September Birthdays - Shantel and Austin

September brought the opportunity to celebrate the birth of two incredible people. 

First up - Shantel. Shantel is an incredible wife and mother. She is diligent and hard working and is always willing to sacrifice for others. This year the kids were so excited for her birthday. It fell on a Sunday so she had meetings in the morning which meant the kids spent the morning furiously either finishing the presents they were making or making little gifts. Caleb, Lucy, Austin and Lucy all had a gift for her. It was cute to see Lucy and Caleb want to do something for her. Lucy made her something little from scraps of paper. Caleb gave her a $1 (that's a big deal for him) and Austin and Lydia made things for Shantel too. Plus, earlier this year she found some cups she really wanted and bought those that the kids could give to her. We are so grateful for Shantel and loved celebrating with her. 

Next up was celebrating Austin, starting with Birthday bags. Austin is such a wonderful boy. He is kind and fun and quick to choose the right and be obedient. He is a kind sibling and a good friend. 

Shantel went up to Wyoming on Sunday night which meant that his birthday started in Monday morning in Wyoming. He was able to celebrate with Grandma and Grandpa Walker and had so much fun in Wyoming. 

Shantel took the kids to get ice cream up in Wyoming and they were so happy. 

That night we had so much fun celebrating Austin. Lydia made him a Gryffindor scarf, it was so kind. 

 We got him roller blades and he had fun going outside and rollerblading with Lydia and the Wards. Then they came out and had been last minute finishing a present for Austin and he got to open a present from Audrey and Ellie. They are such great friends and good gift givers. 

Q3 Dates (David and Shantel)

I love going on dates with this wonderful guy. Honestly, I feel grateful for how many opportunities that we have to spend one-on-one time together. 

1. We do a 3 hour date swap with our next door neighbors, the Wards, once a month (we get a date, they get a date). 

2. We swap for "Cousin Weekend" where all the cousins go to one house once a month and the other two couples get a date weekend. This means that we host cousin weekend 4 times a year and we get 7 date weekends in a year. 

3. We have Hale Center Theater season tickets, so if we can't arrange the date night/date weekends around our play dates, we ask Amy or my mom to come watch the kids for our play. 

4. A handful of other events that give us time together. Sometimes this is as small as sneaking away for a game night across the street, or a movie at Thanksgiving point while Lydia babysits or sometimes it's a larger event like David's work Christmas party that we have to get a specific babysitter for. 

We have a lot of opportunities to be together and I recognize that it's a huge blessing in our lives, one that not everyone has readily available to them. I'm grateful because I think that going on dates, big and small, is so good for our relationship and the opportunity to do things together is an important part of our lives! Honestly, sometimes we go to the grocery store and pick up Panda and Arby's to eat after we put the kids to bed and while we watch a Hallmark movie. Sometimes we take 8 hours to hike to the top of a mountain together. I love all of the things because I genuinely just love to be with David. 

Here are some of the highlights from our dates during July, August, and September. 

Hale Center Theater Orem - Seussical & Arsenic and Old Lace

We are soaking in the last few performances in the historic Orem Theater space. We love it here so much, and are disappointed that the theater is moving to a new space. But, we understand that things change and we are grateful to be along for the ride. 

Seussical - We went to Seussical in July -  The music was fun and upbeat. The musical numbers were energetic and exciting. It is amazing how the Hale Orem can create such outstanding, high-impact performances in such a small space. 

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Arsenic and Old Lace - We went to this in September, as part of my birthday weekend celebration. Arsenic and Old Lace is one of my favorite plays, and I loved seeing it one last time at my favorite theater. Kevin and Amy came with us (we gave them tickets for their birthdays last year).

BONUS: Amy and Derek Perkins invited us to go to the Hale Center Theatre Sandy performance of The Nutty Professor. It was fun to go with them and their family (and generous of their parents to allow us to use their extra tickets as we tagged along). The performance was fun and funny and so well done (although even with all the high show-stopping production, you have to miss a little bit of the smallness of the other theater). This was the first performance that Lydia babysat for us through the whole thing and we were so grateful to her! 

Hiking Mt. Raymond

We knew we wanted to go on a hike for our date weekend in September and looked into several 5ish mile hikes. We ended up hiking the Mt. Raymond Summit, because I've not stopped talking about it since I hiked it with some friends last year. We LOVED it! 

-7.5 miles
-3,028 elevation gain

We saw a giant Bull Moose on the trail about 30 minutes into the hike and almost turned around to go home. I mean, we did turn around and run the other way as fast as we could. But then we saw him cross the path to join up with his family a little ways off and decided to be brave and keep going. I was sincerely terrified that we might be in physical danger, but the adrenaline from seeing the moose helped propel us up one of the steepest parts of the hike. 

These pictures with the peak behind us were taken halfway through the hike and I am pointing to the summit that we ended the hike at. It really was incredible!

The start of this hike is so steep (and so is the end) and I was so tired. But we made it and I’m so proud of us. We are confident that hiking a difficult hike together must be a psychology-approved relationship builder because it’s awesome to accomplish something so hard together. 

Curling

Back in January when we were talking about making goals I decided that in addition to the many things that I am putting my heart and soul into on a daily basis (motherhood, homeschool, homemaking, being a wife, friend, daughter, my stake primary calling, taking care of myself) - I wanted to make ONE goal, but I wanted it to be a fun goal. It took until August, but we finally made that one goal that I made happen: curling! It was kind of a ridiculous goal, but maybe that's why I loved it so much. 

Learning to curl at the Olympic Oval was everything that I wanted it to be! We convinced Jason and Sarah Newbold to come with us, and even though they might have thought we were a little crazy - we all had fun together.  I officially love curling and am already looking forward to coming back again sometime. 

New Shutters and House Update

The paint on our front door has been peeling for a while. I have been trying to maintain it by using an acrylic craft paint that I mixed to be a similar enough color that your eye doesn't catch on the peeling pieces, but finally it's gotten so bad that I knew something needed to be done. As I've been talking to my mom about her house updates, we learned that black doors are the trendiest thing in exterior design right now. I love the look and decided that I was going to repaint our door the trendiest "Tricorn Black".  It took a bit to get David on board because he loves the navy blue that we picked when we first built our house (almost 12 years ago!). But I was feeling determined. 

I got a little stumped when I realized that I can't just paint my door, I would have to take off the shutters and paint those, too. No problem, I thought, until I then realized that one/two of our shutters are on the second floor with no way to access them. I came up against another obstacle when I realized that I would have to get permission from the HOA. 

My urgent motivation for getting the project done was starting to wane, but thankfully I got permission from the HOA after waiting only 2 of the 6 possible weeks for approval and after exploring a lot of options (paying a handyman to come remove the shutters, asking my dad to bring a tractor to my house) I found a friend who had a giant ladder that would allow me to get to the top window to remove the shutter. I purchased the paint and then it was go time! 




I painted the door and shutters and with the help of our neighbors Cade and Leah Ward - I got them hung back up while David was out of town. We decided to do a full makeover and I replaced the exterior garage lights with some really beautiful lanterns, and even replaced the house number with a sans serif number font (something that I have been wanting to do for years). 

The project escalated when I discovered some cracks in the stucco around the garage. I bought some repair stucco so that the cracks wouldn't get worse, but then I also had to buy stucco paint to cover the repair spots. Then because some of that stucco paint dripped on the border right around the garage, I had to go buy the lighter color of stucco paint to repaint the border. It felt like the project just kept escalating but I am SO so happy with the result. 

As always, what I thought was going to be a pretty cheap project (just $50 or so for paint) ended up requiring much more money - almost $600 after all of the paint supplies/brushes, new drill bits for removing stripped screws, new beautiful lamps, updated house numbers, stucco repair, and several gallons of stucco paint. We had some "home improvement" money budgeted for stepping stones in the garden but I wanted this project so badly that I used most of my personal money that I've been saving up to cover the rest of the project. 

This is the first project that was basically 100% me. I wanted it so I made it happen. David helped me hold the lanterns while I installed them because I couldn't do it by myself and I was grateful for his support through the project. I feel like the house looks so nice, and if we aren't going to move anytime soon - we should do the updates to make our house feel nice for us while we are here.