New Specs

Erik, the eye glass lover, has new glasses! I thought I would show them off to you all. Here he is being very enthusiastic about his new glasses. Notice that they are not rimmed glasses!

He has never had glasses that go straight back, so it is a little weird for him. He likes them and I think they look great on him.

PS. I wanted to thank Nana and Dada for their birthday card. Sorry I am so slow. Also thanks Uncle Bill for the birthday card that got to me exactly a month before my birthday :)

New Bicycle!

This summer I had been saving up my money in order to buy a better transportation then what I currently have.  I was debating between a scooter or a road bicycle.  While I was thinking this through a scooter just didn't make that much sense.  If when I get to the student teaching part of my major I will need to get to the school that they will assign me to.  Well there is a possibility, a good possibility that where they assign me will be out of scooter range.  This to me made a scooter impractical.  So I decided and went ahead with buying a road bike.  I tried out several of them and finally settled on one.  I bought a 2008 Raleigh Grand Sport.  It is a gorgeous bicycle and one that will last me several years.  In other news I'm doing good.  A few weeks ago I went into the doctor's office and told them that I was not feeling as well as I should.  He ordered me to have a CT scan.  After waiting far too long, I finally got the results back.  It turns out that I had a fair amount of inflammation in my ileum (the ileum is where the small intestine meets the large intestine).  Luck for me I did not have anything which would cause me to have to undergo surgery.  The doctors once getting my results from my CT decided to double my dose of remicade (it used to be 5mg per Kg).  I went to the doctor's office again today and well I still am not feeling my best.  The doctor said the remicade is not a failure yet but has put me on Entocort (it's a steroid) to try and help me until the remicade can kick into full effect.  Anyways I thought people might be interested in knowing what has been going on in my life. 

Update from Aurora.

Hello Family,
Colette I love your posts! Thanks so much for keeping us all up to date with you and Erik, it makes the miles between us much closer, and … you motivate me to post a blog too!

I can't believe that summer is almost over for me. I report back to school Monday, August 18th. I've had a busy summer: I subbed for summer school for two weeks, spend a week taking a grad class, attended several one day trainings with my school district, enjoyed reading a lot of wonderful books, and sewed a bit. The girls and I have also enjoyed visiting the pool and volunteering at Feed Me Starving Children. But as I look towards the last two weeks of freedom I have mixed feelings as I'm excited about returning to the classroom, but there is always so much more I perhaps should have done, but haven't and probably won't. I guess that's life.

News with Kristen is that she is now employed at Loehman's. It's a store like TJ Max, but it's merchandise is more upscale. She has been training in Oak Brook for the past two weeks, which has been hard, but since it's on Lee's way to work he has been driving her and bringing her home. They are opening a new store about 1/2 mile from our home and thankfully has begun working there this week as they are loading the store for the grand opening this weekend.

We have a couple of pictures to share with everyone. First, we want to share Katie's first cucumber! She has planted several container gardens on our patio and this beauty was her first harvest. We ate it that night and it was delicious.


Some of her other plants include cherry tomatoes, tomatoes, and zucchini. We have enjoyed several zucchini and she also makes a mean zucchini bread with her delicious zucchini's. YUM!


One day last week Katie and I went to Color Me Mine where she enjoyed painting this lovely trivet.

Here's the final product.

Well hope all is well with the rest of the family. If you need help blogging, just let me know.

Love,
Joey

Birthday, Vacation, and Car Talk!

Erik skillfully cutting my cake up for my birthday. He baked it himself! He did a great job, it was delicious. 
Here is what Erik was creating with my cake. He has done this every year since we have started dating! 
Erik put 25 candles on the cake, I am only 23. How rude. I couldn't do it in one blow, because of the massiveness of the cake. 
YAY! A bread machine. It doesn't only cook the bread, it kneads it too. (Erik didn't know that!)
The day after my birthday we packed up to enjoy a weekend in Burley. We had a great time. We played on a really large slip and slide on Saturday, but because I was playing I didn't take any pictures. This picture is of Coral. I asked her to smile for the camera, but she wouldn't. So she got this ball to smile for her. 
Carson, who is now 1, and Cooper showing us their musical abilities. It was great to see them both and I can't believe how much they are growing. 
We had a birthday party for me and dad and all those August birthdays (Carson, Talia, Abbigail, Cooper, Quinn, etc...) Those are Jon's arms. He and Quinn, Wendy, Jacey, Parker and Paige were there and of course Grandma and Grandpa. 
Here is our birthday cake. Nate baked it. It was great and it took a lot of time.
Monday, the last day we were in Burley we went to Shoshone Falls. 
We had a picnic down at the falls with stuff we bought at Costco. 

We went to the falls, after we went to the Twin Falls Temple open house. The temple is beautiful and Mom and Dad were ushers and showed us were to go. 

Here is Mt. St. Helens. We went there for a field trip with work. It took about 4 hours to get there on a big, yellow, school bus. So that is not actually St. Helens, it is a replica. That is what it looked like after the eruption. 

This is what we saw...BOO. We saw clouds and rain and no Mt. St. Helens. Poor kids were sad (I think) I know I was sad. You can see the mud were the water ran off and that is about it. So basically we rode 4 hours to see some clouds, a movie about the eruption in the visit center, and the kids played on a different playground. Oh well. I will just have to go back when it is not cloudy. 
Saturday I did something that I have never done...wax a car. Here is Erik demonstrating the proper wax on technique. 

Here is the car all waxed. Erik is admiring his work. Oh and my work. 

Wax off. Notice the difference between the two sides? So that is what we did this weekend. It was a lot of work good thing Erik did most of it.  Oh and a bird pooped on it at church today. RUDE!!