Michelle leaves

The best dessert I've ever had in my life. Chocolate mouse torte cake from Beyond Bread. Oh man, I'm in love.


Michelle was not familiar with dead weighting. She told me she never tried/failed to carry someone so heavy. I thought it was pretty funny.


We always try to look our best for self-taken portraits.

Since the end of September, we've been lucky enough to have my sister Michelle living with us. Last week she left for BYU Idaho, and we sure are sad to see her go. While she was here we did tons of fun crafts, she drew countless race tracks on our driveway with sidewalk chalk, she made wayyyy too many desserts, I got to take naps, we had more tears than I've ever seen (I am definitely not the emotinal type, so this was new for me), we had tons of free babysitting, we met several of the male single population in Tucson, we discovered what it was like to have a teenager staying out all hours of the night, and we shared many, many laughs and jokes.

On her last night here, I made Michelle skip institute and she and I went to Beyond Bread for the best dessert ever and than she helped me buy make-up. She knows all the ins and outs of that stuff and I don't know very much, and now that she's not here to do my make-up for me, I figured I better learn. So Mike has often commented that Michelle brings out the goofy side of me, and this night I was particularly sleepy and so I ended up quite slap-happy and goofy. It was a great way to end her stay with us. We're so glad she's in school and getting to start that new, exciting chapter of her life. Best of luck Michelle!

Baby blessing

My dad held Devin a lot for me this weekend. I believe at this point they were both asleep in the chair.

My dad with most the cousins.

Mike's dad with baby Maggie.

Most of the cousins about to play in the river in Sabino Canyon

One of the joys of being in Arizona is we are much closer to family. So when we announced our baby blessing, we were able to get Mike's dad, my dad, and both of Mike's sisters and their families in town for the blessing. It was super crazy to have so many people at our house but also a ton of fun and a really nice blessing. We love having family closer. We had great family talks, we hiked Sabino Canyon and we turned the sprinkler on in the backyard and the kids ate a ton of frozen gogurts. Devin wore a cute little white and blue tuxedo that my grandma made for Caleb's blessing. I didn't get a good picture of it, but it was cute!

April Fools Dinner

So this is a little behind the times, but I still wanted to post it. Most years I never remember to do anything for April Fools. But this year I was trying to cheer up a very sad Brayden one day and I told him about how our friend Sharon made a jello drink for April Fools and the girl she gave it to tried to drink it and it fell out onto her face. I embellished the details here for the sake of the story, and Brayden was gung-ho (sp?) about trying it out on unsuspecting Aunt Michelle. So for April Fools we had Michelle and her boyfriend Ivan over for dinner under the pretense that we were saying thanks to the both of them for helping soooo much recently. I felt kind of guilty because Michelle kept saying, "That's so nice. You don't have to do this. Can I do anything to help?" Haha, this isn't to be nice, it's to be funny! Well, no jello spilled onto anyone's face, and Mike thought for sure none of it would work, and I was totally late getting the food on the table, but I enjoyed our meatloaf/mashed potato frosted cake and our ice cream taco salad and our jello berry drinks. I think Michelle and Ivan did too.