Happy Valentines!

This is supposed to be a heart



Our red Toms







The Valentines I "made" for preschool.








-Tarin

Caydence's first haircut!!

It gave me some real anxiety, so I made my mom do it :) It looks 100 X's healthier!!

Before:


About 4-5 inches later:



-Tarin

December

Blogging is so hard for me. I am really OCD about all the post staying in order, so I can't move on to January before I've posted about Christmas. But I have to drag everything over to my parents' house to download the pictures from my camera to post, because we don't have the internet. I really like blogging from my phone, because I can do that at home, but I don't like taking important pictures (like Christmas) on my phone. Is this making any sense? Oh well, I'm just going to post a few highlights from December and call it good.

For my brother Matt's birthday we went to Boondocks and went bowling. At the very end of our second game they had the galactic bowling where you can win prizes. If the neon pink pin comes up in the very front and you get a strike, you win an unlimited pass for another day! Let's just say we won 3... :)

The birthday boy (picture by Caydence)

On Christmas Eve we went ice skating at the Galavan center.

And to temple square.

Christmas morning (Paige had to wake up Caydence, ha ha)

The ONLY picture of Will on his first Christmas (sad) and the ONLY toy we bought him, ha ha.

For Caydence's Christmas I went to Wal-mart after Halloween and bought her a few costumes that were on clearance because she loves to dress up. She had to try them on after opening each one. It was pretty funny. She would open a present, disappear for a little while, and come back dressed up just in time to open another one.

And that brings us to now, I guess :)

Caydence's Dance Recital Video

Thanks to suggestions from Annie, I'm trying to load the video of Caydence's recital AGAIN, but a different way. So hopefully this link works.

Caydence's recital

Don't judge my terrible recording. I was wanting to watch her in real life, not through the camera, so I wasn't great at keeping her centered on the screen. I also was having a REALLY hard time holding it still because I was laughing so hard!

Caydence's Dance Recital

So I'm a little behind in posting this, but no internet really slows things down! So I'm finally at my parents' and thought I'd try to catch up a little.

In mid December Caydence had her first dance recital. She was pretty much adorable!

Have you ever seen a 3 year-old with this much hair?!?
I have tried twice for over an hour to post the video, and stupid blogger can't do it! Maybe I'll try again later, but I'll at least post the pictures for now!

Windstorm: December 1, 2011

I'm pretty sure everyone that reads my blog already knows about this storm, but I'd still like to document it, and one up all of your pictures, ha ha.

So the wind started some time in the middle of the night, but I had no idea, we all slept right through it. I actually woke up around 6:30 when Danny told me the power went out in the middle of his shower. Around 7 or so I settled down in front of our big front window to watch the chaos unfold. It was pretty windy, but I was talking to my mom on the phone, (she lives about 2 miles away), and her damage sounded WAY more severe, so I figured it had mostly passed us by. Then a few minutes later I was talking on the phone with Danny (who risked his life driving to work!) and this HUGE pine tree in our front yard blew over, just missing the school crossing guard parked in her car! But it did take out 2 light posts, a street sign, and was laying on a power line.

Needles to say, the city was INSTANTLY there to cut it down because it was laying on power lines and blocking the road. It was pretty surreal to see these grown men holding on to each other just so they could stand in place! When I first sat down and the wind hadn't quite picked up I saw one of our garbage cans in our front lawn, so I took it back to the parking lot. The rest of them were laying down along the fence (except the one on the neighbors' car!) so I lied them all down and hoped for the best. When the wind really picked up one of them started going down our sidewalk, so I went out to get it, and it literally blew down the street faster than I could run to catch it! I figured it wasn't worth risking an injury! I was being PELTED with all kinds of debris: shingles, branches, trash, etc.

About this time, my cute neighbor risked her life and ran over to my house. She was obviously very shaken, and has no family around, so we hung out for a few hours, and that made it a lot more enjoyable!

This is the street sign the tree took out:

And one of the light poles:We had pretty minimal damage to our apartment. Just a few pieces of the roof were torn off.
And one of the porch dividers was shattered (not ours). I tried to lift up this BBQ, but it was so heavy!! I couldn't do it!

This is the apartment building right next to ours. We share a parking lot that this tree is now laying in. If you can tell, half of it is still standing, and the other half is where cars SHOULD be parked, but miraculously everyone had left because the power was out.
I ended up heading to my grandma's house later that day with my family. She had a HUGE pine tree that fell on her neighbor's shed (that little building in the middle). We were SO grateful it was the shed and NEITHER house was damaged. There were about 15 people cutting it down and hauling off the branches and we were there like 4 hours! It was crazy, and she lost 3 other trees too!
This is just a FRACTION of the mess they cut down.

But my parents' neighborhood was by far the worst damage we saw. Here is just a TINY sampling of the damage.

The strongest wind gusts were recorded in Centerville at 102 MPH!

We were pretty lucky because my parents' neighborhood still had power, so we spent the night on Thursday, and our power came back on around 11:45 Thursday night.

So we spent Thursday through Saturday helping wherever we could, and we were pretty shocked when we got a call that church was cancelled on Sunday morning for more clean up. They were expecting another storm Sunday night and didn't want all the debris that was piled on every one's parkways to cause more damage, so we worked for hours going around our ward and clearing more debris. Davis county even opened temporary drop areas for all the STUFF people needed to clear out. It was pretty crazy. Such an awesome thing to witness our ward (and all the wards around) pitching in and getting everything done in about 4 hours. Even some of the people who couldn't do the manual labor were out passing out hot chocolate and fresh baked rolls, bread, and brownies! It was quite a sight to see. I love our church!!

PS, the storm on Sunday ended up not happening, which we were very grateful for!

Thanksgiving 2011

Thanksgiving is by far one of my favorite times of the year, and this year was probably the best one yet! My sister had a friend visiting from France (Helene) and so she planned a jam packed weekend!

We started with our 2nd Cold Turkey 6k on Thanksgiving morning. I was not even CLOSE to being in shape for running this race! We had really trained for the last one, but I kind of fell off the wagon this time. Finding time to run with 2 kids is so hard!! I really need to get it together because the SLC 1/2 marathon is just a few months away! So anyways, I ended up walking most of the time with Paige and Helene, which I was totally fine with!
Then we had our amazing dinner, of course!

And took a group picture of everyone present. I love my family!!

The next night we went skating at Galavan Plaza, saw the lights at temple square, grabbed some dinner, and of course Hatch's hot chocolate (to die for!)

The next day we went to the temple, went to the shooting range:

and ended the night at an improv show in Salt Lake. It was such a fun weekend! We had a blast and can't wait for Christmas to get everyone together again! :)