Family Pictures

I decided I'd better post some of the family pictures taken while at our family reunion in Bear Lake.  There were a bunch of pictures taken, but I just picked a few to post.

This is all the Croft kids and their families, my Grandma Croft (and Aunt Jeannie) and mom, Ed, Dad and Karan.

The Croft Kids

Us :)  Trevor, Me, Tyler, Hailey, Ashley and Jason.

Summer 2012

We've had a busy summer!  We've been traveling a lot and visiting family as much as we can.  Here are some random summer pictures:

Jason and Saibra.  They're adorable :)

Ashley and the other's got a little wet in a fountain/splash pad.

We played on this at the Art Walk.  Turns out they have a lot more things to do than look at art.

Lunch with some friends.  Thanks guys!

We went to a lot of bouncy house/trampoline places over the summer.  Who knew these could be so much fun?

This is the basement of our vacation rental in Bear Lake that my family stayed at.  It was huge and amazing.  The kids LOVED this whole area and stayed there a LOT of the time we were in the house.

Some hiking with the Johnsons.  Good times.

I'm making a goal to take way more pictures.  I keep thinking of all the places we went this summer and wonder why I didn't take any pictures of our adventures. :) 

Half Marathon

Now I will tell you a long, boring story of the half marathon I ran with my sister and brother-in-law.  It wasn't boring for me, but it may be for you...it's more for my journaling benefit, anyway :)

My sister asked me if I would run a half marathon with her.  I said yes :)  So I did a 12 week training program I found on the internet.  Turns out my brother-in-law, Scott, was also running in this race.  I was really excited and nervous.

That morning we had to get up at 3:00 a.m. to go park at the mall and take some buses (at 3:30 a.m.) up to the start line in Provo canyon.  Why so early, you may ask?  Because there were a million people.  More like 3000. But they had to bus everyone up there because there was no parking at the start line.  

I included this picture of our sustenance choices.  There were a LOT more gu gels, but we had already put them in our hydration belts to carry with us. I can't tell you what a fan I am of these.  I wouldn't have thought they could keep me going like they did.  It's crazy what a boost it gives you when you start to feel sluggish.  Wish I would've tried them earlier in my 12 week training program.  Bummer.

The consistency of the gels are kind of gross, but I like them the most (over the chomps and jelly beans or shot blocks) because I think they work the best. Don't worry, we only used about 3 each.  This picture is of the rejects.

When we got up to the starting area, we had plenty of time to hang out.  It was freezing cold.  They had a bunch of fires set up along the side of the road that we stood by most of the time until the sun came up.  There were a BUNCH of porta potties that we could frequent.  I took full advantage, but you had to stand in line forever.

This is my sister and I at the start (well, like a half mile back from the start)  We looked for my brother-in-law, but didn't see him.  Boo.

My sister and I are wearing matching outfits (because we're cool like that) but we wore our shirt/sweatshirt over top of our sweet tank-tops the first mile of the race.

I ran faster than I usually did while I was training, so I was worried I'd hit a wall.  Most of the race I just drank from my hydration belt and used their water cups (every couple miles) to pour on my head.  I didn't hit any walls, thanks to the gels.  I did get pretty tired and was ready for the race to be over around mile 12.  I could see the finish and didn't want to sprint, but then they had a bunch of people lined up ringing their cowbells on either side before the finish line.  How can you NOT sprint in front of all those people?  So I did.  My awesome brother-in-law was there at the end with a powerade for me.  I hadn't felt nautious until I stopped, then I felt like I was going to lose some gu gels.  I didn't :) Would've been kind of embarrassing to throw up on brother-in-law.  He's a veteran of the marathon/half marathon races, so he says we should run a full marathon next.  My hat's off to all the full marathon runners.  That would be a LOT of running.

I wanted to finish in under 2:00 hours.  I did :)  I finished in 1:47.25.  So I feel pretty good about that.  I think it's about an 8:12/mile average?  Although the app I was using on the run said I ran 13.21 miles, making my average mile about 8:07.  But who's counting? :)

This is my sister, Amanda, and I after the race.  I'm the one on the left.  Hehe, she already used that joke on Facebook, but I thought it was so funny I stole it to debut on the blog.

This is my sister, me, and my brother-in-law, Scott.  I included the flexing picture because I think it's the funniest thing when someone Jones's your picture (man in yellow behind us).

So that's it.  I WISH my phone took better pictures because then I could include pictures of the AMAZING lunch we went to at Tucano's after the race.  All of my in-laws came to cheer us on, and then we all went out to lunch afterward.  It was sooo great!  It was so wonderful to see and hang out with everyone.  Such a great bonding experience all around. :)  Thanks Manda, for convincing me this would be fun!  A new tradition has been started.

Race Day

Hailey is in a "girl's running club" called She Can.  At the end of their season, they sign up for a race in town.  They encourage the girls to race the 5K, but I knew Hailey probably wouldn't be ready for that.  Plus, all the other kids wanted to sign up to race, too.  So I signed them all up for the 1/2 mile fun run.

I signed up for the 10K and then ran with the kids in the 1/2 mile run, too.  Pretend I'm in the picture wearing a blue t-shirt, too.  Also, pretend they have race numbers on...we put them on our coats instead because it was 32 degrees and snowing outside.  Brrr.  Tyler was 3rd, I think.  I ran with Hailey and Ashley in the middle of the pack, and Trevor "ran" with Jason to bring up the rear.  Jason wasn't dead last, only 2nd to last. :) But you would have thought he won the way he ran across the finish line as fast as he could.  Cute. He keeps mentioning the race he ran in.  Mentions it lots of times...

It was a pretty fun day. My race went pretty well, too.  I thought I would have been colder running the 10K, but it wasn't too bad.  The bad part was squishing through the mud when the race went off road.  It slows you down a bit.  I placed 5th in the women and 3rd in my age group with a time of 51:45.  So hopefully in a couple weeks I can do the half marathon in under 2 hours.  Here's for hoping!  I'm sure that will be the next post you hear about :) Wish me luck!

Guess What This Is Going to Be?

I guess I've neglected the blog long enough. It's been such nice weather (except this week) that we've been spending a lot of time outside.

So, guess what this big hole is going to be?

That's right. You wanna see our view from the living room?

Nice, huh? I'm pretty excited to be trying out this next step. It's come with some bumps, though.

After telling the owners of our rental that we are going to start building a house, they decided they would put this house on the market to see what happens. It's been a little stagnant here.

Well, they had a couple showings the first day on the market. Turns out they got an offer and accepted it. :) So now they're giving us 30 days once the home inspection report comes back. (The inspection went well, I know the home inspector. Bummer.) I guess it's really our own fault since we didn't want to sign another lease and just go month to month...but our house will be finished before a lease was up, and we figured we'd take our chances since this house was overpriced anyway. We thought it wouldn't sell quite so quickly.

As a side story, one of the realtors said it was a fluke because these people flew in from California for a day to look at houses and saw a moose in the yard and they were sold. Dumb moose. One of my friends joked that this is my nemesis moose :) I also saw it (I'm guessing it's the same one) a couple weeks ago and it surprised me pretty good. I was jogging early one morning and kind of watching the ground when I looked up and saw the moose standing there about 10-15 feet away (partly hidden by the hill I was on and it was behind a tree). It didn't chase me, but I did grip my pepper spray just in case it was a nervous mommy moose. :)

So now we have to find another rental for a few months while the house is being built. I think we've found the perfect solution, though.

Let me know if any of you have any good suggestions for home building. :)

Pinewood Derby, Part 2

For an Elder's Quorum activity, Trevor planned a pinewood derby race. There were only two rules: 1) no combustible engines (flames) and 2) no impeding other cars.

The activity turned out REALLY fun. I thought my husband was the only one that would be spending hours on his car. Nope. There was talk around the ward about what everyone was planning and working on with their car. There were 19 entries and All of the family was invited. It was a really good time.

Here are a couple of videos of Trevor's car racing. He did a turbine on his car, or a ducted fan? I'm not really up on his lingo, but it sounded cool. He wired himself up a little automatic switch, too. So when the gate dropped, the fan would switch on automatically. It turned out well-- there were a couple other really fast cars that were close to Trevor's times, but there were technical difficulties on the "take off" in a lot of the heats.




Getting ready for the races :)



I was in charge of the food. So I took a picture. Thanks for those who helped! :)



Here are a couple pictures of the standings. Like I said, Trevor took first but a few of his competition cars had some technical difficulties on some of the heats, taking them out of some of the races...




Trevor's car:

Afterward, everyone was planning on what they would be doing next year for the fastest car. Trevor even got a couple calls with big plans of racing at least 2 x's a year, having committee's, rules, different categories, etc. Good times. Crazy Elder's Quorum.

Pinewood Derby, Part 1

It's been a couple weeks since Tyler had his pinewood derby race, I'm a little slow in posting. But I figured I'd better get it in before I'm posting about Trevor's pinewood derby race next week (he's doing one for an Elder's Quorum activity--it's kind of funny how so many of the Elder's are really into this. There's only one rule: You can't impede any one else's car...they all have big plans)

Anyway, Tyler was really excited for the race. I think he took 3rd in every heat but one (he took 2nd in that one). He was fine with it, though.

Tyler's car is in the middle:

Here he is waiting for one of the races to start:

And here he is after it's all over. He was REALLY excited about his "award" of "Toughest Driver." He got Toughest Driver because his little lego guys kept falling off the car when it hit the end of the track. He must've mentioned it three times about how he thought it was "cool" he got "Toughest Driver." :)

For the life of me I can't crop this or flip it to post on here the right way. Dumb blogspot.