Matt a Priest

So, just a month after Matt's Baptism to the Mormon Religion, he was ordained a Priest in the Aaronic Priesthood (Someone who knows church vocabulary better than us, please tell us if we spelled Aaronic correctly.)

The Aaronic Priesthood is a preparatory Priesthood before reaching the Melchezidak Priesthood in which you are able to basically do anything within the church. As a Priest, I am able to Prepare and Bless the Sacrament and also I am able to baptize new members if need be as well, I just have to wait until I get the Melchezidak Priesthood before I would be able to Confirm, give blessings or annointments, and before I can ordain members to a new level of Priesthood.

We are pretty excited about the new way we are living our lives and Matt is very happy with the decision he has made.

Surgery for Matt

I know, shocking it isn't Julia that is out of work for surgery. Last Tuesday, Matt had a tonsilectomy and gets to be out of work until Monday. Thankfully, he is starting to feel much better and is not in very much pain anymore. For those of you who don't know, he had to have his tonsils out for 3 reasons: 1. Sleep Apnea (he stopped breathing 7 times for 30 seconds or more within a 5 hour period) 2. Allergies were making him sick in the morning, 3. He could not train properly for the police department Physical Tests because he would be out of breath after running just around the block and he needs to be able to do 1.5 miles without stopping.

Hopefully, this will all help and he can get back to being his normal eventful self again very soon. Thank You for your Prayers from everyone who knew about the surgery, they were definitely very helpful

Snow, and lots of it

So we are in the midst of our first snowstorm here in Colorado, and if this is any sign of how the winter is going to go, we are in for quite the season. It started snowing less than 24 hours ago and there is probably close to a foot of snow on the ground at our house. October 28th, and we have more snow on the ground than we got all season last year up until March. However, at least our boss is being nice and letting us work in Louisville when it snows so we don't have to drive quite so far, that is nice, except it makes us essential personnel, so WE HAVE TO BE THERE!!! Blah. Oh well, guess it gets Matt ready to be a police officer where he will work whether it snows or not. Anyways, here is a cute picture of Bear, Molly and Liberty enjoying our first snowstorm of the season!!!!

Matt's Birthday and the "Big Surprise"

Ok, so we realized that we have not posted since we announced that we had an announcement and we are sorry. For those of you who do not already know, which should not be very many of you, the big announcement is that Julia is........... NOT pregnant. In fact the big announcement was all about Matt, Matt got baptized Mormon on September 23. What a way to celebrate his 24th birthday. Yes the 23rd was also his birthday. It was really an awesome experience for all involved. Here are some pictures.

Fun Times

So it has been a long time since our last blog, so we will try to get everything into this blog that has happened throughout the last month and a half. At the beginning of August, Matt's sister was in town and we went to Tiny Town, The North Pole, and Water World. It was definitely a fun trip and always great to see Lori. Those pictures will have to get added later because we don't have them on this computer.

As August progressed we came to Thomas' birthday which was very fun as well. We had a birthday dinner for Tom and had an ice cream sandwich cake. I can't believe how old these kids are getting... Thomas is a High Schooler now, Just Crazy.

At the beginning of September, Matt went on another ride along, this time with Aurora Police and it was the first ride along that he actually got to see an arrest take place and take someone to jail. It was pretty fun, just makes me want to be a police officer all the more.

Labor Day weekend we went to Lake McConaughy with Dan, Courtney, Tommy, Kimmy, and Lizzy. We met everyone else up there Saturday afternoon because we had to get the food for the weekend. I was very happy to have my CR-V so I could drive right up to the tents and drop stuff off, unlike Dan who got the van stuck in the sand and had to walk from the parking lot to the tents. Pretty funny stuff, not going to lie. Here is a picture of us by the campfire.

The next amount of fun was Mom Lukens Birthday. Us and Dan and Courtney went over while she was in church and cleaned the house and cooked dinner for her. It was a really great time and she was very shocked when they got home. Now, if we can just find a way for the kids to get along at least on people's birthday's that will be good. Here is a family picture taken by the missionaries.

Stay tuned for future blogs of Matt's Birthday, coming up on Wednesday. Also THE BIG SECRET will be announced very soon and we will blog about the reactions we get once we tell everyone. Matt has to have surgery to have his tonsils removed, and those will be some pictures you won't want to miss. That's all for now.

New Rules at the New Lake

So, for the last few weekends, we have been going to a lake up in Northern Broomfield and swimming there. Up until today, there have never been any signs about no swimming so we have swam across the lake, played with logs, had little rafts out there. Heck, we even took the dogs and they went swimming. Molly and Liberty LOVED this lake. Well, today when we got there, we saw the BRAND NEW, No swimming signs, so what did we do, we jumped in anyways. We went to the dock that we jump off of and started playing around. It was not long until there was a Broomfield Police Officer there telling us we can't swim. I guess it was fun while it lasted, just stinks that we can't have any fun unless we choose to pay for that fun... HELLO, we are in a recession, who has money to pay to have fun, I guess we will see if we can find some new form of free fun. Quite disappointing I must say.

1 Years Old Together

That's right, this past week, our marriage turned 1 year old. It seems like yesterday we were saying I Do in the Butterfly Pavilion, but in all actuality it was a year ago. Crazy how time flies. So, for our Anniversary, Julia and I took a trip to Beautiful Estes Park, Colorado. Although Julia is in a cast, we still had a fantastic time. We got some really beautiful pictures on our way home because we came the long way home through Grand Lake and over Trail Ridge Road. I know it was our Anniversary, but we did not get any pictures of us together mainly because we did not carry the camera too much because Julia was crutching around and Matt was carrying other things for her. Here are some pictures of the scenery that we saw coming over Trail Ridge Road.

One of the things we did was visit the Historical Stanley Hotel and took their Ghost Tour. You may remember the Stanley Hotel from the Movie The Shining. We watched the Mini-Series of The Shining, written by Stephen King the night before we went to the Ghose Tour. It was a pretty cool tour, and the coolest thing was that you could actually feel the presence of the ghosts around you. Our tour guides name was Scary Mary, and if you ever take this tour, make sure you request her. She is the supervisor of the Ghost Tour and she REALLY knows her stuff. She turns a normal hour and a half tour into closer to a two hour tour. I'm not going to give you too much detail about the tour just in case you ever want to go take it, I don't wanna give anything away. But just take a look at some of the pictures and see if you see anything weird in them. We noticed as we were looking at them that some of them had bright spots in different places. You will see on the second picture that there seems like there was an extremely bright light where I took the picture, but there was no light and my flash did not go off. Here are those pictures. Very cool tour. And by the way, there is even part of the tour specifically for the kids, so they would love it as well. A couple of the pictures did not actually come out, although there was plenty of light, they just came out pitch Black. Some crazy things happen in that hotel. But we had a great time. Hope you all can go check it out sometime.