Warning....LOOOOONG post ahead!

Silver Lakes Ward Youth Conference 2009 ......"THIS DAY"
Last week was our ward's two day Youth conference. As the Young Womens President I got to go. This was very exciting for me because the whole time growing up I can only remember ONE youth conference that we had. I was thrilled to be a part of this one. I took over 300 photos (which are NOT all on this post....don't worry!), but for the purposes of my BRAG-arrific blog I will only be showing the ones of ME!!!

They are all completely out of order too. Stand by!

We left early Wednesday morning and headed down to SNow College in Ephraim Utah where we were going to stay in the dorms. They had some water games for us that afternoon, and that night we went up the road to Manti and watched the Manti Pageant. The next morning we headed up the canyon to Badger Mountain to the ropes course that the College owns and did that as a group and then headed home for an hours rest, a shower, and then dinner and a fireside. It was a great conference!!

One part of the ropes course had this 12 foot wall that using teamwork (and a whole LOT of TRUST) the youth had to lift each other up and over. I participated (because I am cool like that) and was so thankful that those big strong priests were able to lift my fat butt up into the air.

And I was even more thankful to Mykel B. for grabbing my belt loop and lifting me the heck over!!!
Beautiful picture I got of the Manti Temple.
Going down the slide with some of my Laurels.
"Trying" to dance. Clearly I did NOT succeed!
Posing with some of my young women! Aren't we cute??
Eating my lunch and just being me!
Making faces with two of my Laurels (Hannah and McKall).What the heck? I don't even know WHAT I was doing in this picture!

Thank heavens all the kids know (or at least have figured out by now) that I am a dork and they put up with me. I honestly would not want to serve anywhere else right now. They are such fine examples to me! I love their guts!

campout!!

The Cole Family Campout is always a highlight of our summer. This year was no exception. We camped out at Southfork up by Monte Cristo. It was great except for when it rained. Which it did a lot. Oh well!! We had fun anyway!

The annual "grandkids and grandparents photo". Always a keeper!!
Doing crafts to stay busy. Grandma was such a good sport and sat right down by the kids and did them too.
Dirty tired faces. Yep! Sounds like camping to me!
This is Sidney about one hour after we got there and already covered from head to toe in DIRT! She thoroughly LOVED camping!! (Can you tell?)

Best Teacher EVER!

I forgot to post this right after it happened. Ooops! At the end of May there was a retirement party at our elementary school for two teachers that were retiring. One of them was Mrs. Henderson, a Kindergarten teacher. She was all three of my girls' Kindergarten teacher and seriously the best teacher ever! They adored her. She kept them in line. I loved to volunteer in her classroom (and I honestly can NOT say that about every teacher!).

She literally cried when we came by to say farewell to her and I wanted to take a picture of her with the girls. SHe is a wonderful woman and will be greatly missed at our school! I was so bummed that Jonathan doesn't get to have her for his Kindergarten teacher. Especially since he went with me each time I volunteered when Rachel and Jenny were in her class and he loves all her "toys".

King for a day!

My cute husband is turning 41! He is officially old. Shhhh! Don't tell him I said that!!
Sporting the crown that Rachel made for him, thereby making him "KING for a DAY".
Mike with his cake and the "4" and one candles. I am so clever. ahem...

Jenny's show

June 11th was the first graders program at our elementary school. That means that miss Jenny was the star of the show (to us at least!). It was animal-themed. They sang songs about animals and recited stories they had read throughout the year that were about animals.
Jenny got to hold up a horse during one of the songs. This is the horse thingmajigger that she made.

She is not really singing. She is already zoning. Her meds had LONG since wore off!Doing the googly eyes during the "little green frog" song. She thought she was HOT stuff because she got to be one of the ones to wear those COOL glasses!

It's a DATE!

June 9th was our last Broadway Across America show. It's such a bummer that the season is over. I have really enjoyed having these dates with my hubby! We don't get out much because with the kids and Mike's work and my calling, time is precious and we are trying to get things done or simply spending it together.

Can't wait for next year's season!! Lion King, Legally Blonde, Wedding Singer....should be a blast!!!

down? really???

I don't know how I did it, but when I went for weigh-in this morning I was down 1.6 pounds. Seriously, I have no idea how that can be. I ate horribly (PMSing and chocolate), and I hardly exercised at all (the AFTER PMSing....). It made for a crappy two weeks, but apparently not crappy enough. I thought for sure that I would have gained. I am glad though that it was a loss. It re-motivates me. Although this next two weeks will be tricky...it's our famiy's campout (yay, Dutch Oven cooking!!!) and Youth Conference. Hopefully I will be good on all the other days and still get a good result.

I am officially 6 pounds away from my goal weight. The goal that I have had for YEARS! You know, to get back to the weight that I was in HIGH SCHOOL! How sad is that? And it isn't even that LOW of a weight. Technically I should be lower. Oh well, baby steps! If I reach this goal before Jonathan's birthday then that will mean that I have lost 50 pounds in 6 years. Crazy huh? The 50 pounds part, or the 6 years part??? Either way, it will be a new era for me and I am thrilled. I still will not be the SIZE that I was in high school (also not a low thing), but I am working on toning up the areas that stretched out to carry babies and have not gotten their flatness back yet.

WOW! SO I just realized this is a long post all about my dorky body. Sorry. I guess I was just so excited that I went on a rant. :]

Sidney and some sneakiness

This series of pictures cracks me up! When we were at Caleb's Special Olympics tournament, Sidney was trying to be sneaky and get into her Aunt Andi's purse. She put her little hand in, and then would look up and see if Andi was watching (which she wasn't...she had no idea until the very end) and then she would pull something out and check it out. Then put it back in, look up at Andi again and then snoop in the purse some more.

It was super funny!!

Craft time

A few weeks ago while the kids were off track I got out these little ceramic things that I had bought and let them paint them. They had tons of fun. The best thing is that I was calm and collected and did not even freak out ONCE about the mess! (I know, impressive right???) Anyway, like I said, the kids had a ball doing this activity and so I bought some of these things to take on our camping trip for all the younger cousins to do. I hope they like it too.

Flashback Friday- the graduate....of 1993

What the crap, right? Yah really. Someone should've informed me about using makeup that makes one look like a ghost. What was I thinking??? This is in honor of it being graduation time around these parts and 4 of my cute Laurels are graduating. Wow! So weird to see them all grown up, but I imagine it was much the same for my leaders too. :]

*this is me and Andi, by the way. And it is circa 1993, so really we can't help most of it. It was the 90's and I will blame it on that til the day I die.