Calvin is 1 Year Old

I can't believe that a year ago we held our cute baby boy. The year has seemed long and quick at the same time. A lot has changed, but we feel that it has been for all the right reasons. We were so grateful to have the chance to go up to Utah to be with family and visit Calvin's grave. 

The day was very sweet and wonderful to remember our little guy. We love him so much and just as my sister-in-law said, we are one year closer to being with him again!!

 The day started with a trip to the temple with a few people in our family. What a perfect place to be and feel him close to us.

 Then we met up with most of the rest of the family at Calvin's grave. We wrote notes to Calvin on balloons and then let them go. It was fun but also really neat.

 What a wonderful, supportive family. We surely missed Stacy and her family, Becca and Bre. But we wrote on balloons for you guys. Love and miss you guys.

After the grave visit, we went to Paces Dairy Ann for a yummy dinner.

Calvin, your mommy and daddy miss you very much. But we are so grateful for the love that we have felt from you. Thanks for sticking close to us. We love you with all our hearts. We can hardly wait until we get to see you again. 

Hiking the next day

If you know me at all, you know that I usually have to go to the bathroom pretty often. It was early in the morning and we were getting up to go to the bathroom and saw this beautiful sunrise.

 On our drive down to Sedona I saw a cool old rusty car in the bushes and thought that would be so fun to take some pictures of. At the beginning of our hike we came across this old rusty car and I was so excited to take some pictures.

The hike was called Girdner trail and it was fun. It took you along the edge of the canyon and then down into the dry river bed. We happened upon some water and it was pretty. 

 While we were stopping to have some lunch, I start to hear this loud rumble. There are a lot of plane and helicopter tours that go on in Sedona so you always hear something but this sound kept getting louder and louder. So I turn to Spencer and say, "Hey, i wonder what it would sound like if we just went under attack from an enemy country. Kinda like this noise right?" Then all of a sudden we see over 20 planes come around the cliff, flying together. It was the coolest thing and so so loud. I tried to hurry and take a picture and got the tail end of the group. So the next day while skyping with my parents we mentioned it to my dad and he said those were for sure WWII planes.

 We were getting pretty hot on our hike, so we decided to stop and soak our feet. The hike altogether took a few hours and we traveled around 6 miles but it sure was nice and pretty.

 So we headed home after our hike but we still wanted to make the tin foil dinners so when we got home we unloaded the car and then started up a fire in our firepit. They turned out so good.

Camping in Sedona

Last weekend Spencer and I enjoyed our first camping trip down here in Arizona! We tried to go to a site up in Flagstaff but it was still close due to muddy roads. So we headed to Sedona where we knew we would find something open. The scenery was quite different. Bushes and cacti instead of pine trees but it still was fun. 

 The weather was about 15 degrees warmer so in the high 70's which was really nice.

 After finding a spot, we hiked around near the site and got some fun pictures.

 We got to the top of this little peak and found a man standing up there enjoying the view. He pointed out to us that there was this little "oasis" type thing that someone must have dug out and set up. It was cool.

 Spencer had fun taking cool closeup pictures of the algae on the rocks, it was bright lime green.

 For dinner we were going to have tin foil dinners, a must, but realized that the beef was still frozen. I guess we thought it would have defrosted by then. So instead we heated up some soup. We then enjoyed the fire, played games, roasted smores and had hot chocolate.