September 2014

I am determined to get caught up, and there's lots to tell you. You got a spoiler last post and so you can probably imagine that September was quite the exciting month for us. But I digress. Let's start at the beginning shall we?

 At the very beginning of the month we went with the Moores and Daelynn (not pictured for some reason....) to the Ogden Temple Open house. This is such a gorgeous temple and I feel so blessed to have so many temples in easy driving range for us. We had a glorious time.

 Sammy was extra cute in the little mini museum thing they had where they had a replica of the Christus on display.

 Also at the beginning of the month (right around the 6th, Daelynn's birthday) we went up to Brigham City's Peach days. We let Lindy ride on some carnival rides (Sammy didn't want to ride....) and two cousins had a glorious time.

Allan and I had the opportunity to help our youth get ready for the Youth Cultural Celebration that was the night before the temple dedication. It was an amazing experience and we loved getting to be a part of it!

 In the middle of September I took Daelynn up to Rexburg to start her first semester at BYU-Idaho. It was a fun day. :)

Rexburg Temple - right by Daelynn's Apartment

Daelynn is officially a student!

Daelynn in her dorm!

 This was the last rehearsal we had with our youth right before the celebration...so much work!

 Lindy was still in UT during September before heading back to Canada and so we went out for Pizza....

Most of our youth right before the cultural celebration began. They were amazing and it was such a neat experience to be there with them!

On the last weekend we had Lindy before she left, she and I made a bunch of Halloween decorations for the house. Spiders and Ghosts, oh my!

We also got to go to Sammy's 2nd Birthday Party. It was Daniel Tiger themed. :D

Rusha was obviously thrilled with all of the celebrating...

 On our last day with Lindy we were able to get Allan's sister Liz to take our family pictures for this year. I played around with some fun editing things in Photoshop and am quite happy with how they turned out. Here's a small sampling:

Finally the last thing we did in September, on the very last day to be exact, was to sign a bazillion (more like 150+) pages to close on our condo.

We are very happy to officially be homeowners and as you saw previously, have already started on the home improvement projects. :D

And that, my friends, was our September. Very eventful. Now hopefully to get up-to-date with our lives....stay tuned!!!

We went to the Zoo!

Lindy came for one of her scheduled visits this past weekend and we had SO MANY FUN adventures planned. I don't know how we managed to pack in so much fun in to so few days, but pack it in we did. :D Lindy has grown so much and she honestly is such a great little bundle of joy and sunshine. We love her and love the time we get to spend with her.

On Monday, with the most beautiful weather ever, we met my sister BreeAnn and nephew Sammy at the zoo and then spent the morning seeing all the animals. We had a blast. :D After the zoo we went down to Liberty Park and had a picnic/played on the playground. It was a good day.

Here are some pictures:

Birds and tigers and elephants oh my!!

My two silly monkeys!!

We had so much fun. And the weather was so perfect. In fact, I got my first sunburn of the season. :P

Until our next adventure....ciao!

General Conference with a Toddler

One of the amazing things about my new life is that I am a part-time mom. It's kind of a daunting task to take on so suddenly - motherhood. In so many ways it really isn't "so suddenly" seeing as how I knew it was coming for such a long time and my role in Lindy's life isn't changing just because Allan and I got married. We're still doing things the same way...but still. To officially be a step-mom (although I hate the word step, so maybe a second mom? I don't know....) is kind of odd to think about.

Anyways. Due to drill scheduling and what not Allan had switched weekends to have Lindy over general conference. Our first non-honeymoon together....with Lindy! (hey, got to get the "normal" thing going asap right?) Knowing that this was happening I tried to be all awesome and put together something to keep Lindy entertained during General Conference. 8 hours of sitting and being told to stay quiet is REALLY hard for a toddler. Heck, trying to do that for 2 hours when what you're watching isn't Tinkerbell is hard to do at that age. ;)

So, I turned to Pinterest. I found SO MANY THINGS and started to feel a little overwhelmed at all the awesomeness out there that moms have put together. I didn't use any ONE source for what I did, but I did find just about everything that I did from this post.

So what did I do, you ask? Well, I got a bag for each member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the First Presidency. I wrote their name on the outside of the bag and then put a different activity in each bag. Here's an idea of what was inside the various bags:

• 4 bags had 3-4 coloring pages from the Friend magazine.
• bubbles (we got special princess bubbles from walmart - they were a dollar or two I think)
• Princess coloring pages (this was a white elephant gift from several years ago, I had been saving it for the perfect time for Lindy.)
• Rip paper and glue to cardstock 
• Brown paper bags + craft supplies to make puppets
• Homemade sewing cards (took 5x7 pictures of a temple/First Presidency from the Distribution Center and used a hole punch to punch around the picture, used ribbon tied to one hole for a starter.)
• Play dough
• Apostle/First Presidency Matching game
• Vertical Drawing (taped a poster board to the wall and let her color on it.)
• Play a game on Daddy's phone (one of her church iPhone games)
• Faces game

I know there was one more, but I can't think of it. We got a little lucky in that during the Saturday morning session Lindy was playing w/her cousins while Allan and I got our washer and dryer picked up/installed in our house. :o) 

Notes: the coloring pages didn't go over super well (ESPECIALLY after some of the more "fun" activities). The ripping of paper and gluing it? PERFECT. That was one that kept Lindy entertained for an hour at least. Also a big hit? The sewing cards. Those are totally going in her Sunday quiet bag. We didn't pull out the bag to make puppets - the apostle this went with (Elder D. Todd Christofferson) went very last on Sunday afternoon and I knew it would be an hour or so project and I didn't want to start it at that time. So...we skipped that bag. Bubbles were another big hit and were used after the Sunday morning session to entertain for a while with Daddy outside. :)

Overall, it was fun times. Lindy loved getting a new "surprise" every so often. Some lasted longer than others - some got played more than once (the faces game for example). Also, I didn't stress on changing to a new bag each time a new apostle spoke. (i.e. the back to back Apostles like Holland to Oaks.) If she was entertained she got to keep going. If she was done and ready to move on, we opened the next bag. This worked really well on helping get through some of the other General Authority speakers that one cannot predict.

Whew. If you made it through all of that then you're amazing or something. ;) Several of the bags I will re-use again and the ones that are now "empty" I will re-fill with new activities for the future. Who knows if at this time we'll have Lindy for conference but there will come a day in the future where we'll always have kids around for conference....so it's good for me to have some of the stuff already put together. :o)

And now...a few pictures of the activities. :) 

Whew. you made it! Catch you later friends! 

P.S. Allan and I enjoyed conference too...so many amazing talks! I'm excited to study them together. :o)