We are alive

So we still exist, but you'd never know it from this blog. It's been a crazy few months and who knows when/if we'll get to regular picture posting. We have caved in and started using facebook more, and since I won an Ipod touch at graduation I've been able to easily post mobile uploads, so some pics do get out there. I'm waiting for pics from our camera to download to our computer, so that's why you get something. To sum up briefly, I graduated the end of May and have now been licensed for almost a month, and have done a little fill in work here and there. I'm basically a jobless bum now and we're living with my parents. Long story, but we hope to have a better idea on our future within a month. We'll see what happens. Anyway, you may or may not find out! Probably no one will read this anyway, you've all stopped holding your breath and checking the blog by now.

Everything else to catch up

We'll have to post halloween costumes, but here was our pumpkins. Hunter designed the one on the left, and Heather did the one on the right. Charlotte and I did the manual labor.

Ready to dig in!
We picked up a few things at the outlet stores for the kids-this was our favorite find-Charlotte likes it.
We've had beautiful weather except for a few days, and we enjoyed it by playing in the yard at grandma and grandpa's, playing ball on the grass by our place, and plenty of bike riding.

I snapped this picture getting home from church. Pretty sweet
Just a cute shot of the kids waiting outside the temple while we were at my cousin's wedding.
Doesn't she look great in a tutu?
This would be her highness, looking down upon her subjects....in daddy's gym shorts.
We've spent a lot of time with our good friends, the Lundgreens-Hunter and Emery have become best buddies. Here's a couple of good shots of them:

The kids got to visit Thanksgiving point, and see dinosaur bones, and other cool stuff.

Utah's fun too!

Since moving back we've had some fun adventures, including...

A 2 month late anniversary getaway to Park City while the kids had a weekend with Grandma and Grandpa. We went to Cafe Rio for the first time since we've been back, then the Grand Theatre for a showing of Oliver. We stayed at the Carriage House in Park City that night. The next morning before hitting the outlet stores, we took a ride down the Alpine slide. This was our ride up...
...and this is where it ends. Too short, but pretty fun.
We caught a BYU game...

...and finally got to meet our nephew Casen Taylor!

Yeah, we miss Memphis, but we've also enjoyed being back here!

Charlotte's bday

At the end of the reunion weekend we celebrated Charlotte's birthday. She's quite the little princess around here, and she enjoyed all the attention for her birthday. She got a dollhouse, a tea set, and a doll set that she's holding in this picture. She loves them all and would play with them all day if someone is sitting in the room with her.



She also got some puzzles-another one of her favorite things to do. In fact, Grandpa was over the other night and she had his every spare second doing puzzles with th
We really can't believe she's growing up so fast. We love you Charlotte!

K. G. Luke reunion

When we arrived from Memphis, mom was excited to put together the first official Kevin Luke family reunion. Since we left three years ago, we had Charlotte join our family, Krista marry Aaron and they had Casen, and Adam brought Sarah and Aiden and Laila into the family. Jared also left on his mission in April. So while we had been together for weddings, we hadn't had just family time since we left, really. Even though Jared was missing, and some of us had to work or miss some of the time for some reason or another, we did get all together for a couple days on a weekend. We're really grateful for such a good family and the chance to get all together. We had a hot dog roast up millcreek canyon one night, where these pics came from:




I didn't get many pics of the rest of the weekend, but we got to go swimming, see a movie, had a dinner at ruby tuesday with just the adults, and had family pics taken. I'll try to post some of those later. It was fun, hopefully we can do it again when Jared gets back.

We miss Memphis!

I was looking through our photos to post some catch up tonight, and I came across this:

and these:



The first is our good friends Zach and Nicole. They were our next door neighbors in Memphis for 18 months, although I'm ashamed to say it took us a few months to actually meet them. Anyway, we became good friends and they put up with our kids smothering them every time they came over. They even babysat a few times for us-don't ask me how we convinced them to do that. They represent the part of Memphis we miss the most...the great friends we made there. Often during our time there we missed our friends and family here in Utah, but we were very surprised when we got here how hard it was to be gone from the many good people we came to know and love there. We'll always have fond memories of church friends, neighbors, and classmates, and hopefully we can catch up with some when we come out for graduation.

The other pics are the other part of Memphis we miss a lot-the great food and fun times. We loved swimming with friends, visiting the zoo, botanical gardens, and sprinkler park. We also hit up quite a few good restaurants while there. We could post tons of pics remembering the good places, this was just one. We actually only found this one this summer, the famous Jerry's sno cone shack. Great fried pickles, and supreme sno cones-that is, sno cones mixed with soft serve ice cream. Quite the combo. The line in the picture is typical. Anyway, just a shout out to our good friends and good times in Memphis-we'll never forget you!

Fourth of July

So I'm reworking this post because I just looked through and realized we actually did get to the fourth on our last post before we went missing in action. So I'm leaving the ones that weren't in the original post and this description of the morning- We had a great 4th, that morning we went to the ward 5K/fun run and breakfast. Heather ran the 5K and was the first female to finish, and was fifth overall. We were so proud of her but she won't let me post a picture of her finish.

This was the best pic we got of a firework
Funnel cakes-'nuff said!
A great pic we got of Declan that night. Cute kid!


They had some blow up slides-Hunter's favorite. The only problem was the line was 20 minutes long for a 2 second ride.

So there you have it folks-Fourth of July take two! On to the rest of the missing four months!

Hunter's Bday

We had Hunter's birthday at our friends pool and everyone had a blast! Opening presents-his friends were very generous, he really did get spoiled.
Heather made this cake!
Hunter was a little water rat, he really loved swimming this summer, we wished we could have gone more often.
I love this picture of Charlotte, having the time of her life! And Nikky was such a good sport to get soaked watching her.
Slide!

We had a great time, and Hunter was spoiled. We can't believe he's growing up so fast!

Summer Lovin

Fourth of July was really fun this year. We celebrated it on Saturday and brought the kids to see fireworks for the first time. The past few years we just told ourselves they were too young to really enjoy them but we were really just being lazy. Anyway, they LOVED it. There was a big fair complete with bouncy toys, face painting, funnel cakes, and of course fireworks. We didn't get home until about 10:30, which may be the latest Charlotte has even been awake. She loved the fireworks and just sat on Spencer's lap giggling the whole time. He said his cheeks hurt from laughing with her for so long.

Here's a quick shot of almost just Spencer and me. Hunter couldn't help but be partially included. He was supposed to be smiling here but he had other ideas.
This is Charlotte attempting to come tickle us. Just picture her fingers wiggling as she toddles toward you, and you have the idea.
Her turn to be tickled...
I don't know how you get two kids to smile at the same time or even how to get Hunter to ever smile normally, but at least they are both kind of looking. Charlotte was excited to get her face painted. Hunter wanted a car but the face painter seemed a bit overwhelmed by this. So he settled for 3 red balloons.

Is that not the most effective puppy dog face you have ever seen. He could have gotten just about anything from me right here. Luckly he doesn't yet know about his super power.
That morning, the ward hosted a 5K and breakfast activity. It was lots of fun and Hunter was very excited to get to run. Charlotte maintained her usual "diva"-like nature by staying in her shaded stroller, with her oversized sunglasses, sipping her drink and snacking on grapes and muffins.
We just love this picture and think she looks like her Aunt Megan in it.
We have great friends that share their pools with us. This was one morning we got to go. Again, Hunter isn't looking or smiling but at least he's in the picture.
This one Charlotte actually cooperated for. For the first time I noticed that we might even have the same eye color. Finally, some feature of mine got into my children. It will probably change tomorrow but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.
Pre-bedtime giggles. Hunter loves to help make Charlotte laugh.

She often bobs her head from side to side as she struts along. I don't know if you can quite see it here, but almost.
You can't see the glare behind these glasses, but she is protectively guarding her goldfish here.
That's all for now. Spencer and I really are going to work at being better with updating the blog. Wish us luck!