Please no..

On Friday we were out to dinner at Panda Express. Our seats were by the door so we could watch people coming and going. I was watching as one particular female came walking in the door. AJ looked out the door and just as she walked in he said "LOOK AT HER!" It was in his loudest voice. Now this particular girl had hair that was reminiscent of David Bowie's look in the movie "Labyrinth." It was blond, blue and black with the perfect fullness of a spiky Q-tip. AJ was completely fascinated with her. Joel and I were trying to keep him from looking at her when he turned towards us saying "She's beautiful." I was in shock. This was definitely not what I was expecting to come out of his mouth, but it is one of the best things he could have said to make me smile and realize just what a sweet little boy he is becoming.

What a weekend!!!

What a weekend!! It was one of the best weekends we've had in a while. On Saturday Joel started working on our deck and I just hung out with AJ waiting for the BYU game to come on TV. It was exciting to watch the cougars take on the cowboys and thump 'em!! Then we dropped AJ off to be with Jen and her family while we went to a concert at the conference center. We went to dinner at a little restaurant at the Gateway called Z'tejas. They had the most delicious smothered chicken burrito ever! I don't want to use words to describe it as they wouldn't do it justice. The best thing I can do is recommend you go there and try it for yourself. After dinner we tried their cheesecake. It was so smooth it was almost like butter they way it melted in your mouth. The concert was called the OC Tanner "Gift of Music: An American Songbook." The whole concert was incredible. For me the best parts were the performance of Brian Stokes Mitchell. He has the kind of voice that I could listen to all the time. It has such a rich quality to it! He sang love songs from the 30's and 40's, "Some Enchanted Evening", "New Words" "I was Here" "Wheels of a Dream" and "The Impossible Dream." I was completely enraptured by the songs and his performance. I am very thankful to my mom for giving up the tickets. It was a great concert and I know that she would of loved every moment of it. Then on Sunday the lessons and meetings just touched my heart in a way they hadn't before. For dinner we had our friends Michelle, Rob and their little boy Nathan over. It was so good to be with them again as we haven't seen them for a while. We ate dinner and talked then played a game, which I can't remember the name of at this time but it was a lot of fun. Our kids played well together and pretty much let us have our playtime. For me it was just one of the best weekends in a long time where it was relaxing and fun.

Crazy Kids Part II

Cute Sara!

Cheesy Brizzie...

I'm gonna get you!

Look what I got!!

Can we play with it PLEASE!!!!

Crazy kids...

Must conquer the green cube!!

Where are my legs?

Those cute Darn Garns!

Wanna share it?

SUGAR!!
These are some of my favorite pictures from last Sunday when we were at my mom's house celebrating some summer birthdays...

more Gardner Village

Gardner Village

Yesterday AJ and I met up with his cousins at Gardner Village to see their Witch displays that they have set up to start off their Halloween Celebration. It was a lot of fun to have the kids pose with the different witches. We also ate lunch at Naborhood Bakery. I have never eaten there before but I loved the fresh bread on the sandwiches. The kids also went and rode the ponies there too. Here are a few pictures from there.

Potty-training...

The other day while I was in my room getting ready I heard a door close. My first thought was Aj had gone into his room and shut the door as he likes to have control over whether his door is open or closed. Imagine my surprise when I heard the toliet flushing! He had actually realized that he needed to go to the bathroom and since I was in my room with the door shut he went in all by himself! I was completely flabergasted!! After trying to potty train him since January, something has finally started to click with him. He's dry every night and tells us when he needs to go. Now he's starting to go to the bathroom by himself. Wahhooo!!!

A year later...

We have now been trying for over a year to have a baby. I would love for AJ to have a little brother or sister to play with since he loves to play with other kids, but for some reason I'm just not getting pregnant. It has been hard watching other people have kids seemingly at the drop of a hat whereas I have been trying and nothing has happened. It was really hard this last Sunday when two babies were being blessed. I had to squeeze my arm to cause pain somewhere else in my body instead of feeling the pain that was in my heart. People keep telling me it'll happen when it's the right time or that I'm still young and shouldn't worry. Sorry but I do worry that it might never happen again. I wasn't really able to enjoy being pregnant with AJ as my thoughts were constantly filled with worry while Joel was away from me at Tech school. Considering how long women are pregnant and that all the doctors say that your fertility starts to drastically drop after age 35 I don't have too much longer to go before it'll be even harder to have a baby. Yes there are treatments out there I can go through but the insurance we have doesn't cover a lot of them and we don't have extra money to pay for them as Joel is going through school. Joel says that even if we only have AJ he still loves me and won't get rid of me. I have been exercising to be healthy. I try to eat more fruits and vegetables. I say my prayers, pay tithing , fulfil my callings, try to be a good wife and mother. I have an appointment with my doctor October 28. It seems so far away. I don't understand why I am going through this right now. Maybe someday I will be able to look back and understand. Right now all I can do is try to find ways to stay positive and distract myself with other things in life.

Preschool

AJ has started preschool this week. It is a neighborhood preschool that some other mothers and I have started together as a way to have our kids play with each other as well as work on some of the basics. The class is on Tuesday and Thursday from 9 am to 10 am. Each mother will teach one week. I decided to be brave and take the first week, which was this week. Wow. I've been a primary teacher for sunbeams, but I have never tried to teach children how to sit still, write letters, listen to directions etc etc etc. It's a whole different ballgame. This is only the first week though, but hopefully I'll feel more confident as time goes on and as I watch the other mothers. In a many situations where I am the center of attention, I am very uncomfortable. I get nervous very easily and when that happens I sweat a lot. I would call it a bad case of anxiety.
AJ loves being in preschool. Even though it's only happened a couple of times , he loves having friends over. I guess maybe I have secluded him more then I should have. I shouldn't be afraid to take him to other people's houses and he's usually well behaved. He's not a perfect angel but he does love to play with other kids.

So much for Sugar Popcorn

I can cook! Or at least I used to think I could until I tried to make Sugar Popcorn this last Saturday. See our ward was getting together to have a Tail-gate party and they had invited everyone to bring a favorite snack to share. After hearing that my little sister was making sugar popcorn earlier in the week I thought that sounded like a good idea. Everyone likes popcorn and sugar popcorn is even better. I started digging through my very unorganized recipe box and located it between the recipes for Swedish meatballs and waffles. As I started reading through it, I noticed there was a sentence that I couldn't understand. "1/4 cube butter".. hmmm... my mind must have had a major malfunction when I was writing it down as that was one of many recipes I was trying to right down to take with my on my way to college. Did I mean 1/4 a cup or 1/2 a cube of butter? I tried calling my oldest (or am I supposed to say more mature) sister , but as she was probably watching the BYU football game she didn't pick up the phone. So I came up with the idea to call my youngest sister as she had just made sugar popcorn. Surely she would have the answer. When I repeated what I wrote down she said

"It's supposed to be 1 cup sugar 3/4 cup water, 1/2 cube of butter."

"Wait a minute. Why doesn't this match what I wrote down."

"I got the recipe from dad, who rattled it from memory."

I decided to follow the rest of the instructions she gave me along with the recipe. I couldn't do any wrong. My father was the sugar popcorn connoisseur as he had been making popcorn as long as I could remember. It was tradition in our family that every Sunday night we sat as a family watching TV and eating popcorn that dad popped. It was great. After years of experience of eating the popcorn and watching my father make it I was sure I couldn't fail. I was so wrong.

After letting the mixture boil for the 3 minutes, I took it right off the stove and poured it right onto the popcorn. That was my first mistake. If you've never made sugar popcorn before, let me give you some advice. DO NOT POUR HOT LIQUID ALL AT ONCE ONTO POPCORN! I did and trust me it wasn't pretty. The minute the hot mixture hit the popcorn, all the lovely fluffiness that is popcorn soon became a massive ball of mush. My second mistake was when I thought I needed to double the recipe. I had so much extra liquid that after the popcorn was turned into mush there was a residue of liquid sitting in the bottom of the bowl. "Well, I'll just quickly pop up some more popcorn and spread it all out," which might have worked if I hadn't had already put everything away and then had to dig it all out and wait for it to heat up to pop the corn. By the time the popcorn was made again, the liquid was already hardening. My third and final mistake had been trying to color the popcorn. Since it was going to a tail-gate party I thought I would try and color the popcorn into the lovely navy blue that is part of BYU's colors. I think I need to take a mixing colors class because the color that ended up coming out after drenching the popcorn was a very ,very ugly green color that when mixed with the remaining kernels looked like something , well, something that has turned me off from making sugar popcorn for a long time. So needless to say I'm done with sugar popcorn for awhile, unless my dad wants to come over and teach me how.

some 07 photos

Photos...

I have finally downloaded over a thousand pictures from the memory cards in our camera. It took a while, but now it's done. It's been a lot of fun to look over them. Some of them I totally forgot about. I'm working on figuring out how to edit them and maybe turn them into a movie and add some music to them. I love taking pictures, I've just never been very good at getting them developed. I know it's the thing to just send your photos somewhere to have them developed and not use your own printer due to the expense of ink, but that would cost me a pretty penny to do that. So I'm just going to have to come up with a better way to enjoy photos of my little boy.

I remember my first real camera. It was a graduation present from my parents. It was such a cool camera! It could take panoramic shots, portrait shots, and so many other features that I never really learned to use them all. I loved being my own photographer, but I have never liked having my picture taken. To me, I am the total opposite of photogenic. Usually I end up looking like a white blob with blue eyes and totally unruly hair that looks to not have been taken care of for weeks. Oh well. At least my family loves me whether I'm a model or just me.