Christmas Pics - Part 1

Merry Christmas!

We've had a great week of Christmas celebrations! Sunday night, we celebrated at the Blaser home. Chad started the night off right by proposing to Angie the second they walked through the door. Everyone scrambled for their cameras, so that's the reason for the fuzzy picture.

We enjoyed a delicious dinner, good company, talent show/story time and a gift exchange. I got a gift certificate to get a pedicure at Remedez from Sally. Thanks Sal! Of course, she probably thinks I didn't like the gift since she kindly asked if she could rub my feet earlier and I said no because I have a "feet thing". It's really just a feet thing for people that I know. I'm thrilled to let people I don't know rub my feet. Strange...I know. The grandkids got new pj's from Grandma B. They look so cute!

Christmas Eve we slept over at the Kepo'o home. Thanks Ryan for letting us commandeer your room! We ate yummy dinner, played games, and watched a movie then went to bed so Santa could visit. Luckily, the kids slept in until 8 AM. Then we dug into presents! Lila was incredibly spoiled...

After present opening, we ate a LARGE breakfast. It was great. Mom surprised everyone with a late gift - Rock Band for the XBox. We had a great time rocking out together. Mom, Chloe and I stayed in our pj's all day. Thanks to both of our families for making our Christmas such a great one!

The Youngest Alicia Fan

My phone ring is the Alicia Keys' song "No One" and Chloe has started singing it every time she sees my phone. I would guess that she's probably the youngest Alicia fan at 1 year old!

Mele Kalikimaka!

He Did It!

My incredibly talented husband can now add 'College Graduate' to his list of accomplishments. This morning, he received his final grades for his final semester in college! He has received his Bachelor of Science in Information Systems. I'm so proud of him. Way to go honey - I love you!

Just A Mom Story

I took Lila to the Dr a couple of days ago and was a little flustered upon arrival. We had been running errands all day and I felt like we hadn't had a second to take a breath. The receptionist looked at me with a little smirk on her face when I checked in, but I thought maybe she had been talking about something funny before I got there. Well, once I collected all my stuff and sat down, I felt a little heaviness on the side of my head. I looked in my hair and found a binky wrapped up in there! Would you have told me if you noticed a binky in my hair?? Sheesh!

Snow!

The snow has returned today! Marc and Lila had a blast making a snowman in our front yard. Brrrr!

Happy Birthday Chloe!

I can't believe you're already 1! I love you!

Lila's Haircut

I finally convinced Lila we had to cut her hair for it to grow. She was so brave and she looks so cute! She looked a little freaked out when she saw the hair on the ground, but once we had it styled, she loved it!

What is your favorite Christmas album?

Mariah Carey's "Merry Christmas" album has been my favorite Christmas album for years, but I would love to see what your favorite Christmas album is. Post a comment. I'm always looking for new good music!

It's the most wonderful time of the year....

Especially if you're pregnant. Why? Chocolate, candy, salt, salt covered chocolate, chocolate covered candy....it's everywhere! And I'm fully taking advantage of my situation. Expect to see me on the Biggest Loser next year.

I love peppermint and every December, Tootsie Roll makes a Candy Cane Tootsie Pop - candy cane on the outside, tootsie roll on the inside. Yum! I like to eat them while I'm drinking a big cup of hot chocolate and let them melt into my drink. The stock boy was unpacking the shipment of suckers yesterday while I was at the grocery store and I took the stack of bags he was holding off of his hands. He looked at me like I was crazy. I passed a large display of "Limited Edition" Peppermint ice cream from Dreyer's and I couldn't resist....full of fat, full of flavor!

I also bought the new scent of Bath and Body Works oil for my oil warmer - Twisted Peppermint. It smells like a mix between cotton candy and candy cane. Having my house constantly smell like that probably doesn't help my sweet tooth. Oh well.

Happy Holidays!

New Family Pics!

Happy December 1st!

We woke up this morning to 4 inches of snow on the ground. It sure is pretty but I really, really hate being cold. It did put me in the mood for Christmas though. Things didn't seem quite right without the snow.





My December has started out very happy - Lunch at Macaroni Grill with my Mom and my discovery of the greatest invention ever (even greater than the Season's drive-through store that no longer exists): Some poor mother who has tried to take a small child into a public restroom alone was smart and teamed up with Koala Bear Kare to create a child seat for the stall! How fantastic is that? I was able to strap Chloe into the seat so she could stare at me from the wall while I did my thing. I didn't have to figure out how to balance her on my lap or desperately try to keep her from crawling on the floor. God bless Macaroni Grill. There are many reasons why it is my favorite restaurant. #1 & #2? Gooey cheese and child seats in the restrooms.

Kick In MY Pants

Yes Rhianna - I feel the same way when I check everyone's blogs and they haven't been updated in weeks. Sorry, I'M GUILTY! Things have just been so crazy lately that I haven't really had time to post about it all. Stay tuned. One day you might check my page and see 20 new posts....

Happy Birthday Mom!

Happy Birthday Mom! You don't look a day over 29 ;)

Thanks for all you do!

HSM 3?

Any other Mom's out there sick of High School Musical? This HSM is a little more real than what we see on the Disney Channel..... (DISCLAIMER: This clip is from Saturday Night Live and a little crude, but hilarious!) Sally? I know you agree with me :)

Dance, Dance....

Last night I had my final dance class along with our "recital". It was so fun to take a dance class again - even though my body rolls look more like body slides and my high kicks are very, very low kicks with my big belly. I almost made it through the last 8 weeks without falling down...I biffed it last night :( But I wasn't hurt, just embarrassed!

My loving husband came to support me with roses in hand (yes, again!). He made me feel good about bumbling my way through the dance. Maybe next year I can impress him with real leaps and turns!

New Alicia!

I downloaded the new Alicia Keys album from iTunes and listened to the whole thing all at once. And it's great! I admire her for the music she writes. I don't know that I would be willing to pour myself into music like that and know that millions of people are going to listen to it. Go out and buy it! :)

Disturbed

Has anyone else seen the Charmin toilet paper commericial with the "Momma" Bear and the "Baby" bear? Baby Bear has a bunch of toilet paper stuck to his bottom and the Momma Bear tries to vacuum it off?? I keep thinking this disturbing commercial will go away, but no. I just saw it again and hope to never see it again. Did Charmin really think the mental picture of trying vacuum little bits of toilet paper stuck in the hair of a bear's bottom would make you want to run out and buy their toilet paper? Did I miss some brilliant marketing idea here?

My Mom's Halloween Slide Show

Thanks Mom! :)

Happy Halloween!

Lila the Goblin

Chloe the Mummy

It's a....

BOY!

We found out today we are expecting a boy to join our family in March. If there is ever an appropriate time to send out a picture of your child's private parts - I guess this is it! :) We currently have enough estrogen floating around our house so we are happy to have another male joining Marc. More importantly, he is healthy and right on track for his developmental age. He was also very, very squirmy the entire ultrasound. It looks like we have another wiggly one on our hands! For Halloween, he dressed up as a skeleton. We are very excited to have been blessed with another child to add to our quickly growing family and can't wait to see him!

Thriller!

Last Saturday my Dad took me to our annual showing of Thriller at Kingsbury Hall in Salt Lake City. This was our 4th time going together, but my 6th year. Which is pretty incredible since this year was the 10th anniversary of the program! It was so good. The primary dancers are usually great anyway, but even the smaller roles were excellent dancers. It is a great way to get in the Halloween mood! Who would have thought that dancers wearing Jason masks would make great dance theater??

It's Official!

Chloe is walking! I don't know if I should be happy or sad :)

Picking Up Butch

I like to read Marc's Sports Illustrated while I'm drying my hair. I know that probably sounds weird, but I have a lot of hair and diffusing it is sometimes a long, boring process. My favorite article is a weekly opinion column on the back page written by Rick Reilly. He's usually very sarcastic but he likes to speak his mind and I think he's funny. He also writes great inspirational articles and thought I would share this one. It's nice to hear stories about people doing service just because.

Extra Credit

For 42 years Middlebury freshman athletes have been Picking Up Butch for football and basketball games. It's a sign-up sheet thing. Carry the ball bags. Gather all the towels. Pick Up Butch. Basketball players, men and women, do it during football season. Football players do it during basketball season. Two hours before each home game, two freshmen grab whatever car they can get and drive a mile off campus to the tiny house where 54-year-old Butch Varno lives with his 73-year-old mother, Helen, who never got her driver's license. And they literally Pick Up Butch, 5'3" and 170 pounds, right off his bed. They put him in his wheelchair and push him out of the house, or one guy hauls him in a fireman's carry. They pile him into the car, cram the wheelchair into the trunk, take him to the game and roll him to his spot in the mezzanine for football games or at the end of the bench for basketball. Butch always smiles and says the same thing from the bottom of his heart: "CP just sucks." Cerebral palsy. While his fondest dream has always been to play basketball, it'll never happen. There is little that he can physically do for himself. "At first, you're a little nervous; you're like, I don't know," says freshman wide receiver Ryan Armstrong. "But the older guys say, 'We did it when we were freshmen. Now you go get him. It's tradition.' So me and my buddy got him the first week. He's pretty heavy. We bumped his head a couple of times getting him into the car. He's like, 'Hey! Be careful!' But he loves getting out so much that afterward you feel good. It's fun to put a smile like that on somebody's face." And the kids don't just Pick Up Butch. They also Keep Butch Company. Take Butch to the Bathroom. Feed Butch. "He always likes a hot dog and a Coke," says 6'8" Clark Read, 19, a power forward. "It's kind of weird at first, sticking a hot dog in his mouth. The trick is to throw out the last bite so he doesn't get your fingers." Thanks to 42 years of freshmen, Butch hardly ever misses a Middlebury game. Not that he hasn't been late. "One day this year, the two guys were calling me on their cell," says Armstrong, "and they're going, 'We can't find Butch!' And I'm like, 'You lost Butch? How can you lose Butch?' Turns out they just couldn't find his house." Nobody at Middlebury remembers quite how Picking Up Butch got started, but Butch does. It was 1961. He was 13, and his grandmother, a housekeeper at the dorms, wheeled him to a football game. It started snowing halfway through, and afterward she couldn't push him all the way back home. A student named Roger Ralph asked them if they needed a ride. Ever since then, Butch has been buried in the middle of Middlebury sports. Sometimes he gives the basketball team a pregame speech, which is usually, "I love you guys." He holds the game ball during warmups and at halftime until the refs need it. He is held upright for the national anthem. Once in a while, just before tip-off, they put him in the middle of the players' huddle, where they all touch his head and holler, "One, two, three, together!" When the action gets tense, the freshmen hold his hands to keep them from flailing. After the games some of the players come back to the court and help him shuffle a few steps for exercise, until he collapses back in his chair, exhausted. Then it's home again, Butch chirping all the way. And it's not just the athletes at Middlebury who attend to him. Butch is a campus project. Students come by the house and help him nearly every day. Over the years they taught him to read, and then last year they helped him get his GED. Somebody got him a graduation cap and gown to wear at the party they threw in his honor. During his thank-you speech, Butch wept. "These kids care what happens to me," Butch says. "They don't have to, but they do. I don't know where I'd be without them. Probably in an institution." But that's not the question. The question is, Where would they be without Butch? "It makes you think," says Armstrong. "We're all young athletes. Going to a game or playing in a game, we take it for granted. But then you go Pick Up Butch, and I don't know, it makes you feel blessed."

Seattle Pics

Yummy Seattle

We have just returned from our trip to Seattle and we had a blast! We went up to visit Eric and Paige Blaser (Marc's brother and sister-in-law) as they were blessing the newest addition in their family, Sommer. She's beautiful! She was so fun to hold and cuddle. Paige was great to let us all come and invade her house. Marc's parents, Ed and Lynne, and his brothers, Chad and Todd were also there. I hope that we were a help more than a hindrance. Their house was so cute. Paige did a great job of decorating. In every room there was an extra touch - a cute light fixture, painted accents on the wall - something that gave each room a special look. I wish I was that creative! Paige and Eric's other 3 kids (Ridge, Cannon and Laine) were so fun to play with too. Laine usually avoids me, but I finally broke through on this trip!! We played "Skater Girl" together and formed a bond. Hopefully she will remember that the next time I see her.

Ed flew down with us and we arrived on Friday afternoon. Eric kindly picked us up from the airport, with Chad and Todd following behind in another car. We all went to lunch together, then Marc and I went off to explore downtown. We went to Pike's Place Market and looked at all of the shops. They had everything you can think of! I wish we had our camera, but we forgot. Pike's is the place where they throw the fish around as they prepare them for buyers (as seen on the opening of Real World: Seattle, for those reality TV buffs out there). They also had a booth where they make mini doughnuts fresh. You could watch the doughnuts being made from start to finish. And they were yummy! (Yummy is the theme for our trip because we ate way too much food.....)

Saturday morning we all went to Chinook's for breakfast. Chinook's is this cool restaurant that is located right on the water. You can see all the fishing boats at the dock behind me in the picture. They serve baked scones with every breakfast and again, they were yummy. When we were finished, we walked out on the dock and looked at all the boats. It was interesting to see the names of the boats and wonder where they had been. Some were really beat up. It was amazing they even made it to the dock in the first place. After breakfast, we went downtown to check out more of the sites. We saw the Space Needle and went to the EMP/SFM (Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum). It was really cool. They had a bunch of exhibits with different music and movie memorabilia, along with some interactive sections where you could learn to play instruments, scratch a record or watch a movie. They had this large tower made of guitars that were programmed to play on their own. It is the only picture we have of the museum because we were quickly chastised by security - no pictures allowed. After the museum, we took the monorail over to the mall. This mall is the location of the very first Nordstrom's. They also had a Sephora, one of my favorite stores. Hooray for shopping!

Sunday was the blessing and Eric did a great job. It was beautiful and Sommer stayed awake for the whole thing without making a sound! After church Paige made an elaborate dinner of salmon, pear and feta cheese salad, rice and rolls. Of course, she did this in about 30 minutes without breaking a sweat! Marc also surprised me with tickets to the Seahawks game! We walked about 2 miles to get there, but once we were there it was so cool. It's hard to describe the energy at a pro football game. It was mass hysteria! There were people painted head to toe with dyed mohawks of green and blue. Before the game started, we went to Safeco Field (the home of the Mariners) and watched the Cowboys/Patriots game on the big screen. It was awesome that they opened the stadium for a little pre-game BBQ.

The view from the stadium is gorgeous! The skyline is so pretty with all the lit up buildings and the clock tower. Even though I cheered for the Seahawks, I still privately cheered for Reggie Bush :) The Seahawks ended up losing, but it was still a great experience. I was able to witness a few animated fights between some drunk Seahawks' and Saints' fans. It was pretty entertaining.

Monday morning, we were on our way back to Utah. It was too quick of a trip, but I was ready to see my girls again. Lila and Chloe were able to stay with Sara (Marc's sister) while we were gone. Thanks again Sara - they had a great time! When I get some pictures from Sara, I will post about their weekend too!

Faith

Marc sent me this email a few nights ago while I was out shopping and he was putting the girls to bed:

Lila came downstairs and said she was hot. I went to open the window. She said, "daddy, there's no wind." I said, "I can't make wind, only Heavenly Father can." She said, "how does he make wind?" I said, "I don't know, why don't you ask him in a prayer?" I walked out to the hallway and she got on her knees (not knowing that I was spying on her) and in her sweet prayer voice said: "Heav-ly Father, How do you make wind? Please make some for me, cause I'm hot. Just try, I know you can do it. Name a Jes-s Chris-, Amen." Then she started to get back in bed and said, "I hope it works!" Daddy was proud!

Lila's Quilt

Mama, Lila's Great Grandma, sent Lila this beautiful quilt. She was so excited to get it! It's pretty pink, Lila's favorite. As soon as Lila opened the box and saw it was a quilt, she marched it right upstairs and put it on her bed. Mama is a master quilt maker. She does everything by hand. I'm sure this quilt took her a long time to make. I was studying it and I can't believe how even the stitches are! I'm not sure I could make the stitches that even with a sewing machine..... Thank you Mama for passing on such a beautiful treasure!

Lila's Official Soccer Pictures

Could she be any cuter???

My Favorite Halloween Movie

I love You Tube - I can't believe I found this on there!!! This movie is called "The Halloween That Almost Wasn't". Joe and I used to watch it on the Disney Channel all the time when we were little. I still think about it every Halloween. (Posted as 3 seperate movie clips - Part 1, 2 &3)

Cabin Slide Show

The Cabin - Part 3

We have just returned from our third (and final) cabin trip of 2007. It's amazing how different each trip can be. We were able to take our friends with us and we had 5 kids in diapers between us - 6 kids total. Just 2 years ago, Lila was the only kid! We took a night drive this time and didn't arrive until 3 AM Thursday morning. Thankfully, the kids slept the whole way and went back to sleep once we settled them into bed. I'm very grateful to Ed for leaving the cabin just a day before us. He left the heater on and it made our early morning arrival much easier

The days were crisp and the nights were freezing cold, but we had a nice hot fire going most of the time. Friday we went to Stanley Lake and went on a hike. Tony, Curtis and Dan attempted to go fishing, but didn't have any luck. We crossed over the stream through a huge field and decided to take a short cut. We had to cross the stream by taking our socks and shoes off....BRRRRR! We had fun as a little family hiking around the lake. Chloe was bundled up in her fleece suit and didn't make a peep the whole time. She loves to be outside!

Saturday the boys went on a hike while the girls hung around the cabin. Things got a little crazy being in such a small space with all those kids. So once the boys got home, had dinner, and settled into watching the BYU game, the girls took off to the Sourdough Lodge and had pie, milkshakes and onion rings....we have the right to splurge, right??

Sunday morning we had a visit by a bear. I'm surprised none of us heard him, but we were all probably involved with our kids. There were paw prints right up to the side of the cabin. He took a couple of bags of garbage along with my car bag that was accidentally left on the deck. I'm so glad I had taken my iPod out of the bag the night before. He did get away with 10 of Lila's DVDs. She was left with Over the Hedge for the entire ride home.....

We had a great time. Thank you to the Parkinson's (x2) and the Pugsley's for going with us!

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Brrrrrr!

We are on our way to the cabin - for the 3rd time this summer... Are we crazy or what? :) We decided to try a night-time drive this time instead of leaving in the early AM. We got the girls ready for bed in cuddly feet pj's and hope they will plan on sleeping most of the drive. Marc has been listening to sports talk radio and I've been enjoying my iPod. I have a hard time listening to music in earphones because I have a chronic sing-a-long problem. I seem to log the melody and lyrics to every song I've ever heard somewhere in my brain and I feel the need to share that out loud with everyone around. I'm sure I sound a lot better with the music than without it. I've been watching the temperature on the rear-view mirror slowly inch down. We are currently at a chilly 48 degrees and it's only 8:45 PM. I can only imagine what the nights at the cabin have in store for us! (For me that means large wool socks, gallons of hot chocolate, and a cozy feather comforter) Grand Jean, here we come!

My Brown Eyed Girl

With a dirty face, but still cute!

A Jump Start on Halloween

I won a Trick or Treat plaque at Bunco last week and I wanted to put it out right away. (If you have known my family for a long time, you know that Halloween is one of our favorite holidays) I had to find something to go with it, so I headed over to Rod Works. I love Rod Works; it's a cute little decor store just around the corner from our house. I found this little Boo sign and skeleton tea light holder and couldn't resist.

Then I went to Walmart and saw a glass pumpkin jar my mother-in-law has on her table filled with candy corns and I copied her :) I put it next to the Trick or Treat sign and it went perfectly!

Now they are all on top of our gigantic TV. At least I am slowly but surely decorating our house....8 months after moving in :) I left the TV on for this picture because Mariska Hargitay was a better option than the reflection of me in my pj's.

Soccer Superstar Update

Lila is now hooked on soccer. She finally figured out you don't have to wait for the other players to move out of the way before you kick and ball and she uses that to her advantage (the other kids haven't figured that out yet). She scored 3 goals a couple of games ago and has decided that if she doesn't score, they've lost the game. We'll have to work on that :)

Busted

Lila left the cereal box within Chloe's reach..... Enough said.

Moles vs Nipples

Lila recently noticed that she has 2 little brown moles on her face and asked me what they are. I explained to her about moles and showed her a couple that I have because they look exactly the same. We also had the same chat about nipples. She wanted to know why boys can show them and girls can't. (Boy, I wasn't expecting to have to explain these sorts of things so soon...)

A couple nights ago, Marc got a scratch on his forehead that got a little scab on it. Lila asked him so sweetly at the dinner table, "Daddy, do you have a nipple on your forehead?" I quickly figured out that she meant mole and we had to explain the difference all over again. It makes me wonder if she's been going around telling people she has nipples on her face.... I'm going to have concerned mothers calling me to ask what Lila is teaching their kids.

Seasons - Part 2

I drove past Seasons on Sunday, only to see a large 'For Sale' sign posted on the side. How could this be? Why didn't they use my customer satisfaction story for their marketing?? Sad. I have written another haiku for them:

Seasons, Rest In Peace
You did not last for too long
Oh, what a pity

The Power of Google

You can Google pretty much any weird question you may have and get a long list of websites or blogs that someone across the world has posted with the answer. It amazes me. Today I noticed Chloe was doing something weird with her head and the first thing I thought of was Stevie Wonder. Yes, Stevie Wonder. (You all know what I'm talking about) So I seriously googled "baby head shaking Stevie Wonder" and it linked me to this response to a blog:

"Have you thought about exorcism? It's probably teeth (since my 7-month-old is shaking her head like she's Stevie Wonder) but you can never be too careful."

I never thought teething would cause Stevie Wonder head shaking, but I guess it makes sense! I went on to read the blog this person was responding to and the story is hilarious. (Posted below) I haven't had a chance to explore the site - Babble - but it looks like a pretty interesting site. I'll have to post an update about what I think when I have a chance to read some more articles.

Has Josie Got Religion?
This is what we’re wondering now, because she’s fallen into these weird habits that we can’t explain and that kind of freak us out and that make us wonder – in those brief moments of first-time parenting hyper-neurosis – if something isn’t maybe really wrong with our daughter, like she’s seen a vision of her personal savior (the not very nice kind) and is now possessed. So this is one of those deals where I’m asking for the veteran parents out there to talk us off the ledge. Okay, the first thing: she shakes her head back and forth really forcefully. It’s more like a whipping action. This happens when we try to give her the bottle and sometimes even when Erin’s breastfeeding, and when Jos is asleep but restless. A couple of times, when we’ve set her to sleep in our bed, this has resulted in her head-butting us. (Erin is calm and understanding about this; my first impulse is to head-butt her right back.) The second thing she does is pull her hair. She reaches back and yanks at her own hair! Hard. This is mostly when I’m giving her a bottle. And then the third thing she does – this one is the most disturbing – is she bores her little fingers inside her ears and jabs at her inner ear flesh, which, because of the length of her fingernails (a direct result of our continued and abject fear when it comes to cutting her fingernails) means blood. Yes, our daughter, our sweet little daughter, gouges the inside of her ears to the point that she bleeds. The first time we discovered dried blood in her ears we nearly keeled over. How in ---- name…? And even as I write this I’m getting a little freaked out. Josie tends to perform these actions at night, during her witching hour, before we set her down to sleep. So I’ve speculated that maybe they represent a kind of last hurrah, like a long-distance runner launching into her kick at the end of a race. It seems a bit worse now that we’re in California, away from home, so maybe she’s feeling a bit more anxious? And there’s always the possibility that she’s reacting to the ongoing pain of teething, though this feels sudden and frantic in nature. The truth is we have no idea why Jose has fallen into this pattern of, well, the technical term would be “self-abuse,” I guess. In our darkest moments, we wonder if she’s not showing signs of some horrible psychic condition. But that’s got to be parental paranoia, right? (Right?) Because she’s really quite a happy little shtunk most of the time, full of smiles, bits of laughter, and gaining weight these days like a Sumo. So our question is: have you fellow parents experienced these behaviors? If so, do you have any idea what they’re about? Is there anything we can do to get her to stop whipping her head and pulling her hair and (especially) gouging her ears? Like some form of benign exorcism? She did all of these things during my midnight bottle feeding last night and it was so upsetting. I kept trying to pull her hands away from her hair and ears, but every time I did she began shaking her head and the bottle slipped from her mouth and she stared at me like I was a big, fat idiot intent on starving her. So I just had to sit there and reinsert the bottle and watch her do these things until, after a few minutes, she calmed down. But as you can tell, now I’m feeling ready to gouge my ears. Help.

Happy Birthday To Me

Yesterday was my birthday. This is a hard birthday for me because I will just get old from here on out. I'm a quarter of a century old! I started the day the usual way, coaxing myself to shower and dress and get the girls going. I was drying Lila's hair when I kept hearing a persistent knock at the door. I went to the door with a sour look on my face because I figured it was the usual sales man wanting to know if we have soft water. I was pleasantly surprised to see it was my husband, with flowers in hand! Marc surprised me by taking the day off work to take me out on a day date! I was glad I had gotten dressed so early. I also burst into tears because I was so surprised. (That wasn't the last time I cried either)

We took the girls up to my mother-in-law (thanks Lynne!). I told her how Marc had surprised me and cried again. :) We said goodbye and headed up to the new Multiplex movie theater in Daybreak. It was huge! And it had reserved seating, which was really cool even though we pretty much had the entire building to ourselves. Our movie didn't start for a couple of hours so we walked around the shopping complex. We stopped at a shoe store (anyone who knows me well knows I LOVE shoes) and bought a pair. Shoes were buy one get one 1/2 off, so we bought Marc a late birthday present too. We made our way back to the movie theater. There is a large lobby full of different restaurants and you can take anything you want with you into the theater. We decided we would get some "snacks" since we were going to an early dinner after the movie, but snacks turned into pizza, bread sticks, popcorn and drinks. Oops.

We saw Stardust - a movie most people have not heard of. But it was so good! The first 10 minutes, I was worried about what kind of movie I had picked. It is a fantasy movie about witches and stars, so it takes a minute to figure out what is going on. The movie was a great mix of everything - it had action, a really good love story (cry #3), and it was very intense. I recommend it! Marc even liked it.

We were still stuffed after the movie, so we decided to go get ice cream instead. We made ourselves sick by splurging. We both got 2 scoops in a waffle cone. Yum, Pralines and Cream. My favorite. I had a sugar stomach ache, but it was worth it!!

We spent the night at home with the girls. It turned out to be a perfect day! Thank you, Marc, for once again being sneaky.

I also had/saw 2 of my favorite things today, Macaroni Grill and my friend Amy Jensen. We realized we have been friends for 9 years - it's so crazy how time flies! We are busy working moms and I rarely get to see her, so I was so happy I got to go to lunch with her today. With all the talking and the bread, we only took about 2 bites of our lunches. I'm sure the waiter thought we were crazy. Love ya Amy!

My Wise Cracker Knew....

We stopped at Panda Express on our way home from the cabin a couple of weeks ago and Lila was introduced to fortune cookies. Her fortune said "Try something new". When Marc asked her what she was going to try, she thoughtfully said "Pepsi!" (Which we didn't let her try)

Today I finally convinced her to try a PBJ sandwich. She doesn't like the way PB looks.... When she took her first bite she said "Remember at Handa Mapress? My wise cracker knew that I would try something new!" She cracks me up!

PS - this is my first attempt at blogging on my BlackBerry, so I apologize if there is something weird about this post!

Yo Gabba What-a?

There is a new TV show on Noggin that Lila really likes called "Yo Gabba Gabba". They have lots of music and the song attached below has helped Lila not leave her veggies out of the party in her tummy, but the show still kind of freaks me out. I mean, really - what is that big green thing supposed to be? And Elijah Wood was on yesterday teaching the kids how to do "The Puppet Master Dance"... Hmmm

Future Soccer Superstar

Lila starts her 4 and 5 year old city league soccer tonight and I couldn't help but spoil her with a new matching soccer outfit. Even her new soccer ball matches...... :) Doesn't she already look like a pro?

Luckiest Girl

Yesterday, Marc (in typical sneaky Marc fashion) had flowers delivered to me at work. Not just any flowers, but a dozen long stemmed gorgeous roses. What did the card say? Just Because. Love, Marc. How did I get so lucky???

The Cabin - Part 2

We have just returned from the cabin - our second trip of the year. We took my family (The Kepo'o Ohana) for their first trip. It is a long drive with a lot of little kids....but we survived and had a blast! Helen (my sister-in-law) was very brave and came along with their new baby, Violet. She is only 4 weeks old. We are glad they came!

Our first day, we relaxed and went to the Hot Springs. It's fun to take people there for the first time because it is such a cool place and it's hard to describe what it's really like. Marc, Joe, Ryan and Lila all jumped off the big rock at the bend in the river - I can't believe that Lila was so brave! (I need to get more pictures from my families cameras....more evidence to follow)

We went to Red Fish Lake on Friday. The water is really cold when you first get in and out, but once you are in, it's nice. We bought a really nice baby carrier before this trip and Marc tested it out. He took Chloe on a hike around the edge of the lake. Here they are across the lake - can you spot the red backpack? Saturday we played at the cabin and did our chores - chopping wood & fixing and painting doors. I thought someone was dying every time Joe and Ryan went to chop a piece of wood but I guess they were getting a good workout! We played Shanghai every night. We also got into some intense Texas Hold 'Em matches. I would like to brag that I won the Texas Hold 'Em tournament - Marc, I'll just take the money out of our account. But Joe and Ryan better pay up! :)

Thank you to the Blaser's for letting me share the cabin with my family! And thank you to the Kepo'o's for letting me take you! It was so much fun to spend some time together as a family again.

The theme song for our trip has been provided by Ryan - he must have listened to this song 100 times. James Taylor "Blossom" This is for you Bro!