Time away

My sweet Grandparents have been planning on going on a family cruise for their 50th anniversary ever since I can remember. Well they celebrated their 50th anniversary last month and we were so excited to celebrate it with them by going to the Mexican Riviera! In all, 17 members of my family were able to be there and we had a blast!!!

This was our wait team on the ship. They served us all week long and they were awesome! Dewa (on the right) even cried when we left. They were so sweet.

This is a picture of Cabo San Lucas. It was beautiful there!

Our second stop was Mazatlan. I think this was our favorite port because we had such a good time. We took a boat ride to a place called Stone Island. On the Island there are no hotels and no other tourists. I felt like we really got to see what Mexican life was like. It was kind of humbling seeing the conditions some of them lived in with no electricity or running water. It made me realize how many things we take for granted. But we really did have a good time there. We were able to go kayaking in the ocean, and we also got to ride on a banana boat that was being pulled by a fishing boat. Our favorite was going horseback riding along the beach. It was so much fun. The only other time I have been horseback riding before this was on a small trail where you were pretty much nose to tail with the other horses. This was much better than that!

Do you see that beautiful scenery behind us? Amazing!

There was a man walking around the beach with his iguanas so we stopped to take a look and he kept saying, "Take a picture, take a picture." So we thought, why not, and took some pictures with the iguanas. Then after we were done he said, "50 pesos." We should have known he wanted money.

On our boat ride over to Stone Island we passed right by our ship so we were able to get some great pictures of it.

Any guess why this rock is so white? Yep, it's bird droppings. Our tour guide called it a Mexican glacier.

I thought the prettiest port of all was Puerto Vallarta. I was amazed at how beautiful it was. We were able to go zip lining there which was a first for me, I was a little nervous about going zip lining in Mexico but once we got there I surprised myself by having a really good time!

After we were done zip lining they had a hut with a few animals inside. I was so excited when I found out you could actually go inside and hold them!


Here Andrew has a scorpion on his forehead, and tarantula in his hand and a python around his neck. No, thank you! Crazy man!

Here is a super cheesy picture of us sitting next to our towel animal.

So as you can tell we had a lot of fun on our cruise to Mexico and for any of you that are thinking about doing a cruise, you should DO IT! You will not regret it!

What did we miss while we were gone? Well, we missed 7 days of straight rain, a tornado warning at Carter's school but most of all we missed our three beautiful children. I don't think I could of handled another day without seeing them. I was so excited to come home to them, and then about 5 minutes later I was ready to be on the ship again. Just kidding!

Thanks a million times to my wonderful mother-in-law who was brave enough to take our kids for a whole week! We thought we were leaving her in the beautiful California sun, boy were we wrong. Thanks again, Colleen!

Growing

One of my favorite things is to watch all that our kids are learning. They continually surprise me with how much they know and how much they are growing. One thing that I really enjoy is listening to Carter and Parker pray. They have been really creative with their prayers lately and they seem to be making a real effort to pray like Andrew and I. Carter can go on for minutes about all that he is grateful for. I love it! I love watching them develop an understanding of God and Christ and love hearing them talk about Samuel the Lamanite, Thomas S. Monson, the Liahona and other church related topics.

The other day I was walking out the door to go to a work meeting when Carter poked his head out and said, "Bye mom, don't forget to listen to the spirit." Then Parker came out to say, "And don't forget to follow the prophet." What great reminders those were! It's good to know that all those times when we tried to teach our children about the scriptures or tried giving them a family home evening lesson weren't done in vain! Because quite frequently I feel like not a word is heard.


On a completely unrelated topic, Tristan has said his first phrase! It's "Wow, that's cool!" I wonder where he got that from? :)

Create

I very often feel like I am not creative or talented enough, but I know with God's help all things are possible. I'm sure most of you have already seen this, but in case you haven't, you really should watch it. I love the message it sends and could watch it over and over again!

Yet another Halloween Post

We had a very eventful Halloween this year. We had a lot of fun with the kids and are happy that they are at the age where they can actually enjoy what's going on. We kicked off the Halloween season by going to a nearby pumpkin patch. They had a petting zoo and hay ride and a few other fun things. Carter was very sad that he had to go to school and miss out.

I decided to do our first Hatch Halloween Party. I sent Party invitations to the boys a week in advance to get them excited and we spent all week making Halloween decorations for them to put up for the party. The day of the party we all dressed up as a family and ate mummy dogs (pictured above) for dinner and carmeled apples for dessert. We also read Halloween books and watched a Halloween movie. It was a lot of fun and I hope to carry on the tradition year after year.

The above picture is part of our decorations for the party.

We also went trick-or-treating at a nearby shopping center, where they did a costume contest. This is Carter and Parker parading their costumes.

This is Tristan accepting the first place prize in the costume contest. He got us a $10 gift certificate to Yogurtland. Whoo hoo!

I told myself I was going to try and be creative this year and make the boys' costumes myself. After many hours of inexperienced sewing and a lot of help from my wonderful husband, Carter and Parker had some pretty good looking Jedi knight costumes!

I didn't have enough time to make Tristan a costume, maybe next year. Plus, I think this costume is so cute I couldn't pass up the opportunity to use it again.

We also did a few other things this Halloween, including a ward trunk-or-treat and trick-or-treating at a Retirement home. Needless to say, after we took our costumes off on Halloween night we were ready for Halloween to be over, but we had a great time and made a lot of fun memories with our kids.

Happy Halloween!

Firsts!!!

Life is full of firsts, and with children every new experience is fun and exciting. Today Carter had his first day of kindergarten! He was so excited. His teacher sent him some magic confetti in the mail with instructions to put under his pillow the night before his first day to help him sleep soundly (but I think it actually had the opposite affect). When he woke up I was shocked at how quickly he was dressed and ready to get out the door. I think it must have been some kind of record! I thought he looked so handsome for his first day of school, but then I am a little biased.

It wasn't until Carter lined up with all the other kindergartners in his class that I realized Carter is kind of short! All I can hope is that in the end the tall genes that we know are in there somewhere will win out over the short ones. :)

Carter has never been a super chatty kid, and today was no different. When I picked him up and asked him how his day was all I got out of him was one word answers. After a lot of probing I finally learned that he went across the monkey bars all on his own and had a friend push him on the swing.

I can't believe he is in school now. Not having him around all the time will take a lot of getting used to both for me and for Parker, who kept saying, "Mommy, I miss Carter."



We also had another first recently in our family. Tristan had his first birthday last month!

He was so cute trying to get a hold of his cake the whole time we sang "Happy Birthday" to him and we so rudely kept it just out of his reach.

He absolutely LOVED his cake and dove right in the second he could get his hands on it and ate just about every crumb!

This past year has gone by so quick I can hardly believe it. We love that cute boy!!!