Emily and I have many things to report (not the least of which is a trip down to Dallas where we stayed with my brother Adam and his family, saw Emily's brother Mark and his family, and ATTENDED BYU'S VICTORY OVER OKLAHOMA), but until we make the time for an epic post, here's a video of Lizzie climbing stairs.
Having closed the MI chapter of our lives, where we met, fell in love, and survived graduate school together, we are now on to being professors in ID. While we enjoy teaching, our lives revolve around each other and our kids: Lizzie & Kit.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Vacation!
Joe and I have been working pretty hard this summer and have both been looking forward to a much needed vacation. Joe has been working days at the writing center and nights working on an e-book he and his adviser are putting together. Since my online course has been over, I have been taking care of Lizzie and helping with renovations in the apartment complex where we live. Vacation started August 5. We flew in to SLC and went to Orem to spend a week with Joe's parents. Lizzie did very well on the flights there, sleeping some and playing some and whining just a little. Here are some highlights from that part of our trip:
Emily gets a drastic change in her hairdo:
Lizzie meet lots of family:
We took Lizzie swimming:
Thanksgiving Point
The mountains! Oh the mountains! (And a beautiful Y.)
On August 12, we headed to Idaho. On the way, we stopped in SLC to visit the new Church History Library where Joe's parents work. We also walked around Temple Square to show Lizzie that beautiful edifice.
Here are some highlights from our time in Idaho.
Giving my mom a quilt that I made for her
Playing games with Mama Swen and my niece Amy
Joe did not get to stay long in Idaho. He had to go back down to Utah on the 14 and then fly out on the 15 (Saturday). He had to work the following Monday. The great news is that in the morning before his flight, he went to a comic book signing with Chris Claremont who in the past wrote for the X-men for 15 years. Considering Joe is writing his dissertation on the X-men, this was a great opportunity to create a potential network for future contacts.
After Joe left, Lizzie and I stayed a few more days in Idaho.
More family came in to town.
I spent some time with some great friends. We all had babies within 3 months of each other: Lizzie, Macey, and Hayden. Lizzie is the oldest.
Although I don't know that I'll ever live in a town as small as Paul, Idaho again, I still love going back home and feeling the peace of a quiet countryside. You just don't get many better views of the Magic Valley than from my mom's front yard.
All in all, we had a great time. We love our family and spending time with them. We're sorry it was so short! This was our first vacation with Lizzie. Although we realize that once a parent, always a parent, even when on vacation, we had hoped that vacation would mean more sleeping in and taking naps. Maybe next time.....
Emily gets a drastic change in her hairdo:
Lizzie meet lots of family:
We took Lizzie swimming:
Thanksgiving Point
The mountains! Oh the mountains! (And a beautiful Y.)
On August 12, we headed to Idaho. On the way, we stopped in SLC to visit the new Church History Library where Joe's parents work. We also walked around Temple Square to show Lizzie that beautiful edifice.
Here are some highlights from our time in Idaho.
Giving my mom a quilt that I made for her
Playing games with Mama Swen and my niece Amy
Joe did not get to stay long in Idaho. He had to go back down to Utah on the 14 and then fly out on the 15 (Saturday). He had to work the following Monday. The great news is that in the morning before his flight, he went to a comic book signing with Chris Claremont who in the past wrote for the X-men for 15 years. Considering Joe is writing his dissertation on the X-men, this was a great opportunity to create a potential network for future contacts.
After Joe left, Lizzie and I stayed a few more days in Idaho.
More family came in to town.
I spent some time with some great friends. We all had babies within 3 months of each other: Lizzie, Macey, and Hayden. Lizzie is the oldest.
Although I don't know that I'll ever live in a town as small as Paul, Idaho again, I still love going back home and feeling the peace of a quiet countryside. You just don't get many better views of the Magic Valley than from my mom's front yard.
All in all, we had a great time. We love our family and spending time with them. We're sorry it was so short! This was our first vacation with Lizzie. Although we realize that once a parent, always a parent, even when on vacation, we had hoped that vacation would mean more sleeping in and taking naps. Maybe next time.....
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Nauvoo trip
On July 7th and 8th Emily and I found ourselves down in Nauvoo, Illinois. We had a few reasons for making our way there, which I'll recount here:
1) Nauvoo is a Mormon church history site that I had never visited, and Emily had only been to once. While we're here in Michigan we're in reasonably close proximity to several church history sites, and we haven't taken as good advantage of this situation as we probably should have.
2) Emily's mom and her brother Scott and his family were going to be in Nauvoo at those dates, so we could see some of her family and they could meet Lizzie for the first time. They also have a son we had not seen who is a few months older than Lizzie.
3) We needed to steal Emily's mom's car, and this seemed like as good a chance as any we were likely to get. You see, come September Emily's mom will be coming out to live near us for a few months (really, really near to us, in the same apartment complex). She's going to help us out as we are both beginning our dissertations. She'll watch Lizzie some every day so both Emily and I can get several quality hours of school work done. This will be a huge blessing for us, as we both need the time to get a good initial push into this final stage of our PhD programs. While she is here, she needs to have a car. There were several options for her to get her car out here, but in the end this trip to Nauvoo seemed to be the best choice. She drove out with her car loaded with some belongings, we met her in Nauvoo and drove her car back to Michigan, and she rode back to Idaho with Scott and his family. Emily and I aren't really certain how we can repay her mom for the generosity of coming out here, but we are really thankful that she's doing this for us.
So, with those reasons for going to Nauvoo, we finally made a trip there. Emily, Lizzie, and I rode on a train to Chicago, then to a city that is only a few minutes outside of Nauvoo. This was our first trip with Lizzie, and the train was a pretty low stress way to travel (we're flying back to Utah this week, so that will be a different experience). The seats were quite spacious, and when Lizzie got fussy I was able to walk up and down the aisles with her. Also, she was interested in the scenery flying by:
Here's Lizzie in Chicago holding up a couple skyscrapers:
And here we are in front of the Nauvoo temple:
Lizzie, Emily, and her mom in front of a statue of Joseph and Hyrum Smith:
This is the room above The Red Brick Store where many early church meetings took place:
We walked around the city, which is right on the Mississippi River:
People often note that Lizzie has some big blue eyes, and this picture shows them off a bit:
Not only did we visit Nauvoo, we also visited Carthage, Illinois before coming back to Michigan. Carthage is where Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were martyred:
1) Nauvoo is a Mormon church history site that I had never visited, and Emily had only been to once. While we're here in Michigan we're in reasonably close proximity to several church history sites, and we haven't taken as good advantage of this situation as we probably should have.
2) Emily's mom and her brother Scott and his family were going to be in Nauvoo at those dates, so we could see some of her family and they could meet Lizzie for the first time. They also have a son we had not seen who is a few months older than Lizzie.
3) We needed to steal Emily's mom's car, and this seemed like as good a chance as any we were likely to get. You see, come September Emily's mom will be coming out to live near us for a few months (really, really near to us, in the same apartment complex). She's going to help us out as we are both beginning our dissertations. She'll watch Lizzie some every day so both Emily and I can get several quality hours of school work done. This will be a huge blessing for us, as we both need the time to get a good initial push into this final stage of our PhD programs. While she is here, she needs to have a car. There were several options for her to get her car out here, but in the end this trip to Nauvoo seemed to be the best choice. She drove out with her car loaded with some belongings, we met her in Nauvoo and drove her car back to Michigan, and she rode back to Idaho with Scott and his family. Emily and I aren't really certain how we can repay her mom for the generosity of coming out here, but we are really thankful that she's doing this for us.
So, with those reasons for going to Nauvoo, we finally made a trip there. Emily, Lizzie, and I rode on a train to Chicago, then to a city that is only a few minutes outside of Nauvoo. This was our first trip with Lizzie, and the train was a pretty low stress way to travel (we're flying back to Utah this week, so that will be a different experience). The seats were quite spacious, and when Lizzie got fussy I was able to walk up and down the aisles with her. Also, she was interested in the scenery flying by:
Here's Lizzie in Chicago holding up a couple skyscrapers:
And here we are in front of the Nauvoo temple:
Lizzie, Emily, and her mom in front of a statue of Joseph and Hyrum Smith:
This is the room above The Red Brick Store where many early church meetings took place:
We walked around the city, which is right on the Mississippi River:
People often note that Lizzie has some big blue eyes, and this picture shows them off a bit:
Not only did we visit Nauvoo, we also visited Carthage, Illinois before coming back to Michigan. Carthage is where Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were martyred:
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Thursday, July 16, 2009
4th of July Cakes
Joe's family (which includes Emily) are all big fans of the Food Network. Early on the week of July 4th Joe casually challenged his little sister, Kate, to a 4th of July themed cake decorating contest. Next thing we knew, members of Joe's family from Virginia to Utah to Hawaii had tossed their hats into the ring and wanted to participate in the contest. Now, none of us really know what we're doing. Most of our training comes from watching Ace of Cakes on the Food Network. But we thought this could be fun.
In the end Kate got sick a day before the 4th, so she wasn't able to make a cake (though she insists she would have won if she had). We ended up with entries from Joe and Emily, Joe's brother Alex, his brother Andrew, his mom, and his Aunt Beth.
The guidelines were that it had to be flag themed, you could only use two cake boxes, and you could work on it as much as you wanted in a 24 hour window from when you started (there were enough time zones involved that it was difficult to lock down an official start time that wasn't insanely early or late for one of the participants). We learned from this year's endeavor that if we do this in the future we may want to have separate categories for those who work in fondant, and those who work with frosting. The cakes just look wildly different depending on what was used.
Here are the frosted entries, from Joe's Mom (the first official U.S. flag) and his brother Alex (an inversion of the Confederate flag (an intriguing choice for the 4th of July, but he does live in Virginia)):
And here are the fondanted cakes from Joe's brother Andrew (a liberty bell and flag) and his Aunt Beth (a flag themed 3D cake):
Joe had in mind using the Gadsden flag for the basis of his cake. The Gadsden flag is from back in the colonial days of yore and looks like this:
It was hard to ration out the two cake mix boxes appropriately to be able to build a three dimensional coiled snake with 3 coils, but in the end it worked out alright. Joe baked the cakes and carved them, and Emily helped with putting the fondant onto it:
Several members of the family who had not made any cakes helped to judge, but in the end Joe and Beth's cakes were tied for first place. So Joe's neice Sophia (4 years old) was called on in as a tiebreaker. She had to say which she liked better, and she chose the one with the snake on it. So Joe won the first 4th of July cake decorating contest in his family.
In the end Kate got sick a day before the 4th, so she wasn't able to make a cake (though she insists she would have won if she had). We ended up with entries from Joe and Emily, Joe's brother Alex, his brother Andrew, his mom, and his Aunt Beth.
The guidelines were that it had to be flag themed, you could only use two cake boxes, and you could work on it as much as you wanted in a 24 hour window from when you started (there were enough time zones involved that it was difficult to lock down an official start time that wasn't insanely early or late for one of the participants). We learned from this year's endeavor that if we do this in the future we may want to have separate categories for those who work in fondant, and those who work with frosting. The cakes just look wildly different depending on what was used.
Here are the frosted entries, from Joe's Mom (the first official U.S. flag) and his brother Alex (an inversion of the Confederate flag (an intriguing choice for the 4th of July, but he does live in Virginia)):
And here are the fondanted cakes from Joe's brother Andrew (a liberty bell and flag) and his Aunt Beth (a flag themed 3D cake):
Joe had in mind using the Gadsden flag for the basis of his cake. The Gadsden flag is from back in the colonial days of yore and looks like this:
It was hard to ration out the two cake mix boxes appropriately to be able to build a three dimensional coiled snake with 3 coils, but in the end it worked out alright. Joe baked the cakes and carved them, and Emily helped with putting the fondant onto it:
Several members of the family who had not made any cakes helped to judge, but in the end Joe and Beth's cakes were tied for first place. So Joe's neice Sophia (4 years old) was called on in as a tiebreaker. She had to say which she liked better, and she chose the one with the snake on it. So Joe won the first 4th of July cake decorating contest in his family.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Not quite mastering the concept
Last week we took the train down to Nauvoo (a more detailed post is imminent), and whilst traveling we let Lizzie sip a little water from a cup. She's done this before, and usually had fine results. For whatever reason, this time she stopped sipping and started blowing raspberries into the water. I'm confident that this is a sign that she's sure to be a milk-bubble-blower.
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