Ten years

  Friday morning I was shocked when I woke up and saw that Jason was still in bed at 9 am.  I freaked out thinking that Jason had slept in and missed work.  I woke him up telling him that it was 9 in the morning and he needed to wake up.  Jason acted like he did not know what I was talking about.  Then he rolled over, looked at me, and said happy anniversary.  Well I did not know what to say because it was not really our anniversary and I was in shock.  Jason had taken the day off to surprise me with a weekend away to Park City.  He reserved a room at a bed and breakfast and had a special dinner planned for us at a fancy restaurant.  I got kind of worried because some bed and breakfast have shared bathrooms, and a romantic getaway is not as romantic if you are sharing a bathroom with strangers.  My fears were needless, as our bathroom was spacious and private.  In fact our room was huge because Jason got the master suite.  There was a door to go outside to a little deck, but unfortunately it was raining most of the weekend so we could not sit out there much.  We did some shopping in Park City.  The restaurant we went to was so great.  It was super expensive, but I think that I had the best halibut ever.  Jason got the Kobe steak, which was wonderful.  We also ordered a little appetizer sampler and it had these goat cheese wonton things which were to die for.  I could have eaten a hundred of them.  It was a wonderful weekend and nice to get away. 
   Then tonight Jason had a present wrapped up for me.  He let me open it, a little early, and it was a binder full of pictures and memories that he had compiled about our ten years together.  It was such a sweet gift that he had worked on for the past year.  I love how thoughtful he is and how much he obviously cares about our marriage and the ten years that we have been together.  It makes me feel good that even the little things mean so much to him.  The gift brought tears to my eyes and I am always going to treasure it.
   I am so lucky to have Jason and I am so grateful for our marriage.  It is hard for me to describe how much I care about Jason and how I feel so lucky to have found him and that he wanted to marry me.  He is one of the greatest men that I have ever known.  He is kind and caring, supportive, and loving.  He would do anything for me.  We have had a wonderful ten years and I hope that our next ten years are just as wonderful. 

Baby Shower

The last couple of months I have been planning and preparing for my sister's baby shower.  Saturday was finally the day of the shower and luckily it all went basically as planned.  I made her two diaper cakes that she loved and most of the food worked out the way that I wanted.  There was a good turn out and she got some great stuff.  It is weird when you plan something for so long and then it is done.  Now I am wondering what I need to plan.  I do know that I will not be planning another shower for a little bit, they take a lot of work. 

 Me with the food and decorations.  I made the little pom pom things on the ceiling.  Thank you pinterest.  My mom got the balloons.

 After the shower we all played in the pool.  It was so nice.  Jason got a new solar cover and it keeps the pool a lot warmer so we can swim longer.  We had piggy back races and thanks to Jason's stealth and long arms we beat my sister and her husband.  We had lots of fun. 



Birthday and Blessing

  Last weekend we went to Idaho to celebrate my nephew's birthday and my nieces blessing.  It was really fun.  Conner had an angry birds party, which was really cute and Elizabeth did such a good job.  The kids were really cute playing the games and throwing water balloons at each other.  One of the funniest things was watching Jason play with 9 kids at the same time.  He started by playing with our three year old niece and one of Elizabeth and Tom's nieces.  Within ten minutes all the kids were chasing Jason around the yard, hitting him with play sword and axes and hanging on him.  We all laughed so hard, because they were pretty funny and almost toppled Jason over a couple of times.  Elizabeth and Tom really have very sweet nieces and nephews. 
  The next day was Taliya's blessing.  She looked so beautiful.  Elizabeth made her dress and it was so pretty.  There were three blessings in her ward that day, which we had to laugh at because we could not think of three blessings in our ward for all of last year.  There are a lot of kids in her ward.  Unfortunately we had to leave after the blessing because we had the long drive home, but it was great to see them and share in their special day. 

 Isn't Taliya so cute.  And doesn't she look gorgeous. 

 I finally got her to go to sleep during the party.  She is so sweet.  Don't tell my other nieces and nephews, but she might be my favorite.

Jason pretending to put Conner in the next door neighbors yard.  Conner seems super scared, huh.  There were other pictures of him with the kids but I did not want to put pictures on our blog of kids that are not related to us without their parents permission.

The foolish man made his sewer line out of ...

pipes that can be broken (Catchy huh.  I am thinking it should replace the foolish man built his house upon the sand).  This week we found out that we have a twelve foot crack in our sewer pipes.  This has allowed water to seep out of the pipe, that has eroded the soil beneath the pipes causing them to sag, which has made our sewer line not work very well anymore.  So tomorrow the plumbers are coming to our house to dig up our front yard to replace that pipe.  The wonderful thing is that insurance or home warranties do not cover anything like that so we have to pay for the whole thing and it is not cheap.  So unfortunately we have to postpone going through another adoption agency presently.  We are still going through LDS Family Services, but other agencies are considerably more expensive and we don't think that it is prudent to go through another agency right now.  It is still something we are considering but after we pay for the sewer line.  So although that is a negative, there are a lot of positives to think about even though we have a broken sewer.
1.  At least it did not back up when we had a bunch of people here like it did one year.  It did break on a holiday weekend, but I just think it likes to break when it is the biggest pain in the butt.
2.  It is expensive, but at least we have the means to pay for it.  It is not what we were planning on doing with our money, but it could be so much worse.
3.  It is not in the street.  It does go under the sidewalk which is not the best, but it would have cost us a lot more to dig up the street.  My dad also pointed out it was good it was not under the house because they would have had to dig up our basement.  So that is a huge positive.
4.  There is a 50 year warranty on the work that is being done, so we don't have to worry about fixing that part again. 
5.  They are fixing it quickly so it is not like we have to live for months with a broken sewer.  Also we will still be able to use the sewer and water while they are working on it.
So I guess once it is done people can come over and use our new sewer line.  Haha, who would invite people over to do that.  Well I am glad that it will be fixed and that we will not have to worry about it for awhile (knock on wood).

last two weeks

    So the last couple of weeks since vacation and graduation have been fairly boring.  This is why I don't have a Twitter account.   My tweets would be things like, went to the grocery store, just cleaned the bathroom, threw a snail against the wall, played on my phone, watched t.v., ect.  Riveting stuff huh.  I would have like one follower and it would be a relative that felt obligated to follow me, lol.  But seriously the last couple of weeks I have been busy getting yard work and house work done.  I got my garden planted and already have some tomatoes on some of my plants.  My roses are looking really good and I am really happy with my new red one. 
     I have decided to start indexing genealogy records.  So what it is, is volunteers look at old census records or other records and type up the information so that when someone is searching through records they can just type in information and have it pop up instead of looking through thousands of names in the hope of finding the one they are looking for.  It has been interesting but kind of difficult because you have to read handwriting that is not always clear and is in cursive.  I am hoping it will give me something to do, that hopefully helps people who are trying to do their genealogy. 
    Well that is about all that is going on, I know super exciting.  I am hoping next month that we will go on a hike and we will probably have the pool working so I can start working on my tan.  Also next weekend is my nieces blessing and we are celebrating my nephews birthday so that should be fun. 
 

Graduation

May 4th I finally graduated.  Jason, my mom, Jennifer, my mother-in-law, Kirsten and Marianne all came to the actual graduation ceremony.  It was so nice of them to come.  I am so glad to be officially done.  Last week I got my actual diploma in the mail.  I am just so grateful for all the people that supported me, especially my parents and Jason who made a lot of sacrifices to ensure that I could go to school.  I am still not quite sure what I am going to do with my degree, but it is nice to have a sense of accomplishment that finished something that I started.

 

   Don't you love how my dad and brother wore Oregon Ducks shirts to my graduation celebration.  We laughed at that.  Go Ducks!

 

 Me, Jason, Kirsten, Janene (Jason's mom) and Marianne

Isn't it great how all gowns for graduation look like Mumus. 

Vacation (Part 3)

Day 9

We had to leave my grandma's which was really hard.  I miss her a lot and she is such a wonderful person.  It makes me sad we see her so little.  Grandma's dogs were sad that Jason left, they really liked him. 

We were not sure what we were going to do when we left.  We had planned on going on a hike around a bunch of waterfalls, but I confused Silver Falls State Park with Golden and Silver Falls, which is a different park.  So I got directions to the wrong park.  I was not sure if we could find the other park, but after my grandma told us that Golden and Silver falls was not that exciting, we decided what the heck and decided to try and find the park with 10 waterfalls.  Boy am I glad that we did.  Jason found a travel kiosk which had directions to the park and we found it easily.  We parked and started for the hike.  Almost immediatly we heard a waterfall and not too far from the start of the hike was the first falls.  It was amazing, partly because we were able to walk behind it.  That was so cool.  It was one of the neatest things that I have done. 

We then started to hike to the other waterfalls.  There are a couple of different hikes that you can do.  One is two miles and you see two waterfalls.  You can do the five mile which you see seven of the waterfalls.  Then there is an eight mile hike were you see all ten.  We decided to do the five or at least see if we could.  After we got to the point where we could decide if we should go on to do the eight mile hike, we decided we were not tired and decided to try the whole thing.  We actually only got to see nine of the waterfalls because one of them was on a side trail and we missed it but nine out of ten is not bad.  Also the hike was so beautiful.  We hiked by a river and along the trail there were little waterfalls, trees, and moss covered rocks dripping water.  We are going to do it again because it was so fun and just so great, next time we want to bring lunch to eat on the hike.  I don't know if we hiked eight miles because we accidently took the wrong trail and kind of went in a weird circle, but we did go at least 6 miles and probably close to 8.  (Sorry for the picture dump, but this was one of my favorite parts of our trip)

After we were done hiking we went up to Portland and checked into our hotel and ate dinner.  We were pretty tired from hiking but it was worth it.

Day 10

We spent the day in Portland.  We wanted to go to OMSI to pick up a cool present for my nephew, but of course they were closed on Mondays.  Jason wanted to go the Japanese Gardens, which were pretty, but I always feel underwhelmed.  We then went to the zoo which was pretty fun.  We then drove to Vancouver because we promised my nephew we would get him a Washington state keychain.  We drove all over stupid Vancouver for two hours and could not find one keychain.  We were so frustrated.  We then went to a mall and did some shopping and ate dinner at a mexican resturant. 

Day 11

We headed back to Idaho, but on the way we stopped at Multnomah Falls because we always look at it from the freeway, but Jason has never seen it up close.  The falls looked beautiful and we were both glad that we stopped. 

I always have a hard time leaving Oregon because I think of it as my home so whenever we leave I get really sad.  Well just to show how great Oregon is we stopped in Pendelton to get gas at an Indian reservation and I found a Washington keychain.  We could not believe it but it proves that you can get everything you need in Oregon, ha, ha.  When we got to Idaho the kids were excited to wish Jason a happy birthday and we went to dinner at Outback steak house.  Elizabeth was so nice and made Jason a birthday cake and we stayed up late playing Dominion.

Last Day

  We were able to spend some more time with Elizabeth's family and we went to the Boise aquarium with the kids and Elizabeth.  It was really small, but the kids had fun.  We then drove back to Utah, which is not an exciting drive.  We did hit a lot of bugs on the way, which was pretty gross.  So I guess it is back to reality and having responsibilities.  It was nice to leave them behind and have a wonderful vacation.  I can't wait to go back to Oregon.  I think that we are still planning on getting a beach house when we retire, so I am really looking forward to when we retire.