October Highlights

Well, it has been a crazy month and with the holidays coming it will probably only get busier. Here are the fun things from October:

1. Halloween

2. Emily's First Birthday (She loves ladybugs...and cake)

3. Helping Mommy with Laundry

4. Feeding the Ducks

First Steps!!!

Emily finally took her first steps all by herself tonight. She is normally our little dare devil, with her headfirst dives off the couch and trying to jump off the edge of the pool, but for some reason she has taken forever to take her first steps. She has been pulling herself up to standing and walking around furniture for about 4 months now, and finally tonight she walked all by herself! We are so excited!

I love how she stands there like, "I don't think so." But then she goes towards Daddy...so fun!

New Posts

There are a few new posts, so scroll down if you want to see what we've been up to the last month.

Great Grandpa Kerr's 90th Birthday

We flew down to California last weekend for a party for my grandpa's 90th birthday. It was a great trip, and it was great to see my grandparents. My grandfather was a doctor, so he and my grandmother have been pretty healthy compared to other 90 year old people. I'm glad that we were able to go and be part of the celebration of his long and full life-we hope there are many more birthdays to come! Emily really liked playing at Great-Grandpa and Great-Grandma's!

This is a cool picture of the sunset from the flight to CA. You can't tell from the picture, but the horizon was a deep red and was absolutely gorgeous!

While we were down visiting, we took Emily to the Play Place at McDonalds for the first time, and she loved it! Dave and I took turns taking her through the Sky Tubes and down the slide-which was her favorite part.

BYU Game and BBQ

For the first game of the season, we had a big BBQ with lots of family (and a few friends), then we all headed up to the game to watch BYU's first win of the season. The little kids had a hard time because it was so hot, but once it cooled down a little, they were fine. There were about 20 of us that went to the game together, and it was so much fun to spend the day with family. We all went back to our place for dessert after the game.We decided a long time ago that Emily would be a True Blue BYU Fan, so all of her BYU apparel is blue. Well, an old man at the game called her a boy! Just because she's in blue (BYU's colors are blue and white-duh), that does not make her a boy. Alright, I'm really not mad about it. I just think she is obviously a girl, but I am her mom, so I might be partial.

Emily's favorite part of the game-eating ice cream on the grass. How she's sitting cracks me up!

Shark Bite

I went to the doctor in late June to have a few things checked out, and he decided to go ahead and have one of my moles removed. My grandfather died of melanoma and my mom has already had it, so I knew that my skin has the potential for some pretty bad cancer. I didn't think anything of it until the pathology report came back and I needed to have it re-done, taking a bigger piece of my arm this time. That was a little scary, but it got even worse when the second pathology report came back and they decided to refer me to the Huntsman Cancer Institute.
All I could think about was that I was only 23 and that Dave and Emily need me. So, I met with a surgical oncologist and he had his pathologist look at my slides (from the first two surgeries). He called me two days later saying that the report came back positive for melanoma. He wanted me to come up the next week so they could do a more invasive surgery and remove all of the cancer cells. We drove up to the LDS hospital at 5:30 am on Monday, August 25th. They knocked me out to do the surgery, so I only remember being wheeled around on a gurney, but when we had a follow-up appointment the very next day, my doctor told me that everything had been successful and that they had gotten all of the cancer cells. YAY!
This really was a wake up call for me that I shouldn't put off till tomorrow what I can do today. I don't want to procrastinate anymore (I still do sometimes), and I want to be a wife and mother that appreciates the process of growing up. I will always have a scar and a divot in my arm, like a shark bite, to remind me that life is too short to wait to do the important things.

Cougar Kickoff

Tonight was the Cougar Kickoff, where you "can meet all of your favorite players." Since Dave had to work, I figured that Emily and I wouldn't go, but Dave and I have been joking about getting Emily's picture with Max Hall(the quarterback) for a long time. So I decided to brave the crowd and see what I could get. There were a lot of LONG lines to meet the players (especially the good ones), but in the end, it was worth it. Emily loved getting her picture taken with not only Max Hall, but Austin Collie, Harvey Unga, and of course, Cosmo the Cougar. She loved Cosmo! Instead of looking at the camera, she kept trying to pet his face. She didn't want to look at the camera when the other guys were holding her either-she kept looking at them, as if to say "You're not my dad." They all seemed really impressed that she didn't cry when they held her, though. (Of course they had no idea that she is already boy crazy at 9 month!)