Hairspray

Saturday afternoon my nieces and I went and saw the movie Hairspray. I haven't seen the old one so I don't have that to compare it to, but this was pretty cute. I love corny cheesy movies where people are singing and dancing and having a good time, so this was right up my alley. John Travolta made me laugh every scene that he was in. Just looking at him was funny.

This movie is rated PG, which is a big reason I decided to see it, and I was hoping for something really really clean....it was clean for the most part though Zac Efron did use a swear word, and it was said very clear, for the word 'bottom' or 'backside' :), and there was a scene where some high schoolers were doing some dirty dancing, too bad they didn't just leave those two parts out.

Happy Anniversary Honey!

Thanks for an amazing four years! I'm so happy we have an eternity to spend together! Love you Scott!

Our little singers and dancers

This video was taken over this last Christmas holiday, so Elisabeth is 2 and 1/2 in the video and she's dancing around in her new Cinderella dress singing, "Once Upon a Dream" from Sleeping Beauty:


This next video was filmed a couple of weeks ago; doesn't Charles look so much older?! I think it's the haircut. Elisabeth isn't singing any song in particular, she likes to make up words to songs and dance to it :) :

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

WARNING: this blog post contains spoilers from Book 7 so if you're reading the book or planning on reading the book you might not want to read this just yet

On Friday night at midnight (when the book started selling) my wonderful husband went out and bought me the 7th Harry Potter book! I couldn't go...well maybe I could have but if I did I would have definitely been throwing up because after about 9 or 10 my pregnant body just can't handle being up anymore. So I woke up to find the copy on our table Saturday morning and started reading.

It was wonderful! I loved it! J.K. Rowling is brilliant, she really is. I expected something to happen with Snape though I was still surprised when he or his thoughts at least actually explained his whole story. All my questions were answered in this book, why Dumbledore's hand was all withered and black in the last book and why Snape had to kill him, and then of course Harry being the 7th Horcrux but amazing how he was able to have only that part which Voldemort sort of lived in him killed and then he was able to come back alive completely whole and purely himself! And then of course I loved the epilogue 19 years later showing Harry and Ginny married and Ron and Hermoine married and all their children going or getting ready to attend Hogwarts. Overall I was just so happy that in the end good conquered evil and Harry didn't have to die in the process, but rather he got to start his own family and keep close friendships.

If any of you have finished reading the book I'd love to hear what you thought of it.

Swimming

It's been pretty hot here the last couple of weeks, in fact one day it got up to 100! That is very hot for Seattle. I won't ever go to the pool by myself because I'm afraid that one of my little ones will drown, so we usually only get to go to our pool on nights and weekends when Daddy's home, but on a couple of the really hot days last week my mom and sister drove out and went swimming with us. Don't you love Elisabeth's grumpy face :), she didn't feel like smiling for the camera even though she was having a blast at the pool; in fact a lot of times when she makes that face she'll accompany it with the sentence, "I'm Grumpy from Snow White."

Harry Potter 5, the movie

My little sister Becca and I and our friend Traci saw Harry Potter 5 this evening on it's opening day. Bec and I dressed up as Harry and Hermoine or perhaps Ginny, take your pick (I already had the costumes from Halloween, so of course we HAD to!) There was probably 2 other people dressed up and one was maybe 10 years old, it was so fun! I'm so glad that I have a sister who likes to dress up and be silly too. Anyways, I LOVE the Harry Potter books and the movies are pretty good...only 10 more days until Harry Potter 7, the final book, is out!!! I can't wait!

The movie was good and the director got most everything in there that's really important, though at the end during Dumbledore's talk with Harry they didn't include the reason why harry has to return to the Dursley's each summer which I think is kind of important, and may prove to be even more important in the last book...we'll see.

P.S. Thanks hubbies for watching the babies!

3 year and 18 month checkups

Elisabeth and Charles went in for their well checkups last week and here are the stats:
Elisabeth: weight- 29 lbs. (25-50%) and height- 36 and 1/4 inches (25-50%)
Charles: weight-24lbs. (25-50%) and height-33 inches (50-75%) and head- 19 and 1/2 (90%)

They both got shots, Elisabeth got one and Charles got two...well actually three because the nurse accidentally didn't get the immunization in all the way in the first shot so she had to do it again, no fun. The kids did well.

Portland with the McDonalds

This past weekend we drove down to Portland, Oregon to visit our friends Lori and Cameron McDonald. We all had a great time! We arrived Friday around 5pm and we walked over to a water park that was in their neighborhood. Unfortunately we didn't pack any swimsuits(I know, terrible parents to forget swimsuits), so we thought we'd just wade our feet in the little streams they have. But as you can see, once the kids got warmed up to the idea of playing in the water they decided to go all out and get soaked head to toe. We stripped Charles down to his onsie and diaper so that he had some dry clothes to be in on our walk back home, but Elisabeth just had to walk home drenched, it was kind of a funny sight, by the way she was walking you would've thought she wet her pants :). This picture to the left is when we first arrived and were just wading our feet.

Elisabeth running up the hill to get to the top of the stream again:

Charles having fun in the fountains:Soaking wet:
Saturday Lori had a work party at a fairground so we all went and the kids got to ride their first amusement park rides! Elisabeth liked all of them except the roller coaster. Charles wasn't too comfortable with any of the rides, and after the roller coaster he didn't want to try anything else.We put Charles on this one but before he even got started he begged to get off so Elisabeth ended up riding it by herself:
The family riding the train around the amusement park:
Lori and Elisabeth rode the Carousel a couple of times:
Elisabeth pouting because she doesn't want to eat pizza for dinner and here we are at Pizza Schmizza:

How Scott and I met

Jamie, thanks for starting this chain, it's been fun to read everyone's stories of how they met; I had heard some of them before but it was nice to hear more in depth details :). So here's our story based on my memories:

Scott moved into the Elms Apartments at BYU during the Spring/Summer term of 2002. He was in the ward that I would be moving into that Fall and so he knew my roommates and even went on a couple of dates with a couple of them :). When I moved into the Elms in the end of August he had already moved out to a different building, still in the same apartment complex, but he was no longer in our ward...I think that would only happen in Utah :).

Scott invited our apartment of girls to play soccer with some other people over at DT field on Saturday's, a couple of us did play soccer quite a bit so we joined them almost every weekend. At this point in time we were all just friends, I had a missionary out that I thought was pretty cool so I wasn't too interested in other guys, and Scott was skinnier than me so that didn't help things either :), I know I shouldn't care about those things, but I did at the time. Well, apparently Scott had a different plan for 'us'. He came over fairly frequently and would hang out with whoever was around. One night for a friend's birthday party we went to see the second Harry Potter movie and Scott and I sat by each other. During the previews he whispered to me, "that actress is so and so (he didn't really say so and so but I can't remember who it was now)" and I said, "no, that is definitely not her, it's so and so." From this conversation Scott talked me into going on a date with him, he said something like, "let's put a wager on this. If you're right then I have to take you out on a date, and if I'm right then you'll have to take me out on a date." I agreed, mostly because I'm competitive and knew I was right. So Scott ended up taking me out to dinner at the Brick Oven.

We started hanging out even more, but still just as friends on my side, though I figured he probably liked me a little more. My older brother Fred was also living in the same apartment complex as us, and was also friends with Scott. One night a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving Scott asked me what our plans were over the holiday. I told him that Fred and I were flying home to Seattle to be with our family. I asked him what he was planning to do and he said he didn't know, that his family lived in North Carolina and that he wouldn't be able to go out there for such a short time....he sounded kinda bummed. So I suggested that he drive out to Seattle and have Thanksgiving with our family, thinking that of course that would sound absurd and he'd say no. But he agreed.

Fred and I called my parents and told them that we invited a friend to join us for Thanksgiving which they thought was great! I ended up getting credit for my flight and driving out with Scott so that he wouldn't have to make the 14 hour trip on his own. Apparently that was the turning point in our friendship. We got to talk about everything and anything! We had an endless amount of time. We talked, joked around, sang, memorized songs, talked some more, and we had a really good time. When we got to my house my whole family loved him, even my dad which was/is amazing! Scott still says that it was my little sister Becca that made me like him because while we were there she pulled me aside and said, "Elisa, he's really cool and he really likes you. I think you should give him a chance." During that trip we held hands and from then on we were pretty much inseparable, it didn't take long until I was head over heels in love with him. He proposed in February and we were married that July.

p.s. sorry I don't have any pictures, we didn't have a digital camera then and we haven't gotten around to scanning them yet. When I do I'll post them.

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!