Another month with Scott

It amazes me how much this cute boy grows each day. He continues to get more of a personality and be more and more fun. He is smiling and laughing lots. He talks to us and loves when we mimic his sounds back. Stan can always make him laugh. Scott will just stare at us until we look back at him and then he'll grin big. We are loving this little boy! (These are about ordered oldest to latest)

This is the onesie Aunt Nikki gave him when he was born. It took me a while before I actually took a picture of it. And obviously he is still working on fitting into those pants...

Stan can always make him smile

He walked with Stan one evening to get the mail. He tolerates the hat.

The next few are of a bedhead hairdo he had a week or so before he got his first haircut

First haircut! My friend, Katie, helped us do the trimming. The bottle kept him preoccupied, he didn't seem to mind it at all!

Just hanging out one day

This was pre-haircut on our drive to AZ to spend time with my family

When he is really happy, he'll eat his hand

And blow bubbles. He always is blowing bubbles

This was one night while Stan was swimming at the local pool, Scott and I were just chilling in the beautiful summer weather. He was supposed to be asleep...

Right after naptime he is sooo happy!

He'll hang out in this chair while I'm doing dishes or making dinner.

Grandma Julie sent him this cute outfit

We love this happy face!

I have some cute videos of him but am having technical difficulties. Those will be added later...

4th of July weekend

I'll catch up on our other adventures this coming week, but I'll share our weekend details tonight. Because we've been traveling lately, we used the day of independence celebration as a completely lazy day. We may have watched hours of tv and had fast food Mexican for dinner. That morning we had gone early morning to a ward breakfast at a park and were able to throw a frisbee around a little. We'll be more patriotic next year. Friday night, we packed up for a Saturday adventure up to the Pecos wilderness.

Scott and I did dress a little patriotic.

We decided it was time for real, real adventure here in New Mexico. We drove up to the Santa Fe ski area where the trail head was. Nambé Lake was our destination, about 3.5 miles from the trail head. The first couple miles were pretty easy, not too bad, but the last mile was pretty crazy, from 55 to 70 degree incline. 

We saw lots of people on trail, which was different for us since usually we go where no one else is. It did make it easy to take more family pictures which was nice. :) We took our time on the way in making sure to keep Scott happy and fed which paid off because he was happy and fun to be with. 

This was along the easiest section of the trail, we had come up over a saddle and were walking along the side of the mountain to the turn off point to go up a very steep mountain.

Just to set the record straight, people always wonder why I carry Scott instead of Stan. Scott weighs a lot less than all the things Stan has to carry (3L of water, food, wipes and diapers, sweaters, ponchos, etc.). I'm happy to carry the child. :)

There were beautiful aspens all along the trail.

Most of the trail we were pretty well surrounded by the trees but this was a small clearing before we headed up and up.

The lady we had take this picture was hilarious. She took a picture from about four different angles of the three of us. We were just glad to have a photographer I guess.

The beginning of our ascent. There was a beautiful creek coming down from the lake and we wove over it a few times.

It is hard to capture how steep this trail really was, this was the least steep of the steep part.

One of our breaks to keep this boy happy. It was working :)

Stan is better at getting Scott to smile for pictures than I am. He just stares at the camera whenever I try.

Nambè Lake at the outlet.

The bowl, when we were sitting next to the lake, we saw someone up on top of that ridge.

He was so happy to get out of the carrier.

We kept hiking past the lake a little and found a beautiful meadow and stream area.

This is looking back toward the lake.

Another picture trying to capture how steep it was.

We saw some beautiful flowers all along the trail. We have loved having more rain this year and seeing the fruits of it.

This was the most accessible of these beautiful, huge columbines

The elephant flower

We made it back to the car right before the rains hit! It was such a wonderful day!!

Our Hobbies

It should come to no surprise to anyone that with all the hiking we do, one of us has to know a lot about maps. That someone is Stan. He has spent many an hour looking at topographical maps. When we were dating and first starting our adventures in the wilderness, I would often ask him where we were, how much farther we needed to go, how much higher we needed to climb etc. He would pull out his handy little printed topographical map and tell me. Admittedly, sometimes I didn't think he really knew the answer but was just making it up, but we always got where we were trying to go and his map reading skills thoroughly impressed me.

Some know that we started writing an app together last year that was a domino game. It was fun to do together in the evenings but in about January we decided to change routes and write an app that would not only be fun to write but would be useful to us too. Enter TopoTracker:

I wish I had pictures of each stage we have gone through with this app, but we are super excited at how far it's come. Just imagine a blank screen. That's where we started. To make it a family affair, Stan does the talking and I do the typing. I've learned way more about computer programming than I think I ever bargained for, but I have really enjoyed learning one of Stan's loves. 

Basically we wrote/arranged code to download maps from USGS website, to cut those maps into tiles, and then those tiles are saved onto a memory card we put in Stan's phone and the app retrieves them as needed. We've added GPS, compass, route tracking, distance tracker, a destination marker with distance to that point, and the ability to lock your GPS location as the center of the screen. That's what all the buttons on the bottom of the screen are. Pretty much my husband is super smart. It's been a fun project to do together.

The other hobby that we have gotten way more into than I ever knew was possible is:

 Ham Radio

Stan got introduced to these through a friend in our ward. He went to the guy's house to chat and came home with stars in his eyes. He started studying for the license exam and I got roped in (Stan claims that I roped myself into it). I figured if he was going to have a license, I would need to have one too so that I could talk on them too. We studied hard for a week, ordered our radios off of Amazon, passed our license tests, got our call signs, and now we're exploring the world of radios and repeaters.