Warm up Sprint Triathlon before the BIG one in October! 
Blake and Dash take a summer Sunday nap 
Our First in person College tour! Meet Cam the Ram. We loved CSU. Halle also did a virtual tour at BYU. There were 5 people in her group, and 3 of them went to EFY together a couple years ago. A face would pop up on screen and Halle said, “I went to EFY with her.” And then it happened again! Crazy world. 
Josh’s FIRST EVER high school tennis match! 
Dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings after winning!! 
And it happened to fall on our 19th Wedding Anniversary. Nowhere I’d rather be than cheering for my kiddos. 
We did our back to school dinner at Mt Fuji Hibachi grill this year. It was a ton of fun! 
Annual Palisade Peach Pie 
We got to tend Jane and Max and Luke for a weekend while Sarah and the girls went backpacking. 
This was our real anniversary celebration–Dinner under the stars at Rioja. One of my favorite things. 
Rusty REALLY wanted family pics in this sunflower field. But it was high noon and none of us could keep from squinting at the sun. 
This one of Halle’s is Adorable. 
2021-2022 Family Theme: Be a Stone Catcher. Bryan Stevenson introduced us to this concept in “Just Mercy” and Elder Renlund expounded on it in General Conference in April. “Brothers and sisters, not throwing stones is the first step in treating others with compassion. The second step is to try to catch stones thrown by others.”
We want to not idly sit by–we want to be actively engaged in combatting unfairness in the world. Stand up and DO something instead of remaining silent on the sidelines.
Each kid got a jar of pretty rocks. “Stonecatcher” is engraved on one of the rocks.
Love where you live! 
Playing hooky from work and life. While the kids are away, the parents will play! We brought our Jimmy Johns Sandwiches with us and ate them out on the water. So fun. 
Anxiously waiting for Josh after tennis practice. 
Stake Dances are BACK! It did my heart a lot of good to see the youth back together again.
We hiked Gray’s and Torry’s Peak with Josh and co! Josh’s first 2 14ers and #2 and 3 for me! It was quite a challenge to get to the top for these boys. So, so steep. Josh was amazing! He was just like this mountain goat. He could scramble anywhere. When we got to the top of Gray’s Josh took a few minutes to admire the view. Then he pulled out his phone and said, “I have 3 bars up here!!!” And Ben decided not to summit Torry’s. Instead he waited in the saddle and played Clash of Clans. Hilarious. I was so proud of these boys!
The Pink backpack didn’t make the journey this time–I needed a camelback for water. But I was thinking of her when I took in this view, so I think it counts.
BEST WEEKEND EVER! The Hawaii gals reunited for some fun in the sun to celebrate Jessica’s birthday. We stayed at Snowbird. Everyone was planning on coming, but then Micah got Covid and Kasey had a cough so she played it safe. We were so sad not to have Kasey and Rachel with us. We went on a little hike, had a very strange dinner at Alta where we are pretty sure the server was trying to get fired–he was so, so bad. Then, matching PJ’s and gabbing the night away. The next day we spent a solid 8 hours at the pool and could have done more. We got to meet Jessica’s new boyfriend, Rob. And it turns out Rob is Cole’s boss at Avanti! It was fun to send Cole a pic of us together.
BanksFamilyFive 