Jerry's home and Cruise!!

Jerry's finally home, yes!!!! We are so excited and so glad to have him back. It's been a long, long summer. He came in Friday night, and we immediately dropped the boys off in Columbus with Jerry's brother (THANK YOU THANK YOU James and Ruth!!!!) and headed off Saturday morning to Ft. Lauderdale on a Caribbean Cruise. Needless to say-it was AMAZING. We had so much fun.

Here we are at "The Meeting Point" getting ready to board the ship.

Dinner. The food was so incredible. We ate ourselves sick at every meal, it was great. We went with some of our best friends from Utah, Emily and Nate.


First port-Key West.

Exploring Key West.
Jerry and the sponge man.
Em and Nate. They were such great travel companions, and such a fun couple. We LOVE them, and it was so nice to get to spend time with them.


In Key West we took a Catamaran boat out to a reef and went snorkeling. The fish certainly weren't as good as they were in Hawaii or even the Red Sea, but it was still really fun.


Nate and Jerry. What a couple of good looking guys workin' the life jackets :) And seriously, do you see how blue that water is?


We saw this huge sea turtle, but didn't get a very good picture of him. Of course he came up to the boat right after everyone got out of the water.


Formal night.

Second port: Cozumel, Mexico. Here we shopped, had lunch, and swam with Dolphins! It was so much cooler then I thought it would be. We don't have any pictures, because well, we were in the water with the Dolphins.


Thanks to hurricane season, we had a couple of rainstorms. Here we are hot tubbin' in a crazy rainstorm.


Me and Jer, just happy to be together again.


Seriously, we had such a fun time. The only disappointment was we were supposed to visit Coco Cay, Bahamas as our third port, but because of Hurricane Earl, the water was too rough to be able to take the small boat from the cruise ship into port (it would have been a rainy day anyway). The captain decided that it was too dangerous to let anyone go ashore, so he steered us out of the rain and into sunny skies and we just floated around all day. Luckily, on a cruise ship there is still a ton of fun stuff to do, and good food to eat.

Painting

In June I finally painted my bedroom and I've been meaning to post pictures for a while, but I never quite got around to it. Also I don't feel like the room is done, but I'm going to have to wait a while before I can afford to really finish it like I would like. But I do think it's a vast improvement.

BEFORE: (boring and blah)


AFTER: (my camera really isn't very good, so it does look better then these pictures show) and yes, getting rid of the baby dresser was SOOOO nice. I painted his room too, pictures to come.




I almost really love it. However, it just doesn't feel quite right. Is it the color of the paint? Maybe it isn't quite the right shade? Or maybe the bedding. I'm definitely rethinking the pillows and I don't like yellow showing on the reversible coverlet. Or maybe it's the stuff on the walls? Or maybe my furniture is too dark for this shade of blue. If you have any idea's or suggestions, PLEASE share!

Below is a picture of one of the rooms that inspired me and I feel like my room is totally missing the mark.


Or this I love! I really wanted purple bedding with the blue walls, but I'm thinking it's too girl-y since this is my husbands room too. Is it too girl-y?

Now that I see the pictures of my room next to these two, I can see it's probably just a matter of M O N E Y. These two rooms are filled with designer everything. Ahh maybe someday...But for now, I am happy with the improvement.

Half Marathon!

I put on my running clothes twice today. Did I ever actually make it to the gym, no. Today, both times it really was the kids to blame. The result...I bought doughnuts at the store, and I feel like crap. You don't really notice how much better exercise and cutting out the sugar help until you cut out the exercise and bring back the sugar.

I thought that I should post publicly that I am training for a half marathon at the end of October. I'm both really excited and really pretty terrified. Luckily, I have some girlfriends who are going to do it with me, and already they have helped a ton in motivating me to get out to the gym and get moving. But I still have a long way to go.

Our trip-Part 4

Ok, this is the last one.

After we left Jerry in Utah, we drove back to Kansas and spent a week with my sister. We had so much fun!!

Florence and Jonah. They are only 4 months apart, and had so much fun playing together!

Jeremy (my bro-in-law) with all the kids

We went to a lake, it was so so fun! I didn't get too many pictures of all the cool stuff they had there, but there were 2 water slides, a big sprinkler type thing out in the middle of the water, and this big "blob" thing that you can launch people off of. And, it was only $2!


My sister is so smart. She brought a sheet and their play tent and we had a nice, shady, and clean place to sit. (can you see it in the picture behind Jonah? We put a sheet on top too, because the top was open.)

Oliver and my beautiful sister, Amelia.



And Oliver started crawling!!

Our trip-Part 3

Wow, I sure am making our trip seem a lot more exciting than it really was by breaking post's into parts, huh?

On July 4th, we hopped over to the other side of Mt. Timpanogos to Jerry's parents home. We had a really nice BBQ with the Johnson's and the Jurgens came too! We didn't do any other cool 4th of July related stuff (no parades, no fireworks, etc.) but we still had a great holiday and a wonderful visit with family and friends.

Joey and Jerry. BFF's :)

Some of the Johnson's: Nephew's Corbin and Riley. Brother-in-Law Brad, Niece Haley.

More Johnson's: Russ, Becky and two of their boys: Thayne and Jordan.


Jonah and the Jurgens's boys, Sam and Will.

Sam loves being a leader, and Jonah loves following. They got along really great.






The following day, we went back to my Grandparents cabin for a couple of hours to see my sisters and mom. This is a really bad picture (both the set up and I look pretty awful) but it was nice to have us all together, even if it was only for a couple of hours.

to be continued...