What lives in your backyard?

I am terrified beyond belief by the creature that Mike found while working in the backyard on Saturday. I was out running erands at the time but don't worry, he kindly took a picture of it. I am so scared of it but I can't stop looking at his picture. Is it a snake? Is it a lizard? I think his mother was a snake and his father was a lizard thus the creature is a SNAZARD. Let me tell you, if I ever see that Snazard roaming around back there I don't even know what I will do.

Oh yeah, he also lives in the backyard, but I'm not afraid of him.

What year are we in????

After reading this I honestly wondered what year we are in. Are you kidding me?? UMMMMM Brown vs the Board of Education happened like 53 years ago folks. What kind of school allows a "separate" prom to happen each year until now. All the more reason why I never really want to visit or live in the South.

You've come a long way BABY

It really seems like just yesterday that we welcomed home a chubby little bald baby named Blake, or Smushy as he was affectionately called for the first several months of his life.






Fast forward 2 years to Sunday when we celebrated his 2nd birthday. Mike frosted the cute basketball cake as I have absolutely no skills in that department. I now have a big boy who spends hours at a time verking in the yard with his new shovel and gloves and says many cute things (and some not so cute things). I'm still trying to get used to the fact that not only does he understand everything I say but he tries to repeat about half of it.


He got a music set for his birthday and he danced the night away shaking his little shakers and tambourine.





I'm glad he's mine.


Happy Birthday Big Boy Blake!!

Blame it on Alyssa and Jean

I used to hate black licorice or anthing like unto it. At BYU, I met Alyssa who loved eating All-Sorts and other black licorice products such as tea. Well, my curiousity finally got the better of me and I gave in and tried the whole genre of black licorice products. THEY WERE GOOD-REALLY GOOD. Soon thereafter I found myself drawn to previously abhorred items such as black jelly beans and licorice. Recently I was at my sister Jean's home. She presented me with a 5lb bag of Good and Plenty as a prize just because she is so nice. YUMMMMM!!!! Only problem is that now I have 5 lbs of sugary sweets beckoning to me at all hours of the day and night. I really don't do well with the whole willpower thing so I will probably make MIke hide them because i can't stop eating them. Unfortunately I get no help from Mike who after eating one said that it was enough to last him a whole year. Poor Good&Plentys, they are the candy that nobody wants except me. I really wanted to take a picture of my larger than life supply but alas I cannot find my camera. So it you are feeling like a treat stop by.

Grandma's MOO MOO

Last weekend was probably the worst traveling experience of my life. We were headed up to my Grandma's funeral in Salt Lake and arrived at LAX an hour early for our flight. The flight was delayed an hour and then another hour and then another hour until we finally caught a different flight after waiting in the airport for 5 hours with 2 kids under 2. Upon arriving at the Salt Lake airport, we realized that our baggage did not arrive with us. Hmmmm no car seats......how were we supposed to leave the airport without car seats. The lovely Delta baggage claim person kindly offered to let us choose between a wide variety of car seats to borrow, all of which came with a plethora of stains and holes dating back to the 80's when they were made. I think not. Fortunately, the car rental people provided us with 2 good, clean carseats that didn't look like 50 children had lost their lunches in them.

Delta informed us that they would drop off our one suitcase and carseats at Mike's Grandma's in Provo when they arrived. Well, when we arrived at Grandma's house after dinner, there was no luggage to be found. We waited and waited but still no luggage. Mike called customer service and they told us that they didn't deliver after 10pm. Mind you, we had to be out of the house at 8am the next morning for the funeral in SLC and I was going to be playing my violin in front of the whole audience. I really started panicking at this point because all I had were the clothes on my back. ( a barfed on t-shirt and jeans-nice funeral attire) I thought that I would at least wash my skivvies in grandma's tub and she kindly offered to let me sleep in her moo moo while they dried. Don't worry I took a picture for your enjoyment. Haven't you always secretly wanted to wear your Grandma's house coat to bed?????? She also offered to let me wear one of her outfits to the funeral- a nice shiny white grandma blouse with a lace collar and floral skirt. Fortunately for us the luggage arrived at 4am-hmm I thought they didn't do middle of the night deliveries.

Anyway, the funeral went well and I got to wear my own clothes.

Of course we were fortunate enough to spend an extra 2 hours in the SLC airport the following day because the line was long to check in and our luggage barely missed the 45 minute check in time requirement.

All in all I figure we spent over 8 hours total in the LAX and SLC airports over the course of about 30 hours-NICE!!!!

maybe next time we'll drive!!

I hope you all had a Happy Easter. We spent the day at Mom's house and it was quite delightful. It's so fun having a little girl to dress up in cute little floral dresses.

MINE MINE MINE

Blake's new favorite word is MINE. And he says it all the time. Hmmmmm, his 2nd birthday is rapidly approaching imagine that. When I am eating something he wants he declares "MINE" and demands that I fork it over. When another child has a toy that he wants he declares "mine" and tries to repo it even if it isn't really his. I know that this is normal 2 year old behavior but I do have to admit that I miss the sweet non mine days. Today he had a friend over at our house and he was running away from her shrieking mine with his arms loaded full of stuff. I had to take the above picture because after declaring that one of Julia's shirts was "mine" and attempting to put it on I decided it would be kind of amusing to whip out some hair bow thingees and see what he did. Of course he said "mine" and voilee a picture was born. After Daddy told him that boys didn't wear bows he wanted nothing to do with them. I'm glad this little boy is "mine" and I love him even if he says that word a thousand times a day, I just need some reassurance that this won't be his favorite word forever.