Happy "Birth" day Max!

My sister Mary had little Max at 12:03 this morning. He is 6 lbs 7 oz, 18.5 inches long and a miracle! When Mary and Spencer when in for the ultrasound at 20 weeks they were very excited to find out the gender of baby #2. Not long into the ultra sound the tech discovered an abnormality. Max has multiple problems with his little heart. Mary set up a blog to help explain and follow Max's progress. There have been multiple doctor appointments, ultra sounds, tests and a lot of tears and worries. There will still be multiple doctor appointments and tests, but many of the tears and worries have been calmed with how wonderful Max has been doing since he was born.

Spencer and Mary with little Max. What proud parents.

Max's initial check up right after birth~ what a beautiful baby.

I love my sister so much and I am so happy for the new addition to her family. I wish we lived closer so I could be around to help out with Morgen and to give this little angel extra hugs and kisses.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

On Christmas we had a lot of rain, mixed with a little bit of snow. But today we have already gotten 6 inches of snow and it is still coming down. Christmas was great, busy, fun, crazy and wonderful! I hope everyone had a great holiday!

PS On the news tonight they did a calculation~ shoveling a normal driveway with 6 inches of snow equals shoveling 2,000 pounds of snow! We are also on a long corner lot, so I also shovel a lot of sidewalk and to top it off I sweep/shovel all the snow off of our trampoline as well! Thanks for the work out Mother Nature!

A picture's worth a thousand words

Okay~ I am feeling way too lazy and busy to spend a lot of time blogging about the rest of our trip to California. So, instead I am just going to post a bunch of pictures that will show our adventures. And just so you don't think I am biased towards my boys~ there will be a lot more pictures of them since the 3 of us stayed in California an extra week. Shayden and Korby had to get back to school and work. Enjoy!

One morning I got up early with my dad and went hiking. It was beautiful watching the sun rise over the mountains. It looks like we are hiking by a lake, but that is actually the cloud cover that hadn't burned off yet.

One day we walked out on the Oceanside pier. There were two pelicans there that were fighting each other. The kids thought it was awesome!

We went down to Balboa Park one day. The science center was free so we got to go in and play/discover. They have a great kids area where Tanner wrote his name all by him self. He was so excited!

Here is my dad and Tanner at Balboa Park looking in the fish pond.

We spent one morning at a cell phone store. There were 8 adults and 3 kids in one small store for 2 hours! At least they had display phones that kept the kids pretty entertained!

At Balboa Park they have a free trolley that drives you all around. The driver was really sweet~ she gave my boys each a hat and let them blow the whistle!

We spent an afternoon at La Jolla Cove. They boys had so much fun playing with their cousin Morgen. The three of them played peek-a-boo for about 10 minutes straight at one point!

Do you think Jackson is trying to tell me something~ stop taking my picture mom!

If you enlarge this picture you will be able to see that all those dark rocks are actually sea lions. It is always so fun to get to see these amazing animals and to watch how completely awkward they are on land!

One of the highlights of the trip was going to the San Diego Temple to be with my sister and her husband as they were sealed. Here is Jackson waiting outside for everyone.

Tanner is a pretty particular eater (and that's an understatement). Here is his Thanksgiving dinner~ green jello with marshmallows! Oh yea, he also ate a roll!

We went on a family hike. The kids were real troopers. It ended up being about 4 miles. I think Jackson walked about 30 steps of the entire thing!

Here is a sweet picture of Jackson from our Pilgrim and Indian photo shoot.

Right off the freeway in Temecula there is a big duck pond. The kids had a great time feeding all the ducks and taking a walk with grandpa.

It is pretty unusual to get a good smiling picture of Tanner. He usually has a much more serious smile. I love this little guy!

My sister Holly loves jewelry and has more than anyone I know. She was getting rid of some of her necklaces that she doesn't wear anymore, so she brought them over to my parents house and we played "Jewelry Store." All the items were spread out on a king size bed (and they covered the entire bed!), my sisters and I got to go through and pick out anything we wanted! It was so much fun and I came home with more jewelry then I owned before I came down to CA! Shayden was in heaven!!!!

Here's a shot from the loft in my parents house. We love their house!!!

Well, that about sums up our trip to CA. Now I can start posting Christmas pictures!!!

Happy Late Thanksgiving

We spent Thanksgiving with my family in sunny California. It was wonderful and I have some fun pictures to share. First I will show pictures of my family from Thanksgiving Day. We made Indian and Pilgrim hats and took a picture of each family. It was pretty silly and fun. Enjoy!

My dad and mom

The Lee's

Holly and Fer


Mary, Morgen and Spencer

Katie

Megan and John

I hope everyone else had as much fun with their friends and family over the holidays! How truly blessed we are to have each other!

California Dreamin'

We are leaving tomorrow for sunny California to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family. Right now I am stressing out (like I always do before we leave on a trip) and feel like I have a million things to do in the next 19 hours~ yes I am counting the hours. I hope that anyone reading this blog has a great Thanksgiving!!!

This is a picture of the Oceanside beach taken off of the pier. Although my parents don't live here anymore, this is still my beach.

Regular Stuff

Nothing super exciting has been happening the last week or so, just a lot of regular stuff. Busy, but regular. Here we are at a UVU pre-season basketball game with Korby's dad. It was very empty which made it perfect for my boys to run around like crazy and not bug anyone.

We went up to Grandma Lee's house to help clean up all of her leaves. Shayden was a great helper~ the boys undid just about everything we tried to do. They ended up playing with grandpa instead.

Here is Tanner playing with his best friend Tanner O. The two of them together will sit and play trains for hours on end.

We are leaving for California next week, so I am sure we will have some much more exciting stories and pictures to post when we get back.

Autumn

We have had one of the most mild and beautiful fall's that I can remember! The kids had so much fun playing outside, watching all the leaves change color and enjoying the wonderful weather while it lasted.

We have a small park at the end of our circle~ it is the perfect way to spend a nice afternoon with the boys while waiting for Shayden to get home from school.

We went to Gardner Village with some friends for the Witch Festival.

My dad came up to visit and we took the kids to the zoo. I love this picture because without knowing it, Jackson is making the same face as the eagle he is riding!

I am going to miss seeing this once it starts snowing! The past few months have been so wonderful~ Jackson is finally old enough to play outside with the "big kids" and they play so nicely together (for the most part)!

I am not quite ready for winter to be here~ but then again, if it was up to me winter would never get here and we would just go right into spring! A girl can wish....

Finally Halloween

Okay, with all those cruise posts finally out of the way I can get back to posting the more important things~ like pictures of my kids at Halloween.

At the beginning of October I asked Shayden what she wanted to be for Halloween and she told me a vampire. I told her no because I didn't want anyone to think that I had anything to do with her wanting to be a vampire as a result of the whole Twilight phenomenon. However, she kept insisting that she wanted to be that, so I made sure that she looked like a "real" vampire and not like Bella :)

Once Tanner heard that Shayden wanted to be a vampire, Tanner didn't want to be anything but a vampire as well.
And what else would Jackson want to be besides exactly the same thing as his brother and sister?!

I dressed up as well, but didn't get a picture of myself and Korby didn't dress up at all (party pooper!) So we almost had a whole family of vampires. My mom made the awesome capes for my kids. You can't see the insides of all their capes, but it matched the bow on the top. They were awesome! Thanks mom!

Day 8- St Thomas

Our last full day of the cruise was in port at St. Thomas. We rented scooters for the day to explore the island. They drive on the left hand side of the road~ it felt very strange and the fact that we were on tiny scooters, not knowing our way around made it a little more nerve racking. The girls spent the morning shopping while the guys took off on the scooters and explored. By this time the other 3 were snorkeled out and sun burned pretty bad (I was neither!) so we didn't intentionally get in the water this day.

I am so glad that Korby was driving~ although I was a pretty annoying back seat driver (especially since I was directly behind him, holding/gripping onto him and talking in his ear the whole time!) You can't see it in the picture, but my helmet had a HUGE dent in the side of it~ luckily not from me!

This was the only plain building I saw the entire time~ and it stood out so much!


We were stopped at this look out and we could see off to the right a storm coming in (it is hard to see in the picture). It rained every day of our cruise, but only a slight shower for a couple of minutes and then it would pass. This one was not like the others. When I said earlier that we didn't intentionally get in the water this day, I meant that we didn't get in the ocean to swim. Not 3 minutes after we got back on our scooters from this look out point it started POURING! We were drenched within a couple of minutes~ on a twisting road, up on the hillside, on scooters, in shorts and flip flops~ not really ideal conditions to get caught in a storm. So, we had to pull off to the side of the road and wait it out. It lasted for about 10 minutes, but it was long enough to completely soak us. It was an adventure and made for some fun memories!

We had read about a local art gallery that we wanted to visit. When we got there we saw that is was just a group of small local artist shops. Not what we were expecting, but very unique and fun. They even paint their bikes there!

I wish we would have found this sign earlier in the week. Our guys could have used a little sympathy while we were shopping.

This door was was incredible! The entire thing is sea shells~ it must have taken forever to make!

One of our last stops was a beach called Meagen's Bay. We read that it was one of the Top 10 small beaches in the world. It was breath taking!

There were some little boats just sitting on the shore by an old life guard tower. The water was so clear that we were in the water up to our knees and we could see every single grain of sand on the bottom!

As we were leaving the port, this was a resort that we passed by. Doesn't that look like the perfect place to just hang out for a week?!

After eight days of vacationing and 2 days of traveling, it was perfect! We loved every minute of it~ but were very excited to come home to our wonderful children!

Day 7- St Marteen

St. Marteen was amazing! Our plans changed a little bit once we got off the boat. We had planned on doing a zip line tour, which included lunch and a hike. But when we got there, we learned that it was under construction and closed. So, we decided to rent a car and drive ourselves around the island.

If you look close, you can see someone washing the windows on the front of the boat!

Again, the beaches were just stunning!

While everyone else was snorkeling, this pelican hung out by me for about 20 minutes! I got to watch it fly, dive down in the water and come back up with a beak full of water and fish. It was a very large bird.

We were trying to find a beach with good snorkeling. At one stop, some guys showed us an island and for $20 per couple they would take us out there and pick us up 3 hours later. The ride out there and back were a little sketchy! The guys drove us out there on Sea-Doo's (Korby and I on one and our friends on the other Sea-Doo with the other driver). The two guys were as high as a kite! They were racing each other all the way there and on the way back as well~ and racing on 3 seated Sea-Doo's with impaired judgement made for a crazy ride for us! They were jumping each other's wakes and trying to swerve into one another, all at full speed. We were getting a couple feet of air on some of the jumps and there were a couple of times that Korby (sitting on the very back) almost fell off from bouncing so far off the seat. But we ended up with our own private beach! And I was told that the snorkeling was amazing~ Korby even got to swim with a sea turtle.

This is a picture from a cave on "our island" looking back at St Marteen. It was a fun island to explore. I found so much coral and a whole pile of conch shells. I brought one back for Shayden that was about a foot long! It is beautiful!

I started taking a photography class right before we left on vacation, and one of the accessories that our instructor talked about was a polarized filter. It is supposed to take away some of the light reflections. In this picture it is amazing to see what taking away the reflection of the sun off the water and clouds does to the color of the picture!
We ate lunch on the beach and this was the view from our table! I could really get used to this! There was a strip of shops along the beach and now I know what I want to do once Korby retires~ open up a little gift shop on the beach in the Caribbean!

At every port the ship just dominated the entire scene!

We ended the day with a little bit of shopping. A lot of it was either tourist junk or very high end merchandise. But we did find a linen shop that I could have spent hours in and way too much money~ so it's a good thing that we had a time limit to get back to the ship!

It was about this point where we realized that the week was going by way too fast. I also realized that although there were moments where we thought about our kids, we really weren't missing them at all! (Is that bad parenting, or just the effects of a really great vacation?!)