Friday, December 13, 2013

Some of our happenings...

The girls getting a pedicure during our quick trip to Park City....

I went as a chaperone to Amanda's photography field trip to the zoo. It was really fun and not crowded at all.  The best part is that we got in for free! Manda took some amazing pictures of the animals....as well as lots of her friends...The above is the kids we hung out with all day...including a couple that didn't get in the picture.
Amanda, Susie and Maddy and they rode the carousel!



The lighting that day was so good for pictures, too.  No editing done on any of these.

The tiger was so vocal while we were there!  Amanda caught him in action!  He is so pretty, too!

Sydney had a Christmas recital for hip hop last Saturday. Her costume was so cute!  She did a great job and can't wait to join this studio next year.  It's going to be hard to keep her interested in ballet for the next 6 months....


Classic Sydney posing....
I finally blocked out two days (during the day before piano) to get the office painted! Mike did the ceiling and patchwork and then I primed and put two coats on the walls.  It took forever, but the girly room purple is gone and it's ready to be an office!  I am refinishing a desk to put in there. That's my next project....but hopefully it will be done soon.  Maybe I'll have time to work on it tomorrow...cross your fingers.....
It turned frigid here last week! I wouldn't even let our kids sit at the bus stop because it was 0 degrees and they won't wear coats!  I was even cold....and that doesn't happen often.
Amanda stayed home from school last Friday, so we met Mike for lunch. We went to Mel & Becky Mauris' new restuarant, Bountiful Greek. It was soooo good!  Mel is Amanda's soccer coach.
The first Saturday in December was a busy one!  After Sydney's dance recital, Amanda had some dance rehearsals and then we went to the Arveseth cousin party. Bowling and dinner at Doug & Cath's again. It was super fun and I'm glad we got to stay this year instead of running off to an indoor game.  Maddie had to do that this year.....Super fun and I hope we keep this tradition up actually...After that, we headed to Festival of Trees and the girls and I bagged trees.  We took Susie and Maddie with us to the cousin party because they needed a ride down to SLC.  Did I mention it was a blizzard!  The roads were icy all day long.  Treacherous drive, but we were safe. Mike took Brandon home after the cousin party.  We planned to stay at my parent's house because they were out of town and I didn't want to drive home, but when the girls started talking about an all nighter and showering at my parents and eating, I changed my mind. Even though it was icy and 2:00am, I didn't want these girls to destroy the house!  Plus, they needed to be at Susie's house by 7:45am to go deliver the trees on Sunday morning and I didn't want to get up that early.  We made it home safely, of course.   I decided to sleep through Sacrament meeting and just go to Primary.  I got a call at 9am from Shanna asking if I was doing Sharing time today.  Argh!  So, I had to get up and get the lesson ready. It all worked out :)  But we all took naps after church!
Here are some pictures of our Thanksgiving day trip to St George and Vegas.  Sydney and Mike doing the book where you unfocus your eyes and see different pictures...kept them busy all morning!
After hanging on the strip for awhile, we decided to leave and go see the Temple! We had to clear our minds!

Girls in front of Caesars Palace
We rode the roller coaster at New York New York and Amanda dreaming of going back!
We went to Serendipity!  I tried so hard to go there in NYC.  When I heard they had one in Vegas, Mike made us some reservations.  They are famous for this Frozen Hot Chocolate and it was ok.  The waitress suggested the deep fried Oreo sundae and that was delish!  Super fun weekend!
I'm going backwards here, but since it was just us and my parents for Thanksgiving, we decided to go to Little America!  It was great food and no clean up!
Amanda loves loves loves chocolate covered strawberries and had 22?  Chocolate all over her face, but she was happy!  We left for St George right after dinner and my parents stayed with us.  They hung out with the Smiths and with Bud & Kay, too.  It was a great weekend and so great to spend it with my parents!  Great weekend!

Monday, November 25, 2013

Weekend Get-Away

 Here is a picture of half the kids at Amanda's party. I'm not even exaggerating.  See how funny that they are hanging out in the unfinished basement. At least we didn't worry about them destroying anything!
Below is Amanda, Spiderman, Ally and Erynn at the Elliott's amazing Halloween house!

 We left the next morning for St. George.  The kids had Friday off of school, so away we ran!  I have always wanted to take the girls to see Thriller by Odyssey Dance Company at Tuachan. It just happened to be the last night on Friday.  And then, Saturday night was a cover band of the Beatles, The Fab Four. Brandon LOVES the Beatles, so Mike & Brandon went to that concert on Saturday!

Mike laughed that Brandon was the youngest one there and he was the second youngest!  They had a great time!  A quick visit to see Aunt Kay and Uncle Bud.  Bud crashed on his bike again at the first of October and broke his femur up high. They had to work on his hip as well as the leg.  He's a tough guy!

The girls have always wanted to stop at these baseball fields where High School Musical 2 was filmed. We had a beautiful day on the way back from Ivins and decided to make their dreams come true!

 They thought about jumping the fence, but then we found an open field. Just one. All others were locked up tight!

 Brandon wanted to be in the pictures and the girls were being mean to him.....

 I'm so in love with all the amazing colors.  


 Amanda did edit on the one below...it's pretty cool.  She is taking photography at school this year and is getting quite good!
We got home on Sunday and had family pictures taken by Kirstan Johnson.  These are just a few that Amanda got loaded onto the computer. I'm having a hard time loading the rest from the cd she gave me.


 Kirstan had to come back the next week and take some more of Amanda. I think she only had a couple.  The place on Sunday where we were was packed with people getting family pictures taken.  It threw Kirstan off  :)


Here's a random picture of my rainbow piano!  I was teaching one afternoon and a rainbow appeared!  Now that the sun has moved to winter mode, it sets while I'm teaching and hits my Grandma Gib's clock that I have in that room.  Kind of cool!


Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Halloween 2013

 A change of weather brings out the crazy!
 Amanda was Iron Man.  She also got a pink morph suit (like B's), but didn't wear it.  Shocker :)  Sydney was Elmo.  Here's the background for some of their outfits:
 Sydney was to be one of the 4 girls dressed like Sesame Street monsters. But, this past couple of weeks, we are experiencing mean girls again....honestly, it's a good thing I love this time of year, or I would start to dread it like I do with January!
 Yes, there was a similar story last year with Amanda.  Now it's Sydney's turn.  This involved finding notes that were written about her conveniently dropped by her so she would see them.  Mean Snapchats that I had to put a stop to and more.....Anyway, she ended up going around with one of the girls...just because that girl had gotten ditched by the two other girls....and now the trick or treat friend is telling lies to the other 2 about Sydney. Ugh!  I told her to be done with these girls and go with her nice friends that she has at school.  I will drive her anywhere or those girls can come here!  Sydney is a tough cookie and is doing ok with all of this....only a few tears....let's move on....
 Amanda decided to have a party this year.  We said ok and kept asking her how many kids she was inviting...To her friend's credit, they told Sydney to hang out with them and the 9th grade boys....which was nice and we were ok with since we were chaperoning this party and would know most of the kids...
 Somehow it all worked out.  Brandon went out with Spencer and his parents.  I was glad that both Mike & I would be home because a little after 7:00pm....there were cars full of kids being dropped off at our house!
 We figured we had 60 kids here.  Sounds crazy, but it was fine.  You know there are a lot of kids when you have some of those kids coming upstairs when everyone else was in the basement (yes, the unfinished part...so weird), and saying there are so many people down there you can't move!
Amanda had everyone go to the haunted house down the street, Shadows of Fear, put on by the Cheneys.  They do this every year for a charity and it's a really, really good haunted house!  This year they advertised on tv on Channel 2 and on radio at 97.1.  They don't have a price, they just ask for donations.  I know some of Amanda's friends went through for free, but most of them gave money and we gave Amanda a little extra for them.  The Cheneys loved it and told the kids to come work it with them next year!  Mike & I went down later (mostly because one of the boys stayed at our house and handed out the candy) and the line was so long, we didn't go through.
 We also sent the kids down to the Elliots Halloween house.  Every year, they do a theme and everyone including their next door neighbors are the actors.  Katherine, the mom and wife, is amazing at decorating (she has a couple of books) and Rob, the dad and hubs, is music and acting.  (He wrote the score for The Saratov Approach....an amazing movie I'll talk about later.
 Our neighborhood is just fun anyway at Halloween.  Many families that don't live here come because there is so much going on.  The Wilsons finally put up their decor after Amanda gave them a persuasive essay about it!  He is our Kaysville legislature rep and he is one of the owners in Destination Homes.  They had just had a grand opening for a huge building project here in Kaysville and it made putting up their own decor seem overwhelming.  Jeni, Brad's wife, was super involved because one of the designers was not able to help....
 Anyway, back to the party.  The kids were good!  They hung out. Didn't watch the movie I got them.  We made them scones.  They listened to music.  They handed out our treats.  One of the boys was dared to hug Mike and they hugged it out.  Hiliarious!  The boy Amanda liked was there, but I never figured out which one he was.  We made homemade rootbeer and it was gone in a few minutes!
 They all started leaving about 11pm and many of the kids helped to clean up or offered.  I was shocked!  The last few boys were gone by 11:30pm and Amanda immediately came inside and started vacuuming and cleaning. I think she wanted to leave a good impression because the party was fun and she might want another one at some point!  Good move, Amanda!  Sydney only stayed out about an hour and a half and then hung out at the party.  Brandon was out the longest which is unusual for him.  We ran into him at the Elliots and brought him home, but he had a great time and thanks to the Harwoods for letting him tag along!  Their son, Spencer, seen here with our kiddos is our adopted son. We live next door and our boys are usually at each other's houses and we always call Harwoods if we need somewhere for B to hang when no one is home.  I love that....

We got up fairly early on Friday morning and because the kids were out of school, we headed to St George!  After a few hiccups along the way, we got there about 2pm.  The girls and I saw Thriller by Odyssey Dance Company at Tuacahn and shopped and went to see The Saratov Approach.  This movie is about 2 missionaries that were kidnapped in Russia in 1998.  Like I mentioned before, Rob, did the music and it was amazing!  The girls and I cried at several times and were laughing out loud at other points.  The best part was the conversation we had on the way home.  There were several parts in the movie that sparked this conversation about sacrifice and faith and the things we discussed because of it will be priceless to me.  The boys went golfing with Spencer Jones and  Hal  Morrell....18 holes! Brandon is starting to love golf!  Then, because B is a huge Beatles fan, they went to Tuacahn and saw a Beatles cover band, The Fab Four.  They had a great time, too!

On Sunday, we stopped for a visit to Bud & Kay.  Bud had a biking accident again a few weeks back and so we thought we'd be visiting a broken man, but he was up and walking with a cane.  They  had even been to church.  He's not one to stay down....We had a great visit and then headed home to cold weather and yes...snow.