Utah-Idaho-Utah Vacation

I’m very behind on posting, so I’m attempting to catch up this week before Bryce starts school again next Monday. Time will tell if I succeed.

After Bryce took Step 1 of his medical licensing boards in June, he had two months before his MPH classes started so we decided to take a few vacations. During the end of June/beginning of July we took a two week vacation to Utah to see friends and family. Here’s a recap of our travels:

June 25-26: Spent with Grammy and Grandpa Ted for Grammy’s 80th party. My whole family was there (and really nearly all of my extended family). Here’s a quick picture of Grammy and Grandpa Ted with Mark. He’s around their 25th great-grandchild. Ted turned 90 this past March. Although we didn’t get to this time around, we love playing cards with them. We’ll see them at Christmas in Colorado and I’m looking forward to a few good rounds. My sister, Susan, her husband, Brian, and their two girls, Grace and Kate, were there too. Grace and Mark had lots of fun at the kids museum, the Treehouse, in Ogden, and just playing at Grammy’s.


June 27: Bryce’s little sister, Ashley and her husband, Greg, had their first baby on June 16th. Despite being only 11 days old, they couldn’t pass up the chance of having their parents, us and his sister, Kim, and her family from N.C., as well as Bryce’s two other sisters that live in Utah at the baby blessing. Needless to say between all of the Harbertsons and Greg’s side of the family, little Aurora had a very large circle of priesthood holders blessing her. But, the real riot was trying to keep 10 cousins ages 0-6 semi-quiet on two parallel benches in sacrament meeting. We all ate lunch together afterward and got to enjoy what was as close to a family reunion as we’re probably going to get for a few years. Grandma took all of the pictures so I don't have any to post, but they do exist.

June 28-29: Spent with my parents, sister, Joy, and Grandma Joanne and Holly down in Utah Valley. We hung out, ate, and toured the Thanksgiving Point gardens while my dad and Holly went golfing with Bryce’s dad and uncle. The gardens were really pretty and we got some cute pictures of us and Mark.

Mark feeding Koi fish at Thanksgiving Point

Mark LOVES water.

Omi had bubbles for him to play with in the Secret Garden.

Best we could do with a family picture.

June 30: Catching up with Tiff, Kyle, Kallista, and Dave as well as Tiff and Kyle’s kids. Tiff and Kallista are some of my roommates from college. We’re really glad we got to get together since both Kyle and Dave are starting MBA school in different states. Thanks also to Aunt Debbie for letting us crash at her place despite having her oldest son, daughter-in-law, and their 6 kids already there.

July 1: Spent some time with my sister, Joy, and then dinner with some of my old colleagues at BYU Graduate Studies. I worked there for 5 semesters +2 summers while at BYU and LOVED it. I wish I could have seen more of the staff, but was glad to at least get to go to dinner with Claire, Janice, Breann, and Maria.

July 2-4: The day we got married was a bit snowy so Bryce’s uncle, Glade, couldn’t make it down from Idaho for the wedding. I hadn’t ever met him, which means Bryce hadn’t seen him in 4 years or so. So, we decided to go up to Island Park, ID for the weekend to see him and his family as well as spend a day at Yellowstone. The weather was nice and cool and the park was awesome. Mark did surprisingly well in the many hours in the car thanks to Cars, Emperor’s New Groove, and Ratatouille. That DVD player was really a lifesaver.

Awesome waterfall at Yellowstone.

See the bison causing the traffic jam? He was just crossing the road.

Walking the trail around the Mud Volcano.

And, of course, we had to wait for Old Faithful to go off.

July 5: Hung out back down at Grammy’s in Ogden to recoup a bit (it’s 4 hours from there to Island Park) before driving nearly 6 hours to St. George to see Bryce’s sister, Erin. Erin and Chris had graciously let us use Chris’s car for our trip so we figured the least we could do was return it to them and spend a few days there.

July 6-8: Down with the Gappmayers in St. George. Mark had fun playing with his cousins, Max and Sydney and their two dogs, Murphy and Thatch. Bryce and Chris watched the kids so Erin and I could go see Eclipse, which, surprisingly, they weren’t too excited to see. We also hit up a splash park so the kids could play for a while. Then, after a fun, but exhausting two weeks, we flew back to Baltimore from Vegas. Thanks to Pres. Obama for deciding to fly into the airport as we were trying to leave, delaying our plane by almost 2 hours and not getting us home until nearly 2am after a 5 hour flight with a 16 month old.

All in all, we had a really great time, which is why we didn't take many pictures. Thanks to everyone who let us use their beds, eat their food, and borrow cars and everything else while we were there. Hopefully we'll make it back out in another few years.

We Do Exist

Despite all indications to the contrary, we are alive and well, although I can't say the same about my sister who hasn't blogged once since her baby was born...in September!!! I'm about to make a threat to not post again until she finally puts something on her blog, but we'll see if I have to take such drastic measures.


So the last time I blogged about the family was for Mark's birthday. As a gift from our friends Brandon and Cari, Cari took some more wonderful pictures of little Mark. As you can see, he wasn't really in the mood to smile or look at the camera, but that might have been because we had just taken him all over the country and he was a bit worn out. Anyway, you can see more pictures of this shoot here.

In March my grandpa, Ted, turned 90! I got to go out to Utah for his big birthday celebration, which was awesome. He's doing great and I hope he makes it to at least 100. While I was there, I couldn't pass up the chance to see some old college friends, Tiff and Kallista. The three kids are all Tiff's, despite what it might look like.

After Utah, we swung over to Colorado for a few days to see my dad who was busy with tax season. He really only got to see Mark for a few minutes at his office, but I saw him some at night. I'm very proud of him. His accounting firm that he started a few years after we moved to Colorado Springs was voted the gold medal in the Best of the Springs awards that the local newspaper puts out. They all deserve it.

A big motivation for my trip to Utah was to avoid another pre-test week with Bryce. He just has to spend a lot of time studying, so it's less fun. Mark still wished him goodluck though. We flew baack the night after he took his test and then headed down for a week in North Carolina with some of Bryce's family. I didn't take any pictures, but we had a good time.

Here's a picture of Mark at the airport in Denver. He was making friends with all sorts of people.

For Easter my friend, Amy, organized a giant Easter egg hunt at our apartment's playground. There were at least 30 kids with 8 eggs each so you can imagine the chaos. Here's Mark waiting at the top of the stairs to head down to find his eggs.

He got bored after only an egg or two and sat down to explore his treasure. I couldn't resist the baseball Easter basket.

We all ate lunch afterwards. Here are a few of his friends. We love having so many little kids to play with.

Mark sometimes thinks he has a pet mouse, although he prefers the wireless one. His new favorite thing is to sit in our laps with his wireless mouse while we play on pbskids.org with the corded one.

On Easter morning Mark was thrilled to find out that his eggs had something in them. He stopped and ate his puffs without finding any more eggs.

Sorry this is so small, but hopefully you get the picture of his attempts at running. This was over a month ago at the Cherry Blossom festival in D.C. He's much more stable now. He was so happy to be out of his stroller. He also loved the pigeons.

We went to D.C. with the Murdocks and the Jacksons. Cari, of course, brought along her camera and took more cute pictures of Mark and Mallory. Here's the post on her photography blog.

More recently, Mark loves to play on the deck. His friend, Caleb, has a box that he likes to sit in so we made him one out of his diaper box. He loves it, despite how this picture may look.

Bryce has finished all of his med school classes and is now just studying for Step 1 of his medical licensing boards. He takes those on June 23rd and then we are off to Utah/Idaho to see family and friends for a few weeks. Things are pretty normal for me: Mark, work, quiet book.

Why I Haven't Posted in a While

Late last year I decided to make Mark a quiet book to take to church. My sister-in-law, Ashley, was coming to North Carolina for Christmas so I recruited her to make one too since I didn't have a sewing machine up here in Maryland and two is always better than one. Being ambitious, we figured we might as well each make an extra for a friend as well. We were delusioned enough to think that we could do 96 pages + cover in only a few days during the break. Needless to say, we didn't get them even close to done. Instead, it awoke a new and dangerous hobby for me: crafting/sewing. Whenever I get bored/frustrated with how slow the quiet book is coming, I take on a new and easier project. This has happened multiple times (3 already this year), but I am happy to say I have completed these projects and am now going to actually finish the quiet book! Every free moment I have when I'm not working, taking care of Mark, doing housework, doing church things, or spending time with Bryce has been filled with crafting. I used to think people were insane that crafted figuring I could work an hour more and buy what took them hours to make, but I must admit, there is something fulfilling in creating something great from scratch. So, here's what I've done:

First, I made crayon rolls. I took this idea from my sister who took it from this site. Mark has a lot of little friends with birthday parties out here so every kid in 2010 will get one of these. Making them in bulk also saved a lot of money! They only cost $4-5 each, including the crayons and are great for church since they protect the crayons from getting crushed in plastic bags.


Second, another sister-in-law, Erin, wanted to make I-spy bags for her kids, but figured the more people we got to do it, the cheaper we could do it for (since the little items inside often come in multiples.) She collected the items and vinyl; I picked up the poly pellets and fabric. I then made a key by individually taking pictures of all of the items, used Photoshop to remove the backgrounds, and then compiled all of the photos of the items in a Word document with the descriptions that I then printed and laminated. I used another blog post to make sure I didn't mess up the sewing, but added the little pocket on the back of my bags to house the laminated key. Mark's still a little young for this, but enjoys looking at and bending the key when he can.


Finally, my friend, Adrienne, did a post about an FHE board she created. It was a great idea (which she adapted from another friend, Krystel) since it was magnetic (sheet metal) on one side and then felt on the other. I have a variety of FHE materials from a group I did, and some visual aids have velcro while others have magnets. A board with dual functionality was just what we needed. I was chatting with Amy about it one day and she mentioned that she would be interested in doing one too. Great! Split the costs = cheaper and cooler (double the ideas). Michael's was having their bonus buys that week so we got a bunch of stuff for at least half off, but couldn't find any frames with sheet metal (Roberts in Utah has them, but we're a bit far from there). As we were brainstorming cheap or free ways to get sheet metal, Amy remembered that dry erase boards are often magnetic. How great is that?!? So now we have something to write on and use magnets. Amy's husband James made us frames that encased the dry erase board completely after having glued a piece of felt to the back of the dry erase board. Awesome. So then we painted the frames black while Mark and Caleb played. We then recruited Tara's Cricut machine to cut out cute letters, and mod podged them on the frames. I decided that I could use the dry erase board for more than FHE so I made that side more general and the felt more specific. Then I attached a wire to the top and covered it with some cute ribbon. I must say, I am very proud of this board. It was a group effort, for sure, but very worth it. Thanks everyone.

That's all. I'll post some pictures and an update of little Mark in the next day or two.