Time marches on

 My children's lives are flashing before my eyes!! Aaah! I feel so overwhelmed to ever catch up on blogging. I have let one thing after another distract me and now all the pictures I need to blog are all over the place--on 2 different phones, 3 computers, and blogger doesn't even look the same and google+ is annoying and the list goes on and on. A lot has happened since I last blogged. I've enjoyed having Junior's picture to look at every time I've gotten on the internet but now Nick is gone too and I just know if I don't get my act together they are not going to be very happy with me when they get back. And I'm already down to less than 18 months with one of my missionaries! I will just have to start going through the pictures I've got one by one and see if I can remember enough about them to blog about them. So here I go--The above picture is the boys' at their matching jobs. They both got to be lifeguards at the Y here which I know they both enjoyed for the most part (I can never get Nick to behave for pictures it seems). It was a good experience for them both and definitely helped pay for the start-up costs of their missions. Jeremy was also a lifeguard at the Space and Rocket center which I may have said in a previous blog but I'm too lazy to look. And seriously if I have to check everything like that I will never get any blogging done! Junior sent us some pictures from the beginning of his mission and one of my favorites was this superhero picture. I guess a lot of the kids that were at the MTC with Junior watched the Avengers movie right before heading out and a lot of them had tshirts of their favorites. I have no idea who these Elders were but nice shirts.

 This was a photo from Jeremy's plane ride to Provo. We couldn't really afford to fly with Jeremy (or Nick) so they had to head out on their own although they haven't been on a plane since they were very little. They both did just fine and arrived safely.

 I assume Nick could have a photo just like this one since they have the same name and both went to Spanish-speaking missions and both got suits from the same place.

 

I know General Conference of October 2012 was like a lighting bolt went through many people (us for sure) with the announcement by President Monson that young men could now serve missions at 18 instead of 19 and young women at 19 instead of 21. Junior was at the MTC during that conference and he said it just blew everyone away, they couldn't stop talking about it the whole time. Nick was among the first of the 18 year olds to go as he was so excited about the news, there was never a doubt that he would go as soon as possible. I had started to wonder if our having him skip a grade when he was younger was the best idea because he was not enjoying college here at all.

  He was very unmotivated and just seemed to be floundering a bit (the above picture is his first day or so of college) so it was such a wonderful day when we heard that announcement although I felt like a woman who just had a baby and found out she was pregnant again! It was so hard to say goodbye to Junior and now I was going to have to do it again with Nick! Nick turned 18 in January this year and was off to the MTC in just over a month after that. He just last week arrived in his mission from the MTC--the Salt Lake West mission spanish-speaking. This is one of the gazillion photos we took to find one to send in with his mission papers. I will blog more about Nick's mission soon. It feels unreal to have 2 sons on missions right now but they love it so much and we are so blessed by what they are doing and the people who are helping them do it.

Now to change subjects again, here's some pictures of Isaac around the time he turned 2. He has been such a handful or I am just too old for this. Not sure which. While delightfully funny, he is also persistently aggravating and trying to keep him entertained has been a challenge. This led to one of the many things that has been distracting me. I do a once-a-week preschool in my house for him and a few other paying customers.  :-) I do it with a friend of mine that lives a few houses from me that runs a preschool once a week at her house. So she does Tuesdays and I do Thursdays and we send our kids to each other's preschool. It has been so much fun but any time I have a creative outlet I go a little crazy so it has taken a lot of my time in the past few months. I will do it again this coming school year but not after that.

 And about a month after Junior left on his mission, Jer and I celebrated our 20th anniversary. We didn't do anything spectacular but hey, 20 is 20! Feels great!