October Projects

Wow. I didn't realize that I haven't posted since September.  So much has been going on, but I should have been updating here. My apologies. Let's see if I can give an update for the last 3 months, starting with October.

I turned 27. Just saying that makes me feel old, but not that old. :)

We went to Idaho to visit Clark, Lonnie, and MaKenna for General Conference weekend.  We heard a lot of good things from the leaders of the Church, and, like any family gathering, had lots of fun, ate good food, and the girls loved playing together.  Now that they're getting older, they're having a lot more fun together. This also means not as much supervision (keeping them from accidentally killing each other), but still keeping an eye on them so they don't destroy the house together. 

So this is what they did instead.  If you can't see what they're holding, it's our Kindle Fire HD.  It has become Kayla's Toy.  We recently put a case on it so it can handle a toddler and survive.  I love it (both the case and the Kindle).  There's a special app for kids where the parents can select which apps they can access.  She can't make purchases or surf the web without the parental password.  She knows that's her app, and she goes right to it when she wants to play. They're also coming out with a lot of good apps for kids.  She's learning and it's easy to clean up afterwards! 

The girl's other favorite past-time together was to play with the Daddys. Here's one example.

We love getting together so we can have moments like this.  Can't wait until we see them again!

The last time Mom and Mike came to our house to visit, they offered to buy us a new toilet in the upstairs bathroom as their Christmas present to us.  So we decided to redo the entire thing since we have to take out the toilet anyway.  This took up a couple weekends, but it was so worth it! So here are some before pictures:

As you can see, the people who painted the poo-brown color couldn't take the time to remove their towel hook thing and paint the whole wall...they painted around it.  It took Brandon 10 seconds to remove it and a good half hour of sanding to try to get the pain levels even before we started painting.

And the after pictures:

I think this is the only room in the house that really feels like us.  One room at a time...

We also took family pictures. We love taking pictures in the fall with all the variety of colors.  We went to the park behind Walmart in Orem.  It was a great location! We were only there an hour and we got so many good shots! One of our friends in our neighborhood took them.  She was great!  Here are just a few of my favorites (it was REALLY hard to narrow it down):

And the month doesn't end here!  There's still Halloween!  I decided to make our costumes this year, and with the help of my mom, they looked amazing!  Since Kayla has been into fish this year and we did a fish-themes birthday party, we decided to extend the fish theme to our costumes.  I became a jellyfish, Brandon a sea turtle, and Kayla a little rainbow fish.  I crocheted Brandon's and Kayla's hat, and it took me 3 tries to get her hat size right!  We also decided to have a Halloween party this year.  So here are some pictures of our party and costumes.

I had a lot of fun making all these yummy treats!

Mom was a bunch of grapes,

I think this was the best picture of the fish hat.

Thinking back on this month, October was REALLY busy, but we got a lot done.  I love spending time with family and we were able to do that a lot.  And the next two months are just as crazy but fun! Stay tuned for more HoStories.

Summer Fun

There's been so much going on that it's been hard to sit down and write about it, but I'll do my best.

June was a pretty crazy month.  Brandon and I got asked to be leaders for our Stake's Youth Conference.  We got a little "family" that we were in charge of.  I didn't realize how much work we had to do before the actual Youth Conference even started.   Luckily, our Stake is only about an 8 block radius so we didn't have to travel too far to contact our kids.So we organized a little party for our "family" so they could get to know us and us them.  It turned out to be a lot of fun.  After all the meetings, paper organizing, packing lists and permission forms distributed, it was finally  time for us to pack and go to Youth Conference!  (We couldn't take Kayla with us, but luckily my mom was available to watch her while we were gone.)

It started out at the Stake Center with a Carnival of Life activity.  There were a lot of misgivings about how the kids would take it (for those who've done it would know what I'm talking about), but I think they were just fine.  The Stake leaders handled it very well so that the kids got the point of the activity: it was centered around Christ's Atonement and its power to save us. After lunch we got on the buses and headed down to Manti.  We were set up in tents and then went down to the Manti Pagent after dinner.  That was a really cool experience.

The next day we drove up to the church's Heber Valley campsite.  It was up in the mountains, so it was much cooler than down in the valley.  We were put in cabins: Brandon with all the other male leaders in one cabin next to the boys, and I was in the cabin with my girls.  We went on a sunrise hike (luckily we didn't have to be there for the sunrise, otherwise we would've had to wake up at 5am), did some service, and generally had a fun and spiritual experience.

Here's our family:

After Youth Conference we did a little mini-family reunion. These are really awesome kids.

While we were off having fun with older kids, my mom and some friends of ours were having fun with Kayla.  Mom watched her for a couple days until she had to go down to St. George to visit with her dad. So Adam and Ashley played with Kayla for a day.  They went to the aquarium in Sandy.  Kayla loves fish, so she had a lot of fun there. We'll have to take her ourselves sometime.

Right after Youth Conference was the 4th of July.  We hosted a BBQ at our house for my whole family.  My mom and Mike were in town visiting everyone out west, and we wanted to make a centralized location for everyone to come visit her.  (One of her brothers came all the way down from Washington to see her.) So we found out that we can host a party of 50 in our back yard.  We also learned that we get absolutely NO shade at 4pm in July.  Things got a lot cooler by 6, though, so it wasn't too bad (I hope!) for everyone.  The food was good; the company was fabulous, and I know my mom had a lot of fun.  

Before everyone left, Brandon got some fireworks and set them off on our driveway.  We learned that Kayla does not like fireworks.  She huddled in my arms the whole time.  And these were the fountain fireworks! Not even the really loud ones! My poor little girl. The kinda funny thing is that Brandon recorded it on his iPhone, and Kayla keeps watching it and says "fireworks!" so I think she'll get over the loud noise and enjoy them when she's older.  Our neighborhood also shot off a lot of fireworks that night, so we got to see them all over the place.  It was a good night.

A couple weeks later, Brandon and I were able to go on a date! Yay! A wonderful family in our neighborhood loves to watch Kayla, so they took her for an evening while we went up with another couple to Salt Lake City to see the Mormon Tabernacle Choir perform at the Conference Center. It was the Pioneer Day Celebration, and they had Lindsey Sterling and Nathan Pacheco perform with them.  It was really awesome.  Nathan Pacheco has a beautiful voice, join that with MOTAB and it was AMAZING.

At the end of July there was a wedding!  Emily Bobo is a Bobo no longer!  So, my family had to get together again to celebrate this awesome day.  My brother, Clark, and his family stayed at our house while my mom flew out here again and stayed at my sister, Jessica's.  The morning of the wedding, we were invited to a wedding breakfast up in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building.  We dropped off Kayla at Jessica's house where the babysitter was and headed up to Salt Lake City.  The breakfast was awesome and we got to see what kind of man Emily was hitching herself to.  He seems like a really awesome guy; they're going to have so much fun together.  Then we walked around Temple Square until the sealing that afternoon.  It was my first time at that temple, and the little that I saw was beautiful. It was a beautiful ceremony.

Later that night was the reception at the Capital Building.  They set it up in the rotunda.  It's a beautiful building with marble everywhere. We got some nice family pictures from it.

Since most of my family was in town we decided to get together for a BBQ at our house on the weekend.  It was a perfect day for a BBQ: cloudy and cool for July.  Unfortunately before we were able to cook the hamburgers we had a bit of a scare.  Kayla scratched her eye and we had to go to the doctors.  So we left my family at our house to eat food while we went to help Kayla.  They checked her out and found a nice big scratch right on her pupil. They gave us a prescription gel to put in her eye that would numb the pain.  The worst part was holding her down while we did it.  We then had to go to the doctors the next day to see if it's healing.  We went in and it was completely healed. Eyes heal fast! It hadn't been 24 hours and the scratch was all gone.  I'm so grateful that she healed so fast. It's the worst thing in the world to see your baby in pain, and there isn't much you can do to help but hold her.

Besides that little adventure we had a lot of fun with Clark, Lonnie, and little Makenna.  Kayla loves her cousin. They had so much fun together.  Kayla was asking for her all the time. So cute!  

And that was our fun-filled June and July.  On to August where the fun doesn't end!!!

Fish Story

One day in May, Kayla and Jennifer went to Wal-Mart, and Kayla discovered something she had never seen before:

And Kayla stood in awe as she saw those little creatures scurry about, to and fro.

She was so excited, she just couldn't stop watching them.

Little Kayla would smile at them, maybe to see if the fishies would smile back.

They didn't, of course, but she had to smile at somebody.  So, she smiled at me.

The end.