Jacob playing in the snow

More About Primary

I attended my second week of Primary and taught this time.

Last night, there was a knock on the door. A member and her three children were at the door bearing cookies. The youngest daughter, Keltie, is in my Primary class. The family made cookies for Family Home Evening and each daughter got to choose one person to deliver cookies to. Keltie chose me, her new Primary teacher. It was so sweet!

Primary

I survived my first Sunday in Primary.

I have five year old kids. Four girls and four boys. (I was totally wrong in my previous post.)

Today I observed and next week I will teach.

New Calling

I am nervous. I have a new calling that I start tomorrow. I will be a Primary teacher. I have the younger of the two CRT classes. It will be 8 boys (there is a second class with 6 boys and 2 girls). I will start out co-teaching with Sara Warnick but she is going on maternity leave shortly. I will report back with how it goes.

Dave will be staying home with the boys. Hopefully Jacob will nap for Dave.

More wildlife

Here's a photo I took yesterday. The squirrel was was nice enough to pose for me.

Oh Deer!

Look what we saw on our drive today! The young deer was very curious about us but the mother quickly went back to eating.



















Further down the road we found these deer on someone's front yard. They two young males were play fighting while another deer nearby was eating.











This is a pretty photo from our drive today.

Evan on his hands and knees.

Evan started today getting up on his hands and knees.

Our New Backyard

We had our backyard worked on by David Margetts (a contractor in my ward) and he did a spectacular job. The work included extending the concrete slab across the length of the back of the house, grass in more of the backyard, a concrete pad for our shed, a concrete sidewalk to the gate, and an attached shed. They also replaced the barely living grass in the front yard and put in a gate on the side of the house where there wasn't one. The project is almost done. All that is left is the roofer coming out to put the concrete shingles on the shed roof. We are very pleased and Dave is looking forward to moving the contents of the garage into the shed.

This is the sidewalk along the side of the house.

This is the slab across the back the day after it was poured. The center slab where all the stuff is sitting was already there.

Our new shed from the backyard.

The new shed behind the new gate on the left side of the house. Also you can see our living grass in the front.

We added these prints to the cement while it was still wet. On the right is Jacob's handprits and on the left is Evan's foot smear.

Evan

Evan is rolling over consistently now. He is such a sweet baby. He loves to look around and to watch and laugh at Jacob.

So what do you think? Who does Evan look like? David or Katy?

Traveling

So far this summer, the boys and I have been to California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Now we are ready to stay home for a while.

California was a fun Crookston reunion. Unfortunately Dave could not attend because of work. We were blessed to have Mary and Rachel help us in our travels.

Evan, Jacob, and I flew to Arizona to visit family. We spent a week in Tucson. I ran into my sister-in-law, Mary, at Wal-Mart. What a suprise for her because she didn't know I was in town. Jacob spend the week being his Grandpa Zimmer's shadow which his Grandpa utterly enjoyed. My parents had all of their windows replaced while we were there. We spend a day in the smoltering heat with ALL of the windows out. Is smoltering a word? Eh, it is now.

We went to Albuquerque for a baby shower and a birthday party. Dave again was unable to come. Poor Dave, we keep ditching him. But we really do love him and we miss him while we are gone. The baby shower was for my nephew and his girlfriend. They are due with a boy in November. Michael's birthday was on September 5th and my parents flew in to help celebrate. Jacob and Evan had a good time with family. They both received tons of attention. Joe rubbed Evan's head whenever he saw him and Evan really loved it. I had the explorer worked on at Joe's shop (by the way, he is my brother-in-law) and Jacob found it rather disturbing that mommy's car was broken and the wheels were off. He asked his Uncle Joe to put the wheels back on.

I love this photo!

I love this photo. From left to right... My Dad and his two cousins. Mike Zimmer, Gary Parkinson and Shari Parkinson. Too cute.

All Dressed Up

Evan's two month appointment

Evan gained four inches and four pounds since birth! And he is oh so cute.

Jacob

Our little smurf

Uh oh Jacob.

Your people paint is wearing off and we can see your smurf skin!

Jacob and his new little brother

Welcome Evan!

Evan joined our family on Friday, May 9th. The poor kid was purple when he was born because the cord was tightly wrapped around his neck. Evan weighed 7 pounds 4 ounces and was perfect.

So far, baby number two has been much easier. We were smarter this time and sent Evan to the nursery for a few hours each night so we could get some sleep. When we came home we were tired but we were not zombies like after Jacob was born.

Rockin' Jake

Jacob loves performing for the camera. Better than that, he loves looking at his pictures on the camera. So after each shot, Jacob runs over to the camera to check out the picture.

WE CAME, WE SAW, WE CAUCUSED

We came, we saw, we caucused.
Today was the Colorado caucus and Dave and I showed up at our local high school to participate. We had never caucused before. Being from Arizona we just voted in the past. It was 12 degrees outside and icy when we arrived. The high school was packed with people - different precincts in different classrooms. There were 60 to 70 people in our classroom plus lots of children. I knew a good number of the folks in the room from church. We voted on pieces of paper for whom we wanted for President. Two gals volunteered to tally the votes and that was that. Romney swept our room with 44 votes, McCain 12 votes, Huckabee fewer votes, and Paul 4 votes. A man came around to each precinct classroom and collected the vote information and phoned it in to a central location. It appears that Romney swept Douglas County entirely.
After the vote, they signed-up volunteers from our precinct for county delegates and for election judges. I volunteered to be an alternate county delegate for my precinct. This means that on March 1, I will show up at the high school and if one of the delegates does not show up I will get to vote for county level stuff.

A Crookston relative lost

We got a couple phone calls from the Associated Press inquiring if we were the family of Duncan Crookston before we decided to look him up on the internet. I also looked him up on the Crookston copy of PAF and it turned out that he was Dave’s third cousin. He had lived in Denver all along - kind of a small world. We googled Duncan’s name daily to learn more and more about this Crookston cousin. We learned about Duncan’s injury in Iraq from a road side bomb that killed three other soldiers and his five month fight for life. Dave and I were both greatly moved by his story. What a brave young man he was to join the military in a time of war. Duncan was the first person I feel like I have some connection with who has died for our country in Iraq. There are many blogs that were on the internet to keep everyone current on Duncan’s status after the injury. He was days away from his 20th birthday when he passed away leaving a wife and a family of Crookstons. Duncan's great-grandfather was the brother of Carlton Crookston, Dave’s great-grandfather. We had wanted to go to the funeral service at the LDS church in Denver but Dave couldn’t leave work and I was afraid to go alone. This all brought home to me the realness of this war. I get so caught up in my life that I forget that there are young men and women fighting for my right to get caught up in my life.