Baby Scottie

So I have been meaning to post our new son's debut. He was born on Friday, October 27th after an exciting 30 hour labor. He was in the posterior position so his head was bumping up against my spine during the whole thing causing a slow labor and a whole whole lot of back pain. But luckily he has been such a cute cuddly kid since so he has made up for the process. Here are the stats: 8lbs even, 20.5 inches long, and a 14 inch head. He has been a pretty good baby. Now at a month old he is sleeping usually 5 or 6 hours at a stretch at night allowing me to keep my sanity.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I spent this Thanksgiving at home in Portland and enjoyed every minute of rain. I’ve been living in Phoenix since May and, if you haven’t heard, rain is scarce in this part of the country. Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining. After two summers of Phoenix heat, I’m finally getting to enjoy the benefits of an Arizona winter (I haven’t put on a long sleeve shirt yet, let alone a pair of tights).

Unfortunately, there are many of you with whom I haven’t spoken recently, so here is a long overdue update. After three years of hard work and fun times, I graduated from BYU Law School in April—hooray!


I then moved to Phoenix and (after the previously documented, fantastic trip to Boston) spent nearly the whole summer studying full-time for the Arizona bar exam, which I took in July and passed—also, hooray!

Luckily, I was able to spend the two months after the bar traveling and having a lot of fun before starting back into “real life.” After taking the bar, I went home to Portland for my little sister’s wedding, did the tourist thing in New York City with my parents, and visited my cousin in Dallas. I don’t have any cute pictures or stories about young children like the rest of you, so instead here is a picture of one of my favorite adventures in New York City. My mom’s favorite movie is You’ve Got Mail with Meg Ryan. One day we decided to do a walking tour of the Upper West Side and, thanks to the DVD special features, found many of the landmarks shot in the movie. Here we are in the park where Meg and Tom Hanks meet up at the end of the movie—such a classic.


One of my other favorite post-bar adventures was a day trip to the Grand Canyon—the only one of the seven wonders of the world that I’ve visited to date—with my friends Christine (pictured with me below, also a recent BYU law grad) and Marissa. Our six-mile hike and the views from the rim were spectacular, and I highly recommend a visit to this particular wonder.


My extended vacation ended at the end of September, and I am now doing a one-year clerkship for a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals. My judge is great, so I am learning a lot and loving the work (legal research and writing on the appellate cases assigned to my judge). Outside of work, I’m busy having fun and living the single life. I’m loving Phoenix and don’t have any plans to leave any time soon, so when you want to escape cold winter weather come and visit (the weather really is amazing right now).

Hope all is well for all of you. Your friendship is one of the many blessings I celebrated this last weekend. Thanks!

Jill

Maggie Chan

Hi Ladies- This is Kristen, but I just received this email from Maggie Chan and thought I would post it: Hi, everyone, Bryce grows so fast and big. He has two teeth at the bottom. He can crawl like a pro. He can pull himself up. He likes holding my fingers to walk around everywhere. He is currently 8 months old, slimming down a little since he started crawling but still a chunk. Skyler just turned three today. Sorry for not having the party pictures here. You have to wait for the next edition. He had a Lightning McQueen party, getting a lot of “Cars” toys. The most he wanted was to become bigger and bigger, he said, because he was afraid that Bryce would be bigger than him. He got the idea from too many people to talk about it. Sad… I ran the Twin Cities Marathon on Oct. 1st with a stress fracture on my tibia… Ha… Funny, huh?! I finished 10th overall female with a time of 2:42:19. Considering that I had a cold and a stress fracture, 7 minutes off from what I wanted?! It’s a great race. I still had a hard time to imagine how I finished it with the stress fracture. So now, I am enjoying my time off, focusing on my scrapbooking business. I biked everyday to burn off some of my huge intake of calories and I would start running next week, 6 weeks from the 1st. I had a lot of fun and got to know many people in the process of this scrapbooking business, which kept my mind off from not being able to run in these 6 weeks. Brent was going to be deployed in January but he was told not to when he was training in MS about a month ago. I hated the military life this way; we couldn’t plan on anything two weeks in advanced. Something could be up anytime. So, I guess I wouldn’t be in Utah for 4 months now. Hope everything going well in your sides. Happy Thanksgiving.

Seattle and Waiting

Hey all! I am in Seattle now and enjoying it a lot. I miss Boston, especially the beautiful fall colors and friends out there but Seattle is treating us right. We have been blessed with absolutely gorgeous weather and I have enjoyed being closer to family. I am a week away from my due date so I am getting excited and wondering when our little one will make his big debut. I am hoping he waits until after tomorrow so I can officially be 28 years old before I have my first one. Then when they get older, I can feign great maturity as a mother. :) I miss my job as a dietitian but I am getting adjusted to home life too. My little sister just got married a week ago so I was busy helping my mom out with the final preparations. We also didn't do any pre-baby stuff in Boston because we didn't want to move everything so I have been locating crib, carseat and such. I am amazed at how much stuff one little tiny fellow needs. Hyrum is enjoying getting into the mix at UW. He is busy with classes and research. His professor seems very motivated and they already have been publishing conference proceedings and such so it seems like it will be a good experience for him. Here are some recent pics.

Sunny Fall

We finally joined the bloggers, check it out @ http://zbirdfamily.blogspot.com/
XC is going well, our team is hopefully going to make it to state-although we have taken our share of injuries lately. WA has been having awesome weather and we haven't had any rainy meets yet.
I love this picture, Zac doesn't look to happy (you might spot the spit up all over his shirt) but at least Claire's happy.
I am reading a great book right now, West with the Night by Beryl Markmam-Another book about Africa- but, definatly worth the time. I love being a mom, it has it moments but, Claire brings so much joy to our lives. She loves hanging out with Alex Call (Cammie Heiners little boy) and cant wait to meet Laura's little girl who will be showing up around January. Yea!

Kennardia

Hi All! Decided I would post this morning because what better to do when you're up at 5 with a newborn and its still too dark to go running? Thats seems to be the schedule Breanne likes to keep me on lately. She is totally pooped by 7:30 p.m. so I have to put her to bed, but then she wakes up at 5-5:30 a.m. bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to start our day! Kids...gotta love 'em. Congrats to you expecting moms out there! Its always good news to hear of more red-meat-night offspring.
Okay so what have we been up to lately? We drove to Utah last week for a 206 mile bike race Aaron did from Logan to Jackson (LOTOJA). The kids and I were the "support crew" handing him bags of food along the way so he wouldn't bonk. He finished the race in just over 10 hours and still had a smile on his face! Crazy Man. Of course he's hooked now, so I'm sure we'll be doing LOTOJA for many years to come. Anyone else's husbands interested? I'd love to have a support crew buddy for next year! Anyway, a couple of weeks before that I took the kids on a trip to Texas with my sister-in-law to visit my other sister-in-law who lives in Dallas. We spent the week sight-seeing around Dallas in the 100 degree heat (whew, that was hot). We had to laugh at ourselves sometimes; 3 moms and 9 kids can make A LOT of noise and A LOT of mess! :) We've also been on a few camping trips, Ouray was our most exciting; here's a picture of Abe pondering the difficulty of his climb (he is already a little rock climber in training).

Breanne just keeps getting bigger every day too. She is 6 months old now (oh man, that means I haven't posted on this blog for 6 months! Sorry) and she is rolling over, sitting up, and finally starting to actually swallow rice cereal (as opposed to just drooling it all over her bib) so I'm hoping she'll start sleeping through the night one of these days when she can swallow enough food to tide her over for 8-10 hours. If any of you are ever planning on being in Denver or just passing through and need a place to crash, we'd love to have visitors! Call or email at 720-221-3836 or nankennard@gmail.com

Yeah Kansas!

After three amazing years in Boston, Hyrum and I decided to move to Seattle for some more grad school. Hyrum is going to be a freshman PhD student at the University of Washington in the electrical engineering program. So as part of the moving fun, Hyrum and I are on a cross-country journey from Boston to Seattle. We have been from Boston to Harmony, Lancaster to Gettysburg, and Nauvoo, but one of the most exciting legs of our journey was to visit JoLee and Nathan in Kansas City, Kansas.

JoLee and Nathan are amazing tour guides. Above you can see JoLee and I walking in Adam-ondi-Ahman.
Here we are in a corn field at the same place. Hyrum must be standing on a hill because I swear he isn't that much taller than me. :)
Cows, yup, hopefully they will also be there on that special general conference to come.
JoLee and I. This is a good one because it hides my 7 1/2 month pregnant belly. I don't think I have mentioned that before, but Hyrum and I are expecting a little bambino in October.
Hyrum and I in front of the Liberty Jail. It was a really sobering place, but Nathan must have said something funny.
This may be one of my favorite pictures. Only in Kansas do you see a school bus/pick-up truck combo that can pull a tractor too. Amazing.

Tomorrow we are back on the road heading to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. A few more hundred miles and a few more adventures. I hope to see you all sometime soon, maybe in Seattle?