Something from Sara

Here is Tyler waiting for the bus. He was so excited!

Here is Brook and Chris. Notice that they both had to wear a backpack out to wait for the bus. They don't start preschool until the 2nd, but they can hardly wait.

This week I ran:

3 miles

Fastest mile:

11 min 50 seconds

Well Wednesday it is Brooklyn and Chris's 3rd Birthday! I've finally worked out all the details so here they are. On Wednesday at 3:30 we are going to go swimming at the NS swimming pool. Everyone is invited to go swimming, and we'll be there about an hour or so. Then at 5:30 we'll have a BBQ here at the house for the grandparents and great-grandparents, and then at 6:30 we will party it up with anyone else who wants to come, aunts, uncles cousins, friends, pets, whoever. There will be cake and ice cream and present opening, and it should be a really fun time. Hope to see you there!

I've been feeling bad about a few things lately. Mostly because I feel like winter is approaching really fast and I am going to need my long pants again real soon. The bad news here is that some of my most favorite pants have worn holes in the knees and I have cut them off into cut-offs. So it has become necessary for me to find new pants. I also can't really fit into any of my old pants comfortably any more, so I'm looking for a new size. This is by far the worst thing that I ever have to do. I tried on a pair of 11's yesterday at Target. They were too tight around my thunder thighs. Do I go up to a 13? The 11's fit everywhere except my thighs, I could barely squish them into the suckers, and they weren't any of those "SKINNY JEANS" if you know what I mean. What's up with those anyway? Who can fit into those stupid pants, and who wears tapered ankles? When I was 16 years old (and around 100 lbs) my best friend, we'll call her Emily, and I were shopping at Contempo Casuals and we came across a pair of size 10 jeans. We were so disgusted at the size of them that we swore then and there that if either of us ever let ourselves get that out of control that we would tell the other one and make sure that the problem would get taken care of. Well, here I am staring down a pair of size 13's. Where is a good friend when you need her?

This morning as I contemplated things, I decided that since I usually tend to gain a lot of weight in the winter, I'm going to need some goals.
Goal #1: I am going to run 200 miles on my treadmill before Christmas. I'm going to set up a weekly tracker here on my blog. It will also include my fastest mile of the week.
Goal #2: I am going to be able to fit my thunder thighs into a pair of real pants by Christmas. By "real pants" I mean "sweat pants don't count."
Goal # 3: Save enough money each month so that I can afford a personal trainer sometime before Christmas...this will help me with the first two goals. If you are interested in forming a group we can save some money, just let me know.

This is all that I've come up with so far. Wish me luck. I'm going to need all that I can get.

1. My Garden!
My peas were as tall as Brooklyn! (They tipped over of course, but they looked so good until they did). I am only an amateur gardener, but this is my best year so far.

Look at the pods on these babies! Yum.

2. Family Reunions!

At the Provo River Falls.

6. Swimming Lessons

Chris and his teacher Daniel.

Brooklyn and one of her teachers Nicole, the other one Zaina was more regular, but I never took any pictures on her days.

I took these pictures weeks ago, and the twins are still talking about their swim lessons. Brooklyn was singing me a song that she made up today and it was all about how she was going to swim lessons today to see Zaina and dunk underwater and kick her legs, and have "So Fun." They loved it.

Well Shane has wanted a shed since we moved in. We needed a yard first and since we "finished" that last summer we knew that this was the summer that we were going to get one. Well he was looking at them online and decided that they were really expensive to buy the pre-fab. Then he decided that he was going to buy a kit and just put it together. So I told him to find a kit and get it coming. Somewhere along the way he decided that he didn't need a kit, he just needed a book from the Home Depot and some wood. In my opinion he did a great job. I had no idea that he was so handy.

Here is the inside. All finished. We had no trouble filling it, all the stuff was just cluttering up our garage. It looks all neat and organized in here though.

Here is the back view. I did the paint job. I was really careful to not get any on our new pad of cement. Then Brooklyn got a hold of the stir stick that I had left in the can and she drizzled it all over everything. What a mess-maker she is.

And finally from the front. Don't you think that he did a good job! We are so proud. Oh and by the way, come to find out he didn't even use the book that he bought from the Home Depot. He read it but it didn't have any instructions for a shed that was this size and so he mostly just winged it the whole time. I didn't find out about this until it was almost done so it just made me even more proud of him.

So I guess that this is my summer project. I finally got all the laundry done and folded (I'm supposed to be putting it away, but you know...) Anyway. I look at these piles and think Ugh! Where did all these clothes come from? The kids' piles are three deep!, the towels there is like 20 of them. The picture doesn't show the outside towels that I already folded, because they have a cupboard next to the washer so I just put them away. This took me 3 days to get them all folded and washed. Crazy.

The good news: I made my very own laundry detergent. The recipe claims that it is two cents a load so if that is accurate I only paid about $1.30 for the whole batch! I do love a great bargain.