Tag Archives: mom

Change of Plans

by on February 23, 2011 in me, things i love

I had big plans for the next upcoming months…

I was going to dye my hair
a pretty chocolate brown, just for a change

For Christmas, Bryan bought me a Groupon for laser hair removal
so I was going to use it on my legs and never have to shave my legs again

This summer I was going to take a trip to California and visit Six Flags
the last time we went to an amusement park, I was prego with James and couldn’t ride the roller coasters

Bryan and I discussed going to Hawaii in September
there is an SEO conference and it would have been a great excuse to visit a tropical location

I was going to get lots of extra sleep at night
James is finally sleeping longer and longer at night

I was going to start a nice workout routine
getting rid of the nice little baby fat that has found a home on my stomach would have been good

I was going to have our family pictures taken
and not have a fat face

But my plans have changed and I can’t do any of those things now…

Because … I’m pregnant (anyone else watch 16 & Pregnant?)

and couldn’t be happier about it

We are so excited! And yes, this baby was a little bit of a surprise, but a wonderful surprise. I’m due in the middle of September (due dates seem so unexact, so I’m just going to go with a general time when the baby can come) and James and his new sibling will only be 17 months apart.

This pregnancy has been so different than my pregnancy with James. I’m sick, but not even close to as sick… the only time I’ve really had a problem with being sick is while James had some diaper problems — changing his diaper was a race to see if I could finish his diaper before running at full speed into the bathroom. Such good times.  ha ha!

Its a great reason to change plans. And now my plans include convincing someone to bring me some brownies. Anyone?

Comments { 24 }

Holiday, oh Holiday

by on January 4, 2011 in james, me, ten things, things i love

(Mel, can you hear that song in your head?)

Our holidays were wonderful! How were yours?

We began the holidays by taking a quick trip to California to visit my brother. James and I made the trip with my parents and wee sis.

James was a trooper for his first looong drive

He only had one freak out. We left a few days before Christmas, stayed a day, and came back. Remember the big rain storms in southern CA and southern UT? Yeah, we drove through those.

Before we left, we took out one of the captains chairs in my parents mini-van so there was only one and the back bench, giving James a little bit of crawling room when we were stopped. It was a wonderful idea. Because of the rain and the cold, I didn’t brave the weather to take him into gross gas stations, so he just chilled in the car, crawling around while we took turns going inside. Thanks to Grandma, he even got chances to sit up front and play with buttons.

"Driving" the car was his favorite part of the trip.

(Don’t worry, the car was in park and the emergency break was on while he “drove.”) Notice the band-aid on his hand… two days before we left he pulled my straighten off the bathroom counter onto his hand. Luckily, it was in the process of cooling down, so the burn wasn’t as bad as it could have been (and it was a straightener and not a curling iron so it wasn’t as big of a burn). He also ran head first into the bed frame giving him the lovely line on his forehead that you can see in the top picture.

Begin side note:

This kid is into EVERYTHING and never sits still. He can open drawers, cupboards and his favorite thing in the world to play with are doors, swinging them back and forth. If he does ever push them all the way closed, he cries, because he toy doesn’t work any more. He tries to “walk” between his two standing toys, falling on his face. He attempted the stairs and tries to scale our entertainment center. Yesterday, I took something in the bedroom and came back and couldn’t find him anywhere… He’d made his way into the half bathroom and discovered the toilet paper. joy.

He's a little booger...

Needless to say, baby-proofing is in FULL SWING at our house. He finds things I never would have imagined.

End side note.

Back to our trip. We stayed with my brother, Rob and his beautiful wife, Ali. James is now afraid of Rob (I might be too if I met him in a dark alley). Due to the rain, and their flight to Australia we didn’t stay long and were back on the road in the torrential rain.

On the way home, we brought my brother’s three dogs. James LOVED them. They HATED James.

This was the closest they got to him

The car ride back was a little crowded with 4 adults, a baby and three dogs. Yes, they are small dogs, but they still got in the way. We even had a little diaper changing incident the ended with unpleasant stuff on Rachel’s pillow because the dogs were taking up all the floor space I needed to change a diaper.

On Christmas Eve, we joined my mom’s family for the traditional Food and Nativity night. The food was fabulous. The company was wonderful and James found something new to scale.

He might be Evel Knievell reincarnated. He has no sense of fear.

My grandma was able to join us (she’s been staying in the rest home while her broken leg heals, she’s almost ready to go home! Yay!), and read the nativity from the Bible. James got to be Baby Jesus this year and he even sat still longer than I thought he would.

The grandkids acting out the nativity

On the left, Rachel and Bree are the shepherds. Next, standing in the red is Emily as an angel and Abby as the star. Below the star we have Mary and Joseph, as portrayed by Andrew and Leah with Mary holding Baby Jesus. Above Mary and the baby are our wise men, Jared and Jessie. I think the 3rd wise man (Alyssa) decided to stay with her mom instead.

My grandma reading the story of Christ’s birth is one of my favorite memories of Christmas each year.

On Christmas morning, we woke up earlier than we wanted, our sweet baby decided to sleep from 9 until 12, then stay awake until 2:30, so 8 a.m. was EARLY. But it was worth it because we got to talk to JOSEPH, AKA Elder McCracken, in Peru.

Listening to Uncle Joe

(I realized that I didn’t get a picture of all of us listening, but you can see my dad in the background with the phone. We listened on speaker, while he held the phone close to a recorder.)

It was great to talk to him. He loves it there and is enjoying the people and the work. He described it as the happiest and saddest time of his life. The happiest because of how much his testimony is growing and the saddest because he sees the people and knows how much the Gospel could help them, but they aren’t willing to listen.

(I also realized that I didn’t take any pictures of the present opening. James loved it… mostly the wrapping paper.)

so excited

He was pretty stoked about getting his hands on his dad’s mini oreos. Santa didn’t bring him a lot of candy, just some fun things to chew on and one candy cane. He was in heaven.

The next day we got together for the Phelps’ Family party. The kids all got together and bought Bryan’s parents a new TV so it was pretty exciting to bring it in. It is a super thin LED, only 1.25 inches. It’s crazy the things they do with TVs now.

James got to play with his favorite cousins too.

"Friends, forever...Talkin' 'bout Friends"

(name that song…)

The next week was really relaxed. It was wonderful. Bryan was able to stay and hang out with us all week, so that was lovely. We played games with my family, we made a gingerbread train, pillow piles and we watched lots of movies.

Pillow Pile

New Year’s eve was pretty low key too. We stayed home, tried to get James back on a normal sleeping schedule, watched movies and went to bed.

It was a lovely end to a lovely year.

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My Talented Sisters

by on September 13, 2010 in movie monday, things i love

I found these videos from May 2008. My sisters are so talented.

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Dear UDOT

by on September 3, 2010 in feedback friday, things i don't love

Dear Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT),

Pioneer Crossing is finished and it’s a wonderful road. I really have enjoyed how much time it has taken off my drive from Saratoga Springs to American Fork. I really love that I can avoid Lehi Main Street most of the time. It’s wonderful, really.

However, I think the Pioneer Crossing signs are a little much.

Pioneer Crossing Sign

Pioneer Crossing Sign

There are a number of these signs along the roadway announcing that you have turned onto Pioneer Crossing (normal street signs weren’t enough?) and signs like this announcing that you entered Lehi City and signs announcing that you entered Saratoga Springs.

I’ll accept the signs announcing that you have changed cities. Cities often have nice signs saying “welcome to our awesome city” or “thanks for coming, come back soon.” But the signs to announce that you turned onto a road… too far.

Government spending and budgeting is a tricky business that I won’t claim to understand at all (maybe I should have done a little bit more research before writing this post–what kind of a journalism graduate am I?). It seems though, at a time when there are a lot of budget cuts in many states across the county,  the money from these signs could have been better spent elsewhere.

I don’t know how much each one of the signs cost, but depending on how much it cost, the money could have gone somewhere else (public schools, perhaps). To me, the signs just seem silly and useless. Everyone knows they are on Pioneer Crossing and if they don’t know, they can look at one of the little green signs that every other road uses to identify itself.

So, by way of sandwhiching my complaint with two nice comments before and after … UDOT, I really enjoy your current website with all the interactive maps and 3D information about how projects are going to look once they are completed. It is a really nice feature, especially with all the MANY projects going on in the places I regularly drive. Check out their cool video of the new road going from I-15 to Highland, it should be pretty nice when it is completed: http://www.udot.utah.gov/sr92/. You can also view information about the changes to I-15 and Geneva Road.

Thank you, UDOT, for your nice roads and hard work, but next time, save us all a little money and don’t invest in silly signs.

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Saturday Cleaning

by on March 24, 2009 in things i don't love

Cleaning, CleaningI do not love to clean.  Who does though?  But I do love the feeling after everything is cleaned.  So I guess it’s worth it in the end, right?  Let’s hope.

Tonight when my handsome, handsome husband and I came home from work, we decided it was probably time to do the dishes (sadly, we don’t do the dishes as often as we should, because there is only two of us, and we don’t make that many dirty dishes so we wait until we have more to do.  By time that happen though, we have a huge pile.).  So we went in the kitchen and got to work.  Then, I guess we got in the mood and our kitchen cleaning turned into entire main level cleaning, which then turned to master bedroom cleaning and ironing.  It was a very productive evening.

While I was cleaning tonight though, I was thinking a lot about the cleaning as I did as a child.

I am very thankful that as a kid, my mom made sure we always had jobs to do and she taught me how to clean.

Tonight, I was vacuuming the living room and I remember as a kid when we had to vacuum the living room, my mom insisted that we move the piano bench out of the way and vacuum everything.  So now, when I vacuum the living room, I make sure and move our ottoman so I can vacuum everything and not just around things (I don’t move our love sac out of the way often enough though, it’s a pain to move).

Then, when I was dusting, I moved everything off the end table and bookshelf and dusted the surfaces while they were empty.  Then as I put the items back in their places, I ran my dust rag over then to make sure they were also dustless like the shelves they sat on.  This practice was also something we were instructed to do when dusting the piano when we were little.

Another thing my mom taught us to do when we cleaned that I still do is after loading the dishwasher, you rinse out the sink and faucet.  Then dry the inside of the sink and buff faucet so there are no water spots.

While I know these type of things are standard things that people do when they clean and I complained about when I was little, looking back now, I’m so thankful that my mom taught me these things and got me in the habit.  I know sometimes when I am being lazy in my cleaning and don’t move the things when I dust or something like that, it’s never really the same.

One thing that my mom did though and taught us, that I DO NOT follow her lead is ironing.  (Her method is better than mine, but I hate it so much, that I just can’t do it).

My mom irons like this: when she does laundry, if there is something that needs ironing, she puts it in “the ironing basket.”  This included all kinds of things, like my dad’s dress shirts, polos, her shirts, our shirts, pants, pillowcases, table cloths and sometimes even sheets.  Often, one of our jobs for the week was to iron 5 things — not a lot, but considering how much I hate it, it was torture.  We would sift through the basket to find the pillowcases and table cloths.  If you were one of the first to do your 5 things, you could normally get away with only having to iron the easy things.  After the pillowcases and the table cloths the next easiest would be shirts not belonging to my dad (so mom’s t shirts or one of the kids shirts).  Then if you had to, you’d move on to dad’s polos.  Then if you were really unlucky, you’d end up with dad’s dress shirts.  Which were just such a pain because they were hard to iron and if we did a bad job, dad wouldn’t look nice and he was a CIO and needed to look nice. After we did our 5 things, mom would finish the rest.  Now, this system was a great system for my family.  It helped us learn how to iron (even though we didn’t want to) and we had lots of really nicely pressed things in our house (pillows do look nicer on beds after they have been ironed. Try it if you’ve never done it).  Don’t get me wrong, our system had some flaws, but we won’t go into that.

So if I don’t follow my mom’s system, what’s my super awesome ironing system, you may ask?  I don’t have one.  I hate the chore so much that I would rather wear wrinkled clothes than have to iron.  This isn’t a problem for me, because I’ve come to terms with it.  It is a little bit of a problem for Bryan though, because his Sunday clothes really do need to be ironed.  The system is probably something I should try to adopt from my mom, but it’s just so hard. For a good portion of our marriage so far we didn’t even have an ironing board. My cousin Brandon and his family came to stay with us once and he was amazed that I didn’t have an ironing board.

So here’s my question to you.  How do you iron? How do you make sure everything that needs to be ironed gets ironed? And it gets done in a timely manner?

I know part of my problem with it is my attitude, but still, there has to be a way to do it that makes it less horrible, or maybe not less horrible, but so that my husband can look nice (because really, even with a good system, I’ll still only do my hubby’s clothes so he looks nice and I don’t feel like a horrible wife). He’s pretty awesome and deserves a nicely pressed shirt.

( ha ha! That turned out to be a really long article about cleaning. Wow.)

Comments { 12 }

Deal…NO DEAL

by on April 14, 2008 in me, things i love

Saturday morning, my sisters, mom and I decided to try out for Deal or No Deal. We learned from KSL channel 5 News that Deal or No Deal was doing a casting here in Salt Lake City at the RC Willey on 2100 S. And I was going. We all decided on our good reason for going and the story that we could tell Howie, filled out the 11 page try-out form and were on our way. All wearing green (green for grass, we decided if we won, we would buy our parents grass for their backyard. They have lived in the house for 9 years and due to my dad losing his job they have never been able to put grass in the backyard. They have dirt).

People waitingWe took Trax up to 2100 S and walked the rest of the way. We had no idea what we were in for. On Trax, you can see the RC Willey right before the 2100 S stop. We looked out the window and masses and masses of people filled the RC Willey parking lot. I don’t think I’ve seen that many people in one place beside Disneyland. We thought, this is crazy, but we didn’t know half of it. So we walked from the Trax station to the RC Willey, looking for the end of the line. And we kept walking, and kept walking, and kept walking. Then we left the RC Willey area, went down the street, down another street, down another street and finally found the end. This picture is a Google map of the area. The pink area is where all the people were. It was pretty insane. But we thought, “Well, it’s a once in a lifetime thing. Let’s do it.” Then after we waited in the sun for a little bit, we though, “well maybe we should see how long it will take us to get to the end of that corner.” And we started making friends with the people in line. We were right in front of a cute pregnant woman and her mom. They were pretty funny and really entertaining to talk to. Once we got to the end of the street, we thought, “well, we’ll go to the next end.” Then someone walking by told us they had been there since 6 in the morning (it was 11 a.m.). 5 hours?! No way. Then someone told us it was probably a 12 hour wait. Now we were seriously questioning our decision. 12 hours? Then an official looking person came around and told us they only had 5 spots left. Odds were not good. So after My New Cute Shoesmuch chatting among ourselves…after only one hour of waiting and only moving 1/4 mile, we decided the best thing we could do at this point is get back on Trax and go buy shoes.

So we did: Although we didn’t make it on Deal or No Deal, we had a great time as girls, came home with cute cute shoes, got a little bit of sun (well Rachel was more than a little bit — she was pretty burned) and now we can say, “We almost tried out for Deal or No Deal.

It was quite an excellent day. If you want to find out more about the audition check out KSL.

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