[DISCLAIMER: The general idea of the following story is true. However, the precise details may be slightly inaccurate as I received the bulk majority of the proceedings second-hand. Plus, this whole thing took place over three weeks ago. But, with so many of you who pledge your allegiance to the school with the Y, I figured this story must be told.]

In between Thanksgiving and Christmas we gathered up the family and headed down to Salt Lake for the USU-BYU basketball game held at the Energy Solutions Arena, where the Utah Jazz play their home games.

Rather than make the kids sit in a crowded arena for the entire night, after sitting in the car for much of the afternoon, and thanks to the kindness of Jenna and the Perego kids, Ashley and Andrew spent the evening with their cousins while Amber and I went to the intense game.

Since Jenna is twice a graduate from Brigham Young she also had interest in the game and had it playing on the radio during dinner. Her kids were already accustomed to cheering for the Cougars and they were trying to get Ashley to do the same.

But, our first born held strong. The closest she got to saying 'Go Cougars' was 'Go Coogies!' Then when she heard the radio announcer say Aggies Ashley threw both fists into the air and shouted 'Go Aggies!'

Jenna's oldest child, Joshua, was perplexed as to why anyone related to him would cheer for a school other than BYU. Jenna explained that Ashleys parents were Aggies from Utah State, and they didn't cheer for the Cougars. Apparently this touched Joshua and the other children as they all began to cheer for the Aggies. By the end of the night Josh was even disappointed when the Aggies lost the game.

Thanks to Ashley's influence we should be expecting Joshua in Logan when it's time for him to start college.

We took the whole family to the Utah State basketball game last week against Weber State. We had mixed results with Ashley and the boisterous atmosphere of the basketball games last season, so we weren't sure what to expect this time around.

To our surprise Ashley sat in her seat for most of the game, watched the action on the court intently, and even clapped with the crowd every time the Aggies scored. She eventually got bored, after all she is only two, and began to fidget around our seats. What brought her attention back to the court every time was the music over the loud speaker.

Of course, it wasn't so much the tunes or the beat, but the Aggie Dancers that got Ashley's attention. For most of the second half, when ever the dancers were out performing Ashley could be seen mimicking their actions from her seat. So cute.

After so many wonderful grilling experiences this summer, you'd figure that some bad outings were inevitable. This weekend was one of the biggest busts I've ever had with fire and meat.

In my confidence of such a successful grilling summer, I decided that I was ready to graduate from grilling parts of animals and move on to whole beasts. This time of year suggests an ideal creature: a turkey.

I read through a few recipes and felt that I could handle the challenge. Just before 3pm Saturday afternoon I lit the fire, separating the coals for indirect grilling, placed our bird on the grill, and shut the lid.

Now, I'll admit that I didn't follow all my instructions exactly, but my sources also conflicted on how I should go about accomplishing the task. After six hours of flip-flopping techniques, the meat thermometer read 180, and felt good about bringing the bird inside.

All accounts say that you are supposed to let your bird rest for several minutes before carving, this was no problem as it gave me time to prepare a quite yummy gravy. The gravy was the best creation on the night. The meat was another story.

Excited by the taste of the gravy I began slicing the turkey, eagerly awaiting what I would find inside. To my dismay, it was exactly the opposite of what I expected. The meat was stringy and dry, in the places that it was cooked, and it was even pink in some spots.

The pinkness was nothing a little time in the oven couldn't fix; and the dryness was cured by the gravy. There are a lot of things I need to think about before trying to grill a turkey again, possibly Thursday? (hi Bagbys). But, at least I got the gravy right.

For the last several weeks I have had a bottle of Virgils Cream Soda sitting in the bottom of my fridge. The idea was that I would use it as a small reward for some accomplishment. But, when ever I thought about grabbing the bottle I would second guess whether my current accomplishment was worthy of such a reward.

This thought process repeated itself on several occasions until finally, in a moment of weakness, I sipped the stuff down along side a plate of Pizza Rolls just because it sounded good.

I open with this story because it's a lot like my blogging habits recently. After skipping the birth of our son in September, no other event since has felt worthy to write about in comparison.

Well, now I'm over that and getting back into the habit. Plus, I even fixed some of the colors on our blog site. What do you think?

As mentioned, we have doubled the number of minors in the house with the birth of Andrew in September. He's fantastic and adored by not only his parents, but his older sister as well. Of course, we figure this admiration will last about as long as Andrew keeps his hands off Ashley's stuff. Once he starts to get grabby, we foresee that the love-fest will be history. Or not. Maybe they'll be perfect children, right?

We take lots of pictures and post them to Shutterfly. If you feel you are not on our email list for receiving access to our shutterfly albums - and you would like to be - please leave a comment on this post with your email address.

This story doesn't have much to do with the family, except for that I was there. What I'm about to share occurred while fulfilling my church responsibilities.

I work with the youth, and last sunday while all of us were gathering for a lesson one of the young men cracked open a window as he declared that he was hot. As the nearest person of responsibility I didn't see anything wrong with it, except for the young man's train of thought as it was much warmer outside than in. Laws of temperatures withstanding, I didn't say a word about the window being open. That is until a wasp floated through the open space.

The buzzing creature created quite the silent stir - didn't want to interrupt the teacher. While the boys immediately surrounding me were completely focused on the bee, I motioned to the one closest to the window to shut it so that others wouldn't fly in.

Our visitor hovered around a bit before camping out on the ceiling for much of the class time. Most of the guys had turned their focus back to their shoes until the wasp took flight again. Quietly, each boy prepared himself with what ever weapon they could find. It was the lad directly to my left who was the least frantic, even though the wasp was lowering right in front of his face.

Just as the bee reached chin level, the boy calmly raised his open scriptures and then closed them, crushing the bee inside. Once the class was over all of us familiar with the situation huddled around him to inspect the damage as he opened his scriptures. As he pulled back the pages we found the lifeless bee crumpled in the boys Bible Dictionary. The definition that was smeared with the bee-guts, 'Weights and Measures.' That was enough to make me chuckle.

While slugging through some code tonight my mind made a valiant effort of escaping the after hours torture I was putting it through. The thought of a conversation I had with Ashley this past Sunday came to mind.

Just as our sabbath day was winding down Amber and I went to great lengths to plan an evening with brownies without Ashley learning of it. After all, we were trying to get her to bed. We were perfect in keeping our secret all afternoon and evening. So well, in fact, that for a split second I had forgotten that the dessert was a secret when I uttered the word 'brownies' while carrying a tired Ashley up the stairs.

As the sound of my transgression lingered in the air, I paused hoping Ashley hadn't noticed. Maybe she was already asleep on my shoulder, right? Wrong. For the following two minutes, while preparing for bed, Ashley repeated the phrase, "Mommy's making brownies." In frustration, I ignored her, hoping that the subject would change her train of thought. I didn't.

After hearing my blunder repeated over and over, in defeat I finally said, "Ashley, I don't know what Mommy is doing."

With a look of concern that I had some how missed the point that she was trying to make, Ashley leaned in as if to fill me in on a secret. After making eye contact Ashley explained with a nod, "she's making brownies."

We interrupt our originally scheduled series of backlogged blog posts to bring you this special news bulletin: I got a haircut.

No, really. On Thursday night Amber and I were joking around about buzzing my head - something I hadn't had done since I was around eight years old. I remember it was at Grandma and Grandpa Verhaaren's house one summer, but that's another story. So, after flirting with the idea of becoming much more aerodynamic I heard my mouth release the words, "Yeah, let's shave it off." With that, it only took a few minutes under the sound of buzzing clippers and my looping locks lay lifeless on the linoleum of our bathroom floor. This is possibly the shortest I have ever worn my hair, excluding the previously mentioned summer.

It was Amber's third try at cutting my hair in our entire marriage, the last time happening years ago resulted in an emergency trip to the campus barber first thing the next morning. I'm biased, but I think this is her best cutting job yet. Which brings up a point that I haven't been making clear to those I've told this story to in person. The purpose of the haircut was to go this short. I wanted it. There was not mistake on the length, although most of my co-workers think otherwise.

See for yourself, and let me know what you think.

Sometimes it's okay to backtrack in a blog. I know there have been many events that have been note worthy recently, but there is one night I wanted to be sure to post about. We would like to share with you our first night at the opera.

A few weeks back (or possibly a month or so) one of my co-workers double-booked himself and needed to off-load some tickets to the Utah Festival Opera. Normally I would have passed on such an offer, but this particular performance was for children. The show, entitled The Carnival of the Animals, was a short production narrated by Michael Ballam. Had we known that he was going to be the only character, and that he would spend the entire evening reading from a chair we might have hesitated taking Ashley.

We could have taken the hint from the nice lady taking tickets at the entrance, when she stopped us and asked how old Ashley was. We told her, and she responded with the information that there was normally a four year age limit for members of the audience. She politely instructed us to see what the folks at the ticket window had to say about the matter.

After braving the line to get to the window - good thing we were uncharacteristically early - we talked to the nice girl who told us the same information about the age limit. However, she followed it up with the fact that she couldn't force anyone with a ticket out of the theater. We decided to take the chance and pray that our seats were near an exit - or at least an aisle.

With that in mind our seats were awful. From a spectator perspective they were awesome! We were on the second row of the balcony, directly in front of center stage - the farthest possible point from any one aisle. To her credit, Ashley behaved as good as you could ask for a two-year-old. She followed the story fairly well, and could be heard, through out the theatre, exclaiming, "Kangaroo!" or whatever animal the narrator was talking about at the time.

An enjoyable evening all around, and probably not our last trip to a cultured event with Ashley.

We tried something new this week. Even though we have seen the frisbee golf course that surrounds Amber's office, we had not given the skillful sport a try. To be honest, the 4-foot polls with chain link baskets were just another piece of the scenery. That is until I joined the youth from our church for activity at the course a few weeks back. After tossing the disc around for a quick nine holes I knew it was something we could do as a family - even with Amber pregnant.

The following week we headed up to campus where the course weaves through various dorm buildings at the university. With our USU ID cards we were able to check out proper saucers, and we set out to our first hole. Ashley was ecstatic to be holding a pink disc. I built on my experience from the previous week with the youth making conservative tosses that were safe and practical. Amber, on the other hand, went for distance on her first try. The idea was good, although she ultimately ended up in a tree before getting to the basket. No big deal, these things happen. And, I was able to shoot it down with only a few (dozen) throws of my own disc.

The second hole was even more fun than the first as we didn't get completely stuck in any local vegetation - although we came close to whacking a dorm room window...twice. The evening was progressing into an enjoyable one until the sidewalk reached up and hooked Ashley's feet out from under her. She came crashing down to the concrete with a smack. More shaken up than actually hurt, Ashley was done with frisbee golf - which meant so were we. Our game was postponed on account of injury. Amber and I will have to return soon to finish up the last six holes.

The city of Logan maintains a tradition of holding their fireworks celebration on the night of July 3rd. We're not sure of the official reason, but our theory is so that they don't compete with the shows down south in the state. Having the local show the night before has usually worked out well for us, as I have had to be in Salt Lake over the last few years for soccer games on the Fourth.

This year, however, Real Salt Lake moved their Independence Day game to the third in order accommodate ESPN's schedule. The result was that while I worked the game in Salt Lake (you can find my story here) Amber and Ashley caught the Logan fireworks with some old friends, the Littles.

Our Fourth started with a drive up Logan Canyon where we hiked the Limber Pine trail. We heard that it was not a strenuous route, so we took that as meaning it could handle a jogging stroller. There were some tricky spots, but the stroller totally worked out. Taking an easy pace, we enjoyed the wild flowers that lined the trail, beautiful mountain scenery of the canyon surrounding it, and the majestic overlook of Bear Lake toward the end of the walk.

In our last post we mentioned that grilling drumsticks was our favorite summer treat. We lied. Sorry, we'll try not to let it happen again. I had forgotten about another fun creation we learned to grill last summer - pizza. It's a fun meal to make, and yummy to eat.

The day ended with a trip out to Lewiston to partake in their tradition of fireworks. The show was great, and lasted about as long as Ashley cared to watch. She loved to watch the pretty colors in the sky. And when ever there was a break in the action she would ask, "More poka-dots!?"