My Favorite Things

My sister-in-law Dawna did this on her blog, so here are some of my random (VERY random) FAVORITE THINGS (In no particular order). Some are material things, others aren't, but they're just things I absolutely LOVE! Here goes:

1~ Going to the temple with Kevin. I can't think of any other time on earth that I feel more peace then when I'm in the temple with him. It literally washes the rest of the world away for a little while, and I get a glimpse of eternity when we're there.


2~A CLEAN HOUSE! It's pretty rare, but when the house is clean, I feel like I don't have a house to clean (go figure), and I can spend my time with the kids or working on a project I've wanted to work on, or just sit and relax without thinking about cleaning the house. It sounds odd, but I feel like I can even breathe better when the house is clean, and I get all giddy inside!!

3~John Denver. His music just makes me go back in time when I was a little kid, my parents listened to him on their 8-track player all the time. We'd dance in the living room with my dad. His music will always be special to me. We always would listen to him while driving up to Star Valley, and we still do! Which brings me to my next favorite thing:


4~Star Valley! My dad was born and raised in Star Valley. As a kid, it was one of my absolute favorite places to go. I have SO many childhood memories on the farm, all good ones. Then I married Kevin. His mom was born and raised there as well! So you can imagine we travel there quite often, mostly in the summer. My grandma is still alive, but she left Star Valley a few years ago to be closer to some of her kids and the temple. She lives in Spanish Fork now. It's sad to drive by her old farmhouse and land and know it's not ours to visit anymore. Kevin's grandparents have both passed on, but the family still owns part of their property, so we get to go and stay up there sometimes. There's no place on earth quite like Star Valley!


5~Olive Garden! Especially that zuppa toscana soup. I love to dip the breadsticks in it. Yummm! I don't think I'll ever get tired of eating there! Now there's a new one a little closer to my house, so I'll have to eat there more often.



6~My single serve blender. It was like $13 bucks at Wal-Mart. I bought it for Kevin for Christmas (secretly knowing I'd be using it too). Well, I use it pretty much every day to make a nutritious smoothie: Skim milk, yogurt, fruit, and vanilla protein powder. I mix & match the different kinds of fruit and yogurt.


7~The car DVD player. I don't know how I would live without it! If we're in the car, sometimes the kids will be screaming and fighting, or just plain talking too much, and as soon as I turn a movie on......silence! It's wonderful. Even Ryker loves it!


8~The Mourning Dove. I think they're really pretty, and I love the song they sing. It reminds me of Burley, Idaho, where I also spent a lot of time as a child. (My grandparents lived there, now my aunt & uncle do). I always thought it was an owl, because of the way they sound like a "whoo, whoo", but learned what it really was just a few years ago. Well now we have a whole bunch of them that like to hang out in our back yard. They like to feed from the ground, (thank you, Wikipedia), so I put bird seed on the ground as well as in the bird feeder, which is just outside my bedroom window. I get to listen to them all day, and sometimes they even wake me up in the morning. But it's not loud and obnoxious, so I don't mind. It makes me happy!


9~Of course, last but not least, my husband and my 3 kids! They are the most precious to me of all!


So what are your favorite things? I tag anyone who's reading this!

Fun weekend in Moab!

We took our family for a nice weekend trip to Moab for the half-marathon. I posted lots of pics, so bear with me....
Here I am the morning of the race on Saturday, waiting to load the bus taking us up the canyon to the starting line.

Racers waiting in lines for port-a-potty's and hot chocolate before the race. I understood there were 5,000 racers, but the results only list 3,284.

Even though we're not quite moving yet, this is right after the race started, it turned out a bit blurry. This is the first race I've actually brought a camera on, and I did get a couple of non-blurry shots.

The scenery was awesome!

Here are the girls waiting for me at the finish line.


My goal was to finish in 1:58 or 1:59, since I've been doing that in my training, but I surprised myself when I finished in 1:52:36. I guess I can blame it on the flat/downhill course, and the adrenaline! There were 3 times I specifically remember going uphill, but the rest seemed pretty flat to me. I finished 800th overall, 57th in my age group.

After the race, the girls FINALLY got to go swimming at the hotel, (the thing they were most excited about), but the manager said the pool maintenance guy forgot to turn the heater on, and the water was COLD! The poor kids swam anyway. For a few minutes at least. Kind of a bummer. The weather was SO awesome though! Nice and warm.

And after swimming and lunch, I took a 15 minute nap, and we were off to hike to delicate arch. It was a 3 mile hike round trip, and the girls did pretty good. Bailee is already a great hiker, and kept hiking way ahead of us, and Trinidee wanted to be carried a lot. She's still at that age I guess. Ryker was in the carrier on Kevin's back, and he seemed to enjoy it.




When we got to this overlook where you could see the arch, the wind was SO bad that it took Bailee's hat right off of her head and off of a cliff. She was devastated to lose her hat. Here's Kevin comforting her right after it happened. I was able to go and get it on our way back down though. Bailee was so relieved!



And here's our family under the arch, with a few extras added in! It was a busy weekend.





Kevin ended up carrying Ryker plus one of the girls on his shoulders almost the whole time, (mostly Trinidee). He's so tough! Notice how he clings on to the precious pink hat. It got really windy on the way back down!


All in all, (besides Ryker screaming for a good portion of the 3 1/2 hour drive to and from Moab), the weekend was a lot of fun, and I hope the kids will remember it! It was a great little getaway :-)

Alumni dance pics

The alumni dance went really well last weekend. It was so much fun to perform again! Here's the group right before we performed....

And here we are during the performance. All my pictures turned out blurry!

This is my friend Krista and I after the performance. She's one of the very few in the alumni that I was actually on drill team with. The rest of the girls were younger than me, and I didn't even know half of them. It was great getting to know them though. It's been a fun couple of months being able to dance again.

I was once a.......

I was once a Hunter High Silhouette! It's been almost 14 years since I graduated from High School, and I did some dancing on & off after that, up until 2002 or 2003, before I had Bailee. Well, I'm throwing myself back into the dancing world and performing with some of the alumni at the Hunter High Silhouette showcase this Friday!! I'm so excited and nervous at the same time. Wish me luck, I think I'm going to need it!

Bailee saw this picture and asked if I was dressed up as a clown because of all the make-up. I said, "Yeah, pretty much."

And here's our 1994 team picture:

Good times.

Photo Shoot

I did my first real photo shoot for my brother Kody and his wife Brianna, and their cute little baby Jovi on Saturday. I still don't totally know what I'm doing, but tell me what you think! I think they turned out pretty good :)