If you are able, come to the table

Andrew is only home between 5 pm and 6 pm on weeknights. I work until 5. I'm realizing I'm headed back to simpler meals so that I can start cooking while I work and have dinner ready when Andrew gets home. That way we can have time to chat about our days for a few minutes before he has to change and leave for work! Luckily I watch HGTV (I'm sure there will be an HGTV graph soon), and I am becoming domestic in other areas (such as interior decorating and renovating). These are equally as useful in the scheme of things, right?

We Are BYU Football

Game starts in 5.5 hours. We will be in the stadium in 4.5 hours. We are already in our spirit clothing, and I worry that Andrew will add his war paint soon. Go COUGS!

There IS room at the inn....

We have had a BUSY summer! We love our home, and we love that we have room to take people in. We might even be a little pushy about making people stay here when they're in town!

Right now we have Avery, Jamie, and Tyler in town. SO FUN. Avery is so cute, we love getting to know her.

We're goin' to Jackson

We went to Jackson Hole this weekend as a final hurrah for our first summer together. School starts in a week, and we needed an escape before we settled in to our Fall routine. We joined forces with our friends David and Natalie Bean (no relation!) and road-tripped to WY for a camping / whitewater rafting trip.



Our campground was lovely, in the middle of the Elk Preserve (no Elk in sight), and I was grateful for the bathroom option -- an outhouse with a hole in the ground. I drank as little as possible without getting dehydrated, and only used that wonderful option twice during our 2 night stay.



I usually never pack enough shirts for camping, so I was generous this trip. Not even necessary. Why is that?



This is the four of us plus Andrew's cousin Jason who was our guide on the river. We are currently "surfing lunch counter." Basically, we purposely got stuck on a big rapid and rode it for about 5 minutes! We have some great photos thanks to the guys taking photos from a rock above us.



Just outside our campsite -- what a beautiful view of the Tetons!



David and Natalie with the elk antler archway in the town.

We had such a great trip! And we all came home healthy, mom!

Rise and Shout

...and pull your iPods out...



Andrew has been GLUED to his iPhone, trying to gain any information he can about plans for BYU's athletic program in the 2011 school year. The number of articles I have read only increases according to how many articles Andrew chooses to READ OUT LOUD to me. I've become as well versed in conference negotiation lingo as I want to be -- and I'll stick to my craft blogs while I'm online, thank you very much.

All my friends have blogs with a list of their friends' blogs along the side of the page. I've started one of those lists, and I'm realizing we have not integrated ourselves into the married blogging world yet! We need more blogs / friends for our list. The first step is awareness, right? Then ... something like action? We'll keep trying to make blogger friends so we fit in here in UT valley.

Netflix

So I felt guilty for getting "When in Rome" the other day, so I watched it in the morning and ran down to put it in the mailbox before the mailman came that day. I knew "The Bourne Identity" would be coming next, so I thought we were even steven--one movie for me, one movie for Andrew. But SURPRISE! The next movie was actually "Stardust," which we have yet to watch because Andrew is still so disappointed. Looks like I lost my job running the Netflix queue. I'll just stick to the Instant Queue. It's already full of seasons of Lost and 24, so Andrew won't notice if I throw in some Reese Witherspoon and Katherine Heigl, right?

Home Grown Beans

Less than a month into our marriage, we had a great opportunity to baby-sit Andrew's three younger cousins, ages 8, 5, and 2. Beautiful and fun children. We learned a lot of stuff. A lot. And mostly what we learned is that we don't know ANYTHING about raising children!