Christmas Eve Sunrise

We rarely see the sun rise at our apartment, because our apartment is on the far east side of the apartment complex were we live.  I was outside this morning to take some laundry to the laundry room and saw the sun blazing over the mountains.  This picture doesn’t really do it justice, pictures never do, but I thought I’d share it with you.  I hope you all have a fabulous Christmas!

Sideways Underpants

We’ve been working on potty training Cailyn for I don’t know how long now.  The last time I bought a box of pull-ups I vowed it was the last box. (I have actually made that vow the past three times I have bought pull-ups.)  I can now proudly say that we have half a box left and she hasn’t used a pull-up for almost 2 weeks now!  It is the greatest thing in the world.

When I got home today from picking the kids up from Grandma Bonnie’s house, Cailyn was asleep, but I wasn’t sure how long it had been since she went to the bathroom, so I took her and sat her on the toilet.  She woke up and went potty.  When she got off the toilet to pull her panties up one of her legs was through the waist hole.  Brad said that had happened once before, but it was so funny to actually see it in action.  Cailyn and I both sat there and laughed about it.  Hey, I’m just happy she’s going by herself now.  I’m sure learning how to put on her panties the right way will come later.

Songs of the Season

I’ve been trying to figure out how to post music on my fine blog for awhile.  I’ve found it to be harder than it should be because I’m not on blogspot and wordpress doesn’t seem to like to cooperate with me very much.  I finally figured it out tonight with the help of my dear Bradley.  I’m still not very pleased with the way that it is posted.  I someday hope to be able to have somo type of playlist, but for now, this will have to do.  

I actually wasn’t planning on posting these songs in particular, but seeing that it’s that time of year, I figured they were appropriate.  I was reading a post from a fellow blogger whom I’ve never actually met but have loved reading her posts and look forward to what inspiring thing she will write next.  She wrote some of the lyrics to the song “In the Bleak Midwinter” in her post and it reminded me of a fun experience I had with my mother about 2 years ago.

Growing up, my mother and I have always liked singing together.  We always talked about how fun it would be to make a CD together.  So, about this time 2 years ago we went and did it.  These are some of our favorite Christmas songs.  The thing that I think is kind of cool about our CD is that my Grandmother played the piano for us.  She has severe arthritis in her hands, so it’s kind of special that she was able to play for us since in years to come she will probably lose her ability to play the piano.

To record in a decent studio is not cheap, so we were only able to record for 2 hours.  I sang soprano and my mom sang alto.  There are a lot of things that I wish I could go back and fix(both me and my mom were kind of sick that day too), but we just ran out of time, so that’s what you get.  Anyway, it was really fun to go do this.  I had always wanted to go in a real studio and record because I love singing, so I guess you could say one of my dreams was fulfilled that day. (to listen just click on the hyperlinks below) 

Starbright

Neath the Spell

Marys Lullaby

Christmas Carols Take Me To Bethlehem

(my Grandmother actually wrote the music and words to this song)

In the Bleak Midwinter

He Brought Love

Clementine

I bought this book online a month or so ago because it looked cute.  I’ve been reading a chapter of it each night to Cailyn before she goes to be.  Tonight we read three chapters and finished it.  The little girl in this book reminds me a lot of Cailyn.  I can’t really tell you about the book because this post would be a mile long and I am not that great a summarizing things, so I suggest you either go online and buy it, check it our from your local library, or borrow it from me.  There is actually a whole series of Clementine books that  I can’t wait to read the rest of.  

While I was reading the end part of the last chapter I started crying.  Clementine is crying and apologizing for a all the bad things that have happened and for not being the “easy” child and it just made me think about Cailyn.  I’ve found myself getting really frustrated with her lately with a billion different things.  And I just pictured Cailyn being the one saying she was sorry for being  so difficult and crying about it and I just started to feel really bad because she is only 2 1/2 and 99% of the time she isn’t doing things just to frustrate me even though that is how it seems at the time, so I should just chill out and not get so frustrated.   

I finished reading the last chapter and I was still crying.  It made Cailyn sad so she rested her head on my shoulder and was pouting.  A little bit after that she gave me a hug and a kiss and then said “Mommy, can you read the witch book now?”  So I went and got the witch book and read it to her.

Unfortunately, patience is not one of my strong qualities.  It is one of the things that I continue to work on and continue to have a major struggle with.  

George MacDonald said, “The principle part of faith is patience.”

I guess I need to have more faith.  More faith in myself.  More faith in my ability to be a good mother.  And most of all, more faith in my Savior.  

Blast from the Past!

I was just sitting here thinking about how nice it is to only have 3 more papers to write until the semester ends and how I’m not going to work on any of them tonight because I just really need a break from it all.  So I was looking at some part in our blog and somehow got linked to garageband.com when I found myself reading about Instant Winner.  For those of you who don’t know who Instant Winner is, it is the band Brad and all our friends from high school were in.  Anyway, there here is a music video of one of their songs that was made and when I figure out how to add MP3’s I’ll add some more. I also thought I’d share some pictures from back in the day.

Wedding Tag

My brain just died!

  I am sitting here at school trying to work on one of the million papers I have due and my brain has finally died.  I need a break and it’s only Tuesday…I’m in trouble.  As I have been sitting here, I have just kind of been thinking about my family and how much I love them.  I need to document something that Cailyn said the other day, so someday when she hates me I can look back at this post and remind myself that she really did like me at one time of her life.  

Gavin had gotten a bag of cereal out and spilled it all over the kitchen floor.  Brad went into the kitchen and started picking up the marshmallows and putting them in a bowl for Cailyn because they are her favorite.  I walked in and saw what he was doing and told Cailyn that she was lucky because if it was me cleaning up the cereal it would all just go in the garbage, marshmallows and all, because I’m a mean mommy.  Cailyn’s reply to my remark was, “You’re not a mean mommy, you’re a nice mommy.”  That just melted my heart.  It’s things like that that make parenting worth it.  Of course there are other things but when you have a 2 year old that has a mind of her own and can’t sit still or listen for one second, and a one year old that ou can’t really communicate with at all, it’s things like that that makes all the frustration worth it.  The thing that kills me is how fast my kids are growing up.  I feel like time is slipping away at too fast of a rate.  I can’t wait till I’m done with school so I can spend more time watching and helping them grow.

There is one more thing that I want to say in this fine blog today.  I love my husband!  I don’t think I say that enough.  We are both so busy with school and work that it’s hard to make time for each other anymore these days.  I get frustrated to easily with life a lot of the time but no matter what, he is always there to listen to me and comfort me.  He puts up with a lot.  Words can’t really describe how I’m feeling right now.  I just really love him.  Okay, I’m done….I’m not down with the gooshy stuff.  It’s not really my thing to publicize it…whatever!

Here are some pictures that I just like a lot!

(For some reason I can’t bring myself to post an entry unless it has pictures in it.)

This is a picture of Cailyn on her 2nd birthday.  I think it brings a new meaning to “shovel it in!”

This is one of my most favorite pictures of Brad.  I love the look on his face!

Dinner Anyone?

My friend Amber (Bodily) Baxter and I were talking online several weeks ago and I discovered that she would be in town a couple weeks later (she lives in San Diego).  We decided that we wanted to go to dinner together because it had been awhile.  Then we came up with this brilliant idea of having all our friends from High School and their significant others come along.  So I sent out a mass email and she sent something on Facebook and there you have it.  So the day came.  We went to Chiles in Orem.  It was really fun to see everyone that came.  Anyway, here are the pictures from that night.

Gavin’s Picture Day

bBay!!!

Attention Everyone!  I have a new site called “bBay!”  It’s a lot like that other sound-a-like auctioning website out there, only better because things listed there are most often FREE!!!  

So today, right now, click on the link and check it out, I think you’ll love it! we’ll be posting items to it more and more, so make sure you bookmark it and keep checking back!  here’s the link:

http://www.jackandjillwentupthe.com/bbay/

Make sure you read the “About” page so you know what’s going on, and we’ll see ya on over there!!!

I’m not having any more kids….and neither should anyone else!

So I was reading my friend Angie’s blog the other day and she had gone to www.makemebabies.com.  At the site you can upload pictures of whoever you want and it shows you what your children will look like.  Well she did it and posted the picture on her blog saying that her and her husband were thinking of having kids, but if they were going to turn out looking like this, they’ve changed their minds.  

Here is her handsome child:

So of course I went and did it to see if it was anywhere close to what my kids already look like…..

Talk about scary!!!!  So I took it upon myself to “generate” children for some of my other married friends!  

Taylor and Amber Van Sickle

Kendall and Jaime Ehat

Paul and Amber Baxter

(Amber had actually already done it when I went to her blog to get pictures, but this is the rendition I got!)

I hope none of you will be offended by your child. =]  There is hope though…I think!!  

Cailyn’s Summer Highlights - With Gavin Along For The Ride

I have had every intention to post each of these things as they occurred.  That obviously didn’t happen.  Anyway, these are some fun things we did this summer that Cailyn never stops talking about.  It’s fun…she’ll say, “Remember, remember when we went to …..!”  

 ”The Aquarium” and Chuck E. Cheese in Sandy with Grandma Julie, Ang, Hallie and Bryant

Our trip to the zoo with Grandma Bonnie, Grandpa Terrell, and Kimball

The Utah State Fair with Grandma Bonnie, Grandpa Terrell and Kimball (The first three pictures are from our favorite Vietnamese restaurant ”Mi La Cai Noodle House” in SLC!)

Chuck E. Cheese with Daddy, Grandpa Terrell and Kimball

Bitter Sweet Ending

This summer I have been doing an internship with the Pleasant Grove Ranger District of the Forest Service.  I worked mostly with their trails and dispersed rec crews maintaining hundreds of miles of trails stretching from American Fork Canyon to Payson Canyon, building fences, and supervising and enforcing quality control and safety on several eagle scout projects up Maple Canyon.  My last day was last Saturday.  We spent the day helping an eagle scout build a river crossing up Maple Canyon.  It was kind of a sad day, not because I’m going to miss cutting back brush and doing tread work in 100 degree weather in long pants and shirt or wearing out dated uniforms that don’t breath worth anything (even though I thought it was fun to wear it), but I made some really good friends that I’m going to miss.  Oh well, life goes on….

    Below are pictures of a fence that me and two guys from my crew supervised an eagle and about 40 other scouts and their leaders build.  We were in charge of quality control and safety.  I quickly found out that men don’t like to take orders from a woman in a uniform.  It was kind of funny!!

Man…the difference!!!

Our air conditioning in our civic hasn’t worked that great for the past 2 years.  It gets cold, it just doesn’t blow as hard as it should.  Today I went to Checker Auto Parts to get the battery in the mazda (we’ve been borrowing it from Terrell and Bonnie) checked because it was dead and we wanted to make sure that it was the battery and not the alternator.  Luckily, the battery didn’t hold a charge so I just had to buy a new battery.  While I was waiting for the battery to be checked I asked the girl there if she could help me find some air filters.  Every time we have gotten our oil changed they tell us that we need to get our air filters changed but if we would have them do it, it would cost three times as much instead of me just buying them an installing them myself.  So I finally bought them today and installed them…talk about totally disgusting.  It is no wonder why the air condition wasn’t blowing.  The filter was totally clogged!  Anyway, so our AC is working wonderfully now!!  I can’t believe we’ve gone this long without our AC working good.  I mean heck, the filter was only $10.00.  I haven’t gotten anything done today that I needed to, but it’s been a productive day!

I Slack Therefore I Am

So after about an hour of aimless wandering on Facebook, reading up on some pals and such, i thought to my self, “don’t you have a lot of things to write about on your own blog?” and then I said to my self, “yes.”

To make a long story short, I tried to log into my blog and had forgotten the password it has been so long. it took me about 15 minutes to remember it, and now I am here writing! we’ll see how much I can get done today. I’ll try to make a bunch of posts, so it’s more interesting for everyone else that is reading.

Here we go!

It has sure been a load of fun since the last time I posted, we’ve been around the world and back (at least it feels like it.) I have been LOVING IT at my internship with W.W. Clyde, and have found that it is what I want to be doing! It’s coming up on the end of the internship, and job offers might be on their way, let’s hope so, cause I would really enjoy doing this as a career! (more will come in future posts, with details on what I actually do).

Anisha has been taking over most of the managing here at Grandview Manor, and being a mom of 3 kids (Gavin, Cailyn, and Bradley), while going to school full time and doing her summer internship 3 days a week with the Pleasant Grove Forrest Service, and Service has been what it is. She goes out and works on/manages trail crews tidying up and maintaining the many trails of Utah Co., and enjoys it, but it would be better if she got payed for it. Hopefully next summer she can do it again and will get compensated for it. My I tip my hat to her, she never ceases to amaze me with her energy, and her will to get things done, one of the many reasons I love her so dearly.

Cailyn is growing up too fast, she is the daughter of my dreams and such a delight to our family! She loves movies and singing along to any song that she hears. she is just so fun!

And Gavin is growing as well, he’s crawling, climbing, and exploring and he is just a cute kid!

So there’s the readers digest version of an update on our family, now let’s go to the details! this time we’ll try to keep up!

This Is Gonna Hurt…BAD!!!

I got this in an e-mail and thought it was “post-able” so here it is:
These’ll hurt tomorrow!

Signs of the Times

I don’t know what the “times” are right now, but that’s just the title that came to mind when I was posting this. With that all over with… We were driving along one night a while back, coming up 800 N. in Orem from the freeway and we saw this road construction sign:

Okay, so that looks pretty normal right? Well okay, maybe there is a letter missing, but seems harmless:

Wait, Wait, Wait…. What are we reducing our speed for??

Haha, we had to stop and take a picture of this, it was pretty dang funny. As I was out taking pictures everyone else that was passing by had their cameras out taking pictures too. By the next day they had it fixed, but it was a pretty funny little mishap.

So, we pretty much love IKEA!

We’ve been Big fans of IKEA ever since the first time we went there, it’s a grand store because it is for the most part pretty cheap, the quality of most of the furniture there could also be found at Wal-Mart or Target but the selection at IKEA is what is so cool, and also the design that they have there is more than you would find at our other Big Box Stores. All in all, we love going there, ’cause we do!

On a different, sort of connected-to-the-subject note, My parents gave us a high quality Mantle clock for Christmas and we wanted to get a fine bookcase or something to go in our living room to set it on (and to have more shelves for books and pictures).  So the day after Christmas we went to IKEA and picked out our bookcase and decided that we would come back and get it the next day after we got the Christmas tree down.

The next day came along and we called IKEA and they were sold out of the bookcase that we wanted but they said that they were getting a load in that night and they should get more of that style. We went back on Friday and sure enough they had it there.  We decided to walk through the whole store to get the IKEA experience, and to see if there was anything else we wanted.

It was a swifter walk through the IKEA maze that day cause we had been there the day before and it was just kind of a refresher.  We got to the bookcase section and found the one we had picked out and right next to it was another one that was the exact same style but bigger, and it wasn’t much more so we decided to get the bigger one.  We found some awesome little DVD rack deals that were only $4.99 so we got 3 of those for our DVDs and while walking through the lower level we found some Baskets and a shoe rack that we could put behind our door to… you guessed it, hold our shoes!

So it was a pretty fun time, we brought it all home and had an assembly party, putting all of our new purchases together.  I think that overall we’re feeling pretty dang elated about our purchases, apparently excited enough to be making an entry in the ol’ blog about it eh? Mostly we just wanted to show ya’ll how our new living room looks.  Below are some pictures for you to whoop up!

The fine Mantle Clock

The clock on our new bookcase

Our new bookcase

Our DVD Racks

The Shoe Rack (Nisha did the staining)

And the baskets, we got them to put in place of where the DVDs used to be, only there was one hold up…

The basket was a little too tall to go in the space under the entertainment center because our Ent. center is bowing in the middle so we just pulled out the Saws-all and cut out a notch so it would fit under there!

And that’s that!  Oh, and one more random thing that I got with the Home Depot gift card that my mother-in-law gave me is this fine fire-safe file.

Boy, I tell ya’ what!

All is GROOVY!

Well, Gavin lived through the Jaundice regime and is looking like a normal earthling, he only had to stay in the suitcase lights for about a week… (ha… only) and now we’re back into normal (yet exciting) life.  Cailyn wakes up just about every morning saying, “Beebe!  Beebe!” and always has to go see her little brother and give him a kiss.

She really is a good big sister. She also has her moments when she likes to terrorize Gavin by steeling his binky, or getting all up in his face.  Sometimes shell act like she is going to be really nice and give him a kiss or something but then she’ll just lunge her hand at his face and scratch the crap out of it, which Gavin really doesn’t appreciate.  But all in all, things are dandy.  Here’s some pictures!

Brad’s Favorite Vocab Words

Well, I (Brad) have finally started my little database (if you will) of “fine” vocabulary words, I’ve always wanted a place to store all of these words, as well as have a place where I could share them with everyone.  So, Without further adieu (ado) I proudly present to you “Brad’s Favorite Vocabulary Words”!  These are constantly being added to, so make sure to check back every now and again.  If by chance in your daily lives you should happen to find a great word that for any reason strikes you, be sure to pass it on over to me and I’ll add it to the list! (there is a link on the page where you can do so, and there are links to the page on my Blog roll, and on my Surph-Ography ["links page"]). Desfrute!!!