Updated, Finally! (summer 2010)

:) It's been a very long time since I've gotten on to blog and tell everyone what's been going on (sorry!). I've intended to get on a lot. . . if that counts for anything. Well, since a lot has happened I'm just going to choose the things that I have the best pictures for to share :) It'll keep things more interesting I think.

One Day
So, I got the chance a while back to take a roommates engagement pictures. I was really nervous but I ended up having a lot of fun and getting some good pictures too! I'm going to post a few of my favorites:

b&w

muted color

this is the picture they sent us in their announcement

So, maybe one day I can do photography on the side! I'm still more confident designing and editing than I am taking pictures. . . but, all I need is a little more experience :) (thanks Amanda and Arlin for getting me started)

Ranch
This summer Kyle and I got to go to his grandparent's ranch in Panguitch, UT. He had always told me about the ranch and everything to do there and finally I got to go too! It was so relaxing and fun. I really regret that I didn't take more pictures while we were there. We got to ride four-wheelers, fish, eat tasty food, go on a scavenger hunt, make bows and arrows, hike, see some Indian hieroglyphics, visit some Indian caves, play games, relax, etc. Below are the few pictures I have:

this is me swinging on a gate, one of the pictures for the scavenger hunt :)

this is the collection of flowers that Kyle and I gathered for the scavenger hunt, we gathered the biggest variety by far, and we got pricked gathering some of them off of cacti and sticker bushes!

On one of the days while we were there it was especially rainy and everything was very wet. I finally convinced Kyle to take the four-wheelers out and "go mudding" with me. We rode along the trails and found some great puddles. We came back wet, cold, and VERY muddy (just like I wanted!) It was a lot of fun. This picture was taken on my phone so it's a little fuzzy, but you can see the mud on our faces! Overall, we had a ton of fun and I can't wait to get to go back some day. Thanks to Kyle's family for inviting and entertaining us!

Wisdom Teeth Out
I also got my wisdom teeth out this summer. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but it still wasn't very fun. It was so scary to go in for my consultation and have them explain to me everything that could possibly go wrong (like having my jaw lock for a couple of weeks, being partially paralyzed...) and then having to sign the paper that says "sure, I know all of this can happen, but I accept the risk, go ahead." It made me miss the days when mom got to know the risks and sign the paper. So here is what my face looked like post-surgery:


as you can tell, one side was obviously swollen a lot more than the other (yes, both sides were swollen, the one side is so fat that the other side almost looks normal, hehe). When I went in for my check-up they doctors were both amazed that my face wasn't bruised. . . Anyhow, thanks Kyle and Sarah for taking such good care of me. When I got home I crashed on the couch but Kyle still changed my ice packs and gave me my meds like clockwork. And while Kyle was at work, Sarah did my laundry and made me delicious soft food like scrambled eggs :) This was in August and I'm just barely to the point where I don't still have to rinse/swish sometimes to get food out of the holes that were left. Crazy.

Camping/Hiking/Fishing/Fun
Upper Palisades Lake
We went camping with our friends Mark and Natalie in Swan Valley a while back. We camped one night, got up the next morning and hiked the Upper Palisades Lake - 14 miles round trip! Go us!
This was our 1st camping experience together! We stayed in Kyle's old scout tent which was too small for us to stretch completely out in. . . and then when we woke up in the morning we had the pleasant surprise of being covered in lots of tiny black flecks that were shedding off of the tent bottom, hehe. . . Needless to say I insisted we get a new tent. We finally got one and have gone camping again since in a larger, non-shedding tent :) (no pictures from that trip though) Kyle and I were in charge of breakfast the next morning and we made some pretty awesome campfire pancakes! We are now experts at campfire pancakes. Last time we went camping, just the two of us, we forgot the flipper- so we are both also experts at tossing the pancake up, flipping it, and catching it on the other side!
After breakfast we packed up and started hiking.

This is the 1st lake we came to on the hike, the Lower Lake. Very pretty.

Finally we reached the Upper Lake. Such a huge lake! We hiked around the top of it until we found an okay spot to get to the shore to have lunch and try some fishing.

Look at me cast! haha

Master Fisherman Kyle

We were casting and casting and we were having no luck. So Kyle decided to just put the bobber on, toss it out and see what happened. He tossed it out, sat down, we started talking. We were trying to be very diligent in watching the bobber. But we must have gotten distracted because we looked out and we couldn't see the bobber. . . . Kyle: "Where did the bobber go? Why did it sink? That's so weird. Where is it?" Me: "Um, I dunno, doesn't that mean there is a fish on it?" Kyle: "What, no, why would it disappear like that?" . . . so he goes over to the pole to try and find the bobber. Low and behold, he starts to pull it in and realizes that I was right - bobbers don't just disappear for no reason - there was a fish on it! Kyle tried to reel him in but the fishy got away. Now Kyle knows to be a little quicker when he realizes the bobber is gone, hehehe.

At the end of those rocks is the lake. . . And the red shirt that you see poking out of the trees is Kyle, holding on to a very long blue rope that is tied to a very tall tree. Yep, Kyle found something to help him feel like Tarzan. :) He took a swing which got him quite high off the ground. The guys thought about using the rope to jump into the lake but decided against it because 1)the water was cold, and 2) the fall would have been quite far.

Fishers of Nature Park
Sadly, the only pictures I have of us actually catching fish are from Nature Park- the duck park here in Rexburg. The fish are not big. We catch them and throw them back.

fish-kisser! hehe. just kidding.

my fish was bigger than Kyle's!

Kyle has gone on other, 'real' fishing trips with some of his guy friends and we have actually had fish for dinner once, good fish! I feel confident that if we had to, we could live off of the land. . . (maybe).

Tandem
I've always wanted to try out a tandem bike! We got the chance to rent one from school. It was fun but tricky. We rode around Rexburg for a day. We tried to get pictures of ourselves by putting the camera on timer. . .

the approach

not sure if what part of us made it in the picture, did pretty good though!

finally, we ran into Sarah near the cheap theaters and she took a real photo for us :)

Ross Park
In Rexburg we are lucky to have the "splash park." The splash park is a tiny water-fun area for kids (and there are always tons of kids there) at one of the parks. It has a couple of small slides, water shoots up from the ground and you can run through it, and there is a bucket that fills up and dumps. A couple of summers ago, Kyle and I would frequent splash park. We would dodge the kids and "get soaked" . . . something about being married seemed to make us feel to mature to go back to the kiddie splash park. . . That's when we discovered Ross Park. Ross Park is in Pocatello and has a lazy river, a large slide, a lilly-pad obstacle course, large slide, water basket-ball (which was a lot of fun), and it is definitely not just for little toddlers.

crossing the lily pads!

floating the lazy river- Sarah came with us and took this pict.

So that is the update of our summer adventure! I'll get on again SOON and give you the most recent update. :)

Pow Pow

There is a new pesky plant growing rapidly among the Idaho wildernesses. The shiny red plant baffles scientists, is considered a threat to local wildlife, and has recently had a bounty placed on it. . . This is how Kyle and I ended up hunting the ferocious Dr.Pepper plants (hey, anything for a little extra money, right).

Ok, you are right, there is no real Dr. Pepper plant. We did have a good time setting them up and shooting at them though. Kyle was pretty excited to use his gun he brought back from Cali. We went with friends Shane and Sidney. After setting the cans up on the tips of the plants I couldn't help but think that they it looked like a field of Dr.Pepper plants. It was hard to tell when we had hit the cans though. But when we went and checked them out they were pretty peppered so I guess our aim is alright. Next time we want to take full soda cans and shake em up before shooting at them. . . . Kyle's such a cowboy:


We had fun :)

honeymoon

For our honeymoon we went on a cruise out of San Diego!! The cruise ship stopped for a day in Catalina and a day in Ensenada, Mexico. Of course, we also spent a lot of time on the ship itself. The top picture is at one of our elaborate dinners. Funny enough, we ended up sitting at a group table (we had requested a table for two) right next to another newly-wed LDS couple! haha. There were 4 couple total and so half of us were LDS. Anyhow, the dinners were nice and the waiters would always have some song/dance prepared to entertain us. Also, if the found out that it was your birthday or honeymoon you got extra attention! Woo-Hoo. So this is where the story behind the above photo begins. Our waiter (romeo) found out that it was our honeymoon so one night at dinner we got sang to: "Happy Honeymoon To You" . . . They draped the napkin over our heads and told us we had to kiss during the whole song. Haha. Funny people. The ship also had fun shows and things. When they would come in a clean up our room they would leave us towel creations like the one below.



Our day in Mexico was awesome. We took a tour to the blow-hole and shopped around a market street. We had a chatter-box tour guide who told us some crazy stories about everything (how she tried to feed her kids healthy, how whales feed their babies, how to properly eat a fish taco, how to bargain with the vendors. . .) The first photo is of the vending street. We had fun looking around their shops. But man, they really wanted you to buy something. By the end of our shopping adventure Kyle had gotten a new wallet ("Gucci" none the less, haha ) and I got a pretty sweet purse too! They tried to tell me my purse usually sold for $200 and that for me it would be only $90. Hehehehe. I wanted it for $15, they wanted me to pay $25 minimum, I ended up paying $20. So that was fun.


Below is one of the fish tacos that we ate. They were soo good. And now for a quote from our tour guide: "You know the sharks in the ocean? The ones that usually eat us . . . Well, here we eat them!" So apparently the meat in the fish tacos is actually fried shark. The tacos were really good.


The picture below is of us at the blow hole. The water you see behind us is spraying up through the blow hole. I would try and put up a video but the videos from my camera are always huge and I doubt it would up-load . . . anyway, it was really neat. The water shoots up way high.


The next few photos are from Catalina Island. It's a cute little island! Kyle and I rented these electric bikes. We could pedal (but they had two big battery packs on them so it was way heavy to pedal them) or just switch them to full-power. We got them for an hour and pretty much saw the whole island on them. The bikes were one of my favorite color and I'd always wanted to try a powered bike so it was a lot of fun. We had a blast. Those battery packs are lethal though. I still have two scars on my shin from where I would hit part of the pack while swinging my leg over to get on the bike :) Haha.


Asides from the bikes, we took a tour on the semi-submerged submarine that you see in the photos below. From the inside we could look out the windows and see tons of fish swim by. It was cool because the submarine was also equipped with these big red buttons at each window. The button was labeled "fire." You could pay a couple extra dollars to have your fish-food-torpedoes loaded. When you hit "fire" the torpedo shoots fish food out of the ship above your window. There were lots of hungry fishies.


And that's how our cruise went!! You can kind of see it in the photo above, Kyle had a cold sore that week. I got accused a couple of times of punching him in the face or injuring him in some way. This wasn't the case. Hehe. Yep! That's our honeymoon in a nutshell!

april 17, 2010

We got married on a beautiful day! Everything went smoothly which apparently is not always the case (today when I went visiting teaching we ended up swapping wedding nightmare stories . . . I just listened because I really had nothing to add). Thanks so much to all of you for your support and help!

how it all began

The Story (by Sharon):

So, at BYU-Idaho they put us into “FHE” (family home evening) groups. We plan cool things to do together and meet Monday nights. When you have a good FHE group, you usually end up doing a lot of stuff together on other nights of the week as well. This is how Kyle and I met; in our awesome Fall semester 2008 FHE group. He was always my favorite “FHE brother” . . . he was just so much fun & the life of the party in my eyes for sure!

Fast forward to near the end of Fall semester. This is when Kyle asks me on our first date. I got out of class and had a message on my phone asking me to lunch. I called him back, sang him happy birthday (yep, he asked me out to be his birthday date!) and told him I would love to go to lunch with him.

By this time I was hearing rumors that Kyle liked me. And, I honestly liked him too! It just took me a long time to recognize and accept it . . . :)

At the end of the semester he gave me a ride to Utah (I always fly in/out of the Salt Lake airport) and we hung out some that weekend. By hanging out I mean: he bought me a nice dinner, took me to meet the artist Greg Olsen, took me to this crazy-nice friend-of-a-friend’s mansion home with indoor pool, treated me to ice-cream . . . He pulled all the stops and I found myself wishing we were together.

Over Christmas break we happily chatted on Facebook (honestly, now that we are together, I rarely get on Facebook). And then came the new semester.

I was going back to school not knowing what to do. I knew that Kyle liked me a lot and that there was potential he’d want to date me seriously. However, I also really felt at that time that I wasn’t capable of being a good enough girlfriend to him. For instance, I had already made plans for Valentines Day weekend. You can’t start dating someone and then leave for Valentines Day! Of course, there was more to it than that (a guy I had dated before was going to get home from his mission in a few months), but mostly I was just an over-thinker with the philosophy of “I’d be too much of a risk for Kyle to date; things might not end well. . . I don’t care if my heart gets crushed but I refuse to crush Kyle’s.” I worked myself up into such a worry that I called Kyle over and told him everything I was thinking . . . “Kyle, I can tell you like me a lot but I don’t think I’d be good enough for you so you should probably not focus your dating on me.”

Well, we were still in the same FHE group so we were still seeing a lot of each other. For a little bit I felt awkward being around him. I also really missed going on dates with him. Gradually, things were back to normal. I started making excuses to be around him. I got him to go for a run with me, telling him that if I were alone I was restricted to jogging around campus since it wasn’t safe for lil’ ol’ me to be running alone elsewhere. That’s kind of the big turning event for me – when we started really being together again a lot, and just the two of us. We would ride bikes, play tennis, etc. Finally, the day came when Kyle said “we need to talk.” We arranged to go to dinner that evening. The whole day I was in a panic that he was going to take me out and tell me to leave him alone. But, instead, we went out, had a great time, and then after he’d driven me home, we sat in his car and he spoke to me this beautiful soliloquy (that’s probably not the right word, but it was sweet like poetry). He simply told me how he felt about me. He told me that if I was a risk then I was worth taking and that I was very “special to him in a good way.”  So, that’s the moment my heart melted. For the last couple weeks of the semester we were happily, officially dating. Then, home for me for the summer. Silly summers, always interrupting romances.

Luckily, I was only going to be home for half of the summer. Still, I left telling Kyle that he could date other people while I was home for summer. I couldn’t help but think that someone as wonderful as him would end up finding someone better than me. BUT, much to my surprise, we talked a ton while I was away! The distance didn’t really seem to separate us. :) When I came back for the second half of summer Kyle picked me up from UT and drove me back to ID and right to a surprise “welcome home” party (he’s so good at throwing me surprise parties).

For the rest of the summer I was working as an EFY camp counselor. Pretty much we got to be together every-other week when I had off. The weeks I worked I was with the youth all day long, so Kyle and I just got to talk on the phone at night . . . It was a very fun, but still somewhat rocky summer relationship-wise. I couldn’t stop being my over-thinking, scared self.

Kyle first told me he loved me one evening as we were walking home. It was dark, raining lightly, he gave me a squeeze and just told me, right there as we were walking. Due to the darkness, I don’t think he knew it, but I grinned ear-to-ear. I love how he said it so naturally in such a perfect moment. Over the next several days, and after a couple more times of telling me he loved me, I still hadn’t said it back. When I finally told him, it didn’t come naturally and in a perfect moment. I could tell he was frustrated so I sat him down and said something like “Kyle, do you just need me to tell you I love you? Because I do. I’m happy when you’re happy and it would kill me to do anything to hurt you. . . I’m pretty sure that adds up to love. I love you Kyle.” For me, even though I botched it and it came at an inopportune time, it felt really good to finally tell him; I said it and I knew it! I remember him cracking a half-smile, so I guess he didn’t think I was completely pathetic. :)

Needless to say, things progressed. I’m so very grateful that Kyle stuck with me through it all, I feel so blessed to have him in my life!!



The Proposal (by Kyle):

I knew early on that Sharon was special, each date that we had reaffirmed that idea. After a few months of dating I had a pretty good idea that we were going to get married. The only problem was that I had not talked to her about it yet. So I decided to invite her to spend a week in San Diego with my family. I thought that this would send the appropriate signal. I mean after meeting someone’s family what’s next? On the long drive home from San Diego I brought up the topic of marriage. She was surprised and not quite ready to talk about it. As we drove through Utah we stopped at an outlet mall in park city. At this mall there happened to be a jewelry store of some sort and I asked her if she would like to look at rings. These remark caught her so off guard that she couldn’t watch where she was going and stumbled into an open door stubbing her toe. I knew that she was not ready and that she was going to need a lot of time to think about marriage.

We both decided that we should pray and ask our Heavenly Father what we should do. As time went on we grew closer together and were able to receive the inspiration we needed. It was sometime in October of 2009 that we decided we were going to get married. We began to shop around for rings and discussing wedding plans. We decided that we would get married in April of 2010 and that I should propose in January. The only problem was that in January Rexburg would be covered in snow and she did not want to have our engagement pictures in snow. So she scheduled our engagement pictures for Saturday November 7, two months before I was to propose!

I didn’t like the sound of that so I went and bought a ring, made a nerve-racking phone call to her father, and began planning out how I was to propose. On Thursday November 5 we had planned to do a hike to the top of a mountain so that Sharon could take a panoramic picture for one of her classes. I thought that this would be the perfect time and place for a proposal. I picked her up after class and we started to drive toward the mountain. The weather was not good and Sharon said that she did not want to take her picture there. I thought to myself, “Oh no! What am I going to do now?” We were driving around Rexburg when Sharon yelled, “Stop!” We pulled off to the side of a busy road and she started to set things up to take her picture. This was not a good place to propose, so I said, “this is ugly” and we got back into the car. I took her to a nice place where we could climb down to the river, the sun was setting and it was beautiful.

After she had taken her picture I told her that I had something I wanted to do. We sat down by the river and I explained that if we were going to be taking our engagement pictures, before we were engaged, we would need something to show our commitment to each other. I brought some string out of my backpack and told her that we would be making commitment bracelets. The bracelet would have three strands of string and each strand was to represent a commitment we would make to the other. Sharon made my bracelet and told me her commitments to me as she tied it around my wrist. It was funny because she was nervous and even commented that it felt like she was proposing. When it was my turn I pulled the bracelet that I had made the night before out of my backpack and told her my commitments to her as I tied it around her wrist. I told her that I promised to always protect her, provide for her, and preside over our family. Little did she know that I had sneakily tied the ring onto the bracelet and that it was hiding behind her wrist. I slid down to one knee flipped the bracelet around, revealing the ring, and asked her to marry me. Sharon was so shocked. She did not know what to say. She exclaimed, “Is that a ring?” After a while she said yes and we were officially engaged.

After six long months we have finally made it! We hope that you will enjoy the evening and are grateful that you could make it. Thank you so much for coming to celebrate our special day with us.