Our Girls Camp cake that we made with the girls at the cake decorating class! Jenna Featherston, Me, and JoHanna Featherston Plllllbbb! The girls performing their skit. The theme was "Stand Like A Hero" and each ward had a female hero from the scriptures. Ours was Mary Elizabeth and Caroline Rollins, the girls who protected the Doctrine and Covenants from the mobs. They had a fun "mafia mob" skit, it was great!
I completely forgot to post about Girls Camp. I was asked to be the Girls Camp Director for our ward this year. Girls Camp was way back in June, but I thought I would put a few pics up anyway. It was a ton of work because we had to do all the certification on our own at a ward level. It took so much planning, I can't even imagine being the Director at the Stake level! It was definitely worth it though. The girls are so awesome and we had a good time.
Ben and I went to the Nauvoo pageant in the middle of July. We feel so blessed to be close to the Nauvoo temple and all the church history that is around us in Missouri and in Illinois. It was a wonderful performance and we had a wonderful day doing all of the pre-performance activities. It was a little hot and humid though!
There were bagpipes at the beginning of the performance. They were spectacular!
Pulling each other in handcarts. Can you tell it is humid by my crazy hair? Walking on stilts. The temple was right in the middle of the stage backdrop. At the very end of the performance, in the last hurrah, they lit up the temple in the background. It was beautiful. It kinda took our breath away when it was lit up and the voice of President Gordon B. Hinckley speaking about the temple was playing through the speakers.
Jess wakeboarding.
I don't think I got one picture of Matt(My sister Jessica's husband) that wasn't fuzzy. This was the best I could do. Sorry Matt!
Rachel and Sarah(Mysister-in-law and my niece). We were able to be there for Sarah's blessing.
Lexi (Jared's girlfriend) kneeboarding
Mom Skiing
Me skiing
Love the hair Ben. Fun in the sun on Topaz Lake!
Ryan and Ben on the tube. The goggles are awesome.
Little Adam(Jason and Leslie's little boy)..Sooo cute
Brianna (Jason and Leslie's second daughter)I love the attitude
Granny and Brianna at Topaz Lake
Go Dad! Check out that cut. Look how nice and smooth that water is. We loved having the lake practically to ourselves!
Ben wakeboarding.
Ryan (My brother) and A.J. (Rachel and Ryan's little boy) canoeing. We were pulling them with the ski rope from the boat back to the shore.
Ben, his brother Mike, and his nephew Sam at Lagoon.
Jared and his team at Junior Olympics.
A.J. drinkin' a Jones! I love this picture!
Brianna and A.J. on our vacation at Topaz Lake.
Isn't the stained glass amazing!?
We stopped at Winter Quarters on our way out west and visited the Omaha, Nebraska temple. When we were almost there, the tornado sirens went off and the sky got very very dark. We took refuge in the basement of the visitors center and watched as the rain poured and the winds howled against the black sky. A tornado did touch down just west of us. It was crazy!! This is what the sky looked like.
On our drive out to Utah with Ben's parents we barely made it through some of the flooding in Missouri. This one of the places that half the road was closed and we had to drive through on the side that had higher ground.
Ben's parents came out to visit us in July and we drove back with them to meet my Mom, Dad, Jared, and Lexi in Utah. We spent a couple of days with Ben's family in Morgan before my parents came to pick us up. Jared was playing in Junior Olympics for Volleyball and we watched him for the rest of the week. His team did great and it was a blast to watch him! We then went and met up with the rest of the fam for a week of fun on Topaz Lake in Nevada. We had a great campsite and we had the lake to ourselves most of the week. We got to spend a couple more days at home in Cameron Park before we headed back to Missouri to real life again. All in all it was a wonderful trip and we had a great time! We miss everyone!
Here are some pictures to document our trip.
This is the extra bedroom in our house that we just finished. I will do my studying in here as well as concoct ingeniously creative masterpieces for the random projects I am working on! My amazing mom helped me to finish it while she was out here.
April, Tiffany and I in Columbia. It was exciting to go to Olive Garden, there really aren't very many options in Kirksville and definitely not an Olive Garden. These girls are wonderful!
Tiffany Hillam and I in Columbia, Mo visiting April Henderson and her new little boy at the hospital. He is precious!
I always hear about how difficult life can get, yet somehow it never seems those things will actually happen to me. But when they do make it around my way, I find myself stunned to pieces. That seems to sum up the last few weeks of mine and Ben's life together. A week from this last Monday, after about 11 1/2 weeks of pregnancy, Ben and I found out that we had lost our little baby. Our overflowing joy over being pregnant ended in a not-so-happy moment. It amazes me how much we truly have to learn in this life. It has been a rough couple of weeks with all of this news coming just a week before Ben's finals for his third quarter of medical school.
Despite the blow our hearts have taken, we have been blessed with an incredible support group of friends and family. Our friends out here in Kirksville came to our aid just hours after we received the news and my sweet mother flew out from California the very next day. The phone calls, meals, and flowers were nearly endless over the next few days. We feel lucky to have that kind of support in such trying times. We have pushed through the last couple of weeks and are taking life day by day. Thank you to everyone who has been so loving, compassionate, and supportive at this time of life for us. We are hoping and praying that this blogspot will contain joyful information someday about the child we hope to get in the not too distant future, and then lots more after that.
Ben is almost done with school for a nice long summer break of six weeks. We both cannot wait until this Monday at 4:00pm, and then freedom!! I feel as if I say this over and over, but I mean it more than ever this time--we are both so excited for some much needed time together!! Our plans for the next little portion of our lives have changed a great deal, but we are trying to look forward to the little things like working on our house together, Ben's parents visiting us this June (which is right around the corner!), vacationing in Utah and California for July with family, and moving on to second-year medical school student status this fall. Ben will be glad that he is no longer a freshman; that title never seems to disappear when your schooling goes well beyond High School.
When I stop being lazy we will have some pictures of friends, improvements on our house, and Ben and I up for a visual of our lives in the last little while.
