Halloween

Halloween was so much fun this year with our little buzy bee.  She was so excited to dress up and carve pumpkins and get candy.  We decorated pumpkins at Mark and Paige's house this year and she had a lot of fun coloring and putting sticker on her pumpkins.  She was so proud to put them all out on the front porch.

When I told her to say cheese, she decided it was necessary to pull her dress up

The Saturday before Halloween we went out to Linder Farms with Pops and Nana to get a few more pumpkins and just play around.  She loved the horsey ride and didn't want any of us to walk around with her. She loved petting the animals, but was a little disappointed that there weren't any bunnies to pet.  She also love the barrel ride.  I offered to go with her but again she refused, she is growing up so much and I'm not sure how I feel about it.  She also got to play in the corn pit.  She kept asking to go back in and play, which I was fine with because that was the one free thing.  We also went on a hayride to go pick out a couple more pumpkins.  We all had a super fun time, this will definitely be a yearly tradition around Halloween.

She wanted to show us how strong she was

The Thursday before Halloween we went to the Trunk-or-Treat with Mark and Paige's ward, our ward wasn't doing one this year.  She had so much fun getting all dressed and ready with Audrey and Camden.  We prepped her before hand that everything was pretend and that she didn't need to be scared of anyone because they were all wearing costumes.  Each time she would walk up to a car she would say "trick-or-treating" and she was very good to say thank you each time some one gave her candy.  On Saturday we went trick-or-treating with Audrey and Camden around their neighborhood and then headed over to my parents house to do some trick-or-treating with LJ around my parents neighborhood.  Luckily the weather was really nice, so no one had to wear coats over their costumes.  It was so much fun to watch the joy on her face and to see how happy she was.  I can't wait to see her reaction Christmas morning.

Pops of course had to dress up too.

Move Over MSA

Almost 2 years ago my dad was diagnosed with MSA, Multiple System Atrophy.  It is a neurological disorder similar to ALS.  It is a very rare disease and so we as a family wanted to help raise awareness about the disease and help raise funds to support research.  The diagnosis really hit our family hard, as you can imagine, and we wanted to do something, anything.  Knowing that there really wasn't anything that we could do specifically for my dad, since there is no cure for the disease, we wanted to do something that could possibly help families that might have to deal with this disease in the future.  My Dad has always been very active and competitive.  When we were growing up he was always competing in triathlons or runs of some sort.  We thought that maybe doing a fun run would be a good way to raise money and honor my dad's love for running.

We didn't start even thinking about this until the middle of the summer.  In July we got a non-profit association organized, Move Over MSA.  Once that was done at the beginning of August, we were finally able to start planning the race, which was held on October 17th.  This was the first time for any of us to plan something like this, so we didn't have super high expectations for this first year. A lot of what we did was hit or miss and we definitely learned a lot that we will do differently next year.  Luckily there a lot of people that love my Mom and Dad and so we had a lot of support.  We were able to find sponsors pretty quickly and had a lot of friends a family volunteer to help.

We decided to do a 5k, kids 1 mile, and a 1 mile obstacle course.  Tucker's varsity football team wanted to do some service so we had them help with the obstacle course.  There was also a kid in my parents ward who helped organize the obstacle course as his Eagle Scout project.  The Centennial football team invited other high school football teams from around the valley to compete against them in the obstacle course, the Patriot Challenge.  There was a total of 5 football teams and they all seemed to have a great time and luckily the Patriots took home the sledge hammer.  Originally we thought that we would have about 100-150 people sign up for all of the races, well to our surprise and excitement we had almost 400 people show up for the races.  We ran out of bib numbers and shirts, but I guess that is a good problem to have.  We held the races at Centennial High School and they all went really well.  It was definitely a busy week leading up to the race, but everything really came together well.  My sister Tiffany really did most of the organizing of it all and she did a really great job, that's why we named her the President of the association : ).

We just can't believe how much support our family was shown.  There were people that traveled from out of state and others who couldn't run but donated to the cause.  We were really just overwhelmed by all the love that we felt from everyone.  It truly goes to show how amazing my parents are and how loved they are by everyone that meets them.  We were able to raise enough money to donate $15,000 to the MSA Coalition, who will then use $1,000 for education and awareness and the other $14,000 will go toward research.  We seriously thought that we would be sending them $3,000.  We have already started working on next years run and hope that we get just as many or more people to come support the cause.  It was such an amazing day and we can't wait to do it again next year.

Packet Pick-Up and Late Registration

The start of the 5k

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Friends and family showing love for my Dad

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Some of our lovely volunteers

Waiting for the finishers

My Dad cheering on the runners

Me yelling out times because the clock stopped working, the one hick-up of the whole day

Start of the kids 1 mile

Medical and food tents

Explaining the obstacle course to the participants

The Patriots

All of the football teams that participated

This picture just captions our family perfectly. Tucker refused to put his shirt back on and the rest of us just laughing at him.