iPad 2 giveaway!

There's this great little company called Zagg (whose headquarters happen to be in SLC) that we love. We found their awesome iPod screen covers and with the way Kyle tends to ruin screens, it seemed perfect for us. We also use them for our phones. Amazingly strong covers with a lifetime warranty. Totally worth it.

Anyway, they are doing a Black Friday giveaway of iPads. Here are the details, from their site:

On Black Friday, November 25, 2011, starting at midnight (MST), we’ll be giving away an iPad 2 every hour. 24 iPad 2s over 24 hours. Each hour is a new opportunity to enter the giveaway. So yes, you need to go to the giveaway page each hour and enter.

Entering the giveaway will be simple. To enter, just submit your email address. For additional entries, you can share on Facebook and Twitter. A Facebook share is worth two additional entries and a Twitter share is worth one additional entry.

The website for more info is: 

Zagg giveaway

Our Anniversary Trip, day one

In July, Kyle and I took a trip, just the two of us. This is a rare occasion for us. We had our honeymoon, a couple of times we have spent one night in a bed and breakfast, and I just remembered a weekend in St. George for a pharmacy conference about 8 years ago. I have taken a few girls only vacations in the last few years.  But never anything with just Kyle. Anyway, all this to say that a kid free vacation has been long overdue!

We drove the kids up to Utah to stay with both sets of grandparents and then we flew to Seattle.


Mt. Ranier as seen from the airplane. Quite impressive!

We got to Seattle, hopped in our rental car, and searched, and searched, for a parking spot so we could make our lunch at the Space Needle. 

The view from the rotating restaurant really is quite impressive. This colorful house really popped out at me as we spun around and was one of my favorite parts of the view.

After lunch we walked down to the pier and the Pike Street Public Market, best known for...

...the flying fish!

If you know where to look you can also find this amazingly gross gum wall.:)

The produce is super delicious and just huge!

One of the common sights we saw were these hanging flower baskets. They are all over Seattle and Victoria. It was so lovely, but probably impractical for arid Santa Fe.

A highlight of our trip was getting to see family we haven't seen in years. My cousin Lara introduced us to her fiancé Jesse.

They also took us on a tour of the outdoor art exhibit nearby.

After a long day of travel and fun, we headed off to our hotel across the river and learned a lesson. Making a reservation for a non smoking room doesn't guarantee a non smoking room. I still don't understand why they make more reservations than they can handle. But we were tired and just gave in and stayed the night anyway.

Not all those who wander are lost

Bettie, Katie and I went backpacking this weekend. It took a lot of convincing to get me to go...I am not a huge fan of camping. But Bettie has some awesome powers of persuasion and I went. It was a very relaxing and fun 3 days.  We always knew exactly where we were (Right here! What more do you need to know?), even if we didn't always know how to get to where we had planned. But in then end, we made it to our original destination. 

Our first destination: an unplanned but decidedly perfect detour to Nambe Lake. Great waterfall on the way. The lake was surrounded by impassible mountains so we knew it wasn't the lake we expected. But we loved it.

That night we spent in a nearby meadow. It got kinda frosty and the next morning we considered cutting our trip a day short because our toes (and everything else) were freezing in our sleeping bags.

But after we got up, ate, and packed up, we decided we could handle it and were ready for another day of hiking. That is Katie, me and Bettie. We found some friendly hikers to take our picture for us.

This is the sign that caused our detour. The path we wanted was not labeled except for the no camping sign. There were not nearly enough signs to point the way. Also, our map didn't even come close to showing all the paths we passed by. But we never felt despair and we found our way.

This lake was our favorite of the three we saw. We missed the lake Bryce told us to find but found this one instead and we loved it.

Our second night was in a field full of so many kinds of trees, plants, flowers, and bugs. This was my favorite tree, which we camped under.

And this picture shows the answer to why anyone would want to backpack:

There were so many butterflies and flowers. (Lots of bees and flies too, but we'll just forget that part.) So many butterflies, big and small. And lots of amazing flowers.

This was the end of our trip. (I'm in the blue shirt.) We were supposed to have a car waiting here for us so we could drive home. Our husbands were worried because they hadn't heard if we ever found the right trail (the only time the cell phone worked was when we were camping that first night) so they were waiting around in hopes of our contacting them to tell them where we ended up. When we didn't find a car waiting for us, we continued on our way and hiked almost 5 miles until Bettie got the attention of a couple of cute guys ;) with cars full of kids and they pulled over and picked up these three dirty hitchhikers.

The end. :)

Me...then and now

Thanks to Google, this week I found two people from my high school years that I have been trying for years to reconnect with. One is my friend Anna and the other is my favorite high school teacher Ms. Schultz.  It took some work but I found them with some pretty random information about each of them. Go google!! I thought it would be fun to show what I looked like in high school when I knew them compared to what I look like now.

Then (10th grade?):

 Now:

And as an added bonus, my cute family:

This photo is from last summer, but the current stats on my kids: Ben is 11, Courtney is 9 and Johnny is turning 6 this weekend.

Ben's movie making debut

For Christmas we gave Ben the Klutz book of movie tricks. Yesterday, he tried it out and made this film: The Neat Fairy. Hope you like it!

Courtney is adapting quite well to this broken arm

(Thanks to our awesome new iMac, photo and video posts are now a piece of cake and I will hopefully be blogging more  because of it.)

So, on Wednesday, Courtney collided with a soccer ball and this happened:

That day, Courtney was very quiet and melancholy. I think it was pretty scary for her. But since then, she has been happier than usual. This morning she came knocking on our door and asked:

(She is very quiet, but she says: "Can I have some medicine?")

Which, if you know Courtney, is absolutely a. maz. ing. She has also figured out how to make do with one hand in many situations. Today she changed her shirt on her own, with only a little help from me. More examples of learned independence:

That is a Beyblade, the biggest craze around our house right now. It took a bit, but she figured out to turn it around backwards and pulled the rip cord with her thumb.  The most impressive act yet of her one handed achievements is that she can now play violin one handed:

 She will not let this broken arm get in the way of playing the violin. This is her first year taking violin at school and it has made quite an impression on her. Her teacher says she is one of the more advanced students she has and that she will miss her. Courtney will not be able to play in the year-end concert, but her teacher is letting her keep the violin over the summer. She has already pulled it out 4 or 5 times since Wednesday to practice. :)

Disney photos...at last!

Taking the easy way out, here is a slideshow of some highlights of the Disney part of the trip. Enjoy!

Santa Fe in photos

My wonderful husband took two days off to celebrate my birthday.  Today we went downtown to try out our new photography skills.  Here are the end results of our day.  And just think, if you came to visit us in Santa Fe, you could see these places in person.  hint, hint :)  Enjoy!  (If you want to see a particular photo larger, just click on it.)

Really, Johnny?

Johnny: Mom, how many years are we dead?
Mom: Well...
Johnny: I mean, how many years are we dead before being a Grandpa?
Mom: Johnny, none of your living grandparents have died yet.
Johnny: Not even once??