Utah Part 3

Our last day in Utah we hung out at Seth and Katie's house and went to church with Amy and my mom. After church we decided to go to the park and have a picnic. After eating our yummy fried chicken, potato salad and corndogs for the girls (because we're sinners and bought food on Sunday), we got to play at the playground! It was really fun and I think everyone had a really great time. It was just nice to be able to hang out and relax and just be together. (I have more pictures that my mom sent me, but because they're in a Kodak gallery and I have no idea how to get them off without buying them, waiting for them to be shipped to me, and scanning them in, you don't get to see those. Bummer, dude.)

Chloe the photographer

Chloe and Beema

Having fun at the playground! (Sidenote...When we moved here a lot of the girl's clothes went missing. I have no idea where this shirt is. Or her cute polka dot multicolored shirt. Or Preslie's brown shirt that is just like this pink tank Chloe's wearing, but brown...Where have all their clothes gone?!?!)

Preslie was trying to get the camera, and Cody is just being sexy with his beard. (PS I'm not joking about the last part...I really did like it and was sad when he shaved it off into a Hitler mustache...which lasted about 5 minutes)

This is the only non-blurry picture I have of Hallie! She was NOT feeling it in the wood chips! But I promise she had fun the rest of the time. 

Wooohoo for Utah!

Preslie's Teeth

Preslie and I are playing a game counting her teeth. I ask her how many teeth she has, she counts (each time to 15) and then I tickle her because that is just so many teeth to have. It's pretty fun. We both love it. I think my favorite part is her counting. It goes like this --

"One, two, tee, gagoo, gagee, abooganenoo, eeeight, niney, ten, hot dog, dog, tirty, fourtee, fifteeeeeen!"

It makes me so happy.

Then I counted her teeth to see how many she really has, and guess what. She knew all along! She really does have 15 teeth!

Utah Part 2

Later that night, we went to Orem for my Grandma's big birthday party. I wish we had taken pictures of all the food and decorations because everything looked amazing! I was so impressed with everything. All the grandkids and great grandkids put on a little show and there was a little carnival area for kids to play some games.

Chloe liked playing the games, until we found one game with a not-so-nice girl in charge of it. I'm pretty sure she was about 14 and on a definite power trip. She was not being nice to Chloe or Preslie, so we stopped playing. All the other ones were fun, though! And had nice kids running them.

I was so happy that Alyssa came! I was SO hoping that little Warren would want to be born that weekend so we could be there and meet him, but he took his sweet time and didn't come until we were long gone! I guess we'll just have to go back and hang out with them again!!! 

There was a photo area set up, so we took some pictures infront of it. Cody and the girls and I took some with the little props that were there, but not with our camera and I don't know where those pictures are. Someday I'll post them if I can find them!

Chloe LOVED all the yummy food! And I really mean, YUMMY!

I was so happy Amy Jo and her family came, too!!! I miss hanging out with her so much!

Our kids all together! We tried for a long time to get a good picture with all of them looking at the camera at the same time, but it never worked. Then Gage decided he wanted to be the main part of the picture, so he walked right up to Cody and smiled :)

(I made Chloe and Preslie's shirts. It only took like 10 hours of straight sewing...and the fabric I got is not stretchable at ALL so the girls wore those shirts that night and Chloe wore it once more after that and they are now too small. :( Oh well, at least they went with the "Red, White and Blue" theme that night!!)

Such a cute boy!!!!!

We had a great time at the party and it really was amazing! All the people planning and working on it for SO long did a fabulous job!!! Happy Birthday, G!

Utah Part 1

This year, on June 3, my grandma turned 80! My mom and aunts got together and threw her a great big party. When I was a senior in high school I moved to Utah and moved in with my grandparents. (I'm pretty sure everyone already knew that, right?) (PS don't let me forget to post the story about me telling someone -the father of a boy I was "dating"- why I moved to Utah and how he didn't believe me and hated me and yelled at me. And his wife. It was great.) Anyway. I really felt like we owed it to my grandma to go to her party since she put up with me for a year of my life. So we did!

We made the drive Friday morning. June 3rd is also my little brother's birthday, and he was having a party that night so we wanted to make it for that. We left San Diego around 6:45 and got to the party around 7. It was great! I don't have any pictures of that, but it involved me changing in the bushes, lots of fabulous food and fun people. It was a great party!

The next day my nephew was celebrating his 5th birthday. (His birthday is actually in December, but his parents decided December is too busy and cold, so they celebrate 6 months early when it can be fun outside!!) We had so much fun. April went all out on a superhero party and everything was awesome! They had a bounce house and we had a great time talking to everyone. All my cousins (with the except of 2 or 3) were there for my grandma's party and a lot of them made it to Aidan's party, too! It was fun being with everyone.

Chloe loved playing with all of Aidan's tools!

She also LOVED that Amy would give her free reign of her camera! She actually is a pretty good photographer for a 2 year old! I'll have to post some of her pictures sometime. 

On the bounce house with Uncle Seth 

Preslie was a little nervous about going down the slide!!!

Sisters! -Minus Brooke who was so sick in the hospital!! (Or maybe home by now?)

The Night We Had Pirates Over for Dinner

Pirates of the Caribbean 4 came out in May this year. To celebrate it, I decided to do a pirate dinner!

*I really don't care very much about the Pirates movies. I like them, but haven't even seen the 4th one and I can't remember the 3rd on at all. I liked them when I saw them, but it's not a movie I have to see over and over again.*
So I decided I had $20 to spend on all the food and decorations or whatever else we were going to do. First I went to the library to see if we could even get a Pirates movie to watch that night. I got the second one and our library rents out movies for free! So I was happy to find it there. Then the girls and I headed to Party City to see what kinds of pirate things they had. They had the actual Pirates of the Caribbean stuff, but I just wanted to be more generic, so I was glad they had regular pirate stuff, too. When I walked out to dinner with all our pirate gear, Cody looked so excited. I think that was my favorite part :)

Cool dude poses with angry pirate faces. Notice the earrings? The hats, earrings and eye patches all came together in a pack of 4. Totally perfect for us!

Preslie trying to do a "cool dude" (which is a thumbs up)

I bought a rotisserie chicken from the store so it was super easy! I had looked online for dinner ideas and one said chicken legs that you could call Parrot Legs, but since we had a whole chicken it was called -Parrot Legs and other Parrot Parts. :) I had little "flags" in each food so we'd know what it was. (Which was really just cut up post it notes stuck onto toothpicks. 

We also had cannon balls - watermelon balls....or really pieces since I don't have a melon baller,  pirate's teeth - corn, and frosty ale - root beer. We also didn't use silverware cause pirates don't care about that stuff, they just want their food! It was HILARIOUS watching everyone (Ok, really just me, Cody and Chloe) not use silverware. (Preslie -at that time- never used silverware!) Especially with the corn. And the chicken was so greasy our fingers were gross! 

This was the invitation I had waiting for Cody. I found a website you can put in whatever you want and it turns it into pirate lingo. Then I burned the edges and drew a skull on the bottom....but I went a little burning crazy and the skull caught on fire so I doused it in water. ....So the skull is missing. It was in the bottom right corner.

She didn't love the eye patch...

Yeah, she was scared...

After dinner and after the girls went to bed we got out our "pirates booty" (one of the pirates hats filled with candy - Hershey's "gold" nuggets, lifesavers -cause even pirates should wear lifesavers if they're thrown in the ocean!, and ring pops) and watched our movie. ...Well, about half of it. We got sick of it and turned it off. But it was so fun! I think we all loved it. We'll have to have a pirate night again soon!!

PS I got a lot of these ideas at the dating diva's website. They have a lot of great ideas over there!!

Where We've Been

These past few months have been busy. And by busy, I mean seriously insanely busy. In June my parents came out to California to help us clean out my grandparents old house - the one we are now living in. No one has lived here for 2 1/2 years, so it was pretty bad. Full of stuff and just plain filthy. For 7 days we cleaned for about 9 hours a day. We were planning on going to the beach and Downtown Disney with them.....yeah, those things didn't happen. We were too exhausted from cleaning. Then my parents left and we went back to San Diego. I continued cleaning our apartment to get ready to move. I'm sure you all know how that goes. We had movers so we luckily didn't have to pack anything, but I still had to organize and go through everything and pack the things I didn't want the movers to pack. I also spoke in Sacrament, sang in Sacrament (different Sunday's), planned a few RS activities, and made posters and fliers for them. Oh, and attended. Cody was gone for 2 weeks, so that was fun too. Then we moved. The packers came, packed us, we cleaned and had our walk through all in the same day. It was a pretty long day. Luckily we have the best ward EVER and had volunteers take the girls all day and come help us clean. They were amazing and I still need to send thank you cards.

Then we moved here. We stayed in a hotel the first night, and moved in the next morning. We unpacked quickly - before the week had ended (so 4 days), which was nice...but we still haven't hung up pictures or anything because we're painting everything. We have now painted the entryway and the hallway (I'm supposed to be doing the trim in the hallway right now) and only have the bathrooms, our room, the girls room, the office, the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen left! Oh, and the den. I forgot. Woohoo! :)

So. I'm tired. We can really only paint after the girls go to bed because they'll get in it and we don't want to have to redo anything. They have been going to sleep later because it stays light so long and they can't figure out yet that just because it's light outside it's still night time!

Also in July we celebrated 4th of July with Austin, Sara, and Dirk and Tami. We had a lot of fun swimming and hanging out with them! Then the next day we went to Ramona to visit Seth and Brittany who had come up with their girls. (I tried uploading some pictures Brittany sent me, but they weren't working) It was fun to be with them and Chloe LOVED playing with Madi and Mya. We went to the beach the first day and some really random, weird homeless man started following Preslie and me around telling me that "her feet were made to walk on sand...she's going to be one of those people in New York that is a bridge to the world (?? I said 'thank you' to him when he said that, thinking it's good for people to be a bridge to the world...he was like-NO it's NOT a good thing. Ok....)...she's got the JUICE" ....Yeah it was interesting. When I told him I had to get back he said, "We all do. We all have to get back. JESUS CHRIST." (I am pretty sure he meant we all have to return to Christ someday..not just saying His name....)

That night Preslie got sick and was throwing up all night and the next day. We thought it was from the heat but that Friday Chloe and I were also sick and she was throwing up too. Luckily I missed that part. It was pretty awful. Cody somehow missed it for a week, but was throwing up yesterday and is sick today. What a bummer. Today was his first day of work here, so he had to call in sick on his very first day! Good thing they're understanding.

Sorry this is sideways...This was 2 days before  our wedding at the LA Temple where I took out my endowment

Yesterday was our 5th wedding anniversary. I know that absolutely deserves its own blog post...but lets be real here. I'm almost falling asleep right now. I don't know when I will blog again!

However. These last 5 years have been totally amazing. Not everyday, not every minute, but in general, totally amazing.

I can't say enough how big of a blessing Cody is in my life. And the lives of my girls. And I'm so glad that we get to be together forever! (Yesterday we celebrated by trying to go to the OCFair...We tried to get to the fair between 12-1 to get in free (and free parking), but instead sat in traffic for 2 hours with the rest of orange county trying to go to the fair. When we finally found a parking spot (on the street because all the other 4 fair parking lots were full), we decided it wasn't worth it with the huge, basically unpushable stroller we have because it'd be so packed. So we left. We then went to Laguna