November 2017--Thanksgiving in Utah

We serendipitously happened upon great prices for airline tickets, so we decided to go to Utah for Thanksgiving.   It had been a number of years since we'd been there for a holiday, so it was extra fun to be there and have a good excuse to see lots of extended family as well.

One of my girls' favorite activities at Grandma and Grandpa's house is to play dress-up with the old prom dresses that belonged to me and my sisters.  I was excited to join them this year and was thrilled when I fit into my dress from 25-years ago!

We also took advantage and went on a few hikes.

We hiked the Y twice....once by ourselves....

and once with the Bournes.  The Bournes are good friends of ours from here in Virginia and now that Cami is married to their oldest son, I guess we're related too!  {NOTE:  Cami was still on her mission at this point}

Adam and I hiked up to Rock Canyon, where Daddy proposed to me all those years ago.  

Meanwhile, Emma hung out with friends from home on BYU campus--Miko, Rachel, and Diana.   They showed her around and got her extra excited to be a student there someday!  

We also discovered a fun new ice cream place.  It's inside the restaurant, "Good Thyme Eatery" on Center Street.  It's called, "Roll with It" and they make the best rolled ice cream around.  I ate a non-dairy version and honestly thought it was the best non-dairy ice cream I'd ever eaten.

They all start off as liquid and the worker makes it into ice cream on a super cold metal surface right in front of you.  Yum!

We spent a lot of time at BYU....

We went to Glen's cousin Stephanie's baby blessing....

We loved the opportunity to spend time with my sister, K and her family who were visiting from California...

The kids enjoyed the opportunity to spend time with their cousins...

We also got to see lots of extended family....including my Uncle Buddy, his family, my Nana....

and lots of my Mom's siblings that came to Thanksgiving dinner at my parents' house.

We randomly decided to try running a 5K race on Thanksgiving morning.   I struggled in the altitude, but somehow still finished 2nd in my age group.  Granted, with my advanced age, that doesn't mean much, but I was still proud.  Don't laugh at my obnoxious running apparel....I did not come prepared to run a race and the pilgrim hats were part of the "costumes" that they provided.

Here are the goofy t-shirts we got from the race....

I made and ate lots of pie....

And just enjoyed the opportunity to spend time with some of my family that I don't get to see as often.

I'm sure that lots more happened in November, but this is all the blog is getting this year.  :) 

The Last Eight Months or So

Wow, I've really this blog slide.  After ten years of regularly keeping it up, it was having a family missionary that finally did me in.   Now she's back home again and my family keeps mentioning to me how much they miss having the blog as a family record, so I'm here to give it another go.  

Since I'm so far behind,  let me just start with a summary of the last several months.   And you'll probably notice at a glance, that it's been a pretty exciting and full several months, so there are at least a few things I need to expand on with separate blogposts before I get back to blogging about the present again.   Let's hope I can stay on top of it again!     

Okay, here's the summary....

November--We spent Thanksgiving in Utah

December--Glen found out that his position at work was being discontinued as of February.

I ended my year-long chocolate fast.

We made a goal to visit the temple every week until it closes in March.

January--Cami returned home from her mission on January 30.  

February--Cami spent most of the month of February at home.   She had her mission homecoming, Garrett came for a visit, they got unofficially engaged while he was here, then on February 27 she flew to Utah where he officially proposed.  

Glen's job ended and we had to adjust to him being at home all the time too.

March--Spring break to Savannah, Georgia.  And lots and lots of wedding planning.

April-- Cami and Garrett got married in the Salt Lake Temple on April 21.  Clearly this deserves a blogpost of its own, so stay tuned for more details and pictures coming soon.

Also, Spence moved to Utah to stay.

May--We took our long ago planned trip to visit Cami's mission to Southern France.

We realize that, because of a stupid glitch,  our health insurance has been cancelled.

Homeschool conference in Williamsburg.

June--We had Cami's reception here in Virginia.

YW camp for Ellie, Emma, and me (and Glen)!

Adam went to  scout camp

Glen and Adam head to high adventure.


I think I'll try and do a little post on each month.   Stay tuned for more.....

Christmas Card and Newsletter from 2017

Here are our 2017 Christmas cards and newsletter: 

I ordered the cards from Simply to Impress:  

 I designed the newsletters on Microsoft Publisher...

Hope you had an amazing Christmas!  

Trip to NYC

Here's a recap of our trip to NYC as told to our sister missionary serving in France!

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Hello to the Sweetest Sister Missionary in France (or in the Entire World)!

How's life in Toulouse? WE are in VRM here at our house, which stands for Vacation Recovery Mode. That means I have loads of laundry to do, I'm kind of grumpy and tired after our super long days and not sleeping in our own bed, my tummy's on edge because of all the junk we ate, and I'm kind of dreading the jump back into reality that will start tomorrow morning. But vacation was awesome, so it was worth it!

I'm going to recap what we did here, so that when you are back and want to plan your trip to NYC next summer, that you'll have it all in one place. If it will bug you to read all the detail, feel free to skip over this part. (I'm really serious about making that trip happen).

Wednesday--
We left as quickly after seminary as we could (about 9ish) and drove to NJ and left our car in the park-and-ride there in Secaucus.

Then we took a train into the city and checked into our AirBnB.  (How I love that everyone's old enough to carry their own stuff now!) 

 It was a pretty decent apartment not too far of a walk (maybe about a mile) from Times Square. We ate dinner at Guy Fieri's restaurant. We honestly picked it because someone handed us a coupon for a free dessert there, but it actually turned out to be pretty darn tasty. After that we went to HAMILTON!!!!! It was awesome!  (we enjoyed getting decked out in our frilly clothes for the occasion!)

Thursday--
Ate breakfast at a bakery.

World Trade Center Memorial. It's a pretty sobering experience to visit and think of all the lives that were lost there. The memorials are different, but pretty thought provoking.

Battery Park to catch the ferry to Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Use statuecruises.com for the best prices (and make sure to get tickets well in advance). The security lines for the cruises is HORRIBLE, so give yourself extra time when you go.

Statue of Liberty--Going inside was a bit anticlimactic, but being on the island and seeing the SofL up close and personal was a cool experience!

Ellis Island--This was a first for us and we really enjoyed it. There's a lot of history there on the island and I highly recommend everyone go at least once.

Chinese restaurant (Wu Liang Yi) for dinner.

It was fantastic.

Anastasia on Broadway.

The quality for this show was very high and I recommend seeing it someday! I honestly liked the music a bit better than Hamilton and it was so fun that the actors were willing to come out and mingle with the audience afterward. Emma, Adam, and Ellie were totally enjoying the groupie scene....

and loved getting their playbills signed by all the actors.

Junior's Cheesecake. Apparently this is a post-Broadway tradition. Cheesecake is too fatty for me, but the one bite I did take of it was pretty amazing!

Friday--

Levain Bakery for breakfast. WE got blueberry muffins and cookies for later. They're pretty famous for their cookies. It's probably a joke compared to a run-of-the-mill French bakery, but it was pretty good as far as American bakeries go.

Manhattan temple. Brother Koch (your old seminary teacher) works in the offices there, so he met us and took us around the property (but not into the temple).

We also met Dad's aunt Debbie there, along with some of her kids and grandkids who were there on a girls' trip for fall break.  

 It was just random that they happen to be in town at the same time and it was fun to see them again. Some of the kids I'd never met before.


Central Park. We took a bike tour of Central Park and saw wayyyyyy more of it than we'd ever seen before.  

We saw some really beautiful places there and I highly recommend it as a way to see more of it than you could ever walk to.

Our driver only got in one minor accident when he hit a woman that stopped rather unexpectedly (and he wasn't paying very close attention). She was okay, but it was a little sad to see how harsh the whole thing was. The driver blamed her. The woman blamed the driver. It was honestly both of their faults and it was more than a tad awkward. Other than that it was a cool experience!

Serendipity for lunch. We went and got lunch....

and frozen hot chocolates!

I'm still not eating chocolate this year, so I got a pineapple/lime drink instead.

I was only a little disappointed to be missing out on the chocolate (okay...maybe a little is an understatement). My sandwich was fantastic though (you can see a glimpse of it there at my empty spot at the table).

MoMA--Museum of Modern Art.

It was cool to see Claude Monet's Waterlily painting and Van Gogh's Starry Starry Night in person.

Some of the art is downright weird...

but overall it was a cool place to visit.

Walk over the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset. Ellen James told us we needed to do this and now it will forever be on my list of things to do in NYC.

WE LOVED IT!

Juliana's for dinner.  

Juliana's is on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn, so it was a perfect place to stop. Pizza was good, but my cheeseless pizza left a little to be desired. I feel like in order for a cheese-free pizza to be good, it needs lots of flavorful toppings to make up for the lack of cheese. They missed that memo and made it pretty skimpy. The crust was excellent though! (this was a another Ellen James' recommendation)

Walk back over Brooklyn Bridge at night. Again...it was fantastic!

The view of Manhattan's lights glittering in the distance as we crossed back over the bridge was absolutely mesmerizing.

Saturday--

Breakfast at Ess-a-Bagel. It was only a block away from our apartment and honestly we just got in line because there was a long line in front of it!

Haha! The bagels were hot, fresh, and amazing, but the actual breakfast sandwiches were a bit disappointing. Next time we'd just go into the express lane and get bagels and cream cheese. Luckily they had low-fat cream cheese or I would have been very annoyed.

Checked out of apartment and made our way back to the car in New Jersey.

(the kids all wore their Hamilton shirts on the way home)

Lupper at Ruby's Diner--Biggest disappointment of the trip. (can you tell by my face how annoyed I was about it?)

Part of my problem is that I was sick of being good food-wise at this point, so I was already super annoyed that we were at yet another place where my selection of foods was so limited. And I was really craving a milkshake (which everyone but Emma was getting), so when my turkey burger came out flavorless and with soggy bread about the same thickness as a crepe, I was mad, mad, mad.

Being tired and out of routine did not help my plight either. So I left there not having eaten much, refusing to pay for the joke-of-a-meal, and absolutely fuming that they had the gall to serve something so pathetic on their menu.

I came home and made pumpkin pancakes for dinner, which was 10,000 times better than Ruby's crapburger.

And that was that. We got home, did some grocery shopping, I finished up the programs for today, and helped Kristina with her primary program. Today I continued to eat like garbage (celebrating Adam's birthday a week late) and am now enjoying a quiet evening with Spence out pokemonning (as per usual for him) and the kids off at a youth fireside (that I wasn't invited to)! Dad's writing his letter to you and I'm writing this email. Your snail mail letter is already done and ready to pop into the mailbox tomorrow!

Tomorrow is the get-back-to-reality day and I fear it will not be pretty. We'll have all of the work we didn't do on Friday to make up for and I feel like it's always hard to rally into a routine when we've had a few days of being off. But we have your letter to look forward to, so there's always that!

Here we are after church today.  Ellie's dress is a Chinese knock-off I bought for myself, but the sizes ran suuuuuuppppperr small, so it's Ellie's now.  That's the last time I buy from a company without reading the reviews first! 

WE love you, Sweetie! Have an awesome week!

Love, 

Mom 

Here we are at the Metropolitan Opera House. It's very near the temple