I miss the old days sometimes

this is nate.

K, so yesterday we were at the church waiting for our bishop interviews with the bishop to renew our temple recommends. While waiting in the hall, I heard my teaching companion (I teach the 9-10 year olds) in the clerk's office talking about somebody's records having not been forwarded to their new ward. Since I had some time as the membership clerk in the last ward, I was kinda proud of myself for knowing what needed to be done for it. Long story short, I heard him making a call about Jon and Jamie's new address. This is how this connects to me finally sitting down to blog today. My teaching companion is Bro. Chris Miller, who is married to Marinda Egbert, older sister to Jon Egbert (the Egbert clan which we were in the old Villa Bonita ward with for all of my growing up in Vegas), husband to Jamie Hammons, older sister of my great great friend Molly, married to my other great friend Elliott (I was their connection to meeting and ultimately ending up married thank-you-very-much)(and a thank you to Wet-N-Wild also), neither of which I've talked to in what feels like FOREVER since they moved to Florida :( Sooo, I broke into this conversation I was listening to and told Bro. Miller that I could probably track down said Jon and Jamie's address... I'd just call her sister (after all Molly has always been super organized, super on top of things and would probably have her sister's address within arm's reach of where ever in the world she may happen to be when I called her up. So I called her up.

Of course she happened to be going to bed (oh yeah, I forget that the land of Florida is 3 hours ahead) and get this... admitted that any time she needed an address, she'd just call up her good ol mom! I was amazed. For all the years I've known this amazing Molly, the secret is to just have a mom who's that much more amazing (oh, I miss molly's parents too, they're good people.)

So I could only chat with them for a couple minutes when it was my turn with the bishop and since th were going to bed, I'd call them later.

Afterward, it got me thinking. I really do miss Molly and Elliott. They are 2 of a small handful of friends that I will ALWAYS feel are my closest friends. This group of friends were what got me through a lot of hard times during the crazy part of life we call the teenage years (and some after). Even now, being married, living all over, not getting to talk for months on end, any time together is not enough time because you have to spend so much of it just filling in and asking what other people are up to and it almost feels like and Q and A session instead of quality time together.

So all this reminiscing made me get to thinking about how neither me and Stac have blogged and, really, the blog is a really good way to kinda keep up even though you can't be together for all of life's activities. And since this is already a pretty lengthy post (which I'm sure is really boring for a lot of you to read) I'll just post some pictures of our recent activities.

Here we go.......

We went to the Lied's Discovery museum. I remember going here on field trips all the time as a kid. As an adult, it's still really cool, and almost as fun as it was when I was a kid just to see my own kids enjoy it as much as they did. 2 thumbs up for the discovery museum.

Goofed around at Arby's...

Stac's brother went into the marines.

Zoee turned 4 and ended up getting 2 parties (thus 2 cakes).

Gus has discovered that food can be really good. And if he's in a good mood will make a really funny face and crack us all up.

And he....

Finally got a real haircut! He looks SO much better!!

And while Stac's parents were down for the birthday girl, they worked really REALLY hard and made the back yard much more fun for the kids. They built a sand box for Zoee and Gus since they spend so much of their time in Huntsville in the sand. Garage sales yielded some good finds including the slide which both kids love and the water play table thing. And the birthday girl got a pool for her birthday.