Quick trip to Utah...and then some.

We'll start with the "and then some" part. 

I ordered these teeny tiny books. How stinking cute are they?!! My boys think they are the coolest.

And this is silly, but Devin is such a builder.
He's always building the coolest things with these wood blocks and with our Legos.

The cutest part is that he names everything he builds.
I love his creativity.

On to our quick Utah trip. 

And it was literally a 1 day trip...

Matt was offered a different job in Pleasant Grove/American Fork area. 

We were pretty interested in this other job, but wanted to meet the doctors with the group.
They flew us to Utah, very last minute. We flew out Friday, had dinner at my sisters house in
Riverton (she's like the best cook in the world!!!!). Saturday we lucked out and were able to go
to my nephew's baptism, since we were staying with them. I had another nephew that was
baptized that same day, but it was too far to go to. After that we went back to Jenny's and scarfed some lunch and headed to meet the docs. We drove to PG and met Dr. Allen and Dr. Young at their office.
Their wives came along too, it was nice to meet them all. They showed us the office, which is really nice and quite large. We were very impressed. Then Matt went off with Dr. Young to tour the AF hospital and I went out with his wife to a boutique and cupcake shop! :)

Then we ran back up to Riverton (thanks to Ella for watching James all afternoon!!!!).
Spent a little time there and then shot back down to Orem where we met the docs at
The Chef's Table for dinner. It was very nice! And after that they took us up the road
and we went to the popular Waffle Love place to have a delicious waffle for dessert.

Then rushed back up to Jenny's hung out with them for a while and then hit the sack!
The next morning we flew out at 6am. It was literally the fastest trip of my life!

James was a trooper, and since we left so early and everything, he just stayed on our
time zone, which made it much easier on us.

Cute little Averie is only a few months older than James. I'm so excited to move back

and be in the "baby club" with my sisters for the first time! :)

A few pics we snapped at Jenny's after the baptism. 

Mom, Jenny, Mandy and Me.

Averie (cut off), Lexi and photobombed by Mitch. 

My nieces and nephews are funny doods.

And THANKFULLY, we left our boys with my sweet friend for 2 days.

They had a blast!!! She sent me some funny pics of them while we were gone.

In the end, while we were very torn (about the two job offers).

And after MUCH thought and prayer, we decided to take the job in PG.

We're sad things didn't work out with Payson, but we are feeling really good about our 

decision to go with PG.

We are really excited to move back to Utah and start a new phase of our lives back in our home state.

Thanks for everyone we saw for a minute (literally!) and especially

to Jenny and Brandon for their fine hospitality!!!

And Lexi, for letting us stay in her room. :)

Feb-March 2014

As usual, February and March were cold and pretty miserable. 

Cleveland is rough this time of year.

Here are a bunch of random photos from those months.

 James had a little surgical procedure done in Feb.

Maybe this is too much info, but he had an undescended testicle when he was born.

They fixed that and moved it to the right place! It went very smooth and fairly quickly.

In and out in one day. He was pretty miserable the rest of the day, but otherwise bounced back 

very quickly. Thankfully!

 Hssa event at the Science Museum...always fun.

 The first warmish day. Luke and his friends thought it'd be a good idea to walk through a huge mud puddle. His rain boots got stuck, literally sucked in. A much older kid, thankfully, fished them out for me. As you can see Luke was pretty muddy. What you can't see is that his whole backside is also

covered in mud...and of course I walked to pick him up that day. Boys... :) 

 We discovered our new favorite thing to do at night, is sit by the fire

in our basement...why did we not do this sooner?!! 

 Open gym to get the wiggles out!

We put Luke in this indoor soccer class...thing. It's not really a league, but

they teach them soccer skills and they play against each other, etc. It was a good 

winter activity.

This is his Polish buddy, Alek. They're the best of friends. 

They're also in the same Kindergarten class.

 And just for fun...these are many of the names of the kids in Lukes grade...can you believe some of these names?!!

At the end of March, Luke's grade had their little play of The Little Red Hen.

It was short and sweet. Luke had a small part.

Sadly, only maybe 1-2 weeks later, his music teacher, Ms. Smoker, who was the one 

who put the whole production together, died in her sleep. It was quite tragic. She was young, 

and had two very young children. Luke was really sad. It was a sad time at the school. 

It wasn't a terrible two months....but boy are we glad it's spring time now! :)