Yellowstone and Stuff

So, Rachel has been writing all of the blogs for a while.  I guess it's my turn.  I'll give a short update and then some pictures (the reason people read blogs).

Well, Rachel has been working hard at her job.  She's got a lot of kids that are holy terrors, but it was worth it so we could learn some of the things we definitely didn't want to do as parents.  She'll be really glad to be done.  I just finished my semester today!  I'm excited to be done with this school.  Not that I have anything against BYU-Idaho, I will just enjoy something different.  Also the break will be relaxing, I hope.  Now that I don't go to BYU-Idaho anymore, I can grow a beard (Rachel shakes her head).  This semester was eventful.  I took a lot of marriage/family/parenting type classes and got a lot of good books.  That's what's new with me, I guess.

We went to Salt Lake for the 4th of July weekend.  We spent Saturday morning up at a lake in North Ogden on the pontoons and canoe.  It felt good to soak up the sun.  At least it did, until I got burnt, then it just hurt.  I really got burnt on my left arm, which coincidentally is the arm exposed to the sun when you drive.  We went to Sugarhouse to see fireworks.  It took us a long time to get out of there.

On Sunday we went to Music and the Spoken Word.  It was really great.  Rachel and I went down to Provo to visit our friends one last time before we move.  We visited Dane & Bridget Smith, then Natalie Christensen, and then Taylor & Valerie Jackson.  It was good to visit all of our friends.  We planned to stop and see Kayla, and Jeremy & Emily Brown on the way home, but Rachel got sick, so we headed straight back to Rexburg.

Now, let me tell you about this crazy sickness that came upon Rachel.  I've never heard of this before, but now we're pretty well informed.  It started Friday night when Rachel started getting a little discomfort under her jaw every time she ate.  As it turns out, one of her salivary glands had something blocking it (we think it was some kind of stone).  All day Saturday and Sunday the discomfort turned into extreme pain and swelling under her jaw every time she salivated.  This made eating not very enjoyable for her unfortunately.  She had to eat really fast, take Tylenol, and sit with an ice pack held to her jaw/neck until the pain went away.  By Monday it started getting infected and instead of just the pain happening during eating, it was constant.  Any movement or talking made it hurt worse.  She says it was worse than when she had a dry socket.  We considered going to an urgent care center, but decided to wait.  We finally got her an appointment with her doctor in Rexburg, who told us to try sucking on lemon drops (which was probably the last thing she wanted to do) and massaging it to try to force the stone out.  The lemon drops were the magic cure, because in a couple of hours the pain was gone and the gland slowly drained for the next two days.

So, last weekend we went with Thomas and Lindsey Giles to Yellowstone National Park.  It had been maybe 12 years or so since I last went there.  We saw a lot of Thermal Pools and Hot Pots.

There was a really cool one that was called a Paint Pot.  It was just a lot of molten clay bubbling and spurting from the ground.  That was cool.  Here's a picture of one.

We went to Old Faithful after looking at those.  As it turns out, much to my dismay, Old Faithful is not really that faithful.  The geyser blasts every 40 to 126 minutes.  That's kind of a large gap in time.  Don't count on Old Faithful to tell you the time, because he will probably be off by a whole bunch.  Nevertheless, he did explode, as predicted (I guess he's a little faithful).  It was pretty cool.  

Here's us with the old geyser in the background.  It was calming down by the time we got a chance to take a picture.

We went and got ice cream at the gift shop afterwords.  Yellowstone was fun.  

We took a picture of Rachel's pregnancy at 30 weeks last Sunday.

We had our good friends Chris and Nicole Davis over for dinner on Sunday.  This will be the last time that we see them for a long time.  It's sad to leave all of our friends behind and to not have any where we're moving to.  We'll survive.

Our plans haven't changed.  We're moving to Portland for Chiropractic School.  We've got a place to live (almost).  We're moving in two weeks.  It's going to be super stressful getting packed and making that long drive.  I hate long road trips.  What makes it worse is that Rachel and I will be driving each of our cars.  That's pretty much what we've got going on.

Here's a cute picture of my wife!