The Dixie Round-up

On Thursday and Friday nights, we went to the Dixie Round-up down in St. George. It was a lot of fun and on Thursday night we all got totally decked out in Cowboy attire. It was pretty fun and Gracie finally got to wear the little cowgirl outfit that her Nanny and Grandpa LeBaron gave her last year for Christmas. It was too cute. I've included a family picture we took before we left, a picture of Gracie in her too cute cowgirl garb, and some rodeo shots of Gracie with her granddad Gardner and Justin's sister Carrie with her girls.
I only remember one joke from the rodeo clowns, but here it is- "Why do women have such clean minds?" "Because they change them so often." HA HA HA!

Run for your life!

I've included a picture of Gracie in the jogging stroller. She and I have been running each morning in preparation for the Saint George Marathon. It is really pretty in Pine Valley and I love running to the reservoir and seeing the beautiful trees and forest. I hope that we will be ready to go the distance. I have another training run tomorrow and then I will run the race on October 5th.
The other pictures are of Gracie and Justin. He took her for a horse ride on Saturday and she loved it. What a nice dad! I've also included one of just Gracie and Doc.

Piggies

On labor day, we had a party at Justin's grandma's house. It was a lot of fun. I put gracie's hair in pigtails for the first time. I love playing dress up with Gracie and now doing her hair.
Gracie is getting just big enough and fast enough that she really enjoys playing with her cousins and she follows them around the yard and the house.

Horsin' Around

As promised, here are more cowgirl pictures. One funny note about this particular day... you'll notice that the horse isn't wearing a saddle. When Justin went to lift Gracie off of the horse he had to be careful because little Gracie had grabbed onto the horse's mane and was holding on extra tight. I guess she wanted to take the horse with her.
You can see from the picture with Gracie on Justin's shoulders that she wanted to take him with her too. You have to be careful when she's up on your shoulders because when she gets excited she gets a death grip on your hair.
The picture in front of the saddle house is of Gracie sitting on her granddad's lap and Justin keeping them company. What a cute bunch!

Yee- Haw

On August 25th, Justin saddled a horse so that Gracie could go on a little ride. Justin held her up on the horse while I led with a lead rope and then we got a few pictures of Gracie holding on by herself. She is a natural!
It is amazing to me to watch a baby around such a large animal. You would think that it would inspire a lot of fear, but Gracie loves the horses and I have to watch her because she is totally fearless.

Argh Matey

These were just a few shots that I took of Gracie at the Pine Valley dinner I liked the picture where she was giving the squinty pirate eye- or maybe she was trying to give a cute wink and is as uncoordinated as I am.
This was the weekend of August 18th. That weekend was when Gracie started letting go of the couch when she was standing up so she could practice standing on her own. It is fun to watch her experiment and try new things that are probably really scary to her. She is gaining a lot more balance and is getting really good at standing on her own, and has taken one step a couple of times but then I think she gets stressed out and doesn't know what to do next. She is at a really fun age though and we love to see her personality shining through.

Kelli and Seth's Wedding

This is my cute mission companion, Kelli, and her cute new husband, seth. Kelli and Seth got married the second week in August and I got to come up to Salt Lake for the wedding. It was a beautiful day and everything was perfect.
Kelli is one of the most generous people you will ever meet and she always has a smile on her face. We first met when we became companions at the MTC in provo and then ended up serving right by each other for about half of our missions. At the end of my mission we were companions again for our last six weeks and had a blast. Congratulations, Kell.
The picture at the bottom is of sisters from the Germany Frankfurt mission that were there at the sealing. I was companions with three of them, but served close by the other two.

A ride on the wilde side

Gracie had fun one day sitting on a saddle in the saddle house in Pine Valley. I thought that these smiles were pretty cute.
When I see cute pictures like this it just warms my heart and makes me so happy that I married a cowboy. We love to let Gracie sit on horses and Justin takes her for little rides sometimes.
Hope that everyone likes cowgirl pictures because I have a lot more to post.

Gracie the Gummer

This is Gracie giving her now famous "gummer smile". She started this about a month ago and it totally makes us laugh- she squints her eyes and gives a huge cheesy grin. Where do babies learn these things? Well, all I can say is that it is pretty darn cute.
These other pictures are some of Gracie's new hair-dos. Her hair is finally long enough for me to put it up in a little elastic. It sticks straight up but I can't believe how grown up it makes her seem- especially because she has just never had much hair. The other pictures are of the day that I put a pink spongie curly in Gracie's hair to see if I could get a cute curl. It didn't really work, but at least we had fun trying. I included the other picture of Gracie sucking her thumb because my checker at the grocery store yesterday said that she had never actually seen a baby suck her thumb. I used to think this was a really cute habit until last week when Gracie swished her hand around in the toilet bowl and then sucked her thumb. (I might have to delete this gross story from my blog, but for now I'll push my pride aside and share it).

Camping and Bryce Canyon National Park

Here are some pictures from our camping trip this summer.



The last weekend in July we went camping with Justin's family on Cedar Mountain. We had a great time playing horseshoes, sleeping in a tent with Gracie, and spending time with Justin's family. Justin and his brother Jeff had a few lawns to mow on that Friday, so Gracie and I went early with Larry (Justin's dad) to go to Bryce Canyon with Gracie's other cousins. It was a lot of fun.

Journal Writing

I had an epiphany the other day. The reason why I am such a bad blogger is the same reason why I am sometimes a bad journal writer. I don't have internet at my house, and it takes a little bit of time to blog. Sometimes I have enough time that I could blog about what is going on that week and I could even post a cute little picture. But right now I am saying to myself "If I post a current picture, I've lost my chance to go back and do a re-cap of the last month and a half." Back to the journal writing thing, "If I write about this week, I'll never go back and write about all that other stuff that happened." Why do I fall into this silly trap? Well, I will try to post a few new pics today and maybe even catch up from the last month and a half. Here we go.