This year for Memorial Day weekend, I was able to pull Jill away from her dissertation for a few days to take a quick trip down to Houston to visit friends and family. One of the things we go to do while we were down there was enjoy a mega-birthday swim party to celebrate everyone that had a birthday or will have a birthday in a few month’s time.

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I was a party pooper and decided to stay dry and take photos, but everyone who got into the water had a blast. Unfortunately, Jill and I took off early to go visit our friends John and Shasta in their new home, but we still had a lot of fun.

Amidst the vast amounts of housework I’ve been doing, I was relieved when Brigham called me to tell me that he had scored some free tickets to the Round Rock Express baseball game. That night, the Express squared off against the Las Vegas 51’s in what proved to be another

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The highlight of the evening, however, was how much fun Asher enjoyed running up and down the slope of the grassy fields behind the outfield. At times, it was tough to remember that there was even a game going on in the background.

With Jill on the home stretch of finishing her dissertation, things have been fairly crazy around the house. So I was happy to have slept in a bit on Sunday morning to walk in and find this sight:



In order to keep things quiet around the house, Jill hooked Asher up with the wireless headphones so that he could watch some morning cartoons while the rest of us caught up on sleep. What a great solution!

It has been a very long time since I’ve put together a time lapse video, so I racked my brain for a while and decided to try out this experiment. Using a bolt and a quick grip clamp, I secured my camera to the dashboard of the Scion, hooked it up to Jill’s netbook, and off we went! Here’s a photo of the setup:



Here’s the time lapse in its finished form. This was me and Asher dropping Jill off at Texas State. What’s fun is that you can see me pulling a U-turn as we were headed home because Jill couldn’t get into her office and we had to go back and pick her up!

On Saturday, Brig invited us up to his place to help celebrate Brady and Alex’s birthday. All of the kids had a lot of fun building off-road jeeps and going on a safari! Afterward, we enjoyed some great banana flavored monkey cakes.

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With so few days of cool spring weather remaining, Jill and I decided to head out on Sunday afternoon to walk around a nice park in Buda that she discovered. I ended up snapping a few photos while we walked along a few trails and let Asher explore.

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Per tradition, our ward has a camp out every year in the spring. This year we were a bit nervous about attending, given the rough time Asher had sleeping in a tent last year. Nevertheless, we figured that since he’s aged a year that he might fare better, and we didn’t really have a choice because we were on the activities committee.

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What really made this event fun was that Brigham and Mason were able to come as well! Asher really enjoyed hanging out with Mason, and we all had quite a bit of fun exploring the waterfalls at Pedernales Falls the next morning.