Day Three, Day Four

I've got to start telling you about Day Three by adding a little information from Day Two. While we were hanging out with Erin and Phil, I broke my toe. Well, I either broke my toe, or just severely injured it. We didn't get it confirmed by a doctor, but it sure swelled up and turned purple, and of course, it hurt like crazy! I hurt it by jumping over a storage tub. It was that simple. I wish I had a heroic story to add, but I was just hopping over an open storage tub that was sitting in the middle of the hallway, and I wacked my foot on the side of it. It hurt, and I hopped around for a bit, but then I ignored it until a few hours later it STILL hurt like it had just barely happened, so we grabbed a bag of frozen corn to put on it while Erin and I visited. (Marcus ate the corn when I was done with it. He loves frozen food.)

At some point during the evening, when I was realizing just how hurt my poor little toe was, Brian asked to take a look at it. He started poking and prodding, then he squeezed my toe, and we heard a soft "crack," which was quickly followed by my screams and the thumping of me hopping around the room again. Brian sadly, and a little bit guiltily, said, "Yeah, I think it's broken."

This picture was taken the next morning, after things had calmed down a little bit. You can see that the purple was already starting to go away and the swelling was going down. Still hurt, though, especially after Brian accidentally stepped on it while we were gathering our luggage to head out the door. I think it's pretty clear that Brian and that toe were not getting along that weekend.

After driving through a blizzard in Southern Utah, we stopped and filled a Ziplock bag with snow to put on my foot. Then we stopped at a store where Brian bought a small brace and a bottle of Excedrin, which I happily accepted. I think the snow was the best thing we did, because my toe was feeling so much better by the next morning. As bad as it hurt on Saturday and Sunday, I was surprised at how well it was doing by Monday.

So we drove from Orem, Utah to Las Vegas, Nevada on Sunday. The drive was beautiful! I kept trying to take naps, and Brian kept waking me up to look at the scenery. I was glad he did.

Here's some of the pictures we took along the way:


Um, I guess that's about it. I thought I took more pictures than that, but I guess I was more involved in the "I Spy with My Little Eye..." games than I remember being. I know I took pictures of the red rock, and the flowers, but I can't find them. So just imagine that they're there. It really was a beautiful drive.

So we stopped in Las Vegas (actually, Henderson) to visit Jamie, and once again, we didn't take any pictures, because we were having so much fun catching up. For anyone who's wondering, Jamie's doing well. She has a beautiful little girl, and her new house is fabulous. Thanks for letting us stop by, James!

After spending more time than we should have, we headed West toward California. There was a car accident just outside of Las Vegas, so the going was very slow at first, but things moved faster after a while, and we played more "I Spy" and "20 Questions." Brian and I tried to get the kids to play the game where you come up with a category, like "colors," then you have to take turns thinking of songs that have colors in them, but the kids weren't too interested in that. We played boys and against girls, and Brian started a game with the theme being "snake," because he knew Ethan would be able to come up with the "Green Anaconda" song, and he had "She's a Cold Hearted Snake" in his head, and he thought I wouldn't be able to come up with anything, but I completely blew him away with the song, "If you take a turtle and a snake, put them together and see what they make. A neck that's long, a tail that's strong, add four paddles where they all belong. A, B, C, D, Elasasaurus! Elasasaurus! The giant of the sea!" (Does anyone know that song besides my family? I've never heard it anywhere else, but I know we didn't come up with it!)

After we made it into California, we played the "Try to Keep the Engine from Overheating" game and lost...twenty minutes from our destination. Luckily, we were headed to Brian's aunt's house, so Uncle Tracy came to rescue us.

We spent the night with Karen and Tracy (and Gregory!) and while we were settling in, Alyssa worked on her worksheet to figure out where we were headed the next day. Every time we stopped somewhere to that point, someone would ask if we were going to Disneyland, and Brian would hush them up quick so the kids wouldn't hear, and we were able to successfully keep our secret until we got to Karen and Tracy's house and Tracy unknowingly spilled the beans. So Alyssa knew what the worksheet was going to spell out, and she kept saying, "It's Disneyland, I just know it," and Tracy kept trying to convince her otherwise by coming up with silly names.

Alyssa: See? It says, Disneyla...It's going to spell Disneyland for sure.

Tracy: No, it's probably Disneylatawahoo. That's where you're going.

Or something like that. It was fun. Yeah, so she figured out where we were headed, and the next morning Brian and Karen took the van in to get the radiator replaced, and then we were on our way. (Thanks Karen and Tracy (and Gregory!) for everything!)

I slept almost the entire way to Disneyland. I didn't mean to, but I did. So that went by quickly. We stopped at our hotel, dropped the car off, and walked across the street to the most magical place on Earth.

Spoiled Rotten, Really I Am

Last summer, when I was dreaming about buying a house someday, and we were figuring out when we might be able to do so, we planned a trip to Disneyland this Spring, since our plans were to wait until later this summer to start house hunting. We decided that we would go, then we made our hotel reservations early so they would be cheap, and then we left it at that.

Fast forward to this January when we started looking for a house and found our wonderfully fabulous home on the first day - this is when I had a few tiny moments of sanity where I was actually the one saying, "We shouldn't go to Disneyland. It's going to stretch things too far," and Brian was the one saying, "Let's see what we can do. It's great to go when the kids are still young enough for it to be special to them."At this point we had only made our hotel reservations, and we could cancel them at any time without penalty, so we just went ahead and kept them, but we could still back out if we needed to.

So ever since Brian started working last summer, he's been in charge of taking care of the office computers and printers, and apparently he's been doing such a good job at it that they haven't once had to call the guy they used to have fixing the computers since Brian started working there. When Dan and Bruce heard that we wanted to go on a vacation, they very nicely let Brian cash out the reward points on the office credit card to help pay for the trip, as a special thank you. It completely blew me away! Dan said it's just proof that Family Eye Care loves Brian, and it actually gave me one more reason to love the fact that Brian works for them.

So long story short, we went to Disneyland last week! Yea! It was a miracle that the vacation even happened, and the whole thing lived up to it's miraculous expectations. It was fabulous!

DAY 1
We left bright and early Friday morning. I say "bright and early" in reference to Brian. I wanted to leave at 5:00, and he said absolutely not, and we ended up leaving around 7:30. We kept the trip a secret at first, since we didn't know if it would be happening or not, but then we went ahead and kept it a surprise for the kids, and they didn't even know we were going anywhere until we woke them up and said, "Let's get in the car and get going." It was so fun fun to watch them get dressed and ready and keep asking, "What's going on? Where are we going?" I made a workbook for Alyssa with maps and such, and it had worksheets in it for each leg of our trip for her to figure out where we were going. As she was figuring out the first one, she kept guessing our destination.

"We are d- D! We're going to Disneyland!"

Me and Brian, "No, keep going."

"We are driving to S- Silverwood! We're going to Silverwood!"

Again, "No, keep going."

"We are driving to Salt Lake City, Utah. Utah! That's where Callie and Cecily live!" We were glad that she was just as excited to see her cousins as she was to the possibly of going to Disneyland or Silverwood.

We were surprised to find that it was snowing on Cabbage Hill, and we stopped for a very cold and very quick picnic breakfast at one of the rest areas.

Brian and Ethan braved the cold.

Marcus and Alyssa were the pansies who stayed in the warm car.

It was crazy-windy on the drive down. For the whole trip we actually drove through almost every weather possibility imaginable: snow, wind, rain, blizzard snow, sleet, hail, and intense heat. It was great!

We stopped at Tucanos in Boise, Idaho for lunch. We were planning on hitting a Tucanos or Rodizios in Utah, since Brian loves churrascos, but we hit Boise around lunch time (perfect!) and lunch is cheaper than dinner (even perfecter!). We were way impressed at the quality of the salad bar, which they actually called a "salad festival" for obvious reasons, and we thoroughly enjoyed our stop. Although Brian spent the rest of the drive saying, "I ate way too much."

During lunch Marcus was doing this crazy thing where he would stick a raisin in his mouth and dance to the music and make silly faces.

We got into Salt Lake City around 7:45 and after some confusion with our hotel room we met up with Brian's cousin's family for ice cream. The hotel confusion was that they put us in a room with one king-sized bed, and when Brian called the front desk to say we needed two queens, they said they must have changed the beds in that room without changing the information in the computer, and after having the same problem when we moved our luggage into two other rooms, they just ended up putting us in a suite, since they were guaranteed to have two queen beds. It was nice to be able to send the kids into the sitting room the next morning to watch cartoons while Brian and I slept in.

Back to ice cream: Brian's cousin, Scott, is graduating from the University of Utah, and he and Alexia have two beautiful children (Ethan and Emmery) who are just between Ethan and Marcus in age. It was so fun to get together with them. Up until now we've only seen pictures of their kids, and we were only able to see Scott and Alexia briefly at Mark's wedding a couple of months ago. We went to a Nielson's Frozen Custard, because Brian used to love to go there when he was single, but it was freezing cold and they didn't have tables inside, so we didn't end up staying for long. Scott and Alexia said they should be coming up to the Northwest to visit soon, so we're looking forward to that!

Day 2
The next morning we slept in, then put on our jackets to brave the weather and visit Temple Square. We took a tour of the Conference Center, which was amazing. The lady giving the tour was so nice. She and Alyssa had a great time talking with each other. The kids were very well-behaved, although the boys got bored toward the end and just wanted to run around the roof.

The artwork in the Conference Center is amazing! There were so many beautiful pieces depicting the Savior, Joseph Smith, the prophets, stories from the Book of Mormon and the Bible - I would love to go back either without the kids someday or when they're older, so we can spend more time looking at everything. It was all so gorgeous!

We almost weren't able to go on the roof, because of the rain, but luckily they let us. Brian and I were married in the Salt Lake Temple, so it was fun to show it to the kids.

Alyssa loved all of the flowers at Temple Square.

After visiting the temple we headed to visit Brian's mission president and his wife. I loved them! They treated us just like we were their children or grandchildren coming for a visit. Brian told the kids that we would just stop to say hello, and we ended up staying the entire afternoon! It was so much fun. They showed us the movie "The Errand of Angels," which their daughter-in-law wrote about her mission experience. (It's very good - you should watch it. I watched the whole thing while Brian visited and the kids played in the toy room.) They fed us lunch and root beer floats, and the kids made themselves very much at home. Brian had a great time catching up with them and hearing about news from all of his mission buddies.

I don't have any pictures of the next part of our visit, because we were having so much fun to think about taking any. After visiting with the Johnson's, we ordered pizza from Brick Oven Pizza (do you see the theme of eating at all of our old favorite places?) and headed to my brother's house. He just graduated from BYU's MBA program, and they were getting ready to sell their townhouse, so we helped with that a bit after eating dinner. Philip was putting in new light fixtures in the bathroom upstairs, so Brian helped him with that, and Erin is pregnant and extremely sick, so I helped straighten up the girls' bedroom while she laid on the bed and gave me directions. Then the guys played a word-type game on the computer while Erin and I talked. Oh, and all the while the kids were in the basement playing, and we didn't have one single argument the whole time!

We didn't leave Erin and Phil's house until 11:00, and we were exhausted. We stayed in Orem that night, and woke up to snow on our car the next morning.

Day 3 - coming soon

Spring Showcase

Alyssa had her last showcase presentation at MCP today. She did an experiment that we did in our Science class about the animals in Polar habitats having blubber to keep them warm. She was so excited that she was up and ready this morning even before I was. Brian walked into the bathroom while I was in the shower and said, "Alyssa's up and dressed," and when I came out she wanted to know when we could leave. It wasn't even 7:00 yet, and I definitely wasn't going anywhere with no clothes on! It took about ten minutes to convince her to leave my room so I could get dressed.

So after breakfast we gathered her materials and she practiced without the ice water a couple of times with Ethan and me for volunteers. She had a hard time waiting until it was time to leave. We were the first ones in the classroom, and she was so excited when it came time for her turn.

The video is a little shaky (okay, a lot shaky) because Marcus kept trying to see Alyssa in the camera. But she did a great job!

Check Out George-alina

George-alina was just barely a centimeter long when Alyssa brought her home a couple of weeks ago, and we have watched her grow and fatten up until she was about an inch and a half long when she stretched herself out. Over the last couple of days George-alina has been moving a lot less, and I admit there were a few times I was afraid she was dead. I thought that maybe Alyssa's enthusiasm and carrying her little plastic ramekin home around to show George-alina to all of our neighbors had finally done her in, but when I looked closely I could see her little mouth moving. All was well.

Then, this morning I checked on George-alina when we woke up, and sure enough, she is halfway in to her cocoon. Alyssa keeps saying, "Just in time to take her back to school tomorrow!" This whole process has been amazing to watch, especially watching the way Alyssa has taken care of her little caterpillar. The chrysalis George-alina is building for herself is just beautiful. The picture doesn't show the tiny bright yellow dots very well, or the pretty smooth texture.

Baby Nora

Today we visited my sister at the hospital to see her brand new baby girl, Elinore Rose Johnson. She is just the sweetest thing! She weighed in at 9 pounds, 1 ounce, and her face is so round. It's adorable. When I took Christina's other kids to the hospital yesterday, Eliza, who is two, kept saying, "This is my baby," and one time she almost slipped and said, "This is Mom's - this is my baby." All of the kids love her already, and they are all so excited!

Brian and I watched Chris and Nate's other five kids over the weekend, and we had a lot of fun, but I have to say that Christina and Nathan are amazing, because I am exhausted! (Actually, there's one more kid, Emma, but she was in Utah with my parents for my brother's graduation from the MBA program. Way to go, Phil!) You know how they say that when you serve people, you love them even more? Well, it's definitely true. Over the weekend I learned that Megan is the best big sister any girl can be, Michael is rockin' at mowing the lawn, Marian is so kind and patient, Derek is all over the rule of picking up the toys that are already out before you get more toys from the closet, and Eliza is just adorable. But what's neat is that because I was serving their family while Christina was in the hospital having Elinore, I felt a special bond with that baby the second I held her. She's less than two days old, and I love her so much, and she's not even my baby - she's Eliza's!

My Eyes Aren't Itchy Anymore!

This is me.

This is me in contacts.

(dramatic pause)

Any difference?

I know I don't look any different with contacts in as opposed to out (which, of course, is the whole point of contacts), but I feel so much better! (Actually, the first picture is a little blurry, and the second is clearer, so just pretend that the photos represent my vision clarity as well.)

Normally I have horrible Spring and Summer allergies that no eye drop can touch, and I suffer through them the entire summer, but for the last two days while my contacts have been in, my eyes don't itch or feel grainy at all. But once I take them out at night, the itching starts right up. I think I'll be wearing contacts a lot this summer.

Last night I was able to successfully remove them by myself, but I haven't yet put them in by myself. I have these "little, squinty eyes," as Brian says, "which must mean that [I'm] suspicious." It makes it really hard to put contacts in. Luckily, I can pull my optometrist out of bed each morning and ask him to put them in for me until I can do it myself.

Edited to Add: I went in to Family Eye Care yesterday and Ellie patiently taught me to put contacts in by myself! Yea!

Meet George

George is Alyssa's catepiller she's raising as part of her Butterfly class. She is beyond excited! She's been begging to have a pet of her own for the past year and a half, and I am so glad that she thinks this counts. She was able to bring George home yesterday after school, and she has been taking good care of him ever since. George likes to eat the food paste stuff he's living on, and sometimes he sleeps. That's about all he does. Alyssa loves him just the same.

Edited to Add: George is now called George-alina. She has grown twice her original size, and she is molting. It scared us half to death until Alyssa told us, "Oh, I remember now! We have to wait and soon she'll start molting!"

Churches

We're changing our phone number. We just set up our new phone account last week, and we're already ready to change our number. The first wrong call happened when we were out, so I came home to a message for Sister Jessica from a nice lady saying she decided that she would like to go to church that Sunday. I called her back to let her know she had called the wrong number so she didn't think that Sister Jessica ditched her, and if it hadn't been General Conference that weekend, I would have gone ahead and invited her to church with us.

The next calls came from a 1-800-number, which at first I ignored, because I figured it was telemarketers. They called a lot. The same number called us around four or five times a day, and I would just ignore it. Brian finally answered when he was home, and when he told the man he had reached the wrong number, the man said, in an angry voice, "Oh, I've got the right number," and hung up on him. Brian then looked up the number online and found that it was a creditor from Wells Fargo who had been trying to track some people down for a while. No wonder he called so often.

We've gotten a couple of calls to the parents of a girl who has skipped classes at Pasco High. It's just a recording, so I hope they're not getting in trouble for not getting the calls.

The majority of the calls, though, have come from people looking for Sister Jessica or Pastor James, and they all expect us to be a church, so they don't give me any preliminary background when they call, and it completely catches me off guard. Last week a man called and said he had come up to Washington from Sacramento for a job interview. Well, he didn't get the job, and now he needed money to purchase a plane ticket back to Sacramento to be with his wife and family. (I seriously didn't figure out that he was calling a church until this morning. I thought he was just dialing random numbers, hoping to get some money.)

Today, right when Alyssa and I were finishing up her Phoncis test, the phone rang, and I thought it might be Brian, so I said, "Good job, Alyssa! Five minute break!" and ran to our bedroom to answer the phone. It wasn't Brian.

"Yeah," the man said, "I'm wondering if anyone in your church does mechanical work?" I thought for a moment, and said the second thing that popped into my head. The first, which, of course, I didn't say, was: Why are these crazy people calling us? and the second, which I did, was: "You know, we just moved into this house a couple of weeks ago, and we haven't really gotten to know anyone at church that well. We really don't know anybody. I don't know any mechanics."

And then it hit me. DUH! He thinks we're a church. He must think I'm Sister Jessica. I hope he didn't think I was Pastor James. So then I had to explain that we were indeed not a church, and I think I confused him more than he confused me, because he kept saying "We're just looking for a mechanic...We're having problems..." while I apologized and said good-bye.

So we're changing our number.

And speaking of churches, we went to our new ward on Sunday. You would think that having church at 12:30 would make us be on time, but I happened to shut the car door on Marcus' fingers as we were getting ready to leave, and then we had to put ice on it, but he didn't like the ice pack, so Brian pulled a water bottle out of the fridge and had him hold it on the way to church. He drank some of the water, too.

While we were driving to church, I told the kids how important it was to make a good first impression, and that they needed to be good for their teachers. "Alyssa," Brian said, when I was finished, "she's talking to you." (She's been talking back and being quite rude to me the past few weeks, but actually the last three days have been wonderful!) Then Brian started to lecture Alyssa on not talking back and respecting her teachers, and Ethan said, "Look, Alyssa!" as we were passing the soccer fields with fifty gazillion soccer games going on.

"Hold on, Ethan," Brian said, "Wait until I'm done talking to Alyssa. Now you got in trouble this morning for talking rude..." and three minutes later, as we were nearing church, Brian finally said to Ethan, "Now what did you have to say?"

Ethan hesitated for about two seconds, then said, with full enthusiasm, "Alyssa yook out yours window!" It's too bad the soccer fields were long gone by then. We did have a good talk about them, though.

Church was wonderful. Sister Hall (Emily's mom) is a nursery leader, and it would be hard to think of a better person to teach and love Marcus and all the other little kids in there. (There was a boy who fell asleep under the table during singing time, and one of the ladies told me that it was "his table" and he fell asleep there every week. No wonder - church is right during nap time!)

Sister Beck sat beside me in Relief Society, and she was my very first tent mom at Girls Camp. It was fun catching up with her.

As I was taking Alyssa to Primary, a little blonde girl whisked by, grabbing Alyssa on the way. I found out from her mom that Kinzie is the girl Alyssa has been playing with in a yard across the street, and we actually had her over to play today, and then we all walked to the park together. That was a lot of fun! Kinzie is Alyssa's age, and she has a brother a little older than Ethan, and another brother a little older than Marcus. It's perfect! And I really enjoyed visiting with their mom while the kids played.

On Monday a sister who lives in the cul-de-sac over stopped by and invited me to a girls-lunch-out on Tuesday, which was great, and I got to know a few of the sisters in the ward, including the Bishop's wife. She gave us permission to not answer his calls, so I guess we won't have to worry about getting callings for a while. We'll just tell him we thought his number was a creditor from Wells Fargo.

Pie For Breakfast

We had Brian's parents and his aunt and his grandpa over for dinner last night, and yesterday afternoon I asked the kids if we should make cupcakes for dessert. Alyssa asked for something lemony instead, so I looked up some lemon meringue pies on Allrecipes, and found the best lemon meringue pie ever! It is delicious. (By the way, I love cooking in my new kitchen. I love the counter space, and I love that it's open to the family room so I'm not cut off from the kids when I'm cooking.) The pie was so delicious that I'm having the last bit of it for breakfast this morning. (And by "the last bit" I mean two of the three small slices that were left from last night, and when Alyssa asked to have the third slice, I seriously considered saying, "No" to her so I could eat it myself.)

Brian's aunt also brought a beautiful pink Azalea for our new house. She said they usually have problems growing in this area, but to ask Grandma Orton about it, because she successfully has some in her yard. (Our first plant!)

Lemon Meringue Pie III

Ingredients

• 1 (9 inch) pie crust, baked
• 1 1/2 cups white sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1/2 cup cornstarch
• 1/3 cup water
• 4 eggs, separated
• 1/2 cup lemon juice
• 2 teaspoons lemon zest
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup white sugar

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C).
2. Combine 1 1/2 cups sugar, salt, and 1 1/2 cups water in a heavy saucepan. Place over high heat and bring to a boil. In a small bowl, mix cornstarch and 1/3 cup water to make a smooth paste. Gradually whisk into boiling sugar mixture. Boil mixture until thick and clear, stirring constantly. Remove from heat.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together egg yolks and lemon juice. Gradually whisk egg yolk mixture into hot sugar mixture. Return pan to heat and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in grated lemon rind and butter or margarine. Place mixture in refrigerator and cool until just lukewarm.
4. In a large glass or metal bowl, combine egg whites and salt. Whip until foamy. Gradually add 1/2 cup sugar while continuing to whip. Beat until whites form stiff peaks. Stir about 3/4 cup of meringue into lukewarm filling. Spoon filling into baked pastry shell. Cover pie with remaining meringue.
5. Bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes, until meringue is slightly brown. Cool on a rack at for at least 1 hour before cutting.

Ketchup

• It took a few days longer than expected, but we finally got keys to our house and moved in. The Realtor told us that we should be able to get the keys when we signed the papers, but things got a little messed up and some of the companies we were working with for the title put things behind a few days. I spent an entire day saying to anyone who would listen, "If the email they sent us says that the signing is complete, why the heck do we not have our keys yet?!?" I was very impatient, and the minute we got the call to pick up the keys, I stuffed the kids in the car and headed over to pick them up. Then I drove immediately to our new house and started painting the kids room. The boys room is done in Charm Blue, because, obviously, they're charming, and Alyssa's room is done in Purple Slush. Brian calls it Purple Flurp, from Jimmy Neutron. It is quite purple. I've put purple curtains in her room, too, and I think we're going to take them back and switch to white. It really is quite purple in there.
• We got the keys on Wednesday afternoon and frantically painted and moved in until Friday morning. Back in January, Brian signed up for a Continuing Education conference in Seattle for the 27th and 28th of March, and at the time, we thought it would be a great idea for me to go with him. But as things were going, with only two days to move, we didn't think it would be a good idea for both of us to take the weekend off, and up until Friday morning we didn't think that even Brian would be going. We had already set up babysitting for the kids, though, and I completely blew out my knee while moving furniture and wasn't doing very well because of that, so we ended up taking the weekend off anyway.
  
• So just after lunch, we called my mom and Tallia to make sure they were still okay with watching the kids, and Brian and I took off to Seattle. I slept and watched T.V. at the hotel while Brian went to his classes. When he called me during one of his breaks, I answered the phone by saying, "This is the best week of my adult life!" We went out to dinner with Mark and Becky, since we didn't get to see much of them at their wedding. We were right about Becky: she is just as nice as she seemed to be! We loved being able to go out with them and get to know them better.
• We finished getting all of our stuff out of the old house, and spent an entire day cleaning. My poor nails are destroyed from all the cleaning and scrubbing. I'm not entirely picky about my nails, too. My idea of a manicure is just making sure they're clean and shaped nice, and putting on a coat of clear nail polish, so you know that they're destroyed when someone like me says they're destroyed.
• Last week was Spring Break at MCP, so we took the week off at home as well. Alyssa made friends with the kids across the street, who were also on Spring Break, and I organized the new house. It's amazing how fast and easy it is to move in when there's enough space to put everything. When Brian and Nathan (brother-in-law) and Michael (brother) were moving things in, they put all the furniture on the right rooms, which made it so easy to put the beds together so we could sleep well. Mike and Nathan even carried a filing cabinet up the stairs that took two guys carrying each drawer and then the cabinet to get it out of the old house. When they made it to the top of the stairs, almost dead from exhaustion, I said, "Wow, you guys are awesome!" I was really impressed.
• The Easter Bunny came on Saturday. Marcus went downstairs before coming to our bedroom (which he never does) and came back up the stairs with a Cadbury egg in one hand, saying, "Zandy! Zandy!" Apparently he had attacked Alyssa's basket and eaten half of a Cadbury Caramel egg before coming upstairs to tell us of his find.
• We didn't dye Easter eggs until Saturday night, when Brian was at the Priesthood session of General Conference. The kids loved it! Then they ate about 15 eggs between them. At first Marcus wouldn't let me help peel his eggs, and he ended up eating and choking on some shell. It didn't stop him from having fun, though, and soon he let me peel his eggs for him.
• Conference was wonderful, like always. I liked the theme about love that seemed to run through all of the sessions. God's love, love in our families, Jesus' love for us - I loved that. Conference was tough this year, because the kids are still young enough to not sit still, but they're getting old enough to be decently noisy. I spent the entire weekend saying, "Sshh!! I'm trying to listen." Alyssa sat through a couple sessions, though, which surprised me. She did great!
• We had my family over Sunday afternoon. Brian and I were talking afterward about how crowded it was to have anyone over at our old house and how it was so wonderful to have the room to enjoy having people over.
  
• We're back to school today. It's a new Trimester at MCP, so Alyssa starts her new classes on Thursday. She's taking a butterfly class, Hands on History (which she is thrilled about. She loves History!), and she's still in P.E. it Mr. Jolly, and all of the kids love Mr. Jolly. Right now Alyssa is finishing up with Math. It's wonderful to have a school room! The kids are away from the toys and the food in the kitchen, and Alyssa is doing a fabulous job of trying to stay focused.
• I love our new house!
  

Not Yet, But Almost There

We didn't close on Friday, which meant that we weren't able to use the lovely weekend for the move, but it did give me an extra couple of days to paint Ethan's bed (which I didn't do) and whine and complain to Brian about not being able to move yet (which I did do).

As long as the title gets here, we should be signing papers tomorrow and moving in on Tuesday. It's going to be a crazy week! There are so many wonderful things happening right now. Life is fabulous. I am happy.

Have I Lost My Self Control Or Just Regained My Sanity?

Last week a nurse came to my home to draw my blood and test my urine and write down my height and weight. Why? Brian and I are applying for life insurance. I know, we're officially grown up now. We're buying a house and getting life insurance. Officially adults.

So all of these tests were no big deal. The kids were concerned that I would be getting my blood drawn, but when it came time for it, they were busy watching the Green Anaconda song on You Tube, along with other various anaconda videos they kept clicking on, so they really didn't mind all that much. I'm used to peeing in a cup from being pregnant, so, yeah...no big deal. Height: 5' 5''. I knew that. Weight. Well, I might have acted all nonchalant about the numbers showing up on the scale, but the minute the nurse was out the door, I exclaimed, "Are you serious?!?"

Let's back up a little bit to last year when Marcus was still nursing all the time. I wasn't sleeping well. I was constantly tired. But I was skinny! Nursing does great things for my weight. I usually lose my baby fat pretty slowly for the first six months, but then once I reach that point, the pounds just fall off. If you factor that in with the fact that I was painting and cleaning when we moved back to the Tri-Cities and walking Alyssa to and from school, I lost the baby fat from Marcus' pregnancy pretty fast. And it just kept coming off.

I'll be honest with you and say that I don't judge people for their weight. That is just not something I really take notice of when I meet someone. But here's where the real honestly comes in: I loved being skinny. It was wonderful to fit into clothes I hadn't worn in years. It was wonderful to feel sexy when Brian came to visit, even with the loose post-pregnancy skin and my c-section scar bump that I hear will never go away. And it was wonderful to just feel cute, even on my frumpy days.

The down side to all of this is that I could eat anything I wanted and as much as I wanted while I was nursing, and the minute Marcus was weened, the pounds started to pile back on. I ordered a special dress online for Brian's graduation a couple of months before Brian's graduation, and when it came in the mail I considered sending it back and getting a smaller size. I'm glad I didn't, though, because it fit perfectly when graduation time came around. Then, a couple months later, it was a bit snug.

Do you see where this is going? I wasn't happy with gaining this weight, so I started exercising and "watching what I ate" in July, and I've been doing reasonably well with both of those since then. So I was surprised that it was that bad when I stood on the scale last week. And when the nurse left and I finished my exclamations, I resolved to really, really do something about it.

It was the day after my birthday, and Brian had called earlier that day to say he ordered a red velvet cake (so yummy!) to have our parents over on Friday, so I decided that the diet would start on Monday. (Well, originally it was supposed to be Sunday, but my brother's birthday party was then planned for Sunday, and we celebrated a late Chinese New Years at the same time. You don't want to be on a diet for Chinese New Year at my parents house. Yum!)

I spent the week researching and planning. I decided to do the Atkins diet, since I've had family members have success with it in the past. (Please don't leave comments saying whether or not you like Atkins. I don't want to argue either way. Right now it's the concept of a diet that's in question, not THE diet.) Anyway.

So Monday I started limiting my diet to meats and vegetables. No more bread. No more cake, or cookies, or milk. Oh, no milk! I love milk! This is me being honest again: I don't eat goodies as much as I say that I do. I think I bake more than I eat, and talk about baking more than I actually bake. So actually, I don't miss the sweets, especially since I just had a birthday weekend and got myself all caked-out. I do miss baking for my kids, though, or really the thought of baking for my kids. It's only been two days.

I realized today when I was making pistachio pudding and putting them in white chocolate shells that have been living in our freezer for a while that I was making something fun for my family to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, and that I wouldn't be sharing that fun with them. That's no fun! Not sharing the fun is no fun! I realized that I would rather be a little overweight and enjoying life than be skinny and not allowed to eat anything.

So the plan is to make my own rules. We already do a pretty good job of eating healthy. We get our fruits and veggies, eat at home a lot more than we eat out, drink lots and lots of water. I've been doing a great job of getting up in the morning to exercise, and really no matter how big I am, as long as I'm exercising regularly I feel good. Both physically and about myself. I think I just need to be a little more aware of what I'm eating and how much of it I'm eating, and I'm going to come up with some rules on that to follow.

So there it is - diet canceled, or altered. Brian actually just walked in. Here's the conversation:

Carrie: Hey, I'm just finishing up a post. I'll be done in a minute.

Brian: About your diet?

Carrie: How did you know?

Brian: I know you.

(Brian then walked back out of the house and came back in carrying a box of boxes of Girl Scout cookies.)

Brian: I don't know why, but Bruce bought 60 boxes of Girl Scout cookies today....Are you going to alter your diet to include thin mints?....If they say, "thin" they must work!

I'm so glad I am now allowing myself to drink milk, because we have a lot of cookies to eat.

Waddle-ee-Hoo-Hoo!

Did you catch that excitement? I don't even know what I said, I'm so excited. We just got a call from USAA, and they've moved our closing date from the 22nd of March to the 19th of March. We're moving into our own house THIS weekend! Yea!

And here's a couple of random pictures we took in January, since everyone keeps asking for pictures:

My "Surprise" Birthday Party

We've put off school for a bit this morning so I can finish my lesson for Achievement Days this afternoon. My mom and Alyssa (especially Alyssa) think I should take the day off, because it's my birthday, but I've got a week or two marked as vacation for our upcoming move, and I don't want to get too behind. We'll start school in a few minutes, and we'll just take it easy today. It's History and Science day anyway, so it should be pretty fun.

So while I was working on my lesson, the kids kept hollering, "Don't look!" as they brought up play houses and pillows and blankets from the basement. Then Alyssa yelled, "Look when I say three! One, two three!" and they all yelled, "Surprise!" when I turned from the computer.


They had set up a birthday party for me, complete with stuffed animal guests and presents wrapped in blankets. All the presents came from around the house. I got Whack-a-Mole with one hammer, an embroidery hoop, my favorite pair of shoes, a flash light, a toy dirt devil vacuum, and a piece of wood Alyssa once painted.


The kids had me sit on all of the pillows in the play house to open my presents. It was so fun to see how happy they were to give me my presents!

Aaaarrggg!

Yesterday we received a letter in the mail from Seattle. (Guess who was in Seattle with us over the weekend who might have sent it.) It said that it was from Captain Blackbeard Pegleg Hook and that we had one of his buried treasures in our garden. We had to finish our school work before we went out to dig, so we called Grandma and Grandpa Jacks to come over and help us find the buried treasure.Alyssa was so excited! She told all of our neighbors, and she almost had the neighbor boys, Michael and Martin, believing that there could possibly be millions of dollars in our backyard. Bu the time we had our school work finished, and Grandma and Grandpa over, Brian was on his way home from work, so we waited for him to get here, and then the treasure hunt began!

Brian counted off the paces and we lifted a carpet to find a bamboo X laying in the dirt.
We've always had this mysterious layer of white dirt about two feet down, and the directions said that once we hit that we would know we were close. So the kids started digging...

..and digging...

...and digging...

until they finally hit a layer of white dirt.

Brian started helping at that point, and pretty soon he was scraping the top of the treasure. It took him a while to get to the point that we could pull it out, because the kids were helping him, and for every shovel he scooped out, they would knock almost the same amount of dirt back into the hole!

When we pulled the treasure out we discovered that it was full of gold and silver chocolate nuggets, and twenty dollar bill paper with "Good for one ice cream at McDonalds with a grandparent" printed on the back. No one got greedy, and we split the chocolate with the whole group. Some of the gold nuggets had toffee and almond bits in them, so I figure they're worth the most. But it's been only one day since we found the treasure, and we've already eaten all of the chocolate. We still have all those fake twenty dollar bills, though, so we're rich!

Thanks Captain Blackbeard Pegleg Hook!

Seattle Pictures

Aquarium

Pizza!

Chuck E Cheese's

On the ferry

The fish shop at Pike Place Market

At the bottom of the Space Needle

At the top

It's sad to say that this is the best picture I got of Mark and Becky all night.

Oh, We Had So Much Fun!

Caution: This is not proof read. I'm up way past my bedtime, but I want to remember our great trip. Pictures coming soon.

So we headed to Seattle for the weekend for Brian's cousin's wedding, and we had a blast! Brian negotiated home loans and homeowners insurance with USAA on the way up, while I drove and Alyssa became carsick and threw up - eight minutes away from our destination! She was a trooper, though. She started feeling sick halfway through the trip, with a couple of hours to go, and she was able to keep things under control until then.

We met up with the Sumsions (Will, Nelsa, Marley, Evie, Sydney, and Grant) at the Red Robin in Silverdale, then after a lovely dinner with surprisingly well-behaved kids, we went to Will and Nelsa's house, where the kids watched a movie until bedtime and the parents played Cranium's Playoff and watched funny video clips online.

On Friday we walked the shops in Poulsbo and had the best doughnuts in the entire world. I'm not exaggerating - they were that good! Nelsa had a fabulous day planned, and I was so impressed with all the places we went. When they said, "You have to try the best doughnuts," they really turned out to be the best doughnuts." When they said, "...the best pizza," it really was the best pizza. (Plus, the pizza restaurant had basement that we ate in, so it was like having our own private restaurant.) We went to a free aquarium, where the kids were able to touch things in the wave pool, and we saw a baby whale skeleton, and Grant threw a sea shell at one of the tanks because he was trying to feed the fish. (It scared the living daylights out of everyone that heard the crash, but it was so funny.) We went to a free underwater museum that had torpedoes and information about submarines and such, and Will explained a lot of the concepts and gadgets to us, which was so cool. And then we went to Chuck E Cheese's to let the kids run around for a while.

It was a great day! The kids were pretty well-behaved and they got along really well. Evie and Marley are just a few months older than Alyssa and Sydney is about a year younger, so Alyssa just ate up all the attention she got for being the novelty friend. Everyone wanted to sit by her or be her buddy while we were walking around, just like Alyssa likes it to be. She loves those girls, and she was so excited to see them and was so sad when we had to leave.

After Chuck E Cheese's we took a ferry down to Seattle. Ethan loved it and stayed up top with Brian almost the whole time. I wanted to stay up top, but Alyssa was whiny from leaving her friends, and Marcus was cold, so after a while we headed inside and then to the car.

We then checked into our hotel, and even though it was late, we knew the kids needed to eat dinner, otherwise we'd be hearing, "But we didn't even eat dinner!" when it came time to put them to bed. So we went to Azteca, one of the closest restaurants to the hotel, around 8:30. Alyssa kept falling asleep in her chair, Ethan was too tired to eat anything, and Marcus ate everything he could get his hands on. The minute we got back to our hotel room, we all crashed and immediately fell asleep.

We met Brian's parents, Linda and Ron, and Scott and Alexia for the continental breakfast the next morning, and then took off to Pike Place Market. It was so fun to wander around the shops and end up at the place where they throw the fish all about. There was a huge row of flower booths that all had huge bouquets of flowers for just five or ten dollars. They even had beautiful dried arrangements for way cheap, but Brian and I decided that we wouldn't be able to get one home without it being destroyed. If I lived in the area, I would definitely go there once a week or so and get fresh flowers - the tulips were gorgeous! Oh, Alyssa made friends with the "pot lady" (a lady who made and sold pots) and then she found a daffodil on the ground, which the flower shop owner said she could keep, and from that point on she was determined to make it back to the pot lady, "to talk to her," and when she found her, Alyssa gave her the daffodil to put in one of her pots.

After Pike Place Market we went to the Space Needle and actually got to go up to the top. I've never done that before! I was hoping to at least walk around the bottom and check things out, but we went up the elevator, and the kids loved it. Ethan loved it the most. It was his favorite part of the trip, he said. While we were driving around Seattle, Brian and I kept saying, "Look, there's the Space Needle!" and the kids would be, "Oh, nice, big deal," but after they visited it, every five minutes while we were driving around we would hear Alyssa or Ethan say, "Look it's the Space Needle," or "Look! It's uh Hace Yeedle," respectively.

We wore ourselves out again, so after a quick stop at McDonalds for lunch (and some Greek gyros for the adults from a neighboring place) we went back to the hotel where I fell asleep while Brian watched the Olympics and the kids ran around the room. Brian even cleaned up a diaper emergency while I was sleeping - yea!

So after watching the ending to "Independence Day" we got ready and headed to the wedding. Marcus made machine gun noises during the ceremony, and when I stood up with him in the back, he really wanted to eat the cupcake wedding cake, which I wouldn't let him, of course, so he wasn't too pleased with me. The wedding was beautiful. Becky looked gorgeous, and she pumped her arm when they kissed and kept doing little happy dances throughout the evening. She seemed like a very happy person, or maybe she was just happy she was getting married. Probably both.

We were all exhausted. Alyssa kept drifting off during dinner, and Ethan fell asleep during the toasts, so we took off just after Mark and Becky had their first dance. Even though the kids were tired, Alyssa and Ethan really wanted to swim. Marcus fell asleep on the way to the hotel, so Brian stayed with him while I took the other two down to the pool. We swam for about twenty minutes, then fell asleep the second our heads hit our pillows.

We left for home the next morning after breakfast and enjoyed a quiet Sunday afternoon together. Then Brian's parents came over after the kids went to bed so we could try all the fancy cheeses Brian and his dad splurged on at Pike Place Market. It was a fabulous weekend!