Where have I been?

Goodness, it looks like I've been away for a while now. I just don't know where the time has gone. We haven't really been doing much of anything big or exciting or scary or bad (unless you watch the economy, but that's not my fault I don't even have a mortgage). I really have no excuse for it having been about 6 weeks since I actually posted. It seems like I've been running crazy, but I don't have much to show for it. Between church, Joe's school, two girls, and trying to keep the house running it's just gotten away. Here's a few interesting things we've been doing:

1. Rachel went to an Eye, Ears, Nose and Throat specialist office about her funny eye-crossing behaviors. She's just nearsighted the Dr said, but she may need glasses around her birthday if her eyes don't continue to improve. They seem to be getting better but it's a really slow process.

2. We got the van serviced and found several things that needed to be fixed totaling over $1000 and it's sad that our student loans had to go mostly to that and not to actually paying off the van.

3. Joe started teaching! He has one class that he's teaching now and he really seems to be enjoying it. Next semester he's teaching 2 sections of the same class. He's also taking his qualifying exam in November and will hopefully be working on his dissertation by Christmas. He also got a bit of a job offer, but we're not done with school yet so it didn't even come to anything. It's nice to know that Joe's got a profitable degree that he can use though.

4. Karen is almost completely potty trained! Last week was kinda bad, but overall she's only using pull-ups at bedtime now and most of the time she goes in the toilet!!! She can even go by herself but then some of the time 'forgets' to put her underwear back on (she'd rather be free...). It's nice to not have 2 kids in diapers anymore.

5. Rachel is almost fully mobile. She can sit herself up and pull herself over. She can roll all over the place and yesterday started to commando crawl. She's really doing better in that department than Karen did. Rachel is now 8 months old; Karen didn't crawl at all until 10 months, I think someone's trying to catch up.

6. As I write, my government is attempting to buy up $700 billion in bad debt to just hold on to it for a few years... not that I have anything to do with that really since I don't currently pay taxes myself, own a home, or have anything in the stock market right now, but it's just a crazy situation. And it means the price of food is probably going to go up again... but it's just more fuel for an already exciting political season. It's crazy, but I don't even know who I'm voting for yet. What a crazy year this is!

Well, this is a long enough post for now. We've been busy and hopefully I'll be back for good now... until something else minor comes up, right? Here are some pics from the last bit...

These two pictures are from a party we had for our friends who were moving back to teach at BYU-I. Since then (July) they have moved to ID, one of our other friends moved to NJ, and another one had her baby!