Provo City Half Marathon

Yesterday I ran the Provo City Half Marathon. I was really excited about this race, because up to this point, I've always felt like I trained one way, but then when it came to the race, I wasn't mentally tough enough to push myself as hard as I knew I could go. So finally, this race, I trained at the same pace that I actually ran. There are still, obviously, things that I can do better in the future-but this was a big step in the right direction. I feel reenergized! 

 I enjoyed the course. (It helps when most of it was downhill or flat.) We mostly ran down the Provo River trail, and it was really pretty. The only bugger was that the last 3 or 4 miles was a straightaway down University Avenue staring at the finish line for what seemed like FOREVER! 

 This is about .1 mile from the finish line. It's crazy how you can be so dead and suddenly get a burst of energy that lets you sprint to the finish line. Just shows you how powerful your mind is!

 My mom said that she tried so hard to get me crossing the finish line, but some guy got in the way! It's the thought that counts right? My official time was 1:53:43. So that's an average of 8.41 per mile. I cut 17 minutes off of my previous half marathon! 


Josh is expecting me to cut another 17 minutes off my next one-in a month. Someone please explain to him that it doesn't typically work that way.

 My parents were nice enough to come support me at the finish line. Josh's nephew got baptized the same day, so he wasn't able to come (seeing as how the baptism is a once-in-a-lifetime event.)

Also, thank you to my sister and her family who let me stay at their house. Even staying in Spanish Fork, I had to wake up at 3:45, and I don't even want to think about how much earlier that would have been had I driven from home. I didn't sleep much the night before (no fault of Bethany's). I think optimistically, I may have slept for 15 minutes... total...all night. I don't know if it was nerves, the wind, or just the fact that I kept thinking to myself "Go to sleep...now. Okay...now...for real...now..." But it all worked out in the end.


I'm so grateful to everyone who helps and supports me in my running. Sometimes I feel like it's a full-time job for everyone involved. 

Everyone wish me luck in the next couple months of my training! I'm gonna need it!

18 Month Pictures

Here is our beautiful girl at 18 months! Oh, we love her! (Even though she's gotten too big too fast)

 This is the dress that I got her for Easter. She totally didn't need another dress, but it's tradition, and Josh seemed to really like it, so I couldn't take it back.

 At the photo shoot, I tried to do 2 different outfits. Lesson learned. Meili is only good for one outfit at this stage in her life. So this is the only decent one we got in the yellow. To me, this picture makes her look so old. It looks like this is her kindergarten school picture-maybe it's the blue background.

What a sweetheart!

At 18 months, Meili's obsession for babies is growing daily. She sleeps with 3 babies every night, she is drawn to dolls everywhere she goes, and if there is a book with a baby in it-no matter how insignificant that baby seems to me, she will find the baby, memorize the page, and demand that we read that book everyday.

She is trying to mimic sounds more and more, and seems to learn a new word everyday. My favorite right now is Roo-like Kango and Roo in Winnie the Pooh.

Her teeth have finally started filling in, and they seem to be growing like crazy. I've lost count, but I would say she has about 10 teeth.

I think she's becoming more familiar with family members. I feel like if I say their names she knows, somewhat, who I'm talking about, and likes playing with her cousins. But she definitely likes her grandmas and grandpas best!


At her 18 month appointment Meili weighed 20.81 lbs (finally big enough for a forward facing carseat, but we will probably wait a little longer anyway.)- which is the 6th percentile. And she is 33 inches-the 86th percentile.

18 Months

These pictures are a little random but my Mom worked really hard to crochet these little shoes for Meili and some of the other nieces, so I had to get a picture of them because they are so cute! Since Meili has decided that it's necessary for her to be in shoes from morning to night, these have come in handy, because she can wear them as slippers instead of wearing shoe-shoes all the time. Win Win!

 Only problem is... she can take them off really easily.

 She's to the age where every time I try to take a picture of her, she tries to play with the camera. What a stinker!!!

And the story of the shirt...
Josh came home one day with 3 shirts and said that he got them at Walmart for $2 a piece. He was so proud of his purchase, but I couldn't lie... this shirt is... how do I say it... not my favorite... maybe a little... ugly... maybe I was afraid it would give Meili nightmares. He thought for sure that she would like it because she loves dogs. I said, that I wasn't even sure that she would be able to tell it was a dog-especially from her perspective, which would be upside down. 


I told Josh that I appreciated his purchases, but she probably wouldn't ever wear this particular shirt out of the house. He said that we could cut off the bow, if I wanted. I told him that the bow isn't the problem. 


Well, one day, that I knew I was going to be in sweats all day, I decided that there was no harm in letting her wear the dog shirt. So I got it out, showed her the dog, and put it on her. Meili couldn't get enough of that dog. All day long, out of the blue, she would point to her shirt and say, "dog!" 


What can I say, she is her father's daughter-clothing is not about fashion it is about making a statement. Josh's statements are usually along the lines of "I like the Yankees" or "I feel good in sweats." Meili's statement today is "I like dogs. All dogs. And I don't care who knows it."

Happy Easter!

Meili got the chance to do 3 different Easter egg hunts, and became quite the pro this year. I posted a picture of my parents' Easter egg hunt last month. These pictures are from Josh's family's hunt. They were nice enough to let the really young kids go outside before the older kids. They also hid the eggs really well-sitting right on the lawn in plain sight! Even in plain sight, we had to work with Meili a little bit for her to find them. But by the 3rd hunt-at our house, and with no competition, she got the hang of it.     

Look at her bucket full!

 Like many kids, as soon as she found an egg, she wanted to get the treats out!

 We celebrated Easter at our house after church. In our house, the Easter bunny brings somewhat religious gifts, along with the candy. So Meili got a quiet book for church, that I was really excited about. The words in the book are "I Am a Child of God," and "Families Can Be Together Forever," and includes pictures in it of everyone on both sides of our immediate family. I'm hoping it will help her learn everyone's name. It also has pictures of the temple, prophets, and Jesus. She's still pretty vain and finds all the pictures of herself and says "baby!" or "Mei Me!" 

 Love this picture! (Especially because Josh looks so bored in the background!)

 What would Easter be without blue Robin's eggs lips!

Hope you all had a great Easter too!

17 Months

I don't know if it's just the fact that I've been home more with Meili this month, or if it is an age thing, but Josh and I say so many times every day that we can't believe how smart she is. Not that I'm bragging that my child is smarter than everyone else's (even though there is that possibility :), I just think that around this age kids start picking up so much and learning so many new things everyday.


I love that when Meili and I talk now, we both can understand most of what the other is saying. Meili now knows...
-When I say we're going to read books, she goes upstairs and starts picking one out
-When the garage door opens, my phone rings, or I get a text, she says, "Daddy!"
-She knows that we need to pray before we eat and she folds her arms
-She dances when there is music
-She understands when I say that we're going upstairs, downstairs, or outside
-When I tell her to put on her socks and shoes, she can do most of the work herself
-My favorite...When I ask Meili her name she says, "Mei-Me."


These are the words that Meili can say (that I can think of off the top of my head):
Momma, Daddy, dog, nana (banana), book, bubbles, bird, ball, outside, shoe, baby, no, juice, and Amen. But most often she just points and things and says something that sounds like, "What's that?"


And our quest for good pictures continues... These are the best of the month.

The second Meili wakes up, she believes that she needs to be wearing shoes. However, these jellies that Josh got her, terrified her from the moment she saw them. Luckily, she got over it after a few days of coercing-because they're so cute!


If Meili could live outside, she would-which I am fine with because I love being outside too. She doesn't care what she's doing, if it's cold, or if it's windy like this day-she loves it!

We spent a weekend at my parents' house, and they had an easter egg hunt for the kids. It was such a fun experience for me, no matter how short-lived it was.

I asked her to say "cheese" and she yelled at me.

For my 27th birthday, I taught my first class at my new job, so the percentage of the day that I even remembered that it was my birthday was less than 1%. When I got home, Josh had made me a cake :) I didn't even notice, but he pointed out that the orange rolls are in the shape of an M-for Mommy.

Loved spending my birthday (even though it was only about an hour) with these 2! Thank you both!

What is this?

This is YEARS of hard work.

This is one of my proudest moments.

This is not perfect.

This is boring for most of you.

This seemed like an insurmountable task just a few short years ago.

This shows that I have some kind of scrapbook for my entire life from Jr. High to now. I am caught up!

The reason that I am making such a big deal of this is because…

A few years after Josh and I got married, I started getting down on myself, and thought, “Well I guess I will just never have a scrapbook for High School, College, or the first few years of our married lives. Because I’m sure as soon as I start having kids, I will want to do their scrapbooks and not work on my high school stuff.” So I kind of gave up. I had a scrapbook from Jr. High, and had done a few pages of dances that I went to in High School. Then I did our wedding scrapbook (which was 50 12x12 pages-no wonder I was so behind.)

Then I did a scrapbook for Josh’s football career. (There’s a story for that too. I started getting really down about Utah State football, and I hated some of the things that I heard people saying about the team and the players, so I wanted to do a scrapbook so that our kids could know that Josh worked really hard, and that the Win/Loss column didn’t really show the whole story. So I had to do it quick, while I still had memories about the good stuff.)

I was able to throw a college scrapbook together really fast. But then I was burned out, and started on High School, but just didn't like how it was going etc.

Then, there was Blurb....

Which has changed my life. I think I will try a different Digital scrapbooking program now just to see the difference, but I like that I'm familiar with Blurb, and their backgrounds are cute but not too-super busy or "scrapbooky" looking.

Here are some pictures-which will probably go down in history as the least exciting pictures in all of blog history-because they are pictures of pictures. But I am just so proud. And hope that someone who reads this, will see for themselves that they too could have this joyous feeling of being caught up!! And it's kind of fun to see how my style and technology have changed just in the last 10 years.

This is my Jr. High book, which for the most part, I did in Jr. High and High School.

Every single one of those letters I traced with a stencil, and cut out. Then traced out the little holes (in the E's and A's) and glued them on top. I also cut the frames for the pictures out by hand (GASP).

High School

Another High School-thank goodness for Cricuts, eh?

College-(Never mind the boy that's in most of the pictures. I just liked how these pages turned out. And in my defense, he was my boyfriend for a little while-but one of my best friends for much longer.)

Wedding. When we got married I told myself that I would never scrapbook it, because I wanted it to be perfect and knew that it never would be. But I did. And it is anything but perfect. But it probably took the most blood, sweat and tears of any of them.

Josh's football scrapbook is probably my favorite of the "real" scrapbooks-and it's a good thing, because he's probably looked at it...once.

About a year ago, my friend told me about a really good deal that they were having on Walgreens.com. So I did this one-the first year of our marriage-in about a day. And I can't remember, but I think it cost $7. But that was when I finally realized that I could probably get caught up.

Their program was definitely not my favorite and there wasn't a ton of customizing that you could do, but for a first, it will be just fine.

2008: So now I'm going to try to do one a year, and I think that will probably be manageable, especially if I continue my blog.

This one came by FedEx today, and is what prompted this blog. I was telling Josh yesterday, that I can't believe how excited I am for my books to come in the mail. It's not like it's going to be much of a surprise-I've looked at it a billion times on the computer and when I get them, they will just sit in the basement for years to come. But I do get so excited. I submitted this book last week, and the next day started watching my front door. Hey, you never know. Maybe the Blurb company will decide to print my book in the middle of the night, and ship it in less than a day even though I paid for standard shipping.

And, of course, this is my favorite one of any. Maybe that's because the baby in it is so cute!!!

For anyone who is thinking about digital scrapbooking, and has done the "old-school" scrapbooking-here's my sales pitch.

It usually takes me about an hour to scrapbook one page-the old fashioned way. Which, if you think about my wedding scrapbook that was AT LEAST 50 hours (and I can tell you that it was so far over that it's sickening.) And, like I said, that entire 2007 book took me about a day and all the other ones, I worked at for an hour or 2 at night for a couple weeks-maybe. (However, it does make it easier when you keep up on a blog.)

The 8x10 book that I got today-cost $40 with shipping. Meili's that is 12x12 was about $80 and it has about 50 pages. So if you compare cost: digital vs. "old school" it's not even close. My wedding scrapbook and Meili's first year have about the same number of pictures in them. And I remember it cost us about $40 just to get all the pictures developed for our wedding. So then when you add in the cost of the book, pages, page protectors, glue, stickers, brads, etc. etc. it's a pretty expensive hobby.

The last added bonus is that if you look at that stack of books at the top-that's a lot of space that they are taking up on a bookshelf in our basement. So if I kept up with that, I don't know where I would store them all, and don't really want to store them on a bookshelf in case of a fire or flood. So the digital scrapbooks take up much less space.

(However, I do still have lots of scrapbook supplies and money invested in it, so I'm sure I will do a few more the "old school" way.)

Whew...I'm long-winded...

With all that being said, and in the spirit of full-disclosure, I should mention that my High School one isn't REALLY all done. I have like 10 pages left-but you have to give me a break because High School is 2 GIANT books for me.

Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, I will say that almost everyday I come across a picture or a ticket stub that I wish was in one of my scrapbooks, but it isn't, so I'm sure I will make a "MISCELLANEOUS CRAP I FOUND" scrapbook one day as well.

Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, I would like to mention that my Jr. High, High School, and College scrapbooks have next-to-nothing about my family in them which is kind of a big chunk of my life missing. So I will probably have to do a "FAMILY ONLY" scrapbook someday.

Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, I haven't scrapbooked any races that I've run, because I decided that no one will ever care about any of that besides me, so I am going to do a scrapbook all about running.

So, moral of the story, is that I am not even close to being caught up, but for today, this is a good feeling.

Good-bye!

I had a little good-bye breakfast with some of my friends from work to celebrate me leaving. They told me that they did not want to see these pictures on my blog-so I told them not to look at my blog :)

It's sad how few pictures I have from work, when I worked with these people for 20-40 hours for the last 4 years. Most weeks, I felt like I saw them more than Josh.

Elaine and Julie

Hilary, Leigh, and Jillian

Jen and Laura

I will miss you all! But I will visit lots!