Quarter Century

A week and a half ago TJ turned 25! That's a QUARTER of a century. Old man. Haha just kidding...but really.

I wanted to make him a really awesome cake for his birthday, so I started thinking of ideas and decided I wanted to do some sort of motocross cake. I had this totally awesome picture of what I wanted to do in my head, and I was really excited about it. The cake I made turned out 100% different than I pictured, like a completely different idea, but I love it. I think it turned out quite well. Here is the birthday boy with his cake!

Front view of the cake. I also made it from scratch - cake and icing, so it was that much better :)

And the little motocross dude :) Coolest part is that when you press down on the back fender it makes a sound like an engine starting up.

It had been raining the day of TJ's birthday (and the whole week prior) but the weather cooperated quite nicely for us to be able to go up the canyon and have a bonfire with friends. The boys had fun setting it up and getting it started.

This is the video of when we started the fire :)

We had a great turn out, and it was so much fun to have everyone up there!

We had s'mores and yummy banana boats!

I am so grateful for TJ. He is happy, funny, sweet, thoughtful, and such an amazing friend to everyone. I'm so lucky to be married to him :) Love you Teej! Happy 25th birthday! Here's to an awesome year!

California Sunshine

I blogged about this a couple weeks ago, but blogger ate it. Darn blogger. So here it goes again....

About a month ago my sister and her husband went to London and Paris! My mom was out in California taking care of the kiddos while they were gone, so I went to help her for a few days.

They have a lemon tree in their backyard, so we made lots of super yummy fresh squeezed home made lemonade. Yum!

Katie was a pro squeezer :)

The weather was absolutely beautiful while I was out there! Saturday we spent the afternoon at the park and it was so much fun. This is my mom with Anna and Katie, rockin' the shades.

Blaine and I headed over to play on the slides.

He had a blast just climbing up all the stairs and running around everywhere.

And he LOVED the slides. He would get to the end and before he was even off the slide ask for "mo-ah!" (more)

Anna and Katie thought it would be fun to dig in the sand. It started out pretty harmless...

...then started getting to the hole digging...

...and they dug deep enough they found water! They were so excited to find water.

As you can see in the picture above, they were getting pretty dirty. After we decided it was time to go home I told the girls to hold out their hands so I could take a picture of how dirty they were. This is what I got. They kind of look like zombies. Haha.

They had sand everywhere. Total mess. But they had a blast, so it was worth it :)

When we got home from the park we put Blaine down for a much needed nap and had a little picnic lunch in the backyard.

Mom even brought down yummy Canadian toffee :)

Another fun thing was a Friendly Neighborhood Helpers performance at Anna's school. All the first graders dressed up like a neighborhood helper and they sang cute little songs about them all. Firefighters, policemen, doctors, even the garbage man :)

Anna wanted to be a police officer, so my mom made her a little police badge and put it on a blue shirt and she wore black pants. She even had to have a special hair-do :) Such a cute girl!

Mr. Blaine. I just can't get enough of this little cutie. To say he LOVES his cars would be an extreme understatement. He would line up all his cars on the couch and drive them around, then scoop 'em all up and protect them from being stolen by his sisters. Then he'd resume all the driving around and saying "brrrrrrrrrrrooooooOOOOOOMM!!"

Other things I didn't get pictures of: movie nights with pizza, popcorn, cookies, and treats; many games of Sorry! and other board games, and just loving hanging out with my nieces, nephew and Mom. I miss these little kiddos!! And my mom! It was so so fun to spend time with them. It made it even better to have beautiful weather (especially because it snowed in Utah that weekend...haha). Hopefully we'll come back soon!

Graduation Weekend

This handsome husband o' mine graduated from BYU last weekend!

The day of commencement they had a graduation luncheon for all the athletes that were graduating and it was really nice. This is us with Chris and Emily after the luncheon. So proud of our hubbys!

We were so lucky that both TJ's parents and my parents came down for graduation! My mom was at a hair appointment with Shep, so they didn't come to the luncheon. Shep trumps all :) TJ's parents and Kaeli came to the luncheon and we posed with the cougar statue afterward.

Thursday night we went mini golfing with both our families and had a blast. Kaeli has been looking forward to mini golfing in Utah since she found out they were coming down for graduation. Apparently she thinks it's only a Utah thing :) We ended up going indoors since it was cold. It turned out to be pretty awesome because it was half off on Thursday (note to all those in Provo/Orem--Thursday at Trafalga it's only $3 per person!) and it was glow in the dark. Pretty cool.

Friday was the day TJ got to march across a stage and receive his "diploma" (aka diploma holder:)) It was in the Smith Fieldhouse, which is where TJ practices every day, so it was quite fitting it was there.

TJ with his awesomest parents and Kaeli. Love you guys!!

Me with my awesomest parents. Love you guys too!

One of my fav pics in the cap and gown. Classic.

So proud of you babe!

There was also a home track meet at BYU graduation weekend on Saturday. How convenient! We decided to grab some J-Dawgs before....mmm.....

And then we sat in the rain and cold for about an hour and a half. Brrr! TJ had the largest fan section of anyone there. He is that cool. We counted and there were 19 of us sitting together! Unfortunately it was raining so much that they had to cancel the pole vault because it was too dangerous, so we didn't even get to see him jump! Oh well. It was fun to be there anyway :) (despite this picture, little Kira was very excited to be watching TJ. She's just a little shy :))

Saturday was a play day. We decided it would be fun to drive up Alpine loop and go hiking around up there. The road ended up being closed just after the trail head to hike Timp, so we couldn't go up to where we had originally planned. We decided to pull into the parking lot at the base of Timp and figure out what to do. We ended up finding these awesome snow caves just by the parking lot and we played around in the snow for a couple hours. It was a blast! Totally not what we had planned, but I'm so glad we did this instead. Way more fun :)

We had so much fun crawling around inside the snow caves. Here's TJ and Kaeli.

Kaeli and Brad doing some sort of victory dance....who knows :)

These next 2 pictures crack me up. My dad had to use the facilities before we headed back down the canyon. The snow was high enough that the boys saw they could get on the roof quite easily, and decided to drop huge chunks of snow down the chimney into the toilet.....

We could hear the 'sploosh' when they dropped. It was hilarious. When my dad came he came out with this shield, expecting to be pelted with snowballs. Haha!

Saturday night I went to the BYU men's volleyball game with my parents and Brad and Angie. TJ went swimming with Kaeli. That's all she wanted to do :) We had a blast at the volleyball game! BYU lost...bummer. But it was a close game and very fun to watch.

And that was our weekend! It was pretty busy, but so so much fun! Thank you, thank you to our families for coming out. It really means a lot to us :) We had so much fun playing and visiting and eating yummy meals and just hangin' out. We LOVE you all! Thank you TJ for graduating so we could all have such a great weekend :) We all love you and are so proud.