The Sabbath…It was wonderful

Today I got the opportunity to go to a Ward Conference. As the secretary in the Stake Young Women I am asked to attend all of the Ward Conferences in our Stake and I must admit it is a truly wonderful experience.  I love having the spirit and truthfulness of the gospel affirmed to me in these different building with different bishops. It’s just a testimony to me of the truthfulness of the gospel everywhere. 

For Young Women, the stake Young Women’s President taught the lesson. It was a lesson focused on the 13th article of Faith, but she talked about the best being yet to come. About becoming the best you can become.  She gave each girl a fork at the beginning of the lesson and talked about how you go to restaurants and they tell you to “hold on to the fork” and then taught the whole lesson as they held their forks.  She talked of how we have these moments in our lives that we say “This was the best day ever!” and how the best is yet to come. Then she had me wheel in a cake for the girls to eat. It was her desire that it be a celestial looking cake, and so this is what I came up with…

I was so proud of it.  It was a wonderful meeting and I had so much fun making the cake.

Iced In!!!

We spent the first of February with the ice storm of doom.  On Monday night we started having freezing rain.  I had a field trip that got changed a bit to try to beat the coming storm, so they had someone else drive the students to their basketball game (it was from one school in our district to another) and it was my responsibility to drive them home.  So, I planned on leaving at a certain time as they had told me about 7:30. I get a phone call from my boss at about 6:30 saying they cancelled their other game and could I go get them. I agreed and said I was only five minutes from work.  Well, technically that is true, but it took me 10 minutes to get the already 1/2 inch ice off of my car so that I could drive over there. Then it took me 20 minutes to get it off my bus (and stay off my bus as it kept refreezing). When I finally got there to take the students back, all the students had gone home with their parents so I ended up only transporting the coach back to the school. She was really nice and it turned out she didn’t have a scraper, so I helped her scrape the ice off her car.  It took me 45 minutes to drive 10 miles back to the bus garage, then another 10 minutes to clean another 1/4 inch of ice off my car again. I was EXHAUSTED when I got home. 

We ended up getting about 4 inches of pure ice.  Above is a picture of my yard. I’m not kidding, this is my front yard.  Completely covered in ice. When you step on it you don’t sink.  Even if you jump, or as I found out quickly if you fall.

This is a picture of the ground around my van after freeing it of the ice.  See that big chunk, INCREDIBLE!

I was on the search for the thickest piece of ice that I could get free.  I started with the swings on the swing set and it was pretty thick. Then I found this, out of a camping chair we left outside. I was pretty proud of myself, until…

I found this!!!  This is a huge chunk of ice freed from my slide! AMAZING!

I had to take this one as it cracked me up so much.  This is a mountain of ice that wraps around the back parking lot at work.  You can see that it towers over that SUV.  It was huge!! So funny.

BOUNCE U!!!

So, while there in GA we found a groupon (my favorite thing!!) for Bounce U in Kennesaw.  It was less than half the entrance price. LOVE THAT!!  They had a lot of really fun things to do, however, it was hard to do them and still look decent so my pictures are a little limited! HA!

This was Ethan’s favorite thing.  The big slide. He must have got down it 200 times.  Over and over and over again.  The funniest thing about it was that he had a really hard time climbing the ladder so he was really slow.  So, he would slide, then start his really slow climb and in the mean time all of the other kids would slide and he’d be only halfway up!  They were good and patient with him though.  Then when it got crowded a “bounce pro” would come over and they started lifting him up and helping him up the ladder to speed things along.  He didn’t care, all he wanted to do was slide. Over and Over and Over!

Isn’t it cute how happy he was.

Connie was a little surprised at how fast it was the first time that we went down it.  She was funny.

So this is hard to see, but this is me climbing up the spider.  My niece and nephews tagged along and they wanted me to climb this with them over and over.  It is a trampoline with a tall frame over it.  About ever two feet there is a level of an elastic webbing, for about 7 levels.  It was hard to climb.  I would get through 2 levels and then have to lay down and rest a minute.  My niece would be telling me to “COME ON” and I just kept saying, “I’m old!!”.  It was totally worth it though.  So fun!

I finally wore out and sat with my mom watching Ethan go down the slide over and over and over again.  Isn’t my mom cute?!?

Here’s a great shot of the boys and I going down the slide.  We had so much fun!!

Christmas Day!!!

We had a wonderful Christmas day. Relaxed and fun. The kids weren’t even up that early.  Actually what was funny was that Grant and I were up before they were. It cracked me up. We’ve never been able to wait!

Ethan was thrilled to open his stocking stuffers and was very excited to find a little Buzz Lightyear. He’s a little obsessed with Toy Story 3. Santa also put that in his stocking. It was a good morning for him, until…

Connie and Kyler were divvying out presents and found the ultimate “made his Christmas” present. A large Buzz.  He immediately dropped the little one and ran for the big one. It was funny.

Kyler had a good Christmas as well, lots of legos.  The Legos were very important. He didn’t get quite what he’d asked for from Santa, but did from Nana and Grumpy!

A Nintendo DS.  He was very happy and excited to get started playing it.  Connie’s response was really funny.  She was really upset that he’d gotten one.  Now, we open our presents in age order so she had not yet opened her present and it hadn’t occurred to her that maybe one of hers was a DS as well.  Of course, it didn’t help that Mommy wrapped them and purposely took it out of it’s original box and put it in an odd shaped one! We just let her sweat it out. LOL

Here she is opening one of her more loved gifts…an art set with markers, crayons, pencils, the works!

And the moment she’s been waiting for! The Nintendo DS from Nana and Grumpy Lopez. You’d think she would be thrilled and jumping up and down.  Instead she said “Finally”. Geez!

Family came over and we commenced a very long game of Phase 10 twist. It is actually a really fun game, it just takes a while if you don’t stop chatting and actually play when it is your turn.

This is one of my favorite pictures of the day, so I had to share.  The siblings of my family got together and got my dad a Kindle Reader.  He was so excited, which made it totally worth it.  So, here are two of my favorite men on this earth playing with their electronic toys! I love it!!

We got Ethan some puppets because CLEARLY he loves them! Isn’t he cute?!?

More Christmas Trip

Christmas eve was really fun.  Our tradition growing up was that we would have our big meal on Christmas eve and then eat chili all day on Christmas day.  Jason is not opposed to this tradition, so we carry it on.  We got all of our family together on Christmas eve for a few reasons.  One of my sister-in-laws had family coming Christmas day which because of her dad’s job is pretty rare, so we planned around that for her.  She totally deserved it! So we got together and cooked.

I love this picture because I look like my sister and considering most of my life I’ve been considerably heavier than her, it makes me happy that I might be mistaken for her now!

I had to taste things to make sure they were made right!

My brothers have trampolines and Ethan thoroughly enjoyed them! He wouldn’t leave this one to eat, it resulted in the usual counting to three followed by a stubborn time out stay. Story of my life.

Here’s a great picture of the lineup for food. It was yummy.

After everything we staged for our family picture so we would have a plan for the day after Christmas when we had one taken.  Everything in my family is goofy.  I like this one better than the real picture I think. So funny.

Georgia For Christmas!!

We wanted to try to get back to our blog bandwagon, so here we go.  We got the opportunity to go to Georgia over Christmas to spend time with my family.  The fun thing was that Stephanie and her family went as well, so we got to have time all of us for Christmas.  It was heavenly.  We stayed with Grant and his family and had so much fun. We can’t ever thank them enough. The first order of business was a trip to the Coca Cola Museum.

We had much fun at Coke world, and they have converted my children to Coke for the rest of their lives.  They love it.  There was a fun 3D movie, a tour of the history of coke and various other things and the kids favorite was the tasting room.  They really enjoyed it.  As our day came to a close, we walked through the gift shop and uncle Grant bought them a frisbee. There was a fun little area to play so the kids stopped for a bit to throw around their new frisbee.  It was really a super fun day!