FINALLY!!!

This has been my son Zeuz for the last, are you ready, 8 months! Sadness huh? I'll tell the story for those who don't know it. My dog broke his leg when he was outside "mowing the lawn" with my husband. Spoiler alert: he did not get his leg caught in the mower, take a deep breath. However, the mower is no innocent bystander. Oh yes, he was involved. You see, when Kevin goes outside at ANY time, Zeus must then follow. He cannot STAND IT if Kevin goes out there without him. So like any responsible parent we put him on his leash in the backyard while the mower is going, JUST IN CASE. I mean, he's bitty, he would not win if the two took each other on. Zeus won't go near the thing anyway, so we never worried. Well.....his leash is long. He was on the opposite side that Kevin was mowing on, but saw something across the way apparently and took off to go and get it. All the while dragging his leash behind him. It happened so fast that Kevin didn't have time to shut off the engine before his leash was dragged under into the blades. Zeus was not even near the mower, so it could have turned out to be okay, but oh no, his leash just HAD to be wrapped around his leg. The pull of the blades on his leash snapped his poor leg in half. Probably, embarrassingly enough, the most scary day of my life. Most people would have just been sad and scared and taken him to the vet to get it fixed. I, on the other hand, exposed a crazy person to my husband that I don't think he will ever forget. I was on the verge of hysteria. Keep in mind that I cried in Hidalgo. The movie where the horse lives and wins the race, but got injured on the way. Tears were flowing. Anyways, I was just sure they were going to have to amputate his leg, or put him down, or some other procedure that Satan himself invented. I was shaking and bawling and snotting everywhere, and my husband was trying to calm me down, hold Broken Leg Zeus (who by the way was sweating, panting, crying, shaking, and cursing our names), call the vet, and get us there all at the same time. When we got there Kevin ran in with him while I had to take a minute in the car to become a somewhat sane human being. I go in there crying and I swear it should have been in a movie. You would have thought I was waiting for my child to come out of open heart surgery at Primary Childrens rather than waiting for a splint at the vet. I go up to the counter and ask where they took my dog and the lady asked which dog was mine. I looked at her like she had three heads. I was obviously appalled that she didn't know of this crisis happening in her clinic. MY DOG HAS BROKEN HIS LEG PEOPLE. So anyways, I finally find them and I'm willing to pay millions if that is what the vet would have asked for. I would have flown specialist in from different countries if that is what it would take. Hello. So to try to sum it up here, he was fine, it was a clean brake, it should have only taken 6-8 weeks to heal. But I have a stubborn A dog I guess. Because 8 months and $1600 later, he is finally healed............yeah.

RACE FOR THE CURE!!!

On May 10th me, my mom, my sister, and Kyler all "ran"the Race for the Cure. It was the first year that we participated and it was SO much fun!! The picture above is of the papers that they have you put on your back to honor whoever you are running the race for. We did it for my Grandma, my mom's mom. She passed away of breast cancer, and I miss her so much! She was an amazing woman. I was so proud to be a part of this event, and to just let my grandma know we haven't forgotten her. There were over 18,000 people that walked/ran for the cure! It was a really emotional thing for me, which surprised me. The whole time I was choking back tears, the good kind and the sad. There were mom's there with their families wearing scarves over their bald helds while their tiny children walked holding their hands wearing papers on their backs saying "for my mom" and husbands "for my wife". There were people who had "in memory of my great grandma, my grandma, my mom, my sister and my other sister who's still fighting". This particular person was wearing a pink shirt that meant she was a survivor or fighting breast cancer currently. There were too many pink shirts. Then there were people who joined as a team. If you do that you can design a shirt for your own team. So many people had a good sense of humor about it! (I would think you would have to for your own sanity) These were some of my favorite team names:

*Team Ta Ta's...saving one Ta at a time
*Walkers for April's Knockers
*Christy's Rack Pack
*Save the Boobies (and had a cartoon picture of the bird called the Blue Footed Booby, it's endangered)
*something about needing to get to second base, I couldn't read all of it, but I imagine it was funny

This is something that will be a tradition in our family now. If you can give money to a good cause AND have fun...why not?

My sister and her baby Kyler getting ready to start! He was so good the whole time. He literally stayed like that the entire race. Just watching people and chillin with his cool shades
There were so many dogs! And almost all of them dressed up. It was HILARIOUS. There was a little min pin dressed in a mini skirt and tank top! Shirts, sweatshirts, bunny ears, pink collars, you name it, the dogs were dressed in it. All in pink of course....
You can't tell in this picture, but you see that little grey triangle thingy at the very top of the crowd of people? Yeah, that's more people. It was amazing to see in person, I'm actually quite upset that you can't tell what it really looked like in the pictures I took. But it was incredible the amount of people that went on and on. It looked like that in front of us and in back. It gave me chills to think that all those people were there because they have been affected by breast cancer.
This was at the fountain at Gateway. The survivors wore pink and they walked around the whole upper level after the sign of how many years they had survived or been cancer free. It started from 30 years and went all the way to 1 year. Sad to say the 30 year group, even the 10 years had hardly any, and the years 1-5 went on forever. This is them starting to fill the stairs so they could play a song and let dove's go. It was pretty amazing. Especially afterward to see the women crying and hugging their loved ones.

What an amazing experience, I'm so glad we did it. There was so much going on, radio stations were there, the girls from Good Things Utah, people giving "tattoo's", and news crews. And apparently we were on TV afterwards for the news....a bunch of people said they saw us. But I had no idea I was ever being filmed, so hopefully I wasn't picking a wedgy? Yikes.

Hawaii ! ! !

(I couldn't figure out how to have the writing above this picture, so sorry for random dolphin opening to this post)


Yep, be jealous, cuz it was THAT awesome. I love Hawaii so much and I owe my third time there to my cute in-laws for planning the Harper family vacation there. This was my first time to Kauai though, and I loved it!! It's so beautiful and quiet there. We had so much fun doing all sorts of adventures: kayaking, cliff jumping, rope swinging off into a waterfall, snorkeling, and my favorite the boat tour of the Na Pali coast. So our boat was more like a raft on steroids. We literally sat on the sides and held onto ropes to stay put. We saw dolphins and turltes and humpback whales. Which it wasn't like, oh sweet, there's a whale way out there at sea, grab your binoculars....they were RIGHT THERE. Like, 10 yards from us. It really puts things into perspective when the whale is bigger than your "boat". Yikes! And just to give you a better idea of our watercraft, the captain told us that he had a cool experience where a baby whale came and put his fun IN the boat. Yeah, in it. Crazy eh? I was literally shaking I was so excited to have that experience. They also took us in sea caves and served us lunch on a beach. There we got to walk through an ancient fishing village and and a burial ground for their royalty. Very cool. We ate lots of good food, layed out on the beach, did a little shopping. We spent our last 2 days on Oahu where we went to the Dole Plantation, Matsumoto's Shaved Ice (yum), and Pearl Harbor. Kevin is trying to brainstorm on ways that we could move to Kauai. So far he has come up with taking my dad's and his dad's retirement money and rebuilding a burnt down hotel. So pretty sure we won't be moving anytime soon :(

inside the a sea cave
I didn't mean to put this picture in here, but can't figure out how to get it off. So there you go....
Picture of the Na Pali coast from our raft
Our raft

Us laying at the pool at our hotel
This is us on the hike down to Secret beach. Except that it's not so secret, we found it on a brochure, along with everyone else. Maybe they should call it, "Waves Will Kill You and Take You Out To Sea Beach" because I got my #% handed to me in the water. It was still fun though. It's crazy the power the ocean has.
Us getting shaved ice at Jo Jo's. Here we are kayaking down the river. It was SO pretty, this picture does not do it justice. After this we all cried from the pain of rowing for 4 hours.
My husband looking hard core jumping off the rope swing