The Phantom of the Opera

What an awesome musical!! All of us went to the ASU Gammage Theater to see this production. Anna's critique..."I liked the movie better." WHATEVER! Live is always better. I guess you could say that this year's entertainment theme has been plays. We saw Snowflake High School do Oklahoma, which was so good. They have so much talent there! Now, we anticipate going to see You're a Good Man Charlie Brown this weekend at the Snowflake/Taylor Northern Pioneer College campus. I hope it's good!

Family Pictures

The Wreck

Introducing......Our new car! We are absolutely loving it so far. We needed new tires on the Pilot, it had a few scratches and a dome lightbulb was out. I guess we figure this was the only way we'd get stuff replaced or fixed. I'm actually happy to be rid of my leather seats. They are freezing during the cold months...which is 9 months out of the year, or so it seems.

What an adventure! And as I like to quote from The Little House on the Prairie books, "All's well that ends well". I feel so incredibly blessed. My first thoughts were, "We are so lucky!" But I know that luck had nothing to do with it. Yes, we had a safe car. Yes, we all had our seat belts on, sleeping at 4am. I know our Heavenly Father was watching over us. How else could we all have survived a rollover???

Looking at this picture just now makes me see that there were more windows busted out than I thought. WOW!

The internal structure held up beautifully! (See the orange cheetos? They were all over the car)

Anna got a nice goose egg and abrasion...probably from luggage hitting her.

Her cuts from climbing out of her broken window and climbing back in through the back

busted-out window.

Mike's air bag burn. It's healing nicely thanks to the wonderful salve they gave us for Anna at UVRMC (our favorite hospital in the whole wide world!)

Fortunately, it didn't "mess" our plans up too much. We did everything we went to Utah to do. We attended our Book of Mormon Evidence Conference in Midway, UT and we went to the Sunday morning session of General Conference.

Book of Mormon Evidence Conference

Midway was beautiful conference weekend. We attended a Book of Mormon Evidence Conference. We had heard quite a bit of the material before but it's always a good refresher. There is so much compelling evidence that the Book of Mormon took place in The United States. If you are interested in learning more go to http://www.bookofmormonevidence.org/. We had a sweet room, alot bigger and fancier than expected. And we paid hardly anything for it.

Look closely at the bottom....Raymond, Jen & Mike

Joseph Smith's sword, shown for the first time ever.
We stayed at the Zermatt Resort in Midway, UT
A huge, posh four poster bed. Mike doing what Mike does best?!?

The yummy seafood buffet

Going Green

I think we are really helping global warming?? I'm just SO concerned about it. If you can't hear, it's tongue and cheek. I do, however, have a problem contributing to so much landfill waste. So in the interest of the environment and $$, I have chosen to recycle...ALOT. Well, Mike helps out quite a bit. I'll give credit where credit is due. Since he travels to "the valley" every week, we save all our plastic, metal, etc. and send them down with him to put in the city of Gilbert recycling bin my parents have. We don't really have that kind of recycling in our town. Good think it's clean garbage. We do have paper recycle. Our sanitary district needs it to compost our waste. Yea, pretty gross. I know first hand, having gone on a field trip there. Smelly too. There are a couple of places we can drop it off and it's usually always on our way to and fro. You probably ask, what's the $$ interest? Well, I'm glad you asked. We cancelled our garbage service, saving us $20 a month. We recycle so much that we only have one garbage bag full a week or 3 walmart bags. I recycle there too. I use my Walmart-type bags as my garbage bags. Although Walmart and Safeway, both, have recycling for extras of those too. I take my extras there. Anyway, our good friend Raymond started recycling paper too and now we share his garbage. Or we use our neighbors across the street who is more often then not, staying in their home in "the valley". They don't mind that we use it and we are grateful. You may ask, how does the garbage company feel about this? Answer: They don't mind at all. I called and discussed my options with them. They do have other plans, like every other week garbage pick up. When I asked them about sharing a can, they pretty much said, Go for it. Work it out with your neighbor and it's good with us. So, the moral, where there's a will to save 20 bucks, there's a way.

Tidy and Not So Tidy

I'm sure this scene looks very familiar to many of you. Anna and Amelia share a room. Poor Anna. This is what their beds look like on a daily basis. Anna's is the bottom bunk and Amelia's is the top. I can so relate. My sister, Janette, and I shared a room. You could practically see a line drawn down the middle of the room. Her side was so cluttered and mine was so neat and tidy. I feel your pain Anna. Unfortunately, she has inherited this compulsive perfectionism from both her parents. I will find her up at night getting things just so. When I tell her it can wait until tomorrow she says, it will drive me crazy. I have to do it now. Again, poor Anna!

28 Bottles of Peaches on the Wall

Yup, I canned peaches. Count 'em. There's 28. Since I have limited storage space, I decided to put them above my cupboards in my kitchen. That way I can see how beautiful they are all the time...and so can everyone else. Again, I'm so vain. Since I put the peaches up there, I decided to put everything else. I pickled some beets, dilly beans and made 3 kinds of jam. Strawberry, Apricot Pineapple and Cantelope Peach. I think my "sugar" food storage is leaps above the stuff that will really fill you up, ie, legumes, wheat, etc. But I just can't resist jam. When in crisis, I'll just have to say to my family, Gather 'Round the Sweet Stuff.

Before

After

I'm So Vain

I actually did it. I can't believe it. I had toyed with the idea of removing the mole on my chin and finally did it yesterday. I mentioned to Mike that I'd like it off along with another mole. So we went to the office to take care of some other business and ended up taking both off. Mike has a soft tissue laser which makes it easy to remove moles, skin tags, etc. I was really anxious about the one on my chin. I don't know why. Maybe because it's been a part of me for so long. Amelia even said, DON'T DO IT! When all my girls were babies, they noticed it and played with it while nursing. Sometimes at the office we have mole removing parties. Debbie said that last week when business was slow, she called her husband and sister to come in and have some things removed. So if any of you who want anything done, come pay us a visit.

Summer Campfire Fun

I love where I live. We live where people come to camp. Hence, we have made a fire ring in our "side" yard. Since a lot of the Utah family hasn't been here, I'll give a brief description. We live on 1/3 of an acre, not a square 1/3. It is fairly long and narrow. Our back yard isn't very deep. We originally fenced it so the kids could play in the back and I have piece of mind knowing they weren't wandering off. Now it's to keep the dogs in. We do have a bit of "yard" to the side of our house which isn't fenced where we have our wood pile and a second driveway should we need it. Since we don't use the driveway much anymore because it's pretty washed out from monsoon rains, Amelia and I made a fire ring. I decided I wanted to do this because a lot of our friends have one. But their homes are more off the beaten path. Ours is very visible and I've been afraid that if we attempted this, we'd for sure have a visit from the fire station. Since one of the captains is in our ward, I asked him what the rule is. He said that we are allowed one warming/cooking fire without a permit. AH-HA! I can legally do it, even if someone calls the fire dept. So for Friday night, I made plans to roast hotdogs, made 3 bean salad, corn on the cob and make s'mores. The girls got to invite one friend each. Unfortunately, Mike was traveling home from his job in Mesa. I needed a friend so I invited Raymond, who would have been invited anyway. I was really anxious for this bonfire, and a bonfire it was. It also wasn't very cold. It was so hot that we had to sit several feet from the fire until the sun went down. All in all, with good food and friends, it was a blast. We can't wait to do it again.

Singing Girls' Camp songs

You Go Girl!

Amelia participated in a Triathalong on August 15th. She hadn't trained much except for doing track in the Spring, swim team over the summer and leisure bike rides through the neighborhood. I am just so proud of her for just wanting to AND finishing it. She swam 175 yds, biked 4 miles and ran 1 mile, in that order. Allie decided that she'd run with her, since we didn't know we could bike or run along side her before we arrived. Even after all the events Amelia had done, Allie still couldn't keep up with her. (Running just isn't her thing.) Way to go Mia!

Don't know this first girl, Amelia, her good friend Nicole & Allie

Utah....There We Came

One thing led to another, which led to another, which resulted in a 3 week summer vacation to Utah. I can't think of a better way to spend summer break than with family. We had a great time. It was nice to not be rushed and to cram so many things in. We started our trip with a family reunion with Jen's family and ended it with a family reunion with Mike's family at Bear Lake. Since I'm not Elisha, I didn't get many pictures. And when I did try to take some pictures, some how I got sand in the zoom of my cheap, point and shoot camera that it wouldn't take pictures and still won't. So I rely on my cell phone for nice, grainy pictures. We had many fun things we did with family in between the reunions...4th of July parade with Shan and Matt's family, fireworks with Matt and Elisha (thanks for the s'mores!), a missionary farewell with yummy roast beast, sending a missionary to the MTC and many other things I'm sure I'm forgetting. I want to share some of the things we did on our own that you might not be aware of. Mike and I attended the temple 2 times in one weekend, the Logan and Bountiful Temples. Allie got to do baptisms at Logan as well. Allie and I also did temple work at the Salt Lake Temple. Allie spent the night with Stefanie to do baptisms early the next morning before Stef had to go to work. I woke up at 4AM to attend the 6am session, so I could be done at the same time Stef and Allie were, and hopefully see General Authorities walk down the hall to a meeting, which they never had. But that's okay! We enjoyed the temple in all its glory. So that made it 3 times for Jen and 2 times for Allie. We were on a roll. We also went to the Oquirrh Mountain Temple open house. Let me pause for a moment. Being there in Utah and making a point of attending different temples and pointing the different temples out to the girls really made a difference in our trip. I realize since we've been home what a spiritual lift I had gotten during that short 3 weeks. On our trip home we passed 9 temples. WOW! I just think that's incredible. I wanted the 2 younger girls to feel the spirit of the temple and to have a picture in their mind of what temples look like. So when Mike and I go to the temple, they might be able to visitualize it and remember how they felt when they were there. What a neat experience to share with them.

Just love those doorknobs! The Garden of Eden Trees

Oquirre Mountain Temple

Hiking to Mt. Timpanogos Cave is an adventure we are all glad we took on. It was only 1 1/2 miles but it was straight up and, of course, straight down. It was tougher than I expected but well worth it. Once we left Timp, we drove to Provo via the back way through the canyon. It was so beautiful, but very windy and made Amelia car sick. We drove by Bridal Veil Falls, the Provo Temple, the MTC and, of course, we had to visit the BYU Creamery. Not before we ate at Olive Garden, on the corner of University and 2200 N. (I think that's the address). That building holds significance, in that, it used to be the Tepanyaki, where the shrimp bounced off Mike's forehead, during a celebration following his brain surgery. BYU Creamery
Fry Sauce....only in Utah
We had a quick tour of the Church History Museum, Temple Square and the Conference Center. (Thanks for coming with us Emma. Hope you had fun.) Now for a funny story. We had walked around the Museum and Temple Square long enough that we needed to feed the meter before we went to the Conference Center. When we got to the car, Amelia jumped in. She was waiting to drive there. Well, little did she know that we were parked right across the street from it. When I told her that she said, that's not THE Conference Center. Allie and I kept assuring her it was and she still didn't believe us even when she saw this sign. When we walked in, a sister greeted us and said "Welcome to The Conference Center." Amelia still didn't believe her. The only thing that convinced her was when we walked in to the huge room where everyone sits. THEN she believed it. What a silly girl!

The view from the Conference Center Roof

Church History Museum - They asked, "He's that big??"

In the Tabernacle

Cherry Pickin' Fun (Thanks Katrina!)

Total Picked: 220lbs Total Earned: $70 Total Fun: Way Too Much

Puppies getting lost in Grandpa's garden (I thought there was going to be another heart attack) How Sweet It Is
Our trip was full of so many wonderful things, I'm sure I've missed some of them. Some of these pictures describe what we did, even if it wasn't bogged about. Thanks Grandma and Grandpa for letting us intrude for so long!