Phoenix, Arizona

Last week I had the amazing opportunity to go to Arizona and visit my sister, Carolyn.  A few months ago she called me to see if I wanted to come visit her and go see Wicked with her and my cousin, Cynthia.  She had worked it out with Cynthia to get me a flight pass so I didn’t have any excuse.  Well, it turned out I had a kind of good excuse not to go since she had bought the tickets for Wicked already and they were right smack in the middle of the busiest week of celebration our family has all year.  Thankfully I have an amazing husband and kids and they didn’t mind me being gone for the anniversary and birthdays that I would miss.  It turned out to be a super fun trip with lots of visiting with family.  I was enjoying myself so  much that I didn’t take too many pictures.  I did get a few though.  This will be a long post mostly to help me remember so if you are bored…sorry.

I arrived on Wednesday and after getting settled at Carolyn’s house we picked up Cassie (isn’t she cute?) and headed out to do a little shopping.  I was hoping to find something great to wear for the play on Thursday, but it was a strike out shopping trip for me.  There was one dress at Banana Republic that was pretty cute, but it was just a tiny bit small for me and since it was on clearance they didn’t have any in my size.  They had a size smaller and two sizes too big, but nothing my size.  Thankfully I came prepared with something to wear just in case.  We got home and had dinner, put Cassie to bed and then watched a movie to relax.

Thursday morning dawned bright and early (Cassie is an early riser).  We hung out for a little while just playing with Cassie and visiting and then we got ready for the play.  We got to the play in just the nick of time after having a tiny bit of trouble finding parking.  Thankfully we got super lucky and found a good spot and walked FAST to the theater.  The play was wonderful!  I’m so happy I finally was able to see it.  I’ve been wanting to see it for a few years now.  Ever since we listened to the soundtrack on a girl’s trip.  For some reason it is super hard to get tickets when it comes here.  I LOVED it!  A HUGE thank you to my awesome sister for taking me and to Cynthia for getting me to Arizona so we could all go together.  I have the best family! 

After the play we bought some souvenirs and then we headed to La Grande Orange for dinner.  I had read about it on a blog and it looked fabulous so I had asked Carolyn if we could go, but it didn’t sound like we were going to be able to so I forgot all about it.  As we were driving there I asked her what kind of food it had and that’s when she reminded me that I had asked to go there.  I have to say it did NOT disappoint.  The food was fabulous and the service was amazing.  I was the only one that ordered a burger at the table and I asked for it to be well done.  Well, when I cut into it there was still a bit of pink in the center.  I decided to go ahead and eat it anyway.  Well, the server came back and noticed on his own that it was not done how I had ordered.  He also noticed that I had taken off the green chile because it was too spicy (I had asked him specifically if it was spicy—usually I really like green chili, but this one was flaming hot!)  He offered to get me something different even though I had already eaten half the burger.  I told him it was fine (amazingly enough the burger tasted great even though I usually don’t like it if there’s any pink at all)  Even though I had told him I was fine with the burger a few minutes later the manager came over to check on it personally herself.  Seriously, we eat out a fair amount and good service is definitely hard to come by so I was super impressed that he noticed that stuff on his own and asked about it.  If I lived close I would be a faithful customer. 

Everyone else got pizza and traded slices all around.  I only tried Carolyn’s pizza with avocado and prosciutto and it was REALLY good.  Their desserts were fabulous too I seriously wanted one of everything plus one scoop of every flavor of  gelato they had too.  In the “grocery” side of the store they had all kinds of souvenir type stuff.  Think cracker barrel type stuff, but a little more upscale.  The stuff was seriously cute!  I was so busy oohing, aahing, and eating, that I didn’t take one picture!

Friday we headed to Mesa to see my Grandparents.  I haven’t seen them in a few years so it was great to see them!  My grandma is a talented seamstress and she is still going strong with her sewing.  She showed me several of her projects and they were beautiful as always!Grandpa sent me home with some of the jewelry he makes and a belt buckle for Jason too.  I could tell he was a little sad that his trembling hands have made it so he can’t make much jewelry anymore.  He was so good at it too.

We met up with Cynthia at the mall for a little shopping and girl bonding.  It was lots of fun!

Friday night we stayed in and made some chipotle chicken tacos for dinner and it was delicious! After dinner we spent the rest of the night talking.  It was nice and relaxing.

Saturday we slept in a tiny bit and then headed out to find some accessories for the house.  We found some really nice vases to go in the entry way niches she has.  They look fabulous, but I forgot to take a picture (are you noticing a trend yet?)

In the afternoon Albert’s Mom came over with her husband and my cousin Cynthia came with her family and we had a BBQ.  Cynthia’s husband, Eric made some amazing steaks for us.  We also had potato salad, roasted asparagus, and apple crisp for dessert.  We were all stuffed at the end. 

Such a cutie pie!  I could have snuggled her the whole time and been happy.

After everyone left we all collapsed on the couch and just relaxed.  I did remember to take a few pics of that.  Thanks for the great time!  Now it’s your turn to come visit me!  Love you all!

Bean Museum reptile show

The kids on our playgroup are getting older so I thought I would schedule the reptile show for them at the Bean Museum.  The kids really loved it, but the Museum that day was REALLY busy for some reason.  It was pretty loud and a little hard to hear the cute girl doing our reptile show, but the kids didn’t seem to care at all and had a GREAT time.  Here they are feeling a crocodile skin---or maybe it was an alligator skin, I can’t remember.  The turtle was really cute and Liam touched it, but I missed the picture.This lizard was really creepy looking to me.  His tail is all fat because it is where he keeps his food stored…a tail full of crickets…YUCK!

Why do snakes make my skin crawl??  I was glad to use the camera as an excuse not to have to touch it.  Liam didn’t mind though.This is Liam with his friends Adam and Gannon.  They were three wild boys and all of the Mom’s together couldn’t’ get them to stay calm. 

Every time I got the camera out they “posed” for me.  Adam’s Mom, Angie got a  hilarious picture of these guys both doing SUPER cheesy grins, but I missed it.  This is Liam man-handling Adam’s brother Cooper. 

I was taking Liam’s picture and cute Adam jumped right in.  I’m always happy to see kids doing things that Liam does all the time too. 

It took some convincing, but Liam finally agreed to a picture with his Mom.  It’s always good to have proof I was actually there. 

Even though it was pretty crazy at the museum I think we all had fun!

Valentines checklist

Valentines craft made for grandparents and birth mom—check (Liam had a blast doing this)

Valentines made for Liam’s teachers—check (see what I made here super easy and cute)

Valentines addressed to classmates—check (I helped a lot with this one)

Cute valentine heart treats made for Liam’s valentine party—check (I dipped pretzels in pink candy melt and filled the holes in on a few so they looked like hearts)

Valentines made for my kiddos—check (idea from here I just gave each child one and put a cute saying that goes with their little gift on it)

Inexpensive Valentine gift for kiddos bought—check

Valentine gift and card made for the husband—check (from here—continuing the scratch off card theme)

Yummy dinner planned for tomorrow—check

Whew!  Now I can finish up everything else for our week of celebration…that I will be missing most of.  Hopefully my family will survive without me.  Normally I don’t do so much for Valentines, but since I’m missing all the other celebrations this week I thought I’d have fun with it. 

Do you celebrate Valentines?  What traditions do you have? 

Blessed

I am feeling so blessed lately.  It really isn’t fair, how blessed I am.  I mean, I have had some struggles, but nothing near as difficult as so many people I know personally or have read about in blogland.  We (my little family) are healthy, we are strong, we have the gospel.  We have everything we need and so many things that we want.  We are comfortable.  We have love in our home.  I have a wonderful husband that takes such good care of me and our children.  Honestly, I keep waiting for something hard/bad to happen.  I know it will come eventually because trials always do, but for now I’m going to enjoy being happy and healthy and incredibly blessed and then I’m going to go out and try to find someone to share my blessings with. 

What about you?  Are you in the midst of a challenging time in your life or are you feeling content and getting ready for the hard stuff that is to come?

Taking chances

Some of you are going to laugh at me because of this post.  That’s okay with me.  Something you should know about me is that I have a terrible habit of doubting myself.  In almost every area of my life I find it easy to second guess my decisions.  Especially when they involve spending large amounts of money.

Because of this little problem of mine my house has been at a standstill as far as decorating goes.  When we moved in eleven years ago I had big plans.  Unfortunately I didn’t have the funds to go with my big plans.  Over time I have just gotten used to the lack of style my house has, but I always wish it had more style.  The problem is that having style costs money and means taking chances—chances that you might take the time and money to do something that you think will be awesome except then once you do it, it isn’t.  This is where I’ve been for the past few years.  Paralyzed by the fear that whatever I decide to do I will hate.  So, I find reasons to not do anything—I plan, I research, I search for the perfect thing—only I usually never find the perfect thing for the perfect price and then I give up. 

One of the resolutions I made this year was to take chances, make mistakes and be okay with it and to quit procrastinating.  Admittedly, I started small, but you’ve gotta start somewhere don’t you?  I’ve wanted to do a cool picture collage in my house for a long time.  We got some awesome family pictures taken a few months ago and I have been dreaming ever since of how I could put them on the wall in an awesome display.  So, I started drawing out some ideas…they seemed ok on paper, but it was all honestly overwhelming to figure out what frames to buy and what pictures to buy and how it would all fit together on the wall.  I found tons of inspiration on pinterest and a few tips to help me out with my planning.  My awesome husband knew that I wanted to do it so he bought me a kit for Christmas.  It looked like this:I really liked the frames, but the tree thing just wasn’t part of my vision.  So, I used the frames as a jumping off point along with the fact that I knew I wanted a big print of my whole family as part of it.  Once I had a better idea of what sizes the frames were I cut a bunch out of graph paper so they were to scale and then I used another piece of graph paper to give the guidelines of the space I had to fill and I tried all kinds of different configurations on paper to see what I liked.  (I didn’t take pictures of this part, but here are the tools used)I cut out a few more frames than I had in several different sizes so I could get a better idea of what frames I still needed to buy.  Emily loved helping me with this part too.  When we’d find a configuration that we liked we would sketch it out on a piece of paper so we could remember it later.  Here is one of the papers we used to sketch ideas on. 

Once I had all the frames we set it all up how we liked it best and then we searched our pictures to figure out which ones we wanted to use in the collage.  The problem was, that we didn’t take into consideration which orientation the pictures we had that we liked were in so we had to go back to the drawing board a little bit after we chose pictures.  (Thanks to Segi and Tami for their suggestions on this part!)

Once we had the pictures and the general idea of how we wanted the frames we laid everything out on the floor to get a sense of the spacing and everything. 

We made paper patterns of all the frames so we would know the exact dimensions and to help us get the hangers in all the right places and we taped them up on the wall.  This is where I got the anxiety about making so many holes in the wall and had to cross my fingers and force myself to take the plunge and just do it!  (have a good laugh at me now)

Finally done!  I LOVE IT!So, there you have it.  I finally stuck my little toe into the water and hopefully I’ll be able to plunge the rest of the way in soon!  Actually, I’m being forced to because we are re-doing our basement shower and tiling the whole thing.  Let me tell you the anxiety I’m feeling over this one…it’s huge!  It’s so expensive and so PERMANENT!  Hopefully I can do it!  Wish me luck!

Are you a risk taker or a worrier like me? 

Going back to Cali

Remember a few months ago when I blogged about visiting California to see my Grandma?  Well, I went back, but this time for her funeral.  I’ve been wanting to blog about it, but just haven’t been able to find the right words for my feelings about the whole thing.  I still don’t have the right words, but I need to write some things down so I can remember them before I’ve forgotten.  I loved my Grandma and will miss her so much.  She was such an amazing woman and I hope that I can be a little bit like her by the time I have to leave this earth.  This is from when I went to visit in September.

Christmas at Temple square in 2004She came to visit in November of 2008 and we were lucky enough to have her at our house a few of the days she was in Utah.

This is when she first met Liam (I think)

I miss her so much.  Every time Emily plays the songs that Grandma taught her on the piano it reminds me of her.  One thing I’m grateful for is my knowledge that I will see her again someday and that she’s now reunited with her husband and parents. 

Now a few highlights from the few days I was in California. For some reason all these pictures are in reverse order so we’ll go backwards since I’m too lazy to move them all around.

Her funeral services were beautiful with lots of music just like she would have wanted.  I couldn’t seem to make my voice work to sing most of the time, but I tried my hardest to sing as much as I can because that’s what Grams would have wanted. 

This is at the cemetery before they dedicated the grave.  After the dedication we all said our final goodbyes and then we took a few pictures.  All the kids with Grandpa’s sister, Carol.

After the funeral there was an open house at my Grandma’s house for anyone that wanted to come.  It was mostly family and close family friends, but it was nice to sit and remember her with others that loved her too.  Of course we had to take a few pictures.  All the family together. (we were all exhausted by this time)

The girl cousins.Siblings.  This was the first time I’ve seen my brother Tom in just over four years.  I miss him.Me and KathiAll of my immediate family that was there. 

My brother was awesome enough to pick me up from the San Francisco airport so that I didn’t have to take a shuttle.  It was super nice to get to catch up with him and meet his new wife.  They got married in November so this was a baptism by fire thing for her to meet so much family all at once.  She was a champ and fit right in to our crazy bunch.  She’s awesome and didn’t mind me talking my brother’s ear off during the drive either.  She insisted I sit in front with him which I truly appreciated.  On our way through SF Tom told me that one of our cousins on the other side of the family lived and worked in SF so we called him to see if we could stop by to see him.  Thankfully his work is kind enough not to mind us bugging him. 

This is my cousin Jason.  I don’t think I’ve seen him since I was a teenager.  He was super nice and the chocolate at his store is REALLY REALLY good!  I ate it really slowly to savor every little bit I could. 

We stayed so long visiting Jason that we ended up in rush hour traffic going North to Cotati, but it made it easier to take pictures.  That’s the best I could do of Alcatraz while we were driving and through the fog too.  The golden gate bridge…that was the nicest view we had the whole drive.  The rest of it was just lots and lots of cars and some vineyards when we were lucky.  At least I was in good company while we drove and my brother is a seasoned driver so I didn’t have to worry at all.  There you go.  My trip back to Cali.  It’s still so strange to think that nothing will be the same next time I go there. 

A huge thank you and tons of love to my husband, Jason for holding down the fort while I was gone.  Also, to my neighbor Tami and my sister in law Heather for watching Liam when Jason had to give a presentation at work while I was gone.  I really have the best family ever!

Christmas concerts, programs, and tree

Our Christmas tree this year.  We usually wind the ribbon around the tree like garland, but this year we tried something new and we really liked it (even though it took forever to figure out).  What do you think?

?Everyone wants to do a Christmas concert and since my kids are both in musical groups we spent a good amount of time attending their performances.  That’s Em above playing clarinet in the intermediate band.

Liam wanted a picture of himself at the concert.  We were there a little bit early so he was being goofy playing with my sunglasses.  The concert was great!

Jason is in a choral group at school called vocal premier.  They performed at the mall one week so Liam and I went to listen and then took Jason to lunch at Chick-fil-a.  It was nice to spend some time with Jason.

Liam’s preschool had a cute little program the last day of classes.  While they were singing Santa Claus is coming to town Santa actually came to preschool!  It was funny watching all the awestruck kids trying to keep singing.  Liam wouldn’t sit on his lap, but he did stand by him and tell him he wanted Captain America toys.  Thankfully Santa came through on that one.  Even though they had already performed at the mall, the choir still had a Christmas concert at the school.  Coincidentally it was scheduled the exact same night and time as the Orchestra concert which meant that Jason had a busy night and had to miss the last number at his Choir concert so he could make it to the orchestra one.  Hopefully the teachers will coordinate better with each other in the Spring. 

Too bad Jason has to be way in the back where it is really hard to get a picture of him.  He plays in the advanced orchestra and their concert was great!  We enjoyed listening to their improving talents.