Yes, we are alive...barely.

Well, it has been almost two months since I have updated about our lives, so I am going to do one post to catch up on all the happenings since school started. Most pressing (and the reason that I haven't updated) is the fact that both Cameron and I have been sick for a ridiculously long time. We luckily didn't have the flu, but just really bad colds that dragged on FOREVER. It seemed like we were just passing it back and forth which was pretty frustrating.

Here is a non-exaggerated picture of our kitchen counter for the past month or so. We figured in the last month we have spent roughly over $200.00 just in cold medicines and juice alone. I am fairly sure that we have kept the people at Tree Top Apple Juice in business for the last little while with how much of their product we have been consuming as well. By the way, we have just as much medicine as right here in our upstairs bathroom...fun times.



The next notable occurrence at our house is how "domesticated" I have become lately. For Christmas last year, Cameron's parents got me a bread maker and his mom showed me how to do a couple easy bread recipes with that. So since Christmas I have been making all of our bread, which has been fun and cheaper in the end. A couple weeks ago two of my friends and I decided that we wanted to try our hand at making some freezer jam. I had never done it before and I was expecting it to be pretty hard for some reason, but it was really easy and turned out great! Here are a few pictures from that adventure.

The chefs

My partners in crime...for many things (:

cooking

Rylee got to help out a little too

The finished product, it is delicious!

The next event in our lives was "celebrating" Cameron's birthday. I say celebrate with a little hesitation, because it did not exactly turn out as well as we might have hoped. Here is how I envisioned the day, First of all, I had great plans to wake up early on his birthday and make him a big, nice breakfast with eggs, bacon, and pancakes, then have a fun drive down to Provo for the weekend, get a mini-vacation with the hotel that his parents put us up in for the game, relax and enjoy the great game and watch BYU destroy TCU. In reality it went like this... the night before both of us go to bed horribly sick and hacking our lungs out. By about 2am I can't take it anymore and make Cameron go sleep on the couch for the rest of the night(he snores normally, but with him being sick it was out of control and with me being the lightest sleeper EVER, it was not a good combo...This is the first time in this story that I win wife of the year, making my husband go sleep on the couch on the eve of his birthday. But it gets better. I wake up too late to make his beloved pancakes(second time I win the award), but I figured, oh that's fine I will just make the egss,bacon and some toast, that is still a great birthday breakfast. Well, I started making everything and halfway through cooking the bacon, the fire alarm started going off and I could NOT get it to turn off. It was still pretty early in the morning, and I was afraid I was waking up all of my neighbors, so I ran around forever trying to get it to go off and by the time I got back to get the bacon out it was a total loss. Normally I would say burnt bacon could be salvaged, but this was beyond any kind of saving. SO... we were down to eggs and toast at this point, which is what he got, but I believe I am at a total of 3 wife of the year awards at this point. Cameron went to class and I picked him up later that day to start the drive to Provo. I grabbed us some Taco Bell thinking it would be quick to just eat on our way and I know Cameron likes it. We get driving and there are tomatoes on EVERYTHING of Cameron's. I, recieving wife award #4 completely forgot to ask for no tomatoes on Cameron's things and this made it unedible for him. I then sat there trying to make up for my "life and death" mistake and picked out every single one of those stupid tomatoes. Ok, so I think this was the end of my mistakes for the weekend, but it continued to go not as hoped the rest of the time. Luckily when we got to Provo Kory was So nice and let us eat at Pizza Pie Cafe, which was delicious and really hit the spot. After leaving there we headed back to the hotel, where we sat downing every kind of cold medicine until the next day when we went to the BYU game. Everyone knows how that went... BAD. It was a miserable game and miserable cold, rainy weather. We decided to save what was left of our voices and stopped cheering after the frist quarter. After the game we decided to drown our sorrows in food and heaaded to Tucano's. It was my first time going and was actually pretty cool. It was good food and lightened our moods, which was a good thing. We went back to the hotel, went straight to bed and got up and headed home the next morning. Overall, it was a good trip and nice to see family and hang out, just not quite as we had been imagining. As for Cameron's birthday, I think all in all it was ok. I totally suprised him with an I-pod touch. He had NO idea and was completely suprised by it.

Before the game at Pizza Pie Cafe...obviously it was before the game, they are smiling

Cameron with his new i-pod, which hardly left his hand the whole weekend(and ever since)

After the game...cold,wet, and angry

Sean full from Tucanos, but managing to fit in one last piece

My Sweet Husband

Yet another shout out to my wonderful husband. He is always making me laugh and keeping me calm when I am freaking out about things(which is pretty often). Anyway, yesterday I was having an especially stressful day trying to get my class schedule figured out for this last semester so I can still graduate. I was talking a million miles an hour and thought I was having a heart attack(this is usually when I say "my heart hurts", which is not really an exageration). I started making dinner and sent Cameron out to get a few last things for the meal. He knew how completely stressed out I was and when he came back he had brought me this:

A beautiful rose and a Coke. He knows me way too well. It was exactly what I needed to just relax and not think about my schedule for a while. A wonderful suprise! Thanks hunny!!

Adrian's Wedding

Right after we got back from the rafting trip we came home, unpacked, re-packed and left again all within about ten hours or so. We headed down to Salt Lake to see my good friend Adrian, from college get married. It was a beautiful day and the bride looked gorgeous. It was fun to see her and I was also really excited to see my friend Rachel who I hadn't seen in a year! It was so good to see her and spend the day just chatting and laughing like the old college days (:


I was very proud of my bargain shopping for our hotel. It was a Hampton Inn that I got for way cheap, but I wanted to still get a nice one. This one looked really nice online and got good reviews, but you still never know. I was very pleasantly surprised when we got there. It was really big and everything looked brand new and way good for the deal I got. Just had to share my proud little moment on this trip.


The night before the wedding, my cousin Stephanie invited us over to her new apartment for dinner. She made a delicious meal and it was so fun to see all my cousins who live in Utah. This is Cole, Amy(my cousin Jordan's wife) and Garrett.


Here are Rachel and I outside the temple. It was SO good to finally see her.


Cameron and I outside the temple


Not sure what we were laughing about here, but I thought it was a cute picture.


The beautiful bride. She looked so happy, and I am so happy for her. Congrats Adrian!


After the wedding and before the luncheon Rachel, Elissa, Cameron and I decided to go take a tour of the conference center. This is on the roof.




The girls

Skelton Family Rafting Trip 2009

This year my family decided to do a white water rafting trip. We went to Riggins, Idaho which is the same place that my dad has been taking the young men rafting for over ten years. Cole and Cameron and my dad had been before, but it was the first time for any of the girls. We had a few minor(ok, pretty major) setbacks to start off the trip with, but in the end we were able to get in two days of rating.

The whole family... So much fun!


Dad, AKA Captain


It rained and was cold the whole first day so we were all stylin' in our ponchos


Cameron and Cole leading the way




My dad devouring a huge burger at our favorite place to eat in Riggins


The owner saw us taking pictures and thought it was so great, so the next day when we came we saw she had put this up on the reader board: Looks so good, tastes so good, Take a picture of it! It was pretty hilarious.


Cameron saw the photographer on the bridge and decided it would be funny to wave.


We also had fun just hanging out in the hotel. It was a really nice hotel that looked out right over the river. It was also kinda nice because there were not many people there so we had a lot of it to ourselves.





Overall it was such a great family trip and even though there were plenty of car problems, I don't think it could have gone much better. I think we are all hoping it will become an annual Skelton vacation.


The family


The real us (:

Lovinger Family Camping Trip 2009

It is a long standing tradition in the Lovinger family to go camping at Glacier National Park each summer. I have now been twice as a new Lovinger and it is tons of fun each time. This year we went about a week after school was out at the end of July. It is a great time to just hang out with the family and get together when we are all living in different states the rest of the year.


The trip got off to a rough start when the suburban broke down about 45 minutes away from camp. Cameron, Sean, Scott and I all went ahead in our car to hurry and set up the tents before it started raining. We were just in time because right as we were finishing it started pouring. Cameron went and picked up his parents and Nicole and Tyler from the car and by the time they came back Sean, Scott and I were all huddled in one tent trying to stay dry. We quickly threw everything in the tents and set up our things to go to bed. Cameron and I walked into our tent to find huge puddles of water everywhere. We thought we could just go to sleep and be fine, but there were drops of water dripping through the top of the tent and onto us. We decided that we would just sleep in our car that night and hopefully the rain would stop soon and we could go back to our tent. The rain didn't stop all night which meant we spent the first night of our trip crammed in the back seat of our car. Here is our nice bed.


We spent lots of time down by the water and skipping rocks was a favorite pastime.




Sorry this is a little blurry, but it had the most people in it. We played lots of games that were way fun as well.


Making homemade ice cream was VERY entertaining


Reading was a big part of this trip as well. Everyone had a book or two they were reading throughout our time there.


The girls making dinner... Very soon there will be another girl to add to the family.


Cameron and I in front of the gorgeous scenery.


The boys tubing


Cameron and his dad after tubing


The soon-to-be grandma and grandpa Lovinger

Cameron's 5-Day Yard Makeover

Hey everyone! This is Cameron. This is my first attempt at all this blog what-not. Hillary thought it was appropriate for me to write about this one since she wasn't even there.

So, on the last day of school as soon as my last final was over I hobbled to the car on my crutches (see last post) and headed to the Greyhound bus station to catch a ride home to Spokane. Hillary still had to work so she stayed home in Rexburg, but because all my jobs are on campus I don't work when school is out. What is normally only a 7 hour drive becomes 11+ hour bus ride when you have to stop for smoke breaks every 1-2 hours. It is worse than having to stop for toddler potty breaks. I think I was one of 5 people out of the almost 100 passengers that would stay on the bus during these little smoking siestas. But thankfully no bus breakdowns so I made it home and Mom and Scottie came to get me at 1 am.

Ok, I will actually get to the yard work now. So when I was home the summer of 2007 I told my parents I wanted to build a waterfall in the backyard. They said fine, but we want you to build these few little walls first. I thought the walls would take me like a week to finish, but I was very wrong. The Great Wall of Lovinger took me that entire summer to finish but I found a new love/hobby in landscaping.

So this summer I was dedicated to build that waterfall, even though I only had a few days. The only other project I had left before it was the fire pit area. Before I got there, while my Mom was gone one weekend the boys did some demolition and tore down the nasty lava rock fire place. We thought it would be a good, kinda sentimental idea to build the fire pit out of that same rock. We decided to make a little bench out of the stone hearth as well. So Tyler headed up putting together the actual pit, I built the wall, and Sean and Scott carried endless wheel barrows of bricks and gravel. After all of hard work, I think it turned out pretty good. We had a fire almost every night for the next week down there. It was perfect!

I think the cherry tree will be a nice addition.


Here is a close up of the lave rock fire pit and the hearth-bench.

We tried to build a little stone love seat in to the wall near the fire pit.

We even built stairs into the wall for more easy access the fire pit area.

Here is a side view.

Now time for the waterfall. I have been taking pictures and taking notes in my mind for how I wanted my waterfall to look for years now. I don't know why, but I have always had a fascination with waterfalls. My mom didn't want an actual pond, so we decided to go for the water feature at the top and waterfall in the middle. The water feature part is concrete cast, which we quickly found out is extremely heavy. The smallest piece I would guess to be around 200 lbs so Sean and I could get it fairly easily. The middle piece was probably near 500 lbs, and Sean and I were able to wheel barrow it over with only skirting death a few times. Now the largest piece was a whole different story. I would bet that monster is near 1000 lbs. Now that might be a slight exaggeration, but it is not far off. Sean and I couldn't even budge it only the two of us. We got Scottie and my Dad to help and we could still barely move it. We had to have all four of us roll it up the hill. It was a bit treacherous.

Once we got the concrete up on top, the only thing left to to was run the electrical wiring. Now did I mention I had never done anything like that before? That was the worst disaster of all. Jon Spear and I played around with it until nearly 1 am that night and it only barely worked. We just happened to have an electrician come by the house the next morning. When he got there he looked at me, at the spliced amateur wiring, back at me and then just shook his head in shame and disgust. He was really nice did give me a few pointers how to fix it.

All in all it turned out awesome. We even got Montana river rock to line the bottom because it reminded us of being at Glacier National Park in Montana. Sadly, I finished it all about noon that day and we had to leave an hour later to go camping at Glacier. I am happy to finally have my waterfall!

Bad timing for an injury

This past week Cameron was playing in his last men's softball game with our ward. He slid into second base on the second to last play of the game to avoid being nailed in the face with the ball that was coming directly at him and this is what happened...



These pictures were taken this morning(4 days after the incident), so it's not hardly swollen at all anymore. You can see he is starting to bruise pretty bad all around his toes and around his ankle. It looks really gross in person.










It happened at about 11pm on Tuesday. Cameron was sure that he could just ice it and take lots of medicine and he would at least be able to walk on it in the morning. He said he was fairly sure it wasn't broken, but that it was the worst sprain he had ever had. Well, the next morning, he could not even get out of bed and couldn't put any weight on it at all. It was SO swollen and looked pretty bad. We decided to both skip our first class and take him to the health center to get it looked at. They did an x-ray and it wasn't broken(luckily), but the doctor said "wow, that is one whopper of a sprain"(awesome). They gave him an air cast and crutches and sent him off to class. I felt bad watching him hobble along to his class, but I had to get to my classes so I couldn't really help him at all. It is starting to feel a little better and he can more and more weight on it each day, but still relies pretty heavily on his crutches for now.

It seemed like horrible timing, happening right as finals are starting and going to Glacier to go camping in a little over a week, AND Cameron and his dad and brothers are all running a half marathon in Mesa Falls in less than a month. I'm not sure if he will be able to run it, but even if he can it is putting quite a damper in his training... oh well, he said people on campus are extra nice to him when they see him on the crutches and total strangers will come ask him if he needs help carrying things or getting the door and stuff. Thanks everyone!