jacob gets his braces off

The post title says it all!  Jacob is done with phase I of braces.  His teeth look great!  Now he needs to finish losing all his baby teeth and growing the permanent ones.  Then it will be on to the final phase II -- probably in a couple years.

mark survives scout camp

Mark with his troop of boy scouts!  They had a great week at Camp Steiner.  Glad to have him home!

cub scout day camp

Last week I went to cub scout day camp without any of my own boys.  This week Mark went to scout camp (for the whole entire week) without any of our own boys. Weird. We are just in this weird spot of life where our boys are not in these particular age groups and yet we have these church callings to fulfill.  I had a good time with the cub scouts and hopefully Mark had a good time with the youth (he's not home yet).  I took a bunch of photos of the cubs and I had one little cub who was so timid, that he wouldn't participate in anything.  I finally had the idea to see if he would snap a few pictures (wish I would have thought of that earlier!).  He took this one of me shooting arrows:

I was a pretty good shot with the arrows!  One of the other leaders stayed on the shore during the boating and took a picture of us out on the boats:

I also got to try BB shooting and I think I'm either pretty terrible or the gun wasn't working properly.  Probably both, but it was fun too!

july 4th run

The boys and I ran the city 5k on the 4th.  I am so proud of them.  I think we all improved.  Ryan ran it in about 23 minutes.  Not sure about Jared's time, but he was happy with it.  Jacob finished it in about 34 minutes, but apparently it would have been faster if he hadn't had to puke before he got to the finish line!  Poor kid!  I felt bad that I wasn't there with him, but I was running with Matthew. He did great -- we finished around 37 minutes.  That's like 8 minutes faster than last year!  Matthew really tried to run most of it, didn't complain, and took shorter walk breaks.  I think it helped that Mark cheered us on at a couple places along the race route.  The shirts we got were awesome, and yes -- I have no pictures! It was so much fun!