The Atkin Family: May

May started nicely. Lizzie came back from Provo and we had some time together before her mission. She and I got to go to the temple one day:

Eve and I had fun on a hike:

I took this picture of Eve sitting nicely on a rock and realized right after that she peed on it. Potty training has still been hit and miss:

Still a pretty picture though.

We had Lizzie's farewell talk on Mother's Day. It ended up being the only day she could really do it. She did a wonderful job. I was so proud. She will be an awesome missionary. It also happened to coincide with Natalie performing as King Arthur in Spamalot that weekend so some people got to watch her too. She was so good and it was a really well-done show. They killed it.

That same night we stayed up to try and see the Northern lights that we said we'd be able to see. It was really hard to see in person but on camera it showed up really well.

Nate's band went to Lagoon to perform and ended up winning an award!

I loved this sight. Lizzie sitting on the chair with Eve:

I also loved this picture of Natalie she took:

Finally, the big day came to watch my Jeopardy episode. First, we went to Nate's band concert. I'm always impressed by those. They sound great.

We left pretty quick after that to get home for a watch party! We had a pretty good turnout. We made brownies and popcorn and had soda. I could hardly watch myself. The girls were cracking up at me. Everyone was great though and cheered every time I got a question right. Of course everyone was disappointed I lost but I got so much love from so many people on social media and by text. It was really wonderful. I also loved watching all the episodes after with the people I met. Will was a great guy who gave us his number before we left so I texted with him a bit. Grant, who beat him, was also a really great guy so I was happy for him. The other fun thing was seeing all the stats for my episode on the J! archive page (that I studied so hard). I was pretty proud of the fact that our episode had the least number of triple stumpers since the last tournament. Also, I did pretty well on the buzzer, just hurt myself with wrong answers. Also played catch-up since Will dominated the beginning.

Some crazy results of it were that I got a nasty letter in the mail from some guy in Colorado. That freaked me out. I ended up submitting a picture of it to a postal officer since they've been investigating this guy. Through reaching out on the Jeopardy reddit page about that, I got connected to the Women of Jeopardy facebook group and learned this sort of thing is common with female contestants. Pretty sad. I have enjoyed being in the group though. On a lighter note, we found a little recap video of my episode on youtube made by a guy from India with a thick accent. It was hilarious. That was my 30 seconds of fame.

Eli had a spelling bee. Lizzie and I got to go. Sadly, he didn't make it as far as he thought he would.

We had an awards night for Natalie:

She got an award for her awesome GPA (3.9) and a tassel for that. The last days of school came too fast. They did their parade around the elementary schools and Regina sent me this:

We had our traditional last day of school ice cream run:

Then came graduation:

Natalie's friend Alyssa gave a really good speech. Then it was time for pictures:

We got chick fil a after while Natalie went to party with her friends.

Joe and I got out on a fun date one night. We hiked up these rocks in the canyon:

It was a great view and we had a good talk up there.

The last Sunday of the month, Lizzie was set apart as a missionary! It was a really beautiful blessing and there was a great spirit there. Her first day of Home MTC was actually Memorial Day so we decided to go to the ice caves: