At the first of September, we took a quick trip to Utah to visit Grandpa and Grandma James. It was great to get a little break before I started school again. We had a great trip! I went backpacking in the Uintas with Dave, Kevin, and Karen. We had a great time, including cliff-diving into a very cold lake. (Well, at least Dave and I went cliff diving. I couldn’t be outdone by my father-in-law, after all!) During the rest of the week, we had fun visiting with family, celebrating birthdays, playing in Scera Pool, and walking around beautiful BYU campus. As always, our trip was too short and we can’t wait to go back. Thanks to Grandpa and Grandma James for helping to pay our way and make this trip possible.

I didn’t. Oh yes I did!

No…no…I didn’t. I wish it were mine. I only held on for dear life while Kyle gave me a ride. This summer he replaced his old bike with this red Triumph. It’s SO pretty. It’s SO fast.

It was an awesome labor day weekend visiting my parents in Utah and catching up with family! I loved playing killer bunnies with Emmy, Kevin, Karen and Jas!  Someday Em you’ll have that baby and stop throwing up.  You looked and acted WAY better than I know you felt!  You’re my hero.

(Just in case my yw are reading – he always wears a helmet. Body leather too if he’s on the freeway.  We’re just posing for photos here.)

Oliver had an awesome idea to climb one of our trees. When he made it up, he asked me to take his picture.

The best part, though, is the ingenuity it took to get up in the tree. He came up with this system all on his own. I had to snap another photo to capture the “behind-the-scenes” ladder.

He is a pretty clever kid.

This is old news for most of you that read this blog, but I thought I would write this down for posterity’s sake. Around the end of June I was in a crazy bike accident. I was biking home from school at a little after 5 o’clock when a lady in a parked car opened her driver side door right in front of me. I had no time to react — I couldn’t swerve, or hit my breaks, or even blink. I instantly slammed into the inside of the door. I was going pretty fast (not quite full-steam, but almost) and the force of the impact bent the front fork of my bike and bent the door of the car back until it almost touched the hood of the car. As my bike hit the door, I flipped backward through the window of the door. The glass shattered as I crashed through it and I landed on my head on the other side. Miraculously, I was relatively unscathed. I was bleeding quite a bit, though, since a lot of the glass pieces from the window were shoved into my forearm as I skidded on the road.

The accident happened on Liberty street right in front of LAB coffee shop. A couple of workers from the coffee shop came out to see if I was okay. They brought me some ice water and a dish rag to help me stop the bleeding. Someone else brought out a first aid kit and got me the tweezers so I could pick the biggest chunks of glass out of my arm. While we waited for the police to show up, I had a few bystanders come and tell me that they couldn’t believe what they had seen. “That was awesome,” they said, “it looked like something right out of a movie!” It may look cool in movies, but it sure doesn’t feel very good!

When the police arrived, they ticketed the lady in the car for failure to yield to oncoming traffic. I felt bad for her; she was probably in her mid-seventies, and she kept saying, “I just didn’t look. I didn’t even see you there.” She looked even more shook up than I was. The police officer offered to call me an ambulance, but that seemed ridiculous so I declined. A nice girl who had seen everything happen and stayed around to be a witness offered to let me use her iphone to call Kay; she even told me not to worry about getting blood on it. Kay came and picked me up and then I went to an urgent care center to get checked over. They patched me up, gave me a tetanus shot, and sent me on my way.

I included these photos to show off my arm bandages. I healed up nicely, and now all I have left is a few faint scars on my arm. The lady’s insurance even paid for my bike – which I had actually inherited free from our landlord when we moved here – so in the end things worked out well. I feel very blessed; I was definitely watched over on that day. And now I have quite the story to emphasize to Oliver and Abby why we need to wear helmets!

One of our favorite nicknames for Abigail is Nibby Nabby. She is adorable!

The other night as I tucked her into bed, we had the following conversation:

Me: I love my Nibby Nabby.
Abby: I love my Nibby Dad.

When my parents were here in June, my Dad helped me build these grow boxes for our garden. I was excited for my first vegetable garden, and planted snap peas, zucchini, basil, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, and lettuce. Things got off to a nice start, and I was feeling pretty good.

Unfortunately, my beautiful plants have been long on foliage and short on fruit. The spinach bolted before I ever got more than one small salad. The lettuces are so bitter that we can’t eat them. The snap peas have produced maybe a couple of dozen peas, total. And my two pepper plants produce 1 pepper each. I don’t know if the problem is that it’s been too hot, too rainy, too shady, or if it’s just a clueless gardener.

My tomatoes and basil are doing swimmingly well, though. And my zucchini were looking fantastic, and staking them seemed to be a brilliant idea. We had grown about a half-dozen zucchini, but then we had a massive rain/wind storm come through that pushed over my stakes and snapped the stalks of 3 of my 4 plants. Maybe staking zucchini wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Kay made this awesome watermelon shark to take to a party that one of my friends from school was hosting. It was a hit! The kids all loved pretending that the shark was biting them as they got watermelon. (And yes, that is Oliver flailing on the floor in the background because we were taking too long to get in the car.)

Abby really loves watermelon. We tried to offer her a smaller piece, but she insisted on the “big” watermelon.