Oakley's Small Team

Oakley met Logan and David at BYUI in her clogging class. They were 3 little misfits all coming from different clogging studios and not really knowing where they fit this year....SOOOOO....they created their own team. :) They spent an entire Saturday choreographing this dance and worked hard to get it ready to compete. It was such a cute dance and you could see that they loved dancing it together! I'm proud of them for knowing what they wanted and going for it. 

Oakley also did all her usual individual events and duets with Brooklyn, plus a long duet with Laiklie. She danced her guts out at Nationals this year too!

Nationals Instructor

I'm probably the only mom who goes to Nationals to watch the dance instructor. Hahaha! She seriously is so cute and so good at what she does. These little dancers love her being their teacher. I'm so proud of how far she has come over the years as a teacher. 

Laiklie & Ellie take Lagoon

These two cuties had a great weekend at Lagoon dancing their guts out. They worked so hard putting several extra practices in preparing for Nationals and it paid off. They got first on everything including High Golds on several of their duets. I'm so proud of them. It is so much fun to have a great friend as your duet partner. What a blessing little Ellie is to Laiklie. She makes her a better dancer. 

Dallin's Fishing Trip

Dallin and a couple friends got up early one morning to run to the little pond in Idaho Falls to fish before school.  About 8 am he text me this picture. Glad he let the little guy go because he sure would have been stinky sitting in his truck at school all day. ;)

Working Heifers

Ryan and Dale decided to AI heifers again this year. Whenever we AI it takes all of us to get the job done. Ryan ran the chute and did seeders, Dallin kept cows in the chute, Dale did shots and bangs/number tags, Rhett did fly tags, Laiklie was the secretary and I kept the shots and tag guns loaded. It is always dirty work, but fun to work together. This was the first of many days with the AI'ing process. Most were cold and miserable, but glad to be finished!

Ryan's Accident

On May 7th Ryan and Dale got up early, branded and loaded a group of pairs to haul to Ozone. Just as they were coming into Iona with a loaded trailer this 18 yr old that was driving his siblings to school ran the stop sign and hit them. He ran his car along the entire side of our flatbed truck hitting both tires and both doors. He hit them hard enough it took both Ryan AND Dale to pull his grill out of the door. Both the doors were damaged enough they wouldn't even open. No one was hurt and luckily he didn't hit the loaded trailer. We are now out a truck until it gets fixed which makes hauling more cows tricky. We are grateful he had insurance to cover the damage though.

Branding

Ryan and Dale decided this year to just take small groups of pairs to Ozone here and there as we had calves ready so instead of running them all through the chutes and branding the same day they decided to just brand the 10-20 calves in each group by hand. I had no idea this is what we were doing when Ryan told me to come help. I have not laughed so hard in a very long time as I did watching these 3 brothers and Dallin tackle, hold down and brand these poor calves. Half the time Dale and Chase were tackling each other. One time Dale went down, the calf on top of him and then Chase jumped on top of both. Dale was laughing so hard he couldn't get out from under the calf. It was totally worth going to help just for the laughs! 😂 I secretly hope we brand like this every year from now on.