Home Sweet Home

Our house reached completion on August 12 and we were finally able to move in--hence the craziness in our lives. Our builders did a wonderful job and we love the way things turned out. Here is a quick tour:

This is our front entry way. On the left is an office and on the right is a living room.

The living room. We are yet to put up anything on the walls. The living room is where all the things for our walls is. I think (secretly) that I am nervous to put a nail in the wall to hang anything up.

Here is the great room. That is Kayden hanging out on the couch (with no shirt to say the least). You can see through the windows the deck in the backyard. We love going outside and sitting on the deck.

The kitchen. We have yet to buy any bar stools. I have enjoyed my new kitchen and love the openness of it. It looks out into the great room.

Joshua's room. He loves the sport bedding that he inherited from McKay. He has gotten really good at making his bed every morning.

Here is Kayden's room. I thought he wouldn't like having his own room, but he loves it. He has a bookcase in there with all his favorite books. He thinks that is pretty cool.

This is the family room in the basement. Behind it is the toy room. You can also see the door that leads to outside.

The toy room. It has been nice having a space that the kids want to play in.

Jaxon's bedroom.

McKay's bedroom. McKay is growing faster than we know. We decided he was going to need a bigger bed the rate he is going. (I just bought that kid a pair of size 10.5 men shoes!)

The beloved storage room. My parents put together the shelf reliance rotating can system for us. They did a great job and they were quite proud. I don't know what I would have done without my parents through this whole process--especially my mom. She was a huge help with packing and unpacking all our many boxes.

Standing out on the deck looking at the future basketball court.

Josh and his new friends Jack and Owen. They love playing in all the dirt piles that surround our house. This one happens to be on the lot next door that is for sale--if you want to be my neighbor.

Looking across the yard. The property line ends just passed that tree in the middle. There is a fire pit in the right corner.

Hopefully someday there will be a sandbox, play set and trampoline in this spot.

The waterfall out the back door. It has such a nice peaceful sound. The kids love playing in it too!

A view of the back of the house. We are working on the landscaping and hope to have grass in the next week or so. I am looking forward to having less dust outside and a place for the kids to play. I will have to post more pictures of the exterior once the landscaping is more completed.

We love our new house and have enjoyed meeting new people. We have received such a warm reception in the way of baked goods, invitations to dinner and playgroups and also many smiles and friendly faces. We miss our friends terribly, but we are looking forward to this new experience and making new friends.

Write Your Own Story Girl's Camp 2011

I LOVE girl's camp. I loved it as a youth and I love it just as much now (even though it requires a lot more work as a leader). Last year I went to girl's camp as the camp director, and this year I went as the first counselor in the young women's. I learned a lot about being a counselor verses a camp director. I loved being with the girls and I loved being with the other leaders. I feel very fortunate to have been associated with such wonderful girls and leaders. Here are a few of our adventures at camp this year:

Here are some of my Mia Maids: Haley, Shyann and Hannah sewing some bears for a humanitarian aid project. The bears were donated to local fire and police departments to give to children.

Here are some more of my girls sewing their bears: Chelsee, Emily and McKenna.

Here is our stellar leader Jill along with some more of my girls: Zoe, Karlie and Shae.

Quick, take a picture! I am actually sewing here! We may never see this again! I was helping one of the girls with her bear. Another one of my girls, Emily is sitting next to me. I think she was stunned that I was sewing as well.

Here I am posing in the infamous "red sweater" that our stake has with Rachael, Jane and Lyndsie and their finished bears.

Here is all of our ward young women and all the leaders wearing our camp t-shirts. The t-shirts had "Write Your Own Story" written down the side. They were extra cute.

Here we are being silly.

We were able to go to the ropes course while we were at camp. It happened to be my birthday that day. It was also the sister missionary's birthday as well. It was a great birthday!

Here I am at the ropes course with my good friend Kelly from another ward.

Getting all geared up for the ropes course.

My friend Raylyn and I set to go, but very nervous!

We had to climb a telephone pole...

...then walk our way across a tight rope. While I was on the tight rope, my girls started singing "Happy Birthday" to me. It made me smile. After the tight rope, we stepped off the "eagle's nest" and flew down a zip line. It was great fun!

Can I just say: Our skit rocked! We did a synchronized swimming skit that had to include a Dr. Seuss quote. We had one girl pretend she was texting during the whole skit so she "missed" the whole synchronized swimming show. It was a cool skit.

We had a great time out on the lake this year and no one fell in! Here are Emily and Megan and Natalie having a good row out on the lake. This was their first year and camp and they were wonderfully pleasant.

Here are Lynnae (the second counselor) and I in our paddle boat. Man those paddle boats are a lot of work!!

Chelsee, Matti and Jane posing for a picture. Chelsee and Matti went in the lake last year, so I an sure that they are having a much more pleasant time this go around.

Since it was such hard work to get our paddle boat to go anywhere, Lynnae and I came up with a plan to hook our boat onto one of the girl's canoe. We enjoyed the ride, but the girl's couldn't figure out why the canoe was suddenly so hard to paddle!

Jill and Raylyn looking cool on their paddle boat. (They always look cool.)

Barbara and Lisa paddling away!

Katie, Zoe and Lyndsie enjoying their first time at the lake.

Hannah, Shyann and Emily stopping by our paddle boat to say "Hello".

I love Heber Vally Camp. It is such a wonderful place where wonderful things happen and testimonies are strengthened. I look forward to the next time that I am able to go and participate in another girl's camp.

McKay's Birthday

I am behind the times. McKay had his 12th birthday a couple of weeks ago. Life has been crazy (more to come on that later) and my blog has been neglected. But still, I want to tell the blog world about my boy's 12th birthday because he is one great kid and I love him. So here we go:

McKay loves Legos. So my friend made McKay this great Lego cake. Isn't it awesome? She did a great job!

Here is McKay admiring how cool his Lego cake is. We had to celebrate his birthday at his grandma's house this year as our house was in the process of being packed up. McKay didn't mind especially since his Idaho cousins were visiting for a few days.

Blowing out the candles.

Opening presents....Legos of course!

McKay's cousin Bryan bonking him on the head. You have to love that look on McKay's face. Funny kid.

After lunch and birthday cake at Grandma's, we went swimming at our good friend Marilyn's house. She is a wonderful friend to have us over all afternoon. We all had a great time.

Since it was McKay's 12th birthday, we bought him a new suit. (Above he is in his suit for a young men's missionary activity.) He was ordained to the office of deacon in the Aaronic Priesthood the Sunday after he turned 12. The following Sunday he was able to pass the sacrament for the first time. He was nervous, but it was great. I couldn't be prouder of McKay and we are happy to have another priesthood holder in our home.

Clear Creek

Hello, this is McKay, not my mom. This past week, the first through the fifth, I was at Clear Creek summer camp. (It is only for the Alpine School District.) Some of you may remember going there when you were kids. By the way I was brown thirteen, last for everything.

This is my cabin. It won the cleanest cabin award two days in a row, which is the Clear Creek record. We didn't make the record, but tied the record. We would have gotten the record if it weren't for someones jeans!

This is my bed. Pitiful, isn't it? We had to put our suit cases and everything on our bed or some "fury friends" would get to them. Every night we went to bed at eleven and woke up at six in the morning (our counselor gunned some heavy metal music to wake us up) to take showers. The showers were small it was about 2' x 2' x 3'. The curtain was a little small, and the showers had really high water pressure, so the shower would blow the curtain open when you stepped aside for soap.

This is my cabin's sign. It was repainted in honor of us winning the first clean cabin inspection. My counselor was Todd Bilbao. He seemed really awesome at camp, then I looked at his Facebook after camp and his I didn't like his favorite quote--it had some bad words in it.

This is the Almighty Wall. It is in the lunch room. We had to "hug" it, but by the end of the week we all hugged it because we wanted to.

This is one of the many cafeteria posters. It is my personal favorite.

I want to say this is the winter quarters mine, but I'm not sure. This is a coal stack they mine this much per week. This is not all the coal, it is about twice as long and goes to the bottom on the cement, or ground level.

One of the nights during rec; It rained so, we had a dance party. We danced to songs like YMCA and Dynamite. I am somewhere in the background.

The second night I started to feel bad I didn't have any pictures of me, so I took this rather disgraceful picture of me in front of the camp fire we had that night.

This is all the wood we had available for that fire. There we just as much wood at the other camp fire site to.

We visited Scofield on the third day. The number one worst mine disaster in the world happened there. The coal dust and dynamite on the floor ignited one day after someone accidentally put to much dynamite in one spot, ya wasn't to good. This is me in the old jail.

This is me on the ropes course. We had to swing from one spot to the other without touching to ground. I did it on my first try, and on all the other tries.

This is me and my team on the balance board. We beat the Clear Creek record with an out standing time of 21 minutes. The previous record was 14 minutes. We could have doubled it, but it was time to switch.

Clear Creek had it's own mini Bean Museum. The had special permission from government to have a bald eagle in it.

Here are the papers if you didn't believe me.

This is an owl with a duck.

This is Utah's state flower, the Sego Lily. They only bloom for 2-3 weeks once every 3 years and I got the pleasure of seeing one on one of my hikes.

This is a lousy picture of a deer. I saw a lot of animals while I was up there. I saw 4 does, 1 deer, and 2 bears. One bear was on the camp and the other was about 5 miles away by the road.

2 gardener snakes were found and this is one of them. There are no pictures of pot guts, aka, Uintah Mountain ground squirrel, because someone let the one I caught in my trap out.

This is the Scofield Cemetery. Sorry that it is out of order.

And last and defiantly least Stinging Nettle. If you touched it you would get this stuff on you and it would sting like a bee according to Tye Leavitt.