My Sister is a Married Woman!!!

Saturday, June 4th, Draper Temple

Melissa & Andy Bayless make their 1st debut as newlyweds!!!
Liam not sure what to think about his Aunt.

Cutest cousins!

Those are the dresses I stressed over for 2 months...learned many lessons in sewing

(like I should just not try!) But is was worth all the stress seeing it on them, so adorable!

Woo, woo, woo!

Hugs and Kisses all around!

My Mom and Stepdad with the newlyweds.

Must mention my Mom made the fabulous wedding dress,

turned out GORGEOUS! Wish I had her skills.

Most the family, 3 of my 5 brothers, my parents and stepparents.

We didn't do the greatest job of holding her up, I think I used my fingertips :)

If you didn't know, I love my sister soooooo much and I'm soooo happy she has found

someone to love and to love her! Wish them all the happiness in the world!

My family pic!

(This is why I wanted to lose weight before the wedding....I totally look pregnant. No wonder Ava is always asking me if her baby brother is in my belly)

My baby brother & my baby Mya

Love those two!!!

This is a good pic, love the flowing dress.

Guess I should have turned off the date stamp on the camera, would of looked better.

Did I already mention I love my Mark?

I got quite a few hugs from him that day and even a back popping during one of them!

Oh, there's my main man! Love him too. Wish the glasses weren't on his head though!

Time for cake! They weren't messy though. Isn't that a gorgeous cake? And it was yummy too.

Ava stole her cousin Kael from his sister to dance with. I have awesome video of these two. Ava was totally leading the way and making him spin her over and over, it was pretty dang good dancing. Didn't realize we'd taught her anything.

Oh baby! Time to go.....

(It almost looks like she's giving me the finger!)

Congrats to Melissa & Andy!!!!!

No rushing or anything...but I'm super excited to get more nieces & nephews...just saying.

Crazy life update!

I was going to include some adorable pics of the girls (that my FB buddies have already seen), but the computer was taking FOREVER to load them for some reason. So they'll have to wait till another day. For now, I'll just do an update...
CAR: Insurance worked fast and got us a check on Friday. We were surprised they paid us about $4k for our car. But now we have to find something cheap and reliable... not going well. Jeremy went and looked at 4 cars yesterday with no luck. Some were too sketchy, the people, not the cars. So the hunt continues on tomorrow, not a fun Memorial weekend.
PAIN: Jeremy had 4 wisdom teeth pulled on Friday morning, no fun. But he did great. I made him take 2 pain pills that day. And of course he refused any the next and did okay. He hasn't said much about pain today either, just not talking much and still on semi-soft foods.
WEDDING: My sister's big day 6 days away!!!!! It's going to be awesome. I'm going to try not to cry through the whole thing, but I'm so dang excited for her. And today I finally finished dresses for Ava and my niece. They are cute, but only at a distance, too many small errors. I will NEVER take on a project like that again until I'm pro, and that would only come through classes, (or as Jeremy states...more practice...what does he know?) And I'm having fun planning her Bridal Shower, 1st one I've ever done, woohoo!
CHURCH: Ummm...they released me from being the RS Activities Coordinator (or whatever it is called) and put me in as RS 2nd Counselor!!!! Are they crazy??? Or am I for saying yes??? People are so nice though, just about EVERY one told me how great I'd be. Oh well, it's a learning/growing experience, I'm sure I'll be the better for it.
GIRLS: Mya is sooo close to crawling!!! She keeps getting on her knees from a sitting position and trying to go forward. Today though when she'd be on her tummy she'd start violently rocking back and forth trying to move, it was hilarious. She's kind of getting whiny when she's playing on the floor, I think it's cause she's ready to move and is just plain frustrated. Soon enough girl. As for Ava...when does it get better people??? She is just a challenge. Love her to death, but she tests EVERY boundary and pushes every last button I have. I don't like being a parent that yells, but I get so mad sometimes that is all I can do. It scares me to think that I'll have to go through this with Mya, but I also like to believe that each kid is different and maybe it won't be as bad. 8 pm could not come soon enough most days!!!!

I think that is our updates...June brings High Adventure for Jeremy (a week with him gone, blah) and Jer's parents at the end of the month. Good times.

Goodbye, so long!!!

So over the weekend someone decided to take our beloved car of 7 years from our driveway. We were in a little shock to not find it there Saturday morning, since we usually park it in the garage. But Jeremy's side of the garage was occupied by a handcart, built for a Pioneer trek for the youth at church. We had been trying to contact the guy in charge for over a week to come pick it up, so I blame the church! Kidding, that would be get struck to hell. But Jeremy has always been paranoid about leaving our cars in the driveway at night, ever since we got a garage anyways. The other part of the story happened Friday around 5:30pm, when Jeremy got in his car where it was parked at the light-rail station (he rides that in to downtown Portland for work). He felt like his seat was moved back and adjusted differently, but saw that nothing was missing, so blew it off....hmmmm..

Thankfully we didn't have to wait forever to find out about it...Jeremy got a call this morning...car has been found and has been burned. So I pick him up and we go get a release form from the Sheriff's office, then head out to the towing yard.

Ummm, WOW! I thought maybe just a little burned inside, but not TORCHED!

It was found on some rural farming street, they probably dropped it off, took off the wheels and then torched it and fled. Nice!

Maybe we shouldn't share so much with Ava, I believe she now thinks there are TONS of bad guys out there. She had a good cry after I told her the bad guys burned our car. Her main concern was over her new booster seat and some books/toys that were left. Of course Jeremy had to tell her that and remind her not leaving her stuff in our cars, nice Dad!

Now we wait for our insurance to do their thing and see what we can get. Being that it's 13 years old, who knows. But Nissan's are great cars and hold value pretty well. And they'll cover the car seats that we lost. Not thrilled about having to find another car. Jeremy hardly drives anyways, just to the light rail station and a couple times a week to tax-payers offices. So he's not getting anything fancy and new. That's life, right? People can be so dumb and retarded, but that's not going to change anytime soon!

We love Aunt Terry!

I seem to always be a week or more behind in posting...so here is what went on last weekend.

Aunt Terry came to visit!!!

Not my Aunt, but Ava & Mya's.

(She is Jeremy's sister)

So we were busy all weekend doing lots of fun things.

One such stop was Ava's first bowling trip...she loved the first game and did not want anything to do with the second one.

Me and my girls

Watching the scores for us...Mommy is losing bad!

She loved carrying that ball all over the place,

kind of suprised it didn't land on her foot.

Woohoo! I'm the one who needed the bumber & rolling rack though.

Aunt Terry & the girls

We also did some hiking and viewing of the Gorge.

Mya's first ride in the backpack, she loved it!

Quite the trooper.

We found slugs and snails along the way, tried not to step on them.

Ava LOVES her Aunt! Which kind of gave me a break from her for the weekend, since she just wanted to follow her around and talk to her all the time. They even got to be roommates and share Ava's room. Terry discovered how when you have kids you never get to pee alone! So glad she could come and spend a few days with us. They also went to the Zoo on thursday, but I was working and no pictures were taken. Thanks for the visit Terry!

'TOFW' Weekend!!!

Me, my Mom, & SIL Shanda

For my Mom's Birthday, us ladies went to the Time Out For Women Conference.

Those that don't know...it's a big Conference with LDS speakers (who are mostly authors of LDS type books) and LDS musical peformers. It's meant to be uplifting, spiritually and emotionaly, and it was awesome!!! Glad I could go with my favorite gals, though if my Sister was there it would have been even better. We'll have to go back next time around, it's worth it!

Of course we had to celebrate her Birthday with some cake!!

Yummy Costco one too.

And this little man is getting braver at walking,

but prefers to crawl!

I LOVE having family soooo close!!! Wish all of them could be a 3 hour or less drive away...that would be perfect!!!!

Easter happenings!

Of course I posted the photos in the wrong order...oh well.

And if you are my Facebook friend, you've seen most of these.

Above pic is from Easter night, after a fun egg hunt at my Aunt & Uncle's house.

The adults even get to hunt for eggs with candy in them!

Ava and Jessica (my cousin who is almost 8), they get along so well.


My precious Mya!
She's sporting her Easter gift, thanks to her Grandparents Frey for the giftcard!

And a new book.

And someone got too much from the Easter Bunny!!!

He apparently overlooked her rude, sassy, disobedient behavior...

and her current regression of pooping in her undies.

We'll inform him better next year, what a sucker.

We had to color some eggs, don't think we did this last year.

Super cheese!

The Friday before Easter I hosted Playgroup with our friends and we had

an egg hunt in my yard. The kids loved it!!!

Here is our group! We love these kids and their Mommies. Unfortunately many of them

will be moving away this year, due to their husbands graduating Chiropractic college (it's close by, so we have lots of them in our Church). And all of them, except for me, are expecting!!!

And of course there were treats! Aren't they cute? :) I just copied a pic I saw online, pretty easy.

Life update:

~Girls are sleeping great all night...Mommy is very happy.

~Mya is sitting up great and rolling around alot. She tried to get on her knees last week. I'm not ready for her to move so much.

~My sister is getting MARRIED in 5 weeks...I'm soooo excited! I'm attempting to make Ava and her cousin matching, formal dresses. It's not going well, thankfully I'll see my Mom this weekend and get her advice/help.

~Jeremy is getting his Wisdom teeth out in 4 weeks! :) Haha! They have cavities and are just of no worth, need to go. He is NERVOUS!

~This weekend I'm going to 'Time Out For Women' in Seattle with my Mom & SIL Shanda, it's going to be awesome & uplifting...and I need some uplifting.

~The weather here sucks...someone send us the Sun and a little warmth, it was 41 degrees today! Yikes.

............................................That's all for now folks.............................................................................

Playing catch up!

We spent Conference weekend at my Mom's house. Ava has been begging to see her "Best Friend Kiera." But now that we went, she's even more sad to not be with her all the time.

Here is Grandma with her 3 oldest Grandchildren! Saturday my Brother & SIL took us out to eat at The Old Spaghetti Factory! It's been FOREVER since I've been to that place, very yummy though. Kael had to be a goof for the camera! Mya got a taste of their ice cream and didn't think too highly of it. I missed all the really good faces she made. She is so not my child if Ice Cream is not her thing!

THE BFF's!!!! Kiera & Ava

LOVE this one! Liam is so dang smiley and had to be part of the pic, he's adorable.

Miss Independent Sitter! Except when big sis knocks her down.

And she's all into her toys now.

She is my new workout buddy! Not that she needs the exercise.

Good "Tree Pose", huh?

Today we did legs, after a few minutes she was tired and confused by the workout.

We had to go to Deseret Book store a couple weeks ago and since the Temple is right there, we paid it a visit. There were 3 couples outside that had just got married (and all their family/friends). Ava kept talking about when Aunt Melissa and Andy gets married in the temple and how she wants to marry Melissa. But today it switched to Kiera!

Good pic taken by Ava! She wants my camera all the time now.

Someone has discovered her feet and how yummy they are!

Sleeping update: Mya responded very nicely to the "crying it out method." She is out from 7:30/8 ish pm to about 5:45-6:30am. I don't like the 5:45 am days but she'll usually go back down 30 minutes later. And Ava has been doing awesome as well, funny how they correlated all that together.

Not much else going on with us. Our biggest struggle is Ava and her inability to listen and obey us. It's very much testing our patience. Not sure what to do about. She gets a lot of time outs these days, but never seems to learn from them. After hearing last year that age 3 is worse than 2, a patient at work tells me by far 4 is even worse. When does it get better??? My Mom says at about my age! Well that's no help! I need to practice more patience and less raising of my voice! That's our life, now you are all caught up!