Lake Powell

We went to Lake Powell with my family over Memorial Day weekend. We finally packed up our car for TX on Thursday, but we split up the drive a bit by staying at Lake Powell Fri-Tues.  It was fun seeing them again before we headed off to TX. It was actually pretty cold at LP, but we still had a great time being with the family and were very glad we were able to go to the lake once this summer before the baby comes. We played a lot of games, watched movies and soaked up the sun while it was out. Sadly I don't have too many pictures except from this one boat ride when I actually had the camera.

 

Sadly Zak was on the houseboat this ride, so he wasn't in the picture.  I'm embarrassed to say that Zak and I were wimps and avoided the water... because it was freezing cold. My brothers had wet suits though, so that's why all the pictures are of them and their sweet tricks. :)  The pictures don't do them justice though, it was way cooler watching them do the jumps, flips and tantrums live!!

                               My little brother Spencer

 

                                      Spencer's friend Cason

  

                                My older brother Christian

 

                                The goofs chillin on the boat

   

                                The boys going off a slide

K, I really need to figure out how to do a slide show or a picture collage so the posts aren't so long.  Is it easy, anyone know how?  So after Lake Powell,  on Tuesday morning we continued our drive to Texas (17 more hours- YUCK!!)...pictures from our first few days here will follow shortly.

Almost time

We are super crazy busy right now trying to get everything done before we leave to Texas, so it feels like I don't have time to post, but alas. The most pressing--and depressing--part of the move is trying to figure out what we just can't live without while down there and what we can leave here. We are going to try and stuff everything into my car, so we'll see how that goes...I am guessing it will feel something like the following:

That's actually pretty sweet, I wouldn't mind having a few llamas in our car, just to keep things lively. Speaking of keeping things lively, does anybody know how to do live-blogging with blogspot? I need to get it figured out before the baby comes so you can all have some sweet live footage of the blessed event.

Sleeping habits

We are down in St. George for a few days and on Saturday Sharla, Allie, and Bree came to visit at my parents. Several of us were in the kitchen and Sharla called us all into the family room: "guys, you've gotta come see this." So we all went in to see what the deal was and saw this:

This is totally real and Allie is totally asleep. It looks like she was shot dead and left to hang upside down. It was hilarious.

BTW - For you bloggers out there who happen to use Windows, you should check out Windows Live Writer to help you with your posts. It's pretty slick.

Girl's Weekend

Every year the Muir girls (Zak's mom's side of the family) get together for a girls weekend. Usually we do it in Salt Lake or in St. George, but every once in awhile we do fancy ones like 2 years ago in New York City or this one 2 weeks ago in Las Vegas. We always have lots of fun shopping, visiting, eating and just hanging out, they also threw a baby shower for me while we were there. We stayed in a fancy suite at the new Palazzo hotel and we had a blast! Thanks girls for the fun weekend!!

Shopping at Town Square.

The Palazzo Hotel

Outside the Wynn, just before dinner on our last night.

Regime Change

As you may (or may not) have noticed, there are some changes on the blog. First, and most noticeable is that Kate has posted something. Give yourself 2 points if you thought to yourself: "Hey, this post is before Kate's post, that doesn't make sense!" It's just a little backdating I learned from ol' Stevie J. Second, is that the look of the site has changed. Kate has wanted to change the look for a while. As the primary poster, I exercised executive privilege and vetoed the proposal because she wanted girly stuff. Well, as you may have surmised by now, Kate is taking charge of the blog and will now assume primary poster status. As such, you can hold her accountable for any posting lapses longer than one week.

If for some odd reason you find my style of writing entertaining, informative, or otherwise worthwhile, I can be found at my new site: If for some reason you feel compelled to visit my new corner on the net in the next week or so, please be patient while I get things together. If you are not willing to venture out of your routine blog stalking pattern but enjoy snickering to yourself about my grammatical errors, rest assured that I will periodically post here as well.

Bad Blogger

Thanks to those of you who have offered gentle reminders for us to update our blog, yes we are alive and kicking (3 of us). The past few weeks have been hectic and honestly, I can't think of anything blogworthy to tell you about. Regardless of my lack of content, I will try and scrounge something up.
Some of you may remember me griping about INTEX around December last year. Well it's sequel has come and gone and will never darken my doorstep again. Maybe I will write more on my new website (not yet running.) I will use it to talk about geeky stuff that Kate doesn't want me to write about on our "family blog." That probably means the XKCD comics will be banished from these hallowed halls, unless it's a really good one about raptors or something.
On to topics more interesting to the majority of those who read this stuff. Babies and bellies. Here's a picture I managed to get Kate to pose for a few days ago:
I might have to revoke her administrative privileges on the blog for a little while so she doesn't take it down. She is very shy about showing herself off but I know some of you really want to see her progress. Baby kicks a lot and everything seems to be going perfectly so far. That might change when we go on a quick 24-hour car drive to arrive in the sweltering Texas heat. Kate's been keeping super busy with her classes and work schedule along with trying to plan the details of having the baby in an unfamiliar area. Thankfully we have found some great support from good people living there and we have all the major details ironed out.

Moab

We have been trying to go down to Mexico to visit some of my mission areas for a few months now. We planned the trip in February, but I got too busy. We re-scheduled it for this past weekend, and things were looking good. Then we got word from an inside source (Kate's Dad) that airline ground workers in Mexico were on the verge of disrupting service because of a labor dispute. We found out about this an hour before we were to leave for the airport. We decided to play it safe and postpone again so we didn't get stuck down there :( One of these day's we'll get down there. Since we already had the time scheduled off, we headed down to Moab to check out Arches and Canyonlands. We also went to the Manti and Monticello Temples, that was cool. Here are some pics:

Manti Temple - This is officially my favorite temple. If you've never been, GO!

San Rafael Swell - I thought this looked pretty cool.

Landscape Arch - It's amazing that this arch is still intact.

Kate in Arches

Delicate Arch - This was Kate's first time going

Canyonlands overlooking the Green River

Canyonlands overlooking the Colorado River

Monticello Temple - We went on Saturday and it was packed! It's one of the smaller temples, but it's still beautiful.