August/September/October

Yikes, what a title. It has been far too long since we've updated, and I have a really good excuse: Ryan has been way busy and hasn't had a spare moment to let me use his laptop to upload our pictures. Well, it's an okay excuse.

Going back to what I haven't posted about yet, we went to Mississippi with my brother, Dan, and his family for the season opener for college football. It wasn't the best drive to take with small kids, one in particular that is extremely car sick, but we did it, and wouldn't trade it for anything. Oxford was such a beautiful old town, and the people there were so nice! Talk about southern hospitality. People were wishing us luck as we walked to the game in all our BYU gear, and then after we won, thanked us for coming, wished us luck in our season, travel safely, and invited us to come back. Everyone was just so polite.

Ole Miss has such a beautiful campus, and it would have been great to explore it more, but it poured rain right after the game (thank goodness for that) because of a tropical storm. We did a small car tour of the historic sites and homes, and they were so pretty, but the rain foiled much more exploration than that. I commented how nice all the guest homes were on the really big plantations, and then Ryan pointed out that they were probably converted slaves quarters. Oh.


Start of the game, before we got all toasty. The kids did great during the game; Mason slept, Sadie ate treats with Ava, her cousin.


Dan took his boys early to get their faces painted, which left Ryan to walk with my sister-in-law, Heather, and me with our double strollers full of little kids to the game. We realized we were probably fueling the misconceptions about Mormons, so Heather walked a little ahead of us.


Best buds sharing candy

Victory pose with the scoreboard in the background as proof. Dan said he was especially pleased that BYU won, because his boys would have been supremely disappointed driving all that way for a loss. He wanted to solidify early memories of BYU winning in their moldable little minds.

Mason, sporting the jersey


A bad shot of the small town that pops up every game day in Oxford. I guess it's one of the best tailgating experiences in the country? This was after the game was over, and lots of people had already packed up for the day, but all the red, white, and blue through those trees in the distance are those big pop up tents. People were going all out and had fridges and satellite dishes, like they could have lived there for the week if campus police allowed it. Also, a lot of the women (and a few men) were dressed up all fancy-like. Watching some of the ladies in heels made me so grateful to be wearing sandals as we walked back to where we were staying. Near the end they all were carrying their shoes.

Dan was able to find a great place where we could all stay together, instead of separate rooms like a hotel most likely would have been. It had a nice attached garage where the boys (big and small) could go rid themselves of cabin fever.


Here is the girl version of expending extra energy (note the cards all over the floor). We had to be creative keeping the kids from destroying the place once it started raining, and think there may have been a game or two involving rolling poker chips on the tile floor.


On to random shots now. Ryan is back in classes (has been for a while now), and very busy finishing up his last year. We've been enjoying a really mild fall, and we're wrapping up things in Omaha. I've been spending lots of time prepping our place for sale, and we actually have someone coming to look at it on Friday. Wow that went fast.

Father Theresa?


Sadie squeezing my feet. The face helps her squeeze tighter.

A happy coincidence one day (note the shirts)

Mason's newest trick.
(He's almost crawling, but definitely can military crawl to something he really wants)

Okay this next sequence is one of my favorites. Sadie wants to get in on the pictures, so she forces Mason to hold hands with her. Then he gets upset with that and lets her know he needs some space. I'm pretty sure I have the same pictures taken in the stroller.

I've got some great videos of the kids that I want to post too, but our upload speed is about 1/100th of what I want it to be. Sometime later. Maybe.