Fun Summer Activities

Our summer has been super duper busy filled with many adventures.

In the middle of June one of my best friends, Stephanie, graduated from Paul Mitchell the school. We have known each other since freshman year of college and have been close ever since. Some of our favorite experiences were in China together where we lived and taught english.

Steph worked so very hard through school and had to complete 2,000 hours. Here we are together at her graduation. Way to go Steph.

In June we had our 3rd anniversary!!!! It is crazy to me that we have been married for three years! These three years have been the some of the best years of my life. I remember people used to tell us that the first year of marriage would be the most difficult. After the first year Nick and I were confused at what everyone was talking about.... we decided if that was supposed to be the toughest year, our life was going to be blissful because it was joyous and wonderful!!! Let me tell you, in our case, WE WERE 100% RIGHT!

For our anniversary we decided to have a romantic evening here in our sweet home. Nick is such a romantic (If I could just tell you some of the things he has done for me... you would be in awe) and one of the many things he wrote in the card he gave me was, "I am grateful we still have the spark in our marriage and thought it was only appropriate to celebrate tonight by letting sparks fill the night sky." One part of my gift was boxes of sparklers! It was incredibly cute and we had so much fun in our front yard letting the sparks fly!

Three years!!!!

I promised that I would put up pictures of Landon coming home.... well turns out we didn't take as many photos as we thought, so instead here are some of Nick and our adorable nephew, Payton.

He is going to be the greatest dad.

One day while I was inside working on some things, Nick had said that he was going to go out to our cherry tree and pick the cherries. I was so excited because these cherries are so scrumptious. Well I went out side and saw Nick picking the cherries........... in our tree.

Apparently we don't have a ladder so my versatile hubby climbed the tree. (This is so Nick by the way.)

This was the view I saw right when I came out. The tree doesn't look very tall because I took this picture on our porch steps.

One day this month, I was walking home and a thunder and lightning storm broke out of no where. I was only a couple of blocks away from our house and I started to run as fast as I could. Within one minute I got soaking wet. I stopped running and just started laughing hysterically. It was so funny. The storm was so strong that it looked like trees were going to collapse either on me or into the streets. I could not help but laugh because no matter what I did, I was soaking wet. (Even if I had an umbrella it would not have helped because the umbrella would have broken in that strong of wind.)

Nick took a picture of me. You cannot really tell that I am wet because my clothes are one solid color. If you see how shiny my skin is I was drenched! I had to take a towel to my body once I took off all the wet clothing. I felt like a little kid again playing in the rain.

Our ward had the most amazing activity a couple of weeks ago. It was 150 foot slip n' slide! It was the greatest activity. The boys of course competed and started doing crazy tricks down the slide while the girls just had a blast going down tons of times.

Nick walking up the hill in the most beautiful weather.

The boys waiting for their turn to show off for each other.

Nick and I!

One of Nick's tricks he did was climb on the back of two other guys' backs and then ride down. He mastered this and did quite a good job, although I caught the not so good time on video. I kept thinking we were going to end up in the emergency room, but Nick is pretty awesome and doesn't get hurt when he does crazy things, thankfully! (The second time he did this trick is on video, its at the bottom of this post.)

Because our families live in Southern California we don't get to go all the way to California to see them often. It seems like this summer we have made an extra effort and traveled to St. George a lot to meet and spend time with each other. One weekend we met my younger sister there to play, play, and play some more.

Mattie and Rooga have both told me they love having older siblings that are established because we have our own money and we love to use it and spoil them when we are with them which is very true.

I say that because we did just that. We did lots and lots, but one of our favorite things we did was going to the park to play croquet.

Rooga always makes fun of us because we love games and if you look in our trunk at any given time, we always seem to have some game or activity. Well, we had ladder ball and croquet so we whipped it out and had some fun. We were having so much fun that a group of kids started coming over asking if they could play, and they did.

After the game, we took a little rest at the park.

I have the greatest family ever and I get to see them even more this summer which I am so excited for! Landon, Regan, and Nick and I will all be living within blocks of each other come this fall. That means the majority of my family will be in this state. YAY! Cannot wait for that.

Our fun didn't stop, Rooga went back home and Nick and I went to Zions National Park for a family reunion. This reunion was super special because Nick's mom and dad were in charge of it. Every immediate family had their own mansion to themselves. That meant our family got our own place to ourselves.

This was a perfect way of doing it. We got to do whatever things we wanted during the day with whomever we wanted, then had dinner together as our whole family (which is HUGE).

Because our family is extremely outdoorsy, we went on hikes each day.

The first day we went to observation point which was a 6 mile hike that looked out on the majority of Zions.

The majority of Nick's family. (We are missing TA, Nick, Gavin and Brooke)

We spent the 4th of July there which was great because their was a huge fireworks show that Kanab put on. We all went up there and enjoyed quite a large firework show. I was really impressed at how spectacular it was.

Nick, Trevor and Emmet.

After the firework show, Nick and I had sparklers back at the house, and we wanted to have a little fun of our own. We went outside while all the other adults were inside talking and our neices and nephews were sleeping, and we had a blast lighting all of our sparklers.

Yesterday, we went up to Threeforks trail in Spanish Fork Canyon. It was a 4 mile hike up to these hot springs and waterfall. It was so beautiful, but too hot to go in the hot springs. We went in the cold waterfall water instead.

Us at the top of the waterfall. (You cannot see it yet)

A small waterfall we found on the top of the larger waterfall)

Nick straddling the waterfall.

Here is the larger waterfall.

We love the outdoors and are enjoying every little bit of summer. We are excited for more adventures we are going to have this summer.

**Here are two videos of us. One was Nick doing a trick on the slip n' slide and one of us the night of the 4th of July with the sparklers!**