their family is so cute we really enjoy hanging out with them.

Me and Brett

The Maynard Family

Yesterday I had the opportunity to go the Women's Conference. I spent the day with my sister-in-laws, Emily, Natalie and Sher, my mother-in-law, Sue, and 2 of Brett's cousins, Jan and Kami. We headed down to SLC in the morning to go shopping and spend the day around Salt Lake. The conference was so uplifting. The women of the church are awesome! I have a whole new outlook on my Relief Society experience and am excited to get more involved in my ward and be able to serve the women around me. And because of Natalie I will never be able to look at President Uchtdorf the same. She thinks that he is "by far the best looking man in the Qurom of the Twelve" and was sure to tell us the she all thought he is a "stud". It was awesome to be able to spend the day with such amazing women and learn so much from their examples. Thanks for letting me tag along girls! :) (I forgot my camera at home, so Natalie and The Andersons will probably be posting some pictures of us all soon.)
Today we were able to hang out with my mom's family. Her older sister just moved back to Utah from Kansas. It was fun to get to visit with them and they were able to meet Brett for the first time. They are such great people and we are glad to have them closer again. My aunt Janalee and her famiy came down from Idaho. It was fun to be able to hang out with every one and catch up.

The Flinder's Family

The Thomas Family

Tagged!

So I got tagged by Britt forever ago but am just now getting around to actually doing it... What you do is post these rules: List 3 joys in your life; 3 fears; 3 goals; 3 collections/obsessions; & 3 random facts. Then you tag 5-6 others at the end.
JOYS: 1 - spending time with Brett 2 - spending time with friends and family 3 - Anything athletic/competitive
fEaRs: 1 - failure 2 - hurting someone else 3- dying too young
GoAlS: 1 - do well on the GRE 2 - graduate in Spring 2009 3 - get into the Marriage and Family Therapy Masters program at USU Fall '09
ok so those are all immediate goals and I'm going to give you some life long goals too...
1 - get Brett to travel outside of the US with me 2 - raise a family 3 - own a small ranch (possibly own my ouen troubled youth facility specializing in equine therapy on that small ranch)
CoLlEcTiOnS: 1 - Face cards: I buy face cards every vacation that I go on that have a bunch of pictures of the area 2 - junk - I don't mean to collect a lot of junk but for some reason I always seem to gather it up and then I have to get rid of it all about 6 months later. 3 - Pictures! I love pictures and have tons of pictures of nearly everything that I have done in my life (especially major events) I consider my photo albums my journal.
rAnDoM FaCts: 1 - I love doing anything outdoors, especially hiking, running, horse riding, shooting - I enjoy it all. 2 - I love watching movies, especially with Brett and especially when I can talk him into a chick flick 3 - I used to be "up-to-date" with all sorts of underground bands and music and since I've gotten married my love for music has not decreased at all but my time for it has and so I no longer can say that I am "up-to-date" with all the good music that's out there.
I am tagging: Marlee, Kami, Emily, Natalie, Trisha and Whitney

A rough weekend

Friday evening, Brett and his friend Dustin went out looking for elk so I thought I would make good use of my free time and go for a horse ride. Me, my dad, and my brother-in-law, Dearth all took our young horses for a little ride in the Smithfield arena. I rode my 4-year-old, Oli and he was great. I got on my next "project", a 2-year-old, Millie. Everything was going just great when all of the sudden she caught me a little off guard and the next thing I knew I was on the ground. Everything was tingling all over. It took me a minute to get off the ground but when I did, we discovered that I had a HUGE bump on the back of my head and my vision was quite blurry. This bump on the back left side of my head was about the size of a baseball. It was caused by Millie kicking me! Yep, that's right. When I so gracefully fell off, I managed to land right under her and as she "jumped" over my head she kicked the back of my head. Luckily, my sweet sister-in-law, Natalie, had pulled up to the arena about 5 minutes before this all happened and she thought we should go have it looked at. We headed into the hospital and soon enough everyone was there. Brett had returned from the hills, my parents were there, my father-in-law, Craig, and Dearth and Nat and their son Garrett. They took me in for a CT scan and then we had to wait. It came back that I didn't have a fractured skull or anything I just had a mild concussion.

I scraped my hand and arm up pretty good and rope burned some of my fingers. My head killed! and sleeping was sort of a challenge but luckily I have the best husband in the world who is so sweet! He was such a great help and didn't want to leave me at all, for fear that I would get hurt again or throw up or something...
Doc said to take it slow over the weekend, so I sat in a car for a couple of hours on the way to Jackson Hole. Brett's brother Brain biked the LOTOJA this weekend so the whole family took a trip over to support him. We had a really good time as a family. It was great to be able to support B, and spend time with the Petersen family. Overall, beside the head injury and the body aches from getting bucked off it was quite the pleasant weekend.

We really like being home and being able to cuddle our cute neices and nephew.

A Life Update

We have been home now for nearly 2 weeks and BOY! have those 2 weeks flown. It now seems like our perfect summer vacation to Alaska is merely a dream. We are back into the swing of things at life at home.
Our last 2 weeks in AK were crazy! Megan and Zach bought a house and we had to be out of their apartment by Aug 15. However, we didn't even move into the house until the Aug 19. So we stayed at a woman's house that meg worked with and stored most of their stuff at another woman's house in her garage. So we were spread out all over Juneau. We sure were glad that we were able to be there to help the Joneses with the move, especially with Megan being pregnant, she had to be careful with the cleaners that she used. Their house is a fixer-uper but it will look so great once it gets "Jonesed". We think of them often and hope things are coming along good with the pregnancy and the new house.
Before we left, Brett and I also found some time to hike to the Mendenhall Glacier as well as halibut fishing. The glacier was amazing! It's vastness and clarity left both of us in awe. We loved the ridges in the glacier from the ice melting off. It reminded us of a salt lick for cows but bigger and BLUE!



Our friends, that we met through Meg and Zach, Tracy and Ellis Day took us halibut fishing on the last day that we were in Juneau. We both caught "chickens" which are very small (about 20 lbs.) and Brett caught one that was about 45 lbs! We were able to get it home with us and boy do we love it! We can't wait to go back and catch some more! Watch out, here we come next summer! :)


Brett didn't seem to have too hard of a time saying goodbye to the people and the place but I sure did! I miss Juneau and I miss all of the people I worked with so much! Pictures are of me and the girls I worked with and Ray was my favorite cook!

Brett's whole family was waiting for us when we got off the plane. I was so good to be greeted by such great people. We love them all so much and were so glad to see them all again. The babies are HUGE! We couldn't believe that they could grow that fast.

Brett has finally decided that he is going to graduate in English - Technical Writing. It's a good springboard degree for anything else he'll want to do. He is taking 15 credits this semester and is finally really enjoying school. Whew!
As for me, I am taking 18 credits this semester and will graduate in the spring. Along with the joy of graduating also comes the fear of taking the GRE and applying to grad school. I have also had the privilege of being selected to be a peer counselor for Utah State, that means that I will have clients of my own that I work with to help solve some of their most basic problems, such as stress management and sleep management and so forth. And to add to my crazy schedule I am also going to help coach the Sky View Girls Soccer team(s) -Varsity and JV. Call me crazy but I think this semester is going to be a little crazy! I decided to help out with the soccer teams because Doyle Geddes (the head coach) is not expecting a ton from me and understands that I am busy but I needed some "me" time in all of this and soccer is the only thing that I could think of that I would enjoy the most.
We are glad to be home and back in the swing of regular life. We had a great summer and are looking forward to many more to come.