Moving to MN Day 1

Last fall Colten started interviewing for medical schools. When he interviewed at Mayo I always thought it was too good to be true, so when he got that phone call last October telling him he was accepted, I couldn't help but be happy for him. However, in the back of my mind I kept thinking... Minnesota! Are you kidding me? That is so far away and so cold. It has been a fast eight months and now we are here and getting settled.

We were lucky enough to have some of our family join us on the big move. Colten's parents, my parents, and my younger sister all made the 4 day journey. We split it up into four days so we would have time to sight see a little along the way. It ended up being just about perfect with the baby and everyone else.

Day 1 brought us leaving Enterprise in the morning and having 9 driving hours to get to our first stop in Wyoming.

Some parts of the drive Talya looked like this...

Other times she looked like this...

Bridal Veil Falls going up through Provo Canyon.

Welcome to Wyoming!

Natalya @ 7 months

I didn't know how fast time could really go. Natalya is already seven months old! She is so stinkin cute and she cracks us up everyday. She is not crawling yet, but getting pretty close. She rolls all over the place and is sitting up on her own. She loves to snack on anything we'll give her. She loves bathtime, eating and attention from anyone. Even though I think she is pretty chunky, she is just sitting average for her weight and still a little on the tall side. Check out her arm rolls!

New Family Pictures

One of these days I will stop getting new family pictures. Talya changes so much that we could get a new one every month!

We have a wall in our house that we hung our college dipolmas on and it was fitting to put a SUU family picture there.

Our Family

July 4th Camping

It's always on the calendar to go camping over the 4th of July weekend and we are glad we were able to make this one before moving a few days later. Natalya is quite the camper. She did awesome. We loved spending time with the family and it was also good to see some of our extended family who came to join in on the fun weekend.

We hiked to Cascade Falls and because there is so much water this year the falls were beautiful and full of water.

Natalya is just hanging out in the play pen.

Nice hair do!

Cute little Pebbles. I can't believe her hair is long enough to put it in a little elastic. She always looks so much bigger when I do her hair like this.

Siblings Just Wanna Have Fun

Five out of the six kids in Coltens family (+ a spouse and son) got together and all conquered the highest peak in the Pine Valley Mountains, Signal Peak (10,368 feet) at the end of June. I think they had a blast being together. From what I heard them say, the hike getting to the top of the summit was not the most fun thing they have ever done but camping and goofing off near the top was awesome. You'll be able to tell how much fun they really had when you look at some of the pictures. I definately used Natalya as a good excuse to skip out on this one.

Whoa?!

Nice jumping skills, eh? You'd think it took them several tries to do this. Got it on the second try.

At last... They made it to the top and lived to tell about it.

John Wayne meets Clint Eastwood

After a week long Bear Hunt in the Idaho mountains, Colten came back saying he was pretty much a cross between John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. He also said that was the most fun week of his life! I guess boys will boys and who needs women anyways! Camping, great food, horse back riding, HUNTING, and no nagging wives. Life is pretty great.

VS

Yep! Pretty much a cross between the two... Way to go Cowboy!

Cabin Fun

We took several trips out to the Brackens cabin. We camped over and enjoyed being outside, until it got too hot into the summer. :) I've still never seen any elk out there. Someone is always saying they went out to the cabin and saw some elk really close by the cabin. I don't believe them! But we still have fun anyways.

We went looking for a big cave we heard about. They said it was big enough to park a Semi in. Well, on this particular outing... All we found were trees that needed tippin'. These guys had a blast tippin trees over along our hike.

On a different day we recieved better instructions on how to find this amazing cave so our adventure started with a big hike up the mountain (All while Colten is sick with the flu, but he just kept going and going.) We hiked and hiked and made it to this pretty cool overhang on the side of a cliff but not what we would describe as a cave.

So after a little more hiking we finally decided that the cave we were trying to find was completely on the opposite mountain range and we think we can see it from where we are standing. No one had the energy to hike another mountain to what we thought was the cave so we headed back home.

Another day came back around and this time more of the Brackens got adventureous to go out and find the cave. By now, we all have a pretty good idea of where exactly this cave is. Sure enough, they found it! Pretty cool, I guess.

More cabin fun includes lots of ATV riding. This is my younger sister Jess and I on one of these big long rides we took.

One trail we took had a ton of trees laying across the trail so we kept stopping to move them all so we could get past.

The little bear sleeping with grandma on the Rhino.

So much fun! We miss it already. :(

June Happenings

Life has been so busy lately. We tried to get the most out of our time that we have left in Utah so this post is a little old news. We filled our month of June up with lots of fun things. So here begin the posts...

Grandma Bracken is so good to sit down and read Natalya stories. She loves it too!

Natalya LOVES to go swimming. She just sits back and relaxes in her tube thing. Sometimes she'll try to reach out over and splash in the water, or drink the water as well.