An inspiring story

I've been following Oscar Pistorius for a while, and when I heard about the latest ruling allowing him to compete for a spot on the Olympic team, I got excited. You can read and watch his story here.

Sam's First Primary Talk

Sam "gave" his first primary talk last week. We practiced for days before, and recorded a few of his practice sessions which went awesome! He really did well at home, when he was just in front of Marcia, Lucas and I.
But then came the day to actually give the talk, and things didn't go very well. Sam froze, and Marcia had to give the whole thing. We were pretty sad, because as you can see from the video, he really had it down.


For those of you who don't understand Portuguese, here is what Sam said:
Hi kids. The families from the scripture, my family helps me be strong. Nephi, had a bow and arrow, which broke. Everyone got hungry. Nephi prayed. Nephi made another new bow and arrow. Then he gave a lot of food to everyone. Everyone was happy. I Sammy will be good. I will pray to heavenly Father just like Nephi. I'm also going to listen to my Mom and Dad speak, and I will be obedient. I will listen to Jesus also. In the name of Jesus Christ Amen.

Trip to CO

We had a great trip to Colorado. It started with a drive out to CO on our 5th anniversary! Due to the occasion, I wanted to take Marcia to a nice restaurant. We found this cool little Italian place in Grand Junction, and were very happy to do something special.

It was $40 for the food, and we split the meal, and the proportions were insanely small. By the way, the meat is hidden under the parsley. It was good food though.

Lucas had an insanely incredible blowout. Here is the onesie that we just chucked because it was not salvageable. This was gross city. Thank goodness that both Marcia and I were there, so we could team clean this one.


Once in Colorado, Sam wasted no time getting into trouble with Jensen. They snuck away and filled up the tub and threw in a bunch of junk, like statues, apples, cups, starfish etc.

One of the highlights of the trip was seeing my little brother Don, who just got back from Iraq. We got to play Frisbee in the park for a while, and I was in heaven.

Here is us at the Denver zoo.

These little monkeys were teeny tiny. The bigger monkey is about the size of my fist.
About 65% of the time Sam and Jensen got along really well. And Sam wanted to hold his hand.
We had a great experience doing Lucas' blessing at my parents home. It was a very spiritual experience. Dad gave a great testimony, mom played the piano well, and it just turned out very nice.


It was great to spend some time with Tiana as well, after she got home from her mission. She was real excited to play with all the nieces and nephews.



On the way home, I missed the turn, and we drove an extra 110 miles. Aaargh. We didn't get in until after midnight. It was a miserable close to an amazing weekend.

Decisoes dificeis

--update: this post was an april fools joke---

(Eu estou escrevendo em Portugues porque eu nao posso falar essas coisas em Ingles, porque tem pessoas no trabalho que leem meu blog)

Lembram como eu falei que nos iamos procurar trabalho no Arizona? Comecei fazendo so de brincadeira, mas, eu acabei achando um otimo trabalho. Eu faria coisas parecidas como eu faco agora, mas com menos programacao, e mais gerenciando. Parece que eu vou ter um groupo de 8-10 pessoas abaixo de mim, e eles vao ser programadores tambem.

E uma decisao muito dificil porque nos gostamos muito da nossa casa e de nossos amigos em Utah mas parece que a decisao certa e aceitar este trabalho. Vamos ver, nos temos um tempinho para aceitar.

Peeps results!

Danica and Dad ended up taking 3rd place! and I got an honorable mention, so our displays did very well. Thanks for voting everyone!


In case you missed it, here is the final post.
http://www.heiselt.org/liz/blog/2008/03/results.html

Big Birthday!

Marcia's birthday was yesterday, and it was very excellent. I surprised her by taking the family to a nearby horse farm first thing in the morning. I had gone around earlier in the week and knocked on the doors of our neighbors who had horses running around in their yard, and asked if I could bring my wife by and let her ride. The people I talked to were nice, and the lady you see in the picture was super excited that we would even ask to ride her horse.


Marcia had no idea what the surprise was :) The first picture is her in a "perplexed and curious" mode, when she was worried what in the world I was getting her into.

When we arrived and Marcia realized that we were going to ride horses, she calmed down a bit. She rode a horse called LD, and then we got to feed the horses some treats. Sam loved it, and Marcia enjoyed it as well. Sam was making horse sounds the rest of the day.

After riding horses, we spent a few hours at the mall, looking for birthday clothes for Marcia. Sam rode the carousel, and wanted to be like mom, and ride a horse.

After the mall we went to my soccer game, and we won! It was 7-0, and very fun. It was a good close to our season.

After the soccer game, we went to dinner at Shoots with the Runyans. Mmmmm, lettuce wraps.

Finally when we rolled into our driveway late that night, we put Sam down and played DDR for a while.

It was a great day. Oh yeah, and Lucas smiled for the first time as a nice bday present for Marcia.

Peeps! and a great Easter weekend

Danica, Dave, Jesen, Tiger Lilly, and Dad all came into town for the easter weekend. It was a great time to get together. We did a big heroscape game, a couple of egg hunts, malt-o-meal, soccer game, and more than anything else, we make peep dioramas!

My buddy Micah is hosting the competition, and so we thought we'd give it a go. You can see my display as well as Danica's on their blog here.

Danica, Dave and Dad's is the "Lincoln's last peep show". And mine is "Don't fear the peeper (more cowbell)"


You might not get it... so if mine doesn't make sense, you are probably out of touch. To get in touch, just watch this video: , (in case you miss it, the name of the song is "Don't fear the reaper") and then you can see how this video has be come a cultural phenomena here. and here.

ps. you may recognize that pergo used for the floor, as scraps leftover from my last home project :)