U.S.A. Swimming and Water Polo

Well I have been waiting for awhile and thought it was about time that I said something about the Beijing OOlympics. My hero Michael Phelps was amazing. Never have a seen a single athlete so prepared and focused on the task at hand. I was able to see all but one of his live finals on T.V. and I am proud to say that I saw an amazing piece of history unfold. I have had more kids then ever ask about being on the High School swim team or joining our swim club. Michael Phelps said that he set out to change and bring about recognition to the sport of swimming and he has far succeeded even his expectations I'm sure. Thank you Michael Phelps the world of swimming owes you a great amount of gratitude and respect for your amazing feats, sportsmanship, drive and focus. ALL HAIL THE KING OF THE POOL MICHAEL PHELPS!

Well There is a sad and happy feeling to this entry. The U.S.A. Men's Water Polo team won silver in the Olympics on Sunday against Hungary. This is sad because they didn't win gold, but awesome in the fact that they have not meddled in twenty-two years and were ranked ninth going into the Olympics. They hung with the Hungarians for the first half of the match, the Hungarians by the way have won the gold for sixteen consecutive Olympics they lost by three but have brought a great amount of recognition to a sport I love very much. CONGRATULATIONS U.S. OLYMPIANS!

Here we go again!

Well Bethany and I tried to hide it but there is no denying that Bethany is Pregnant. Like I said we wanted to keep it a secret until she was three months along, but people asked the right questions and made their own conclusions from the answers so we decided to confirm their conclusions. Bethany is about two months along and we figure she will be due in the middle of March sometime. I feel sometimes that we can barely handle one, how are we going to handle two? Well we are excited and can't wait. Bethany doesn't want to find out what it is, I on the other hand want to find out.

P.S. I cut my hair about a week ago. but now I am contemplating a beard again.

2 Years Together

Yesterday was our anniversary. We have been married for two years. I can't believe how fast time has gone by. I can't believe all that we have accomplished together either. I really do have my best friend at my side and I love that. I love Terry even more than the day that I married him and I didn't think that was possible. He really helps me be a better person in the gospel and in temporal things. I hope that the love, understanding and friendship that we have grows at the same rate that it has in the past two years!!

Hair today, gone tomorrow.

Okay, if you were to ask Bethany what her two pet peeves with me are they would be that I don't like to shave and that I don't regularly cut my hair. Well lately I have been a little better at the one and not the other. I shave every other day however lately I have just been too lazy to cut my hair. I have had the sides trimmed twice since the beginning of the summer but the top has not been cut at all. We decided to take these pictures and after a particularly hot muggy day when I had not washed my hair for a couple of days.

I had my hat on and when i took it off and ran my fingers through it I found that it would stand up on end. Gross you say, but let me explain. I swim almost everyday in the morning before I coach and sometimes twice a day because every Monday, Wednesday and Friday Part of my coaching job requires me to teach swim lessons for an hour. Its hard for me to justify washing my hair when I know I am just gonna do it again the next day. It is not the norm, but it does happen on occasion.

So Bethany is getting tired of it and I have to admit when I look at these pictures I am reminded of various celebrity mug shots that sometimes make there way to the news when someone of note gets arrested for drunk driving. So we put it up to you family and friends, we want to hear it from you. To cut, or not to cut, that is the question.

I love peaches, because they are so delicious!!

We have been abundantly blessed with peaches and apples this summer. The house that we moved into had two fruit trees that have been here for years. We were so surprised to see so much fruit growing on them. The peaches have really impressed me. We have gotten about 4 bushels of peaches from one tree. They are so sweet and good and good size too. Most of them bigger than a soft ball. We have highly anticipated their maturation to ripeness. We have many times had to save them from neighbors or passerbys wanting to pick them .We have given a lot away, eaten a lot fresh and made a few peach cobblers. I thought I would can them at first, but realized that they were cling peaches and hard to get off the pit.

The apples are small, but perfect for apple juice, applesauce and apple pie filling. I don't think I am going to be as good as my mom would be and make apple pie filling to freeze. I think I am just going to make apple juice.

Fourth of July- "I Love America!"

Even though the weather wasn't perfect we had a fun fourth of July. It was rainy off and on, but pretty good during the parade in the morning which we all enjoyed. I don't know if the parade was that good, but it is fun to see the kids play and sit around and talk.
They handed out these flags which I thought were a hundred times better than candy and the kids loved them. Porter especially did. You couldn't have stolen it away from him.

Of course he loved the candy especially the suckers, but I didn't. Porter was right up there in the line up of kids ready to get any candy that came his way. Really the only way he got some was because some people come along the sides of the parade to give out candy rather than throw it. Porter got 2 suckers and you couldn't have gotten them open fast enough for him.

We were there with Stephanie and her kids, Marthea and their kids, The Bailey's and me and Porter. Here we all are. It doesn't look that exciting, but it was fun.

Our favorite part of the day of course is the Wiffle Ball tournament. We had enough people to have 5 teams and played a double elimination bracket to find the champions. Last year my team was horrible. This year we did so good and had some memorable "plays." We made it to the championship and guess who's team we were up against, none other than Terry Telusky's. It was neck and neck there for a while, but then they did beat us and I have to say that it was fair and square. Terry was so happy and has been remembering those glory moments often in the past couple of days.

We watched the fireworks in Kristy and Dustin's backyard. There were just a few, but it was great. All the kids got to have box after box of snaps and of course every kids dream came true when the pulled out the sparklers and there was enough for each kid to have like fifty. Needlesstosay, the backyard was just full of smoke by the time we were done. Porter liked the sparklers and wasn't hesitant at all to grab a hold and wave it in the air. I was surprised that he never tried to touch the end. He just waved it around, sometimes too vigorously.

Well, I love America and count my blessings often of all the little freedoms we enjoy here. I know that we are blessed. I make Terry think I am crazy when I just turn to him out of the blue sometimes and say aren't we so blessed that we have cars or whatever has come to my mind at the moment.

Cincinnati

Terry and I, Porter and Terry's niece, Kelcy, headed to Cincinnati last weekend to visit my dear brother Bret. His birthday was last Tuesday and we thought we might drive down and surprise him for his birthday, but then decided to make a weekend visit of it instead. We had so much fun just being with him.We didn't know what we would do while we were there, so Terry looked online and found the Cincinnati museum. It has 3 different museums in one. The Children's museum, the History Museum, and the Natural History and Science. One of the neatest parts of the museum was the building it was set in. This building in the picture used to be the old train station. It was huge.

The first museum we went to was the Natural History and Science. It was probably our least favorite. There just weren't that many neat things on display. One fun thing was the cave that you walked through. They made it feel like you were in a real cave with water, cool air, and different exhibits of animals and formations that you might see in a cave.

The next stop was the Children's museum. Of course there was a lot of neat things. It is a child's playplace paradise.

Porter loved the water exhibit. He didn't care much about the neat things you could do with water, just splashing made him happy. We sure missed Tania, Miller and Dallin. We thought of you often and kept finding ourselves saying, "if they were here they would love this or this or this!" We can't wait to come back with them there.

Kelcy and I played a little dress up with these sari's. It was fun for us. They were big enough for us so I have to believe they were intended for the young and old alike. I would have loved to stay a minute and play with the "play store" station or the kitchen set. Those were my favorite things as a little girl.

The next museum was the History Museum. It had the biggest World War II exhibit. What I liked about this museum was that it gave the stages of history around the theme of Cincinnati. My favorite part in this museum was the huge miniature diarama of the whole city of Cincinnati. It filled this whole room and was broken into sections so you could walk through it and see all the different buildings and parts of town.

All the fun wore us out, but we were hungry. Bret had a good idea of a place to go where there are a few restaurants along the river by the aquarium. We headed through town to get there and got to go by his building were he works. It is a huge skyscraper. I always imagined him working in a huge city like this. We even got to see where he pays to park. We couldn't believe he had to pay, but I guess we aren't used to the big city way of life. As we drove through town we recognized some of the buildings we saw in the diarama. It was really neat.

We ate at this nice Italian Restaurant. Then we had to go get some famous "Greater's" ice cream. It is an ice cream place that is well known in Cincinnati. It was really good and we then headed home.

When we got home we were all ready for a nap after the long day of walking. It was so much fun though.

We played a few games with Bret and then headed home. The drive there and back only took about 2 and half hours. Not bad at all. We really enjoyed the ride. We will definitely be going there often!

Family Outings

These past few weeks the weather has been wonderful so we have headed out on nightly bike rides. We have usually gone just around town and to the nearest park. A few days ago we decided to go to a nearby state park and have a picnic. It was kind of a last minute thing, but we loaded up our bikes and headed out. It turned out to be wonderful. The weather was perfect. Porter loves to ride the bike so he was perfect and Terry and I just enjoyed spending time together. We found a neat bike trail that led us along a stream and we followed it until it got to rough to go any further. I love to be outside deep in the heart of natures beauties and to smell the crisp air. I also have found a new thing I love to look out for here in Indiana and that is fireflies.
I think I've always loved to ride bikes and I hope we can see many more neat things together as a family on them.
Porter got this bike seat for his birthday and he loves to go outside. He doesn't like the helmet, but once I get it on he doesn't mind it.

Events in Idaho

I have spent the last two weeks in Idaho. It is always a wonderful break to go and see family even though I am trying to cram in 4 months of fun into such little time. The main event this time was of course to see our dear little scraggles graduate from High School. I never thought I'd see the day when she would reach this mile stone and seem so grown up.

They had a little slide show of all the graduates. Marianna was so cute and is so beautiful now.

She was Valedictorian of her class and gave a wonderful speech. She just did a little unique highlight of each year from elementary school through high school.

I am so proud of her and enjoyed spending a day of shopping and going to lunch with her while I was there.

We all went to support her. I took Porter to the graduation, but he was so fussy that I ended up taking him to the babysitter that Mary had set up for her kids. The babysitter was also tending Amanda's kids so she ended up watching 5 kids. I was so grateful because if not I wouldn't have been able to see Marianna's speech. That is the reason for no kids in the picture.

That weekend Bret and Tania were traveling through Burley on their way to move to Cincinnati. We all decided to go and meet them there for some fun. We went and visited grandma Zollinger and she was so glad to see all of us.

I have to keep taking pictures of Porter with the animals that he loves because he acts so cute around them. He loved Grandma Clark's cats. Thank goodness there was a tame one that was really pretty nice.

He did eat some cat food before I could stop him.

Porter had his first hair cut. We went to Grandma Clark's beauty parlor. He did good for about 10 seconds while I took the picture. Then he was a wiggle worm and cried a little bit just because he wanted to see what was going on and grab the scissors.

We didn't cut off much, but he looks more like a little boy.

Porter was sick for most of our trip and needed a little distraction sometimes. Grandma Clark thought of some cute things to do. Porter loved to listen to her play the piano and she was coordinated enough to play with him on her lap. She had great patience and would just hold him in one arm all the while doing her regular jobs with the other. She said she used to do it all the time with us when we were young. She said, "that's how I would get my work done."

Thanks to Olivia for the great idea and planning we were able to get a little camping at warm river into our vacation. It wasn't the best weather, but we always seem to make memories and have fun.

On the way home we fed the fish bread and marshmallows. There were a ton of fish and were jumping for the bread like crazy.

New Starts!

Our first new start to report is that Porter is walking. He started last Wednesday, Just 2 weeks after his first birthday. He took a couple of steps on his own during the day and then that night we practiced with him going back and forth between Terry and I. I am sure that his legs felt like noodles by the end of the night. He would hardly even stand and so we decided to call it quits. Since then everyone who played with him thought they were the first to discover his new talent. I am happy to say that I saw it first. I thought for sure that he was going to wait until I was gone to try and walk but he didn't. It has been just so funny to see such a little guy walking around.


Another new start for us is the planting of our little garden. We consider it a garden, but really it is just a few potted plants. We planted tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, and zucchini. I planted them a few weeks ago and was very surprised to see that they even grew. They are now about 5 inches tall and growing great! Porter loves to play in the dirt and he eventually will take a taste. He doesn't like it though and will not try it again until another day in which he has forgotten that he already tasted it.

Porter's 1st Birthday Party

We had a little party for Porter to celebrate his 1st birthday. All of Terry's family that lives around here came and enjoyed cake and ice cream with us.

Porter didn't know quite what all the fuss was about during the opening of presents. He doesn't have the art of opening them on his own down yet. I wasn't too worried though. There were many cousins there willing and happy to help :)
He loved this ball I got him! I have to admit though, Katelynn is pretty good at getting him to laugh and smile!
We sang happy birthday to him and put the cake in front of him. He would reach out and just barely touch it and pull back. He certainly didn't demolish it like I thought he would.
We gave him this huge peice of cake and thought for sure that he would just go crazy and eat it, all the while making a huge mess. On the contrary, he didn't even know what to do with it. He just looked at it and lightly touched it. He would have probably ate the whole think if we cut it up into nice little bite size squares.
We then went outside and had a bubble blowing party. Porter loved it. Ilana, Terry's sister, gave him a bubble blowing machine. That was perfect because of course he couldn't blow the bubbles, but loved watching them and trying to touch them.
I bought bubbles for everyone so they all joined in on the fun.

Porter is 1

Happy Birthday Porter!!

Weight- 18 lbs 10 oz Height- 29 1/2 in.
Porter is eating 3 meals a day and drinking from a sippy cup. He takes 2 naps a day. One 3 hour nap in the morning and then an hour nap in the afternoon. He goes to bed between 8-9 at night and wakes up at 7 in the morning. We love to wake up to his little jabbers in the other room.
He is getting his 7th tooth. He has 3 on the bottom and 4 on the top.
One of his favorite things to play with is his stuffed animal "Hop on Pop" from the Dr. Seuss book his Aunt Alida gave it to him. It is so cute to watch him grab it and the first thing he does with it is give it a big hug and just cuddle with it. He also likes toy cars that he pushes around, balls that he is beginning to throw, remotes, phones, and of course anything else that he shouldn't have.
Porter is starting to stand on his own for minutes at a time, but has no desire to take a step. When we practiced with him last week by having him walk between Terry and I , he took 3 steps on his own. I think that he will be walking very soon.

Some of Porter's favorite things to do are taking baths, playing outside, and going for walks in the stroller. He loves music and will dance anytime. He also likes to do the hand actions to the alligator song.

His favorite foods are bananas, macaroni and cheese, cheerios, bread and crackers of all varieties.