Fun with Cousins this Summer

Sophie's First Soccer Game

 

August 15th was Sophie's first soccer game. She has been very excited to play and to have Mike be the coach.  After practicing for a while the game was about to begin. The girls lined up on the field with the coaches and refs.  Suddenly Sophie comes running off the field screaming like someone had cut off her arm. I make eye contact with her panicked face and she started to run from me too.  I go chasing after her and then the ref comes chasing after both of us.  I catch up with Sophie just as the ref catches up with us. I hear the ref say, "I'm sorry it's ok, you don't need to take your earrings out!" REALLY, earrings? Oh boy, I tried not to laugh as I calmed her down.  I told her that she could wear them for tonight but that for next week she would need to take them out.

Sophie has always been a little scared that if I take out her earring that it will hurt like when she had them pierced the first time.  She gets freaked out if I even touch or look at them too closely.  It has been almost 2 years since she had them pierced.  

After the game we got in the car and Sophie realized that she has lost one of her earrings.  She says to us, it came out and didn't even hurt. We then proceeded to Claire's were she picked out new earrings. She was nerves as I switched out her earrings and asked if I would need to make a new hole for the replacement ones.  I reassured she that it would be the same hole and wouldn't hurt.  After she said I know you told me before that it didn't hurt to change my earrings but sometimes I don't listen to you.

Despite all the drama, Sophie's game went really well and she had a great time! Plus she is really fast. We are excited to see her grow and learn more.    

 

Addie wanted in on the action.  Anything Sophie is doing, Addie want to do too.  The funny thing was Addie is AWESOME.  She was dribbling the ball around the girls and kicking it into the goal.  She can't play until next fall, but I know she will kick some butt. Naturally Talented.

Thailand Part One: Chiang Mai

 

In March of this year we had the amazing experience of visiting Thailand for 12 days.  Visiting Thailand is something I never really had thought I would ever do, but We have been blessed with incredible jobs that allow us this chance.  I am going to break this into three posts. We first visited Chiang Mai, then to Bangkok and then to Phuket.

We began our journey with 26 hours of plane travel from Salt Lake to LA, LA to Soule South Korea then to Chiang Mai.  I was worried that the plane rides were going to be really hard and I was pleasantly surprised.  The planes were comfortable, with great food and new release movie.  I would totally travel like that again.

We arrived in the evening and looked forward to resting in our hotel that night.  The next day we headed out on a city tour.  If you think there is a lot of LDS Chapels in Provo, it can’t come close to the number of Buddhist Temples in Thailand.  Every few blocks there is another temple that is super ornate. We visited a few large temples and then took a rickshaw ride around the city. Later that day we went to a tiger reserve and played with baby tigers and very large tigers. Most of them were sleeping except the one large cat that was walking around in the cage with us! Eeek!  Exciting and scary at the same time; their paws are huge!

The next day was one of my favorite days of the whole trip. We visited an elephant reserve, rode elephants and rafted down the river on a bamboo raft. Talk about bucket list.

I haven’t mentioned yet, but food is always a big question when you travel abroad. Well the food at the hotel was great.  A mix of American and Thai food was so great.  I could eat like that every day.  Now that being said, finding food away from the hotel was a little trickery, but we had a few good meals.

I would return to Chiang Mai in a heartbeat.  We really loved the simplicity of life there and the beautiful serenity of the surroundings.