Goodbyes

Last Saturday morning we were planning to go to Jenna's soccer game and then head up to Lovell. Well, since the day started out with a little snow and rain Jenna's game was cancelled. That meant we got to head up to Lovell earlier than planned. The reason we went to Lovell this weekend is because Joel's youngest brother, Dane, left for Sao Paulo early Tuesday morning.


All of Joel's siblings were in town for the weekend (Joel and Daniel are the only ones that live out of town, so I guess I could just say that Daniel was able to come, too). Saturday night we went bowling, and I beat Joel! Although, everyone else beat me, but at least I beat someone! I'm really terrible at bowling and I have an all-time low score of 17 that I got in high school. I did a little better this time around with 96; I'll take that. :)


On Sunday we were able to listen to Dane speak in church. He spoke about the Book of Mormon and did a great job. It was wonderful to get to listen to him bare his testimony.


Sunday evening we went to dinner up at Grandma and Grandpa Asay's. It was Grandma Asay's birthday as well as Joel's Aunt Meredith's birthday, AS WELL AS our nephew, Gavin's, birthday. A big day. :) We were able to get Joel's Uncle Paul to tell a few of his stories and let us video tape them. If you ever run in to Paul Asay, try to get him to tell you the chicken story, it's hilarious!


Monday was spent doing a lot of hanging around and packing. No one knew quite what to get done, but everything did get done eventually. Monday evening Dane got set apart as a missionary. I was so happy I got to be there, and of course I cried like a baby, for a lot of reasons.


Dane's flight was scheduled to leave Cody at 6:30 Tuesday morning. Brenda, Dane, and Erin got up early to get Dane checked in and everything. I guess there was some complications with finding him in the computer, etc. but they worked everything out. Joel and I (and the kids) and Devin and his family were planning to be at the airport at 6:00. As Joel and I were leaving Lovell, Joel remembered that we needed gas or we wouldn't be able to make it there. So we had to stop and get gas. Joel didn't speed too much on the way, but we were hurrying as fast as we could to get there in plenty of time. Unfortunately, the airport people made Dane go through security about 2 minutes before we got there, so we didn't get to give him any last hugs or talk to him. We could see him through a plexiglass window, and that was better than nothing. We were all SO sad to not be able to spend a few last minutes with him. Here is a picture of Dane as we got to see him.

(Darcy, I hope you don't mind that I used this picture, I stole it from your blog)

We stayed to watch the plane take off. Jenna was crying a lot, as were the rest of us. I think she was crying for two main reason. One, of course, she loves her Uncle Dane and was going to miss him a lot. She understands that two years is a long time for him to be gone. Also, she's a very sensitive girl, and she's always had a hard time seeing other people cry; it makes her sad.

We were all sad to see Dane leave, but we are also so excited for this time in his life. He is in the Sao Paulo South Mission, in Brazil. He was able to call from Salt Lake and Dallas, his stops before leaving the country. He sounded pretty down in Salt Lake, but much more positive and happy in Dallas. Dane's girlfriend, Darcy, has started a blog about Dane's mission. To check it out, click here: http://danemission.blogspot.com/.

While in Lovell I was also able to spend a little time with my Mom and her husband Bill, who just got back from AZ. We didn't get to see them nearly enough, but we look forward to more trips up North. They are also coming down for Joel's graduation in just a week and a half, so we'll get to see them soon!

Lucky

It's been awhile since I put anything on so I thought I would go ahead and post a few random pictures.

Last week I was cleaning in the kitchen and Adam was playing quietly. When I peaked around the corner this is what I saw. He had pulled out the shoe basket, thrown out all the shoes (you can see part of the pile in the corner of the picture) and made himself comfortable. What a cutie.

This is what will wore to play outside just last Friday. We had about 8 inches of snow, I would say. He had a great time in it.

Now contrast that with what it was like outside yesterday. Adam thought it was funny to climb into the bike trailer.

And here's Jenna posing in her warm-weather gear. What a difference four days can make.

We haven't been super busy around here, just regular busy. :) We went out to dinner last night since it is my birthday today but Joel has to work today. For my birthday Joel bought me some books I wanted, and I ordered myself some new black flip-flops online. My beloved black flip-flops that I wore for many summers finally pooped out on me last year. I was so sad to see them go. One of my favorite things about them were that they had about a 2 inch sole. As short as I am, I need all the help I can get in the height department. I found some online that are a good brand of good quality and will hopefully last me a long time. I got them in the mail yesterday, so it was an excellent early birthday present.

When I woke up this morning Jenna was there to tell me Happy Birthday. I think she told me that about 23 times before she went to school. :) One of the great things about Jenna is that she gets so excited for any and every occasion. She loves to do things for people on their special day. She wants to make sure everyone knows it's your birthday, and she REALLY wants you to know that SHE knows it's your birthday and she cares it's your birthday. She's a sweet girl.

Tonight we are looking forward to Jenna's first soccer game. Her first game was supposed to be last Saturday, but all games were canceled because all fields were covered in snow. Luckily the weather as been beautiful and the fields have dried out. We are so sad that Joel doesn't get to watch her first game, but he will be able to come to her game this coming Saturday. Jenna is excited to play, and maybe a little nervous. I know I'm a little nervous for her. She's really never played before, and other kids on her team have. Hopefully that will be a good thing so she will have people to watch and learn from.

I have to say that on this 25th birthday of mine I was thinking about my life. A natural thing to do when you hit the quarter century mark, I think. :) I wondered; am I where I wanted to be at at 25? Have I accomplished things? Am I doing anything good with my life? Do I have the things I want and need? Here's what I've come up with... I've gotten a college degree, which was a huge goal of mine. A part of me wondered if I would accomplish that goal with a family and children. Thanks to a lot of determination and an excellent husband, I did accomplish that goal. I have a great husband and three incredible kids, so I'd say I must be doing something right. Or at least the Lord has seen fit to bless me with these wonderful things. I try to be a good mother and wife. I continue to try to expand my cooking/baking abilities (this may seem like a strange accomplishment, but I love to cook, and I love that my family enjoys the things I make. If being a chef wasn't such a high-stress job I would be tempted to try that career route). I have great friends that I love to be with and will miss terribly when we have to move away. I don't have the nicest apartment or nicest cars or nicest belongings, and I couldn't care less. I am so happy with what I have been blessed with that to ask for much more would just seem selfish. Thank you to everyone who has blessed my life so completely! I feel so lucky!

Weekend

Our weekend started with a bang; Joel getting his wisdom tooth out. Brenda (Joel's Mom) came down to watch the kids, and Erin and Dane came with her. They got here Thursday evening. Friday morning we headed out early enough to have a quick lunch in Fort Collins and get to the oral surgeon's office. After filling out some paperwork, signing wavers, and that fun stuff, Joel was in the hot seat. They just did a local anesthetic. After they shot him up with that they took him for a panoramic x-ray of his mouth and jaw so the doctor could see where the nerves come through. It was very interesting to look at Joel's teeth that way. Turns out he's got one wisdom tooth on the top that isn't through yet, and one on the top that is through (we already knew that) and the other side on the bottom there is no wisdom tooth at all. While the local was taking effect we had a good time waiting. Joel couldn't pronounce certain words correctly, so I kept making him talk, and try to do things like roll his tongue. It was quite entertaining. :)

Anyway, when he was good and numb I went out to the waiting room, even though I would have kind of liked to watch them take the tooth out. Joel came out shortly after, maybe 10 minutes, and the job was done. He said it didn't really hurt at all, except some of the pressure they put on the jaw to get the tooth out. When we got back to Laramie we filled a prescription for some pain meds. Joel has taken some but not many. He didn't take any on Sunday and he can't take any for the next two days because he can't be on that kind of pain medication while working. He will just have to make due with Aleve and Tylenol, etc. We are doing what we can to avoid dry socket. I've heard from SO many people that got dry socket about how painful it is, so we really don't want Joel to have to deal with that! But Joel has been recovering well, and his mouth doesn't hurt all that much, he says. He has been a little swollen, and he can't eat solid foods very well because he can't open his mouth very wide. But he says that the pain he was experiencing before is gone, so that's good. He is back at work today.

On Friday night after getting back from Fort Collins I got a call from a guy that I contacted about buying an entertainment center he listed on craigslist. We've been keeping our eye out for a little bit because we are pretty tired of having DVDs all over the place. Adam would pull them out, and could open cases, and sometimes even pop out the DVDs. Not so good for scratching. So anyway, we drove out to West Laramie to look at it and pick it up. Unfortunately another person that wanted to look at it had contacted the guy before me. Long story short we left because they were on their way to look at it. When we were literally one block from my house the guy called me back saying the other person didn't want it because their TV wouldn't fit in it. So we turned around and went back out to West Laramie to pick it up. Dane and I rode in the back of the truck to keep it steady, and that was a bit of an adventure. :) Dane was embarrassed that people were looking at him, and I was trying to hold on to the board on the back of the entertainment center which was starting to flap in the wind. Yikes! Anyway, we got it here safe and sound, and now my mischievous 1 year old can't play with the DVDs. :) The picture below is the picture from craigslist, because I haven't gotten around to taking pictures of it here with everything in it. Maybe someday...

Goings On

I feel like I've been meaning to blog for many days now and just haven't gotten around to it. No big surprise there... :) We've had some exciting things going on and some not so exciting things.

First of all, Joel went in for an interview for a job here at IMH (Ivinson Memorial Hospital) a few weeks ago. The interview went well. The person interviewing Joel already knew him and has worked with him, so she basically already knew that she wanted to hire him. That's nice! The following morning we got the "official" job offer over the phone, and of course Joel accepted! Earlier this week he went in to meet with Human Resources to fill out paperwork, get his ID, fun stuff like that. He will start working at the beginning of June. We are excited to be able to stay in Laramie for one more year. This summer/fall Joel will apply for PA programs across the country. If all goes according to plan, he will begin PA school in the fall of 2010.

Some news that is not as exciting is that Joel has to have some oral surgery in just a couple of days. He broke a tooth a few months ago, but fortunately it wasn't causing him any pain at all. So he was going to wait to get it fixed until he started working and has dental insurance. Well, a few weeks ago his tooth started to ache and cause him quite a bit of pain. After seeing a dentist he found out that he has an impacted wisdom tooth that is pushing on the molar. The wisdom tooth likely weakened the molar, causing it to break. On Friday we are going down to Fort Collins to have the wisdom tooth removed, and he will then have to go back to the dentist for a root canal and a crown. Ick! We aren't looking forward to the work that has to be done (and the bills to pay for it:), but mostly we just want to get that durn tooth fixed! The pain comes and goes, but when it comes it is bad! He is able to fight it off a bit with ibuprofen, tylenol, aspirin, and ambesol, but even those are not getting the job done. We will be happy to have the work done and hopefully have a pain-free Joel.

Those are the main things going on here. The other night we had friends over for dinner, and Adam ended up with a "Hitler" chocolate mustache. It was even cuter/funnier in person :)

I just had to include this pictures because I love Maggie's face!!!

Books to Read

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

The ones I have read are in green

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (i own it, does that count?)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
2 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime-Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (actually I've only read about 3/4 of it)

My total: only 8 and 3/4. Shamefull! Looks like I've got a good list to work from, now. I'm curious about everyone else's totals! A few in particular: Sarah, Tonya, Ranee? I'm sure your totals are waaaaay higher than mine!