Gardens

These are pictures from our new back yard. It gets better and better all the time. Right now is the peak of the spring/early summer gardening season in Arizona. (Those of you who are still buried under snow will be laughing in your turn come July when I am 9 months pregnant and it is 110 degrees outside.) The purple flower is the blossom of my Passiflora or "Passion Vine". It blooms all summer, but each flower only lasts one day. The flower bed is my first completed raised bed in the garden! My Mom and Dad helped me to get it started when they were here at the end of February. Mom helped me plant all the plants, including the spiny ones that bite. (Greater love hath no Mommy...) Then Dad and I went for a drive in the hills above our house and picked up the larger rocks off the side of the road! The other picture is Ryan showing off his tomatoes. He loves to go out and inspect the vegetable garden every morning. Yes, those are swim goggles he's wearing on his head, part of his latest super-hero disguise. I really do love life with little boys! They go from Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker to Nephi with such ease.

Let me introduce....

Here are some snapshots of the Josh and Cheryl Felt Family as we are right now, or at least relatively recently. One of our favorite things to do is to meet our Salt Lake family at a half-way point in Southern Utah and do some camping and hiking. This is a picture of the four of us hiking from Wire Pass into Buckskin Gulch in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Josh and I are comfortably ensconced in our early thirties. I am a full-time stay-at-home Mom and Josh works for Intel here in Arizona. Our oldest son Alex is six years old now and in first grade. The two great loves of his life so far are his Legos and the Lego Star Wars game on the Wii. This is a picture of Alex and his soccer team. Needless to say, Alex is kind of a big kid! :)

Ryan turned three in March despite his best efforts to skip directly from two to six so he could be just like his big brother. Ryan loves anything with wheels especially if it happens to be Lightning McQueen. He is my little gardening pal. He likes to come outside and inspect the plants in our newly installed back yard. He is growing pumpkins this summer and hoping to have them ready for Halloween. Here's hoping they can survive the heat of an Arizona summer. This is Ryan with his race-track birthday cake, thanks to the ingenuity of his Grandma Debbie and his cousin Sydney.

We are expecting another baby in July who will be, to my utter and complete surprise, our first baby girl! So far everything is going well for our little Jillian. She is healthy and seems quite happy in her little, private swimming pool. We are looking forward to welcoming her to our family. The closet in the front bedroom is slowly being converted from little boy hand-me-down storage space to pink, pink and pink. This one is being spoiled unmercifully by her aunts, her Grandmas, and her Mom's friends already.

As I mentioned, we have just finished installing a back yard. I say "we", but I mean "Josh." He worked on it every weekend and every decent evening after work for about two months. It is so nice to have a space for the kids to play outside and to grow things. Here he is smiling with relief to see that after the installation of the sod, the sprinkling system works as it should. Yeah for Josh and Uncle Ken, they seem to know what they're doing!

Well, that's a brief glimpse of the Felt family. We hope to be able to keep track of our family and friends better by joining the blog-fest.

All our best to all of you from Arizona!

Starting Out

This is my very first attempt at setting up a blog for our family. Josh's sister Meggan introduced me to the joy of "blogstalking" on her visit here last month. Since then I have been checking her blog on a regular basis and looking over postings from my Staker cousins. I decided that maybe I'd better get in on the act. Please be patient with me while I learn what I'm doing.