go outside the box

here is what our lives have included recently...

a trip to robert's family's cabin up in fairview with abi and ammon and our niece and her husband in august



turns out i missed the memo for wearing blue basketball shorts and a yellow t-shirt





and i'm not sure how all of this happened









or why i'm posting this picture (and why i wore this outfit, especially these pants)



as well as this one



we had such a fun weekend. somehow we didn't get any pictures of brittany and casey in the mix because they also had some friends who came up with them and somehow, likely because there were only 2 four-wheelers, we ended up separated much of the weekend.

abi is one of my best friends and i know i am guaranteed to have a good time when she's around. she could make staring at a blank wall fun.



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here's what else we've been doing...soccer. robert loves soccer. i thought basketball was his true love, but i think he ended up playing it in high school just because he was tall, had freakishly long arms and because his best friends were doing it (followed the crowd...i thought we were told not to do that? well, robert did). anyhow, it turns out soccer is his #1. i have loved going to his games. he is quite aggressive and most of the time i fear for the lives of his opponents, which makes being a spectator quite entertaining. these are some pictures i took from his last game of the season last weekend. i totally felt like a soccer mom, sitting in my folding chair with a blanket over my legs trying to hold the camera steady while shouting at the refs. dreams do come true (or nightmares, rather)! we are going to try and play intramural indoor starting in a few weeks. i haven't played soccer in 10 years and i'm not sure if these feet still have it in them.







and lastly...robert and i were made young men's and young women's president in our inner-city branch the first sunday we arrived. my boss is actually our branch president so he saw us coming...the sneak. initially there were no ym or yw in the branch but the day we arrived a family of 5 kids were confirmed who had just moved to the u.s. from guinea, africa...making up the entire yw/ym program. they are beautiful. pauline is 19, benjamin is 17, madeline and rosine are 15 and maxime is 8. they arrived in the u.s. about 2 months before their baptism and are just now beginning to learn english. the communication barrier between us has been substantial but we have had fun and i have learned much from them. they were catholic in africa and have a very strong faith in jesus christ. i love them.

they never smile in pictures...i don't get it



here robert and i are talking them into it



and here are their cheesers



We also took the girls to general conference at the beginning of october. i think they were blown away by how many mormons there are. 22,000 all in one place is pretty incredible. it was also really neat to see their excitement when they saw the prophet for first time. it made me realize how numb i've become to my proximity to God's servants.