August and September

Whew! I would not recommend posting two months at once! Sorry in advance that this post is waaay long. But at this point I'm not going to take more time to separate them out!

August and September were rough and full of adjustments for sure. Collin started work the day after we moved here, and I was literally alone trying to find things to keep Ashlyn and I amused in a brand new place where I knew no one. But we were very blessed to have some visitors and get to go on a couple of trips ourselves! So we still had some fun. The weekdays were just looonggg!! :)

AUGUST

Ashlyn not only caught on to riding her trike (finally), but is now rocking the little bike as well! She clears off the back patio and rides around in circles for like, 30 minutes straight. 

We found a park in Jerome! No other kids to play with, but still. Ashlyn really likes to "flap her wings" when she swings. It's so cute.

It was SUPER rainy in August! Didn't help the depression factor of being freshly moved! I like this pic of these two longing to go outside.

I DID let her play in the rain a lot! It took a pretty hard downpour to bring her inside!

We took a trip over to Idaho Falls to see all my siblings (except Jodee) for a few days, about a week after we moved. It was fun to see the little girl cousins sort of play together (maybe next year, we keep saying every year!), and visit with everyone.

Ashlyn loving on Addy, she looks like a giant compared to her!

We went to the War Bonnet Roundup {Rodeo} with my parents! Randomly, we ran into my Aunt Jamee and Uncle Kerry while we were there so they sat with us too! We saw Aunt Elise and McKae there too but they had really close up seats. :) My whole life I have seen advertisements for it since it is the big rodeo they do there in I.F. but never had I been to it. This was my mom's very first rodeo ever! Somehow Collin and I have become rodeo lovers. Weird but true. I was realizing that we've been to a LOT of rodeos! What can I say, we love them! 

Anyway, the whole reason we were there was because my dad, famous city councilman, got paraded around the arena with the mayor and other city council members during the rodeo in a cool little wagon:

Yeah! go Dad! We loved cheering for him really loudly while he had a nice smirk on his face.

It was nice enough for Ashlyn and Grace to swim in the tiny pool one day! They didn't really play together but at least they didn't fight!

I love how Grace is like, "what do you think you're doing?" This little car stroller is always a hot commodity in my parents' backyard.

Unfortunately, the weather took a bad turn over the weekend, and our plans for going to Lava got scratched! We instead drove to Jackson Hole and endured  enjoyed a chilly lunch in the park there and then really did have fun swimming at their rec center. Ashlyn was super brave and went down the small slide alone once! And she went down the big slide with me about 10 times. Climbing up that rickety metal staircase...not my favorite. I had a death grip on her hand the whole way every time because I had all these visions of her slipping and falling through the space between the stairs to her death. I had to take deep breaths the whole way up! The things you do for your kid!
Here's some cute pictures from that trip:

Attempts at a grandkid photo are so great. 

Another fun thing we did in August was the Gooding County Fair! They have a pro rodeo there that is a big deal I guess. Anyway, we went out to the rodeo parade and it was seriously the best. Collin rode on a float with the GMS PTA and Ashlyn and I had a great time. Every single parade entry threw out candy. It was fun! She caught on to the candy gathering concept pretty quick, and luckily we were surrounded by nice families who made sure their older kids left some for Ashlyn to pick up. She left with a serious haul, which is now in Collin's "candy drawer" in his desk at school.

Yeah! Candy!

And also, I got some awesome action shots of her leaping for candy! She loves to jump, especially when she's excited!

I didn't get a good picture of Collin on his float because the entire time he was passing us by, we were SCREAMING his name to get his attention! He couldn't hear us! Ashlyn was getting really sad that he didn't notice us. He finally did when he was about this far away! Oh well. He looked great, just so you know.

We went back the next night for the Gooding Pro Rodeo! Oh yeah baby! The fair was cute, super small but had rides and animals and food and what more do you need? We let Ashlyn ride a ride by herself, she is tall enough!! She loved it.

Me and my Gooding cowboy

On to other random things from lately:

We found lunch at the park, in Twin! We went quite a few times before it ended. It was nice to go to a park that had kids, and Ashlyn made a few little friends. The lunch was hot lunch so she didn't like it, but I did! muah ha ha.

This is a definite perk of our new area, the beautiful Twin Falls temple. I love how you can see it as soon as you exit the freeway towards Twin. Collin and I have been trading off nights to go once a month and it is really great. 

Cooking with Mom! 

Potty training has been a b****!!!!!! We started the week after we moved here, which was the first week of August. And probably by now, the first week of October, I can pretty safely say Ashlyn is mostly potty trained. 2 MONTHS LATER! It was a very, very slow process. And even now still Ash has probably 4-5 accidents a week. But nevertheless, it's worth documenting. Ugh!

First day of school as principal!

Auntie came to visit for about 24 hours--we went swimming at the Y pool in Twin and watched the Lego movie and had lots of fun!

Nana also came to visit! She stayed for a couple of days and it was great to have her company. We ate at one of the 30 Mexican restaurants they have in Jerome, ha ha. Actually, while we were there eating, there was a HUGE hail storm, it ruined like, a lot of farmer's crops. Sad. It really was crazy. Such fast hard hail you couldn't really see out the window!

Luckily the next day was a little nicer and we went into Twin to walk along the canyon rim. 

Nana loves to read--and loves to read to Ashlyn! They spent a lot of time reading stories together. Ashlyn was in heaven of course.

Napping is super rare these days so it merited a picture. I especially love the underwear bum. I will miss that once she stops wetting her pants..... sort of...... she really does have the most delicious little bum!! ;)

This is something I spent a lot of time with during the month of August....crying into my Cowboy Bark....

Some of my hip decorations, I sent this pic to my actually hip friends that I try to copy.

Of all the mascots......

SEPTEMBER

I felt like we got super jipped out of nice weather in August! Thankfully September was mostly hot and nice. We went through a whole jumbo bucket of sidewalk chalk. Someone LOVES to color. 

Exhibit B on the loving to color... we were lucky and inherited the famous little table and chairs from Great Grandma Whittier, and there has not been a day gone by yet that Ashlyn hasn't spent a good chunk of it coloring at it.

"Look! I drew a ghost!" I about fell over. She really did! I don't think it was on purpose, but still......

Rockin the sneaks, especially nice with the no-pants look. She rarely wore pants at home in August. Or September. 

I usually have a summer tradition of a HP marathon while Collin's out at whichever wrestling trips/camps over the summer. Well since there weren't any this year and we moved and all, I still fit it in, and forced Collin to join me! He got into it. Oh I love this stuff. 

Ashlyn started gymnastics! I am a snob and signed her up at the "big nice" gym in Twin, even though it's like a 30 minute drive from us. There is a suuper podunk gymnastics place here in Jerome, actually. That was surprising to me. I think we might go there in the future..... maybe. But with the letdown of not being able to find a preschool I figured going to nice gymnastics is a-ok for this year. She looks like a rockstar in her little leotard (which she picked out herself), and she's learning better each week to listen to her teacher! (ahem)

And for informational purposes, here you can see the super fancy, awesome YMCA I work out at. No joke. There's not even a sign on the front door. They may also be home to a fight club, still not sure about that.

We have been doing our own little home preschool a couple of days a week. It's actually pretty fun. Ashlyn begs for it every day but I don't want to run out of ideas too quickly. We usually do some learning stuff like tracing, cutting, letters, numbers, etc., then an art project, then sometimes another fun activity like the library if the art project didn't take too long. Here she is painting her own little wooden letter "a", this was one of our fancier craft days!

This picture represents probably the worst day I had here. Everything was going wrong (case in point, this picture--curse you McDonalds!), Collin was having a tough time, and generally I was just feeling super depressed about our whole lives. I'm guessing you already read my blog post from this day!

We made a trip to Boise with Collin when he had a training. We stayed at the Hampton Inn right next to the Edwards on Overland. Sad to see that area is almost deserted as far as restaurants go, it used to be a hopping place! But it was still fun. Ash and I hung out with friends.... a lot! Somehow I have no pictures of that though. One of the best parts was when I got Ashlyn and me to the greenbelt for a run in the morning! I miss that greenbelt SO much. It was beautiful, hot weather while we were there, it was awesome! 

Typical reaction to trying to take a picture

Better!

We swam in the pool that night too of course. It was fun. The sleeping through the night however... didn't work out too well. Ashlyn was awake from about 2:00-4:00am, ugh! And I was just getting over a cold and didn't take NyQuil like I should have, so I didn't sleep well even besides the Ashlyn thing. Oh well. I did stay up late watching the Food Network and HGTV so the night wasn't a total bust!

My mom popped in for a visit right when we got home from Boise! I think she mostly felt bad for me that I was all sad and lonely. What a nice mom! Anyways, she always brings like, clothes, toys, and treats so it was kind of like Santa coming to visit! :)

We decided at the last second to hike the canyon instead of going to the cool YMCA. I'm SO glad we did! It was a beautiful day and a good workout, I carried Ashlyn in the backpack the whole way up and back, and it went fast because we chatted the whole time of course! Typical of our intelligence, we took a wrong turn on our way back down and didn't notice until we'd walked about half a mile in the wrong direction. Good grief!! So we ended up walking a whole 3 miles with that fun little detour added in. 

Another fun trip was to visit Tara! Collin and Ashlyn stayed at Morgan's house in Tremonton, and I headed down to Ogden for some sister time. It was fun. Well, maybe not the part where we watched Clue. ;) We shopped at City Creek, woot woot, and ate at Gourmandise. The. Best.

I canned some fruit! The peaches were a paaaiiiinnnnn. They wouldn't peel! It took forever! Later it dawned on me that they were nectarines! The lady I ordered them from gave me the wrong box! No wonder! So, they are super super sweet, being cooked in sugar syrup in addition to already being nectarines.

For Labor Day we met up with Morgan's family and Nana at Lava! It was sort of hot enough but also sort of not! We either stayed in the pool or froze outside of it. It was the last day outdoor Lava is open for the season and I see why! Ashlyn had a BLAST though. Her cousins all entertain and dote on her to no end. 

Also in September we celebrated our 9TH anniversary! We're still doing the alphabet thing, you better believe it! Although this year, obviously, our huge trip was INTERNATIONAL! Can't top that! We still did spoil ourselves though, by getting our first babysitter since we moved here, and going out on a real date! We ate at a restaurant, I forget the name, right on the rim of the Canyon with a really pretty view. Then got Icecream, and finished off by wandering around Fred Meyer for a while, finding something to buy cheap so we could get cash back to pay our babysitter. I feel this is appropriate for a 9 year anniversary. We ain't kids any more!

Cute cute cute, he had left me little treats with cute notes in random places that day. Too bad it was NO SUGAR week for me and Tara's fitness challenge! I ended up having icecream that night anyways so now I realize I should have just eaten the candy too.

And my final fun in September was yet another trip to Boise. This one was just me though! I went over for the IMTA State Conference. It was pretty much the best weekend I've had since we were in Europe! I got to attend nerdy pianist/piano teacher workshops for 2 days straight, catch up and shop talk with my Boise piano buddies, do some shopping on my own, stay at a buddy's house (thanks again, Lindsay!), and even attend the women's broadcast and go out with my besties! It was really the best. Maybe I will make it an annual tradition. 

THE END