A Great Day Off

Sorry, Bri stole all the good Lake Powell Caleb pics, so I'm going to just cut my losses and go for what we did today.

Isn't this guy the cutest ever? He loves hiking: he's either calmly looking at the trees as they go by, or he quietly falls asleep. He probably slept for half of the 1 1/2 hours we were hiking.

I only get one day off a week and I work about 12-13 hours the other 6 days, so I'm pretty stoked to go do something fun on my one day off (on top of going to church). And we again confirmed to ourselves that we chose the location of our house wisely. We're right at the mouth of the canyon so we are super close to the coolest stuff to do. This is a trail we just happened to see on the side of the road and there aren't any fees like most of the trails. Turns out this is our favorite trail yet, by far.

The second cool thing today was playing with Gracie, our new dog. Bri did a whole post about her if you want to hear all the details and why we love this dog so much.

Gracie is going to be a great mountain biking dog - she never gets tired! She's really fast, too. While Bri was answering nature's call, I went up ahead so she could commune in private. Gracie came with and then Bri called her back from about 100 feet away. It's so cool to watch her bound through the forest. She is really graceful and agile. So we just kept calling her back and forth and she was loving it. Later on, we saw a squirrel and when she saw it, she locked on, but didn't run until we told her to. She took off down the ravine and then sprinted back when the squirrel got away. It is amazing how fast and light on her feet she is. Aptly named: Gracie is for Graceful.

The last cool thing and the biggest one was that today is the day Caleb did a REAL laugh for the first time. We might have done a post about his laughing before, but today's were definitely more grown-up. If a baby does something for the first time, but the camera isn't on, did it really happen? Yes it did. He actually did his first "real-person" laugh this morning while we were getting ready for church but it was only really quick. Then, tonight I was just sitting there making funny faces and noises and he did it again. So, we missed the best one while Bri came over and got the camera out, but this is still pretty good anyway. Let the record show, however, that all of the laughs on this momentous day were a result of DAD's funny faces. Obviously I'm the goofier of the two of us, thank you very much.