Girl Power

These are a long time in coming. We had a fun girly photo shoot when Mike was out of town for work.....back in September. (Unfortunately we haven't gotten together again with our friend to get a family picture done.) We had a good time except for it trying to rain. Got kinda cold.

We Moved

After almost 11 years in the same house we have moved. It was crazy and I don't recommend it if you can avoid it. Unfortunately we couldn't. Needless to say, we survived and are no worse for the wear, I guess. We are living in the basement of some friends until we figure things out. It's really nice. These pictures aren't the best but it will give you a general idea....

The Girls share this big room. There are two bedrooms. But they are master bedrooms. They each have their own bathrooms with walk in closets.

Huge bathroom....

....with a big walk in closet

Our storage which hides behind curtains

Master Bedroom. It has a nice big bathroom too!!

Hummingbirds

We have had another good year for hummingbirds. Seems that every time there's a fire, we get hummingbird refugees. This year is no exception. I have tried to capture what our typical day has been like for the past few weeks. I'm a novice at video. Sorry for the jerky movements. Helps if you have good equipment too, which I don't have. As you can see, we have 2 hummingbird feeders. One holds 32oz, the other one 10oz. We've been filling the smaller one about once a day. And the big one about every other day. Although in the last 24 hours we have filled the smaller one twice. For a little background about some of the hummingbirds, there is one or maybe more than one who seems to guard the bigger feeder. He'll sit on a strand of the christmas lights on either side of it. It appears that it doesn't allow as many hummingbirds to feed from it, which would be why we fill the little one so often. We have 2 feeders on the front porch too but don't get near the activity as these 2 back ones. This morning before we left for church, Mike filled the little hummingbird feeder. When he was putting the feeder up, it didn't seem that the birds had any fear of him. They just kept coming anyway. So while one was feeding, Mike slowly raised his hand up to try and touch one. And he did!! He "pet" it twice on it's underside before it flew away. Amazing!! Be sure to turn your volume up all the way to hear yelling at each other and all the noise they make. We just love it!

Be On Your Guard!

I, Allie, am now of dating (and driving) age. So, stay off the roads and lock up your boys, or you might wake up with a banged-up tailgate or a missing son (or both!).

Why?

Why do I even have a blog? I have no idea because I rarely update. I figure no news is good news these days. Catch my drift?!? We are job hunting. That's about the only new thing. We are anxiously waiting to see where Mike can get employment and if we have to move.

The End.

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.