Happy 3rd Birthday Elisabeth!!!

Today Elisabeth was in charge of most of our schedule. First decision:
Wear Cinderella dress and tiara most of the day
Second decision: Go to the mall (still in costume) and ride all the quarter rides and play on the kids computer in the mini library, also located in the mall
Final decision: Party!















(Here is a picture of Elisabeth with the flowers Daddy brought home for her) We love you sweetheart!

Snow White birthday cake!

I just finished Elisabeth's 3rd Birthday cake. For her first birthday we (Gina and I) made a rainbow cake, her 2nd birthday she had a Dora the Explorer cake and this year she asked for a Snow White cake to go along with her princess party (I'll be posting more pictures from the party once that's over). For any of you cake people or people who are interested in cakes here are the details on it: I used a barbie cake pan and covered the skirt in yellow butter cream icing. I covered the bodice of the barbie in fondant that was pre-made from Michael's, chopped her hair (they only have a couple of barbie 'tops' to choose from, so I was lucky to get one that even had dark brown hair) and put a red ribbon on top. I baked the cake last night and then frosted it today; decorating probably took an hour which is pretty quick, so I was pleased about that.

6 weeks

We found out a few weeks ago that I'm pregnant again! I haven't actually been to the doctor yet, but according to babycenter.com (you can plug in your last menstrual period and length of cycle), the due date will be February 18th 2008. Last week I started feeling nauseated and it's been getting worse every day. I'm hoping this pregnancy is more like Charlie's than Elisabeth's because I could barely keep any food down with her for a few months; when I was pregnant with Charles I still felt sick but during the entire pregnancy I only threw up a handful of times. I won't complain anymore, I just am so happy to know that another member of our family will be joining us soon.

We bought a house!

This past Wednesday night, Scott, Charles, and I flew out to Salt Lake City, Utah to do some house hunting. My Aunt and Uncle were our realtors and were amazing as always! We bought a house that's a rambler/ranch style(with a finished basement), that includes 4 bed, 3 bath, living room, office and family room within it's 2,412 square footage. It was built in 1993, some things will need to be updated(downstairs carpet, bedroom colors, laundry room), though it does have a new beautiful kitchen! The yard is a good size, .23 acres, and it'll come with the shed and swingset that you can see in the picture below of the backyard. We'll be moving in the beginning of August. We are definitely feeling the love and tender mercies of the Lord's hand in our lives right now and always. My mom tended Elisabeth for the three days/nights that we were gone and we're so thankful to her for that. Elisabeth loved the one on one time she got to spend with Granny and has told us about many fun activities they did together.

While in Utah we stayed with our good friends the Arkell's who were very loving and supportive of us during this time(thanks again Ben and Gina, and Gina thanks again for watching Char while we signed papers). The kids enjoyed playing with one another, the moms enjoyed visiting and shopping and the dad's enjoyed staying up into the wee hours of the night/morning playing a baseball video game :). Charles loved baby Kamri and gave her lots of hugs and kisses!

Port Angeles, Forks and La Push Washington

Thursday afternoon we took a little road trip, and ferry ride, over to the Olympic Peninsula where we did some camping, hiking, and site seeing. We camped in a KOA Kampground (that's how they spell it) and we absolutely loved it! I don't think I could ever go back to camping the typical way. They're located in all of the states and you can either tent camp, RV camp, or cabin/cottage/lodge camp. We stayed in a cabin for a couple of nights that had beds for all of us and electricity! Outside of each cabin was a fire pit, swing and picnic table. They also have different activities that could keep you busy all day. If you want to check out the website you can go here: www.koa.com/ Thanks to Robin and Fred for telling us about KOA!

Friday we drove down to Forks and La Push where we did some site seeing (for any of you who read Twilight or New Moon, you'll know why I had to look around there :)) and went on a hike through a beautiful forest that took us down to Second Beach in La Push. The only problem we ran into on our trip was during our 1.5 hour drive from Port Angeles to Forks, the roads were pretty curvy and when we were about 5 minutes away from Forks Elisabeth who was sitting in the back corner seat of the van puked all over herself and car seat! It was pretty nasty! We had left all extra clothes at the cabin, so we cleaned her off the best we could with baby wipes but she still wreaked so when we got to Forks we found the only shopping area, within about a 60 mile radius, and bought her a new outfit, they only had a few to choose from...down side of being in a small town I guess. Besides that, everything went smoothly and we had an awesome time! We've actually decided to make it a yearly tradition to go stay at a KOA Kampground and do some hiking.
(Picture of Elisabeth and I in front of Forks High School which is where Bella goes to School, and picture of me and Elisabeth in front of La Bella Italia where Bella ate with Edward in Port Angeles; it was great food by the way!)

High School Musical

Okay, let's try this post again...I think I've figured out the problem with You Tube.

Here is Elisabeth singing the chorus to, "Start of Something New." It's a song from the Disney Movie High School Musical.

Here are the lyrics just in case you can't quite understand what she's saying:

"I said yeah, it's the start of something new, it feels so right to be here with you, oh, and now looking in your eyes, I feel in my heart, the start of something new."

Elisabeth aka drama queen

Today was another beautiful day! I got Charles all ready for the day while Elisabeth put on her skort, t-shirt(she picks out her clothes and dresses herself) and tennis shoes (she went for sandals but I reminded her what happened last week when she got a little splinter in her foot and she FREAKED out for at least half an hour even after it was out!) and we took off to the park for playgroup. She played great for quite some time but then she had a little fall and scraped one of her knees, I don't know if you could even really call it a scrape, it didn't even bleed. Anyways, she froze in place and started to cry. I picked her up and brought her over to a bench so I could take a look at the damage, or the lack there of in this case. I told her that it was fine. But she didn't believe me. She kept looking down at it and it would make her cry even more. So finally I decided we better take off from playgroup early. When we got home I gently cleaned it up while she wailed and kicked and screamed, and then I put some "magic band aid cream"(that's what we call the antibacterial stuff) and a band aid on it and told her everything was all better now. But she was still so upset. She laid down on the couch and insisted upon having her blanket which we never give her unless she's in her bed going to sleep. She would whimper a little, look down at her band aid and start bawling again. Finally I figured out that the sight of it was making her so upset, so I grabbed her a pair of jeans, took off her skort which she was not happy about, helped her get the jeans over her wounded knee and then seriously within about 5 seconds she was so happy again, and went straight to the table where her lunch was waiting for her, sat on her knees like always and ate with us like a normal human being. I'm afraid we've got a mini drama queen on our hands :).

Master Scott!!!

Yesterday was Scott's last day of finals/presentations etc. and so he is now officially done with school and is a master of science in civil engineering!!! Hooray!!! We celebrated with some family today: we ordered pizza, had Henry Weinhard's root beer, ice cream sandwich bars and a cake that I made (of course).

"Lay off me I'm starving!"

Growing up we used to watch SNL a lot, it was great when they had Chris Farley, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, David Spade etc. I love this short skit, I think many of us can sympathize with Chris Farley's character at some point in time; or maybe it's just me :)

Craigslist find

Seattle's 'craigslist' has SO much stuff, it's wonderful! Because there's SO much stuff, people sell a lot of their really nice stuff for really cheap or they'll even give it away for free; I guess they're just hoping someone will come take it off of their hands so they don't have to deal with it anymore. A couple of days ago we (Scott and I) decided that we were going to try and find some furniture items on Craigslist here before we move to Salt Lake City since we'll be moving into something that's much bigger than our 2 bedroom apartment. Now of course I searched the Salt Lake craigslist too but they just don't have much at all compared to Seattle's and because of that things are much more expensive. The items we are searching for include a bookshelf, an entertainment center armoire, and a dresser armoire for the kids room. Anyways, yesterday I found this bookshelf that was just absolutely perfect, and it was free!! I'm sure I'll be on craigslist now several times a day until I find my other items :).

Cheesy children....I love it!!!

The kiddos love to play with their bikes/cars out on our patio, they don't have a ton of room but it's an okay size. Here's a cute clip I got of them the other day...notice Elisabeth's cheesy laugh and Charles' cheesy smile, and he's actually saying, "cheese!" while he flashes his smile, I love it!

'Latter Day Prophets' and Sunday pictures

Here's a short clip of Elisabeth singing one of her favorite songs...she actually has about 30 favorites, but I didn't want to bore you with all of them. Enjoy!


Today we dressed Charles in one of Scott's old outfits that he wore when he was a child, and he and Elisabeth looked so cute in their church attire that we thought we'd try and take some pictures before we took off. This was a little difficult. Charles didn't want to look at the camera:

Elisabeth tried to help by putting her arm around him, but he obviously didn't want her to touch him:

I decided to jump in and see if I could hold Char still for a minute, you can see how well that turned out:

Oh well, better luck next time :)

Big changes

First big change: Becca, my little sister, chopped my hair yesterday and gave me some layers. She took off 5 inches! That's a lot for me considering I've only gotten little trims since probably 5 years ago or so. I love long hair when it's taken care of...it's just beautiful. Anyways, I had a really hard time yesterday deciding whether or not I was going to let her cut off so much but she talked me into it :). And I thought, if I'm going to cut it short, I better do it now that it's getting hot outside so that my reasoning seems more justified. So from looking at the picture you might be thinking, well it's really not that short...but it is to me. Here's a shot I snapped a couple of minutes ago with Charlie because I didn't want to take a picture just of myself :).Below: this is an image I added after I published this blog because Becca called complaining that you can't even see my haircut or the layers in the picture above....so this is a picture that she just emailed to me that we took yesterday :and one more from yesterday with Becca, Bella and the back of Charles:
Second big change: We recently found out that we'll be moving to Salt Lake City, Utah this summer! We've known for a long time that we were going to have to move somewhere if we wanted to buy a home, but we just didn't know where and we were looking all over the U.S. We've been very prayerful about it all and it's amazing how the door just completely opened for us in Utah. We know that this is where we're supposed to be right now. We're very excited, though it is going to be hard to leave my family and friends behind here. It has been so nice living close to family, especially when I've got little ones and a husband finishing his masters degree :). We're not sure the exact day we'll be moving but it'll either be in July or August, it's a good thing we just switched to a month-to-month lease when our contract ended last week!