June ramblings

I forgot to mention in my last post that June 3rd is also a significant day because it marks exactly 3 years since we moved to Eagle Mountain.  Aspen is the same age Toby was when we moved in.  Isn't that nuts?  Even though we get lots of people asking, "How do you like living way out there?" - we really do love our little rural community.  It has proved to be a great place to raise a family. Also, this is the first ward we have been in that actually feels like a ward family.  We have lots of awesome friends with whom we double date and swap babysitting. We love it here and have no plans of leaving anytime soon.

Aspen continues to keep us on our toes.  How quickly we forget the frustrating little things about this age - until we attend church. Sitting through 3 hours of meetings is definitely a struggle since Nick is still working Sundays. But somehow we make it through week after week.  But I must say that even though Aspen is a fairly busy little girl, she is a millions times more mellow than Toby was (and is).  Not only was he extremely active, but he seemed to scream at the top of his lungs whenever he was happy/mad/sad/indifferent...ugh.  So grateful my #2 child is much easier on the ears.

Here are a few pics of our summer so far:

It is so fun to see them start to play together

 

Monday will mark exactly one month since Kaya left our family.  It's still hard without her and I still cry a lot whenever I think about her.  She was not just apart of our family and our day-to-day, but she was a good friend during some of my most challenging years.  The other day I was reading in my blog about how we decided on the name "Kaya."  Part of our reasoning was because in Native Eskimo, her name means "Stay!" and that I wanted her to stay with us for a very long time.  Yep, that definitely brought tears.

Thanks to a good friend, I found and bought this gravestone marker for her.  It is hard to read in the pic but it says: "If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever." I still need to plant some flowers around it.  Below are some favorite pics of Kaya and Aspen.

Also I thought I'd throw in a video of Kaya herding our chickens.  She was pretty good at it but in the clip she gets distracted and doesn't finish the job.  Such an awesome dog who will always be missed. 

The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different - Hippocrates