A Very Busy July

We had such a busy July this year!  It was filled with family, events, health issues and mission prep, and we somehow made it through it all!

We had just gotten back into town from our Seattle trip, and a few days later we started having family come in town for a visit!  We spent the night of the 4th of July at the Haggerty's house for their traditional BBQ and fireworks.  Their neighborhood goes all out and it is a fun place to be on the 4th of July!

A couple of days later, it was Ryan's 17th birthday!  I did a mirror cake for Ryan this year.  It was supposed to look like outer space because he has recently been loving space and mars and is planning on going there someday.  I told him to wait until they figure out a way to get people back from Mars before he commit's!

It's hard to believe that Ryan is 17!  He brings so much fun to our home!  He is a hard worker, a super smart kid, driven (he has recently decided that he would like to be a pilot, so he has been researching many things with airplanes and piloting, and touring airports and flying in a plane!).  He is good at all sports and is currently loving to play cornhole and pickleball.  He is loving and kind (unless I have to wake him up early... but maybe he can't be held accountable for that because he's not really awake yet, haha).  We love him and love watching him grow up!

All of my sisters came into town this week, so we decided that we would all buy the Get Out Pass, so we spent the next few days having way too much fun with cousins at Lagoon, trampoline parks, bowling and more!  Plus, we hiked and went to Dustin's cool Magna Regional Park.

Here is where things started to get a little more tricky--Dustin's family also came into town so we had the Noonan's and the Braithwaite's both staying at our house, and then Maren had knee surgery!  Her knee had been bothering her for a few months.  We had seen the Sports Med doctor and had done an MRI, X-Ray, Cortisone shot, and it was still hurting her when she walked.  So, we reached out to a friend in our Stake, who is also an Orthopedic Surgeon.  He saw her the next day, recommended surgery, and got us in the next week, in the hopes that she would be recovered enough to leave for her mission on time in August.  We felt like the timing of it all was a miracle, so we moved forward with it, even though we had family in town.  The surgery went well.  They cleaned out a bunch of damaged tissue and removed her plica band in her right knee.  She had a little bit of a hard time coming out of the anesthesia, but she really handled all of it like a champ.

Danielle and Tyler and their family came into town the very next day, so Dustin spent some time with them while I helped Maren rest and recover.

We spent an evening in the Ogden Temple with the Braithwaite's, Cragun's, Noonan's and Lana.  We had planned on doing an Endowment session, but we were running late, so decided to do a Sealing session instead.  Tyler just happened to bring a couple of sealing cards for his grandparents to be sealed, and while we waited to see if they could accommodate our large group, he noticed that we happened to be there on the exact date of their wedding anniversary!  And, they had been married in Ogden!  We were able to seal his grandparents to each other on their wedding anniversary, in the town where they were both from.  It was pretty special and didn't feel like a coincidence at all!

Saturday night, we had a BBQ in the canyon by our house.  Arie and Isabel had come in to town as well, plus my sisters, plus the Noonan's friends, the Anderson's, plus the Braithwaite's and Gramma Lana.  We had a heat wave come through that week, and it was about 10 degrees cooler in the canyon, which was a nice break from the terrible heat!

The next day was Maren's mission farewell!  We had planned it around when we would have both sides of the family in town, so that was fun to have everyone here.  She did a great job on her talk, and we were grateful for all the love and support!  She was still very much recovering from her surgery, but she was walking pretty well and could stand pretty well by then.

While my parents were driving up to our house for the farewell, it was discovered that Jen, Jeff and Nicole were all sick with Covid.  So my parents wore masks and only stayed for a bit after church and luckily avoided getting sick (this was the first of many different sicknesses that went through our large group).  Sadly, it did make them miss out on spending any time with family after the farewell.  They had to miss Maren going through the temple, too.  This same thing happened when Avery was getting ready for her mission!  Dang Covid!

The reason why Dustin's family had come into town was because there was a Wiberg/Knowles reunion in Lava Hot Springs, for Rod's 80th birthday.  We spent the next few days, staying in a big house with Dustin's siblings, his dad, a few step siblings and their families, and some of Rod's friends.  We swam (except for me and Maren, because she couldn't submerge her knee yet, so we walked around town and then went back to the house and watched a movie), tubed down the river, ate lots of yummy food, played fun games at the house, made smore's, and had a big celebration for Rod's birthday.  It was so much fun!

The day after we got back from Lava Hot Springs was our cousin, Ivy's baptism.  She had broken her leg a couple of days earlier while jumping at a trampoline park (using those awesome Get Out Passes...), but she was able to be baptized with a very wrapped up, water proofed leg.

And the day after that, Maren went through the temple and received her endowments!  Because of Covid moving through the family, not everyone was able to come with her to the temple.  But we were so grateful for those who could come!  It was a beautiful night!

The next few days the boys spent at Young Men's Camp, and Maren and I were back at the house with cousins (and still trying to heal her knee after the surgery).

We still had one more week of cousins in town, and we crammed the fun in.  We bbq'd, had Pioneer Day celebrations, played games, toured Mrs. Cavanaugh's Chocolate Factory and Hill Airforce Base Museum and so much more!  I'm exhausted just recapping this! 

We won the relay game put on by the girl's.

We went to the Ogden Parade on the 24th to watch Abi play in her marching band, then Pizza Pie Cafe for lunch, Hill Airforce Base, and on to the Hanchett's for dinner and an awesome fireworks show, put on by the teenage boys!

This is Dustin's Great Grandparent's Wiberg's home in Sunset.  The owner of the house was outside and she let us take a picture in front of it.

By this time, the cousin's were starting to make their own Pioneer Trek's back to their homes.  We still had Monica's family here (except for James, who flew home) because she came down with Pneumonia and couldn't do much for a few days.  This was a very contagious strain of pneumonia (I think we had nine people get it out of our family members!), and so, we had another miracle--no one in my family got sick!  We needed this blessing, because Maren was starting the MTC in just one more week.  We were so grateful that we somehow avoided it!  Monica drove home very sick, and it took her a few weeks to get back to normal.  It was a rough sickness!

We had one more week to recover from a busy few weeks of fun.  Ryan had FSY at BYU all week.  Maren and I finished up all her mission preparations.  Our garden started producing like crazy.  And Grant got his braces off!  It was a great way to finish a month of fun!