Family Pictures

I know that this is a really long post with lots of pictures, but I can explain. Every fall, Aaron, Emma and I go up into the mountains to take a family picture in all the pretty fall leaves and we usually stick the best picture in our Christmas card for that year. We went up last week, and our pictures that we took didn't turn out all that great. Enter my dear friend, Erin Summerill. I met her when we lived in Pleasant Grove, and we have stayed good friends since we moved from there. When Erin and her family moved to Hawaii, we had to go visit. In August, they moved back to Pleasant Grove and Erin had taken up photography. Here is where this can benefit you. Erin wants to build up a photography business, and she is always looking for new "subjects." If you haven't had family pictures taken in a while, or would like some beautiful pictures done, at a low cost to you, let me know and I can give you her contact information. You can also click on her blog's link on my page. (It is the one that says Mark and Erin) Here are some of the pictures that she took of us yesterday. Oh yeah, Erin also has 3 young kids of her own, and she handles squirmy, rascaly, sassy blonde headed two year old girls quite well (know who I am talking about?!?) Just in case you were wondering!

Mmmmm....Pie

Those of you that are in my ward should have already been reminded about tomorrow night's (Wednesday night) annual Visiting Teaching Conference. We will be having a dinner, and dessert. I was originally supposed to make soup for this thing, but bowed out at the last minute thinking that my super-queasy stomach might not be able to handle making a double batch of soup (see toilet post below). So I volunteered to make pies instead. I thought about what kind of pie would be yummy, so I settled on a Southern favorite: Fudge Pie. I say southern favorite, because I couldn't find the recipe for this pie (that I have eaten my entire life) in any of my Utah cookbooks (family and ward cookbooks). So, for those of you going to the conference, you can have a taste of this gooey, chocolatey, delicious pie. (I will be bringing the three whole pies. You know, I had to make the first one and sample it to make sure I got the recipe right!) And there should be plenty of pie for everyone else, since I will be sick of looking at them by tomorrow night...and since I will have probably finished off the sample one).

Where I Have Been Spending My Time...

Yes, I am pregnant and oh so sick! For the last few weeks, I have been hanging my head over our toilet once every few days. Well, for the last 3 days or so, I have made multiple daily trips to study the inside of our bowl. And that got me thinking: since we are planning on having more kids, which I assume will bring with it many more sick days, what kind of toilet would I want to be hanging around? I kind of like this one. It's pretty!

Aaron is my hero!

I couldn't figure out how to add a title to my posts, and Aaron just figured it out for me! So ignore my last post, it is all fixed now!

You may notice that my blog is different! I have been looking for a better layout for my blog, and haven't been happy with any of the templates that I have tried. Well, this morning while I was blog stalking, I found a link to this great site that has free layouts. It is: http://matiekay.blogspot.com/. They layouts are super cute, and free! Now, I am trying to figure out how to add a title to my posts....anyone know how to do that? Somehow I have missed that...

Thanksgiving Point We went to Thanksgiving Point for a church playgroup day and played at the Farm Country. Emma had so much fun seeing the animals up close. She would shriek anytime the animals got close enough to touch!

This is a little pony that one of the workers brought out for the kids to see up close. It kept trying to get close to Emma and she would back away. The more she backed away, the closer the pony got to her. Emma never did touch it!

There is a little place in the barn that has baby chicks in a little cage with a glass front. Emma loved these chicks and would squeal everytime the chicks would move. It was so much fun to watch!

California TripWe went to California for the BYU-UCLA football game earlier this month. I am not going to write anything about the game, because most anyone who reads my blog knows how that game turned out. I will say that we had a fun time in California! This was my first trip to Southern California. Oh yeah, the above picture is the football field in the Rose Bowl. We spent a day at Newport Beach. This is a picture of Newport Pier.

This is a sea lion (sea lion or seal? I don't know the difference) that was on the beach.

I was trying to get some cool pictures of the waves on the beach. There were some huge waves that day!

This is Emma and Grace playing in the sand. It was so windy that day!

Emma loves the park!Emma loves to go to any park and play. Anytime we drive past an elementary school playground, she gets so excited and points shreiking "Park! I wanna go da park!" And for the next five minutes I have to explain to her that we can't go to that park... we will have to go to another one. "I see da kids in da park! I wanna go da park!" is her reply. One of her favorite things at the park is the slide.

She looks a little funny in this picture, but there is a good reason. There is a park near our apartment that we go to pretty often. On this particular day, after we had supper, Aaron and I took Emma to play to wear her down before bed time. She was playing by the slide and two little boys soon joined her. One of them was 4 and one was 2. Well, the 2 year old kept trying to pull her away from the slide and she wouldn't go. She kept saying "no thank you" but he wouldn't listen to her and kept pulling her arm. (I taught her to tell other kids no thank you when they are doing something she doesn't like...we had a bully problem once before which resulted in handsfull of her hair being pulled out because she wouldn't get off a toy that she was playing with...) Anyway, her "no thank you's" got louder and more insistent. (Am I a bad mom? I just hung back waiting to see what would happen before I ran to interfere.) Well, before I could stop it, this kid was biting her arm. (That was when I stepped in.)

After talking to the little boy's mom, I learned that he had spent the summer in Hong Kong with his mother and her family and had lost all the English that he aquired before going to Hong Kong and only spoke Chinese now. Poor Emma, trying to use her words with someone who didn't even understand them! (If you click on the picture above this story to enlarge it, you can see the red spot in the bend of her arm where she got bit.)

The scene of the crime!

I have to say that Emma did a great job of recovering from the biting incident and going on with her time at the park. I did have to laugh though, anytime the kid came near her after that, she would yell "NO THANK YOU!".

Hawaii, the second time around!

We recently went to Hawaii for Sampson's (my brother) wedding in the Laie Hawaii Temple. We did lots of fun things on this trip. We went snorkeling a few times, my favorite time was when we went snorkeling with the sea turtles at Turtle Beach. We also went to the PCC with both our family and Brittany's family. We went to Pearl Harbor as well. It was a good trip and it was fun to get to go to Hawaii again!

I had to get a picture of this street sign!

My dad looked up the address to Dog the Bounty Hunter's place. He wanted to get a picture with "Dog" but they were closed that day. Dad went ahead and posed with a larger than life "Dog" anyway.

SunriseSampson playing with Emma in the ocean while the sun rises.

One of the great things about going to Hawaii is seeing the sun rise over the ocean. Since there is a four hour time difference from Utah, and five hours from Tennessee, we all got up pretty early. (We would wake up around 5:30 am, which was 9:30 am Utah time and 10:30 am Tennessee time.) It was a great way to start out the day!

I like the way the sun is shining from behind the cloud in this picture. The cloudy sunrises were the prettiest in my opinion!

Sea CreaturesThis is a starfish that we found at a place we went snorkeling called Shark's Cove. I have never seen a starfish like this. It was so neat! I put it on Sampson's shoulder to try and get a good picture of it!

We put the starfish on Emma's arm.

This is a sea urchin. It was really cool. It would move its spikes individually to move around.

Emma was so good to be careful and not squish the urchin.

This is a sand crab that we found on the beach outside our beach house. Most of the sand crabs are white, and about the size of a quarter. This must be an old one, because he was a bluish-grey color and was about the size of a dollar, folded in half. When Aaron and Sampson caught this one, it pinched Aaron so hard that it drew blood!

Around the beach house...

These are just some pictures that I took while we were around the beach house.

We went to the swap meet and got Emma this apron and borrowed the flower hair clip from Katherine. We got the lime from a tree at the house where Brittany's family stayed. I thought this picture was so funny! This is the view of the ocean from the deck of the house we stayed in.

Here is Emma with her Jefe relaxing on the hammock after Emma had a swim in the ocean.

This is the house that we stayed in.

Hawaiian Flora

So I am a bit of a plant nerd (I love plants!) and I usually get made fun of when I go to new places for taking pictures of flowers and plants. I can't help myself. I think that the different plants and flowers are what give different places their true beauty. So if these things bore you, feel free to skip over this post!These are white plumeria flowers. These are typically the flowers that Polynesian women wear behind their ear. I like wearing them in my ponytail when I am in Hawaii. The flowers are so pretty and they smell heavenly! In the place we stayed, there was a pink plumeria tree outside one of the bedroom windows. When the wind blew just right, the smell of plumeria filled the bedroom!

I took this picture while we were driving into town (Honolulu). (At least I think that was where we were going!) The mountains are so beautiful there. They are massive and look like they are covered in green "fur." The mountains are one of the things that strike me as being so beautiful in Hawaii. On this particular day, with the mist hanging over them, Aaron said it reminded him of the mountains in Colombia.

I was trying to be artistic. It is a cocnut palm leaf and the moon. I know, I am a dork.

This is a view from the temple to the ocean. (The temple is behind me in this picture). I think that I put a similar picture up from our first trip to Hawaii, but it doesn't have the pretty bougainvillea flowers in it.

This is a pink plumeria flower from the tree outside the beach house we stayed in. When we were in Hawaii last, I wanted a good picture of a pink plumeria flower so bad, and came home a bit disappointed. But since this tree was outside our beach house, I got tons of pictures of pink plumerias!

This is a tree that was growing on the temple grounds. I don't know what kind of tree it is, but I think they are so neat. It almost looks like an umbrella. On the Kam Highway, traveling from Laie to Honolulu, there is a field that has a lot of these trees in it. I just love the shape and the way they grow.

Pictures from the wedding

Since this is the whole reason we went to Hawaii in the first place, I figured I should put up some wedding pictures! I took some and Russell took some of these as well. Emma was the "flower girl". She had this pretty halo made out of pink plumeria flowers, but I think that this is one of the only pictures that we have with her wearing it! Here are Sampson and Brittany walking out of the temple. I was going to crop Emma out of the picture, but I wanted everyone to see how she really was during the day!

Here is Brittany trying desperately to get Emma to cooperate for a picture. Emma wasn't having it. She was so funny. Brittany's brother, Kenny, was taking pictures of everyone in front of the temple. Instead of being in any of the pictures, Emma stood behind Kenny and shouted directions for everyone who was having their picture taken. She would yell and point and try to repeat anything that Kenny said. It was so funny!

This is my sister, Katherine, and me. I am 17 years older than her. And for anyone who doesn't know me that well, my hair color is really the same color as Katherine's. And I used to be as skinny as her, too!

Emma loves it when her daddy throws her up in the air. We all think this picture is funny because Aaron had time to throw up the shakka wave. (The shakka is the wave that most people associate with surfing/surfers. According to Erin Summerill, and a few other Hawaiian locals that I met, the "shakka" wave started with a man from Laie who worked in the Kahuku Sugar Mills, located a few miles north of Laie. This man got his index, middle and ring fingers cut off while working in the mill. After that, to wave to people he would put up his hand (that only had a thumb and a pinky) and shake it. Somehow, it caught on!)

(Erin, correct me if I got it wrong!)

A few more from the family reunionJoLayne sent me some of the pictures that she had taken at the reunion. I thought she got some great pictures of Emma. Here are a few. Emma loves to cheese it up for the camera...if she is in the right mood!

Emma is driving Daddy's car, under Grandpa's supervision! (She isn't really driving)

Aaron and Emma on the hike with Grandpa and Grandma Jones.