Sunday, August 16, 2009

Four Month Catch Up

Wow, has it really been four months since i have blogged?! My computer is completely out of commission we still haven't found a new one for me, but Ryan's is working great, so this will work for now. We have both been extremely busy with work, family and a few little vacations. There a ton of pictures i will just narrate from the bottom (earliest) to the top (most recent).
SHOPPING TRIP TO UTAH
Mareesa and Courtney enjoying a refueling lunch between stores on our day of power shopping.

My mom and i at Johnny Carinos... This was a few Saturdays ago, Ry had a boys trip planned with a few of his buddies. I got an email about the $5, $7, $9 SHADE warehouse sale, fate, i think so. We left early Saturday morning, Daddy made us a yummy new juice concoction for breakfast out of spinach, limes, and cabbage---it was delicious!! We hit the road and made good time, we got a few basics at the warehouse sale and then went to Nordstrom Rack and made a haul, it was one of those really good days where you find a ton that you love. We shopped at Gateway for a while and got to catch up with K and Cam for a little while. Overall a very successful trip!

HAPPY ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY!!! 7/31/09

I cannot believe that it has been a whole year since i married my best friend and love of my life. This year has flown we have had a great one and i am excited for many more to come!! Happy anniversary I love you babe!
One of my favorite wedding pics

After our game we went and got our first sno-cones of the year. We found a sno-shack that makes them with icecream, like they do in Hawaii, so yummy. We were going to make homemade pizza together for our anniversary night, but we were both full from lunch and our sno-cones that we decided to just have popcorn and snuggle up for a movie. It was fabulous!!

We had our last softball game the night of our anniversary, it was fun, we lost (surprise, surprise). My cute family came to watch, and my mom made a darling anniversary date night present, with candy, popcorn, a movie, soda, and my favorite, a beautiful red German popcorn bowl.

Ry had to work the morning of our anniversary so we woke up early and made french toast together. We got an amazing couples massage followed by a yummy lunch at Senang.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAREESA!
Mareesa turned 14, she is getting SO old and heading to highschool in a couple weeks, it makes me sad because her turning 14 makes me think that i am turning 24 this year---ah!

MISSY RAE AND TOBY
I just love this picture, our kitties LOVE napping in the laundry basket, aren't they stinkin' cute!?

GLASS+FREEZER=EXPLOSION
I opened the freezer to get my lunch and Dr. Willey had put a glass bottle in there and it had blown the whole top of the bottle of and had exploded ALL over!! After i told him what happened, he said that the company that sent him the bottle told him it would be fine in the freezer... maybe there is something you learn in medical school that i don't know, but last time i checked glass and the freezer never mix:-) At least we had some entertainment for the day.

LAGOON!
Ry and i went to the gym a few Saturdays ago, i went to Jen's bootcamp and he biked with Dane, (Jen's hubby). As we were walking out together Jen said she was headed to Lagoon and asked if i wanted to come, obviously i couldn't resist. So i hurried showered and we headed down to Lagoon. We met some of her good friends, Spence, Kari and her two boys, Cam and Casey. This is the only pic we took:-( but we went to Lagoona beach, and rode rides up until the second they closed. We were exhausted on our way home but we had a blast!

GIRLS CAMP 2009
My mom was assistant stake camp director this year, girls camp was up and West Piney and it was gorgeous, and the girls had a blast! My mom had me come up and teach yoga for their spa day had so much fun. This is the huge slide that led down from the main cabin to the other camp areas.
Me teaching yoga outside facing the mountains, you could hear the creeks, birds and the air was so refreshing. It really was that spiritual experience that yoga can give your mind and body.

My mom is the greatest; she planned an outside movie for one of the nights. Everyone brought sleeping bags and sacked out for The Parent Trap, classic movie, and amazing night, good job mommy, great success!!

My mom and a couple of the other leaders getting ready for the movie.

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!!
Waiting to watch "THE BIGGEST SHOW IN IDAHO", it was fantabulous as always!

Lizzy with homemade icecream all over her silly face.

Every 4th my mom makes individual bags of cream and sugar so that we can make our own little baggies of homemade icecream. We shake them with ice and sea salt and it makes the best icecream you will ever taste, yum!

This was the most time consuming dessert i have ever made... So i found this picture online, fell in love, bought the ingredients, and about five hours later this is my creation. It was a tart recipe, which i have never made, it called for special vinegar that i had to go to three grocery stores to find, anyway it was delicious, but i don't know that it was worth all the hard work.

THE DAY BEFORE THE 4TH...

We met Ry's family at Massacre Rocks to fish and camp on the 3rd. We had lots of fun, i wasn't feeling well so i slept most of the time, but Ry did catch some fish, took some bike rides, and had yummy food.

Ry mountain biking...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOMMY!
My mom drove her present in to visit us, isn't it cute? She has been wanting a scooter forever and finally got a sparkly orange one, and now has her motorcycle license, so funny!

NEW KITCHEN FLOOR
The finished product!

Ry putting in our new kitchen floor, it was quite the challenge since our house is not even close to being perfectly square. But it turned out great, and the hard work paid off, great job honey!

I LOVE THEM...
I'm sure these kind of pictures bore other people to death, but i really do love my cats, and i think they are so sweet when they cuddle up together like this.

ANOTHER CAMPING TRIP
We took another camping trip to Warm River/Island Park. This is Cave Falls, we drove forever to find out that the caves were closed because of a rock slide. We were disappointed, but it was pretty cold so i was happy to get back into the heated truck.

Making breakfast under our make shift lean to, it dumped rain almost the entire trip. We played cards, fished and played more cards, not much to do with all the rain.

A huge sucker that Ry reeled in...it was such an ugly fish!

ANNUAL BRIAN REAMS BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT
Ry's team made it to the last game and lost to the ISU basketball team (they totally rigged it, in my opinion,) they played great and it was for a good cause. Second place, not so bad.

McKAID'S GRADUATION
Cute grad cap cupcakes my mom and i made.
Congrats Kaid!!

Kaid graduated Highest Honors, spoke at graduation, and did a great job. What an awesome kid, i am proud to say he is my little brother.

Mareesa's 8th grade GRADUATION
Mareesa and her friends at their graduation, can you believe she is on her way to highschool?

WARM RIVER CAMPING TRIP
Up at Bear Gulch in the old train tunnel, where my dad use to fish when he was younger, it was beautiful!

Looking down at Bear Gulch, we wanted to fish down there but the ground was too wet for us to hike down without falling to our deaths.

So... we went over to Buffalo river and fished for a while, the only thing i caught over there was a huge mossy rock. Can you see the thunder clouds behind us? That's the storm we had to beat before we got back to camp.

A little Swallow Tail that came to visit our camp site, she's so pretty!

Ry playing with the stuffed bear at the Mesa Falls Lodge.

All the fish we caught that day...

My dad caught the biggest one of the day, he was super excited!!

My little medium size fish.

Big Springs; it was gorgeous and we had so much fun wandering around.

The fam (minus Kaid) at Upper Mesa Falls


Ry wins the award for smallest fish of the trip, it was sardine size:-)

First day fishing of our camping trip...

UTAH
Swimming at Uncle David's house after a very long day of watching Ween play volleyball.
David, Daddy, and Mommy having a jolly old time together.


Isn't she a great lookin server?! We watched her play at Westminster for hours this day, she did great! She is trying out right now for Poky's Highschool team, good luck Weenie!

Monday, April 27, 2009

Weekend Trip

Ry and I seem to never get enough time together, so we planned a little weekend get away. We were originally planning on meeting some friends in Vegas, but things didn't work out so we decided to plan a camping trip to Zion Nat'l Park. We were super excited to use our new tent and camping gear, we both got off work around 2PM on Friday afternoon and left as quick as we could. The drive down was full of random stops for treats, rest stops, picking out books on cd, etc... so in short, we ended up rolling into St. George around 12:30, much later than expected, so we decided against trying to find our camp ground in the middle of the night so we found a hotel in St. George and thought we could set up camp the next day in the day light.
Ready...set...take your time...
Needless to say this was our tent not only for night one but for night two as well.
We got up super early (aka Ry woke my up at the crack of dawn,) we ate a yummy continental breakfast and headed over to Zions. The park was beautiful, i have never seen anything like it, the giant sandstone mountains are triple the size the mountains around here. We took a scenic drive before we started hitting the trails and then got on the park shuttle bus to head to our hiking trails.
Beginning of our hike up to Angels Landing...
Reading the description of the hike we are about to embark on, words and phrases like: falls from cliffs have resulted in death, shear cliffs, stay away from cliff edges.
Do we really want to do this? I am quite notorious for being a total klutz...
Looking down on the switchbacks we just climbed...
Half way there...
Almost to the top...yes, that is a chain that i am holding on to!
Pictures don't really do the steepness justice (does that even make sense?)
I almost fell off the cliff trying to take this picture because the wind started to pick up, Ry caught me and told me to keep both hands on the chain:-) But isn't it a cute picture??
Eating a little lunch at the top, an 800 foot drop on one side and a 1200 foot drop on the other, awesome!! If you're scared of heights i would never recommend this hike, crawling down by those chains was really scary. The wind started picking up on our way down and a storm started rolling in, we definitely headed down at the perfect time.
This is at the end of Refrigerator Canyon (toward the end of our hike), it's hard to tell, but i am leaning my entire body against the wind and holding on to my sweatshirt so tight, i think there were gusts around seventy to eight miles an hour, i have never experienced that feeling, it was insane!
My favorite pic of the trip... still on our way down from Angels Landing.
We made it!!!

There was a cute little trading post toward the entrance of the park, so on our way back to the hotel we had to stop for some yummy homemade ice cream on a homemade waffle cone with gummy worms, seriously nothing better it was delicious!! I took i nice little cat nap after our hike while Ry did some homework, got some In and Out which was really gross:-( they screwed up our order and it was less than satisfying. After that we headed down to Mesquite for the night got in the hot tub when we got back and slept like babies until early bird Ry woke me up at 6AM again, to eat breakfast and hit the road.

We made a couple stops on our way out of the park and took some more little mini hikes and explored some amazing rock formations and river beds.

Down in a gully of a random really pretty river bed...



Driving through Bryce Nat'l Park.
Amazing rock formations!!

Another really pretty little hike we took, we had a blast together!! This was by far one of the best trips we have taken, we took the long and scenic route home and saw some more beautiful mountains, old cabins, and amazing landscapes.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Easter, F.R.I.E.N.D.S, Britney!!!

EASTER SUNDAY
Easter was low key and really relaxing this year, i went to church with my parents and then Ry and I went to one of my bestfriend's, Mike, homecoming talk. He did a great job and it was so great to see him. After two sacrament meetings i was ready to relax before we went to Easter dinner at my grandparents. So Ry and i watched Baby Mama, SOO funny, i highly recommend it, and i made these cute little Easter cupcakes. Dinner at my grandparents was delicious, as always, and we had a great time watching the kids hunt for eggs.
Lizzy running around trying to grab as many eggs as she can, she has got a BIG sweet tooth and polished off most of the treats in the eggs before leaving grandma and grandpa's.

UTAH...SHOPPING...BRITNEY CONCERT
The past three days have been eventful and completely fantastic!!! Monday right after i got off work i drove down to Utah to meet up with some of my very best friends. We all got together and went to Costa Vida for dinner and caught up with everyone and then Randi, Kristen and I went to K's apartment for junk food and Twilight (we didn't make it very far because we just wanted to talk to each other, which was more fun anyway). When the boys got home from playing basketball we headed up to Chad's parents house to get a good nights sleep before our FULL day of shopping!!
Yummy Costa...
The good old trio...
I know we have a million pictures like this, but i honestly doubt i will ever get sick of them.
The damage...(sorry Ry and Chad) my entire backseat was loaded. We went to the new Nordstrom Rack in Sandy, which was AMAZING (and a million other stores,) and we found this "western" store in Springville, that was actually chuck full of the cutest clothes ever. I think if our wallets and husbands would have let us keep going there would have been no end to our shopping frenzy.
Guilty or ecstatic??? You decide.

BRITNEY SPEARS' CIRCUS
Charish and I with our pre-show energy...
Pussy Cat Dolls opening for Brit, they were fantasmic!!!
drum roll please....
I want to be a backup dancer for her....hmmm

Cold as fire baby hot as ice!!!
The finale (and entire show)... most amazing, ridiculous, mind-blowing i NEED to see it again!! Words cannot describe how amazing she was, there was constant entertainment, she didn't forget which city she was in:-), her costumes and props were fantastic,and she had actual circus people. Yes, there were midgets, flexible freaks, unicyclers, and tons and tons more. If you haven't seen this show add it to your list of must see, you won't regret it!
Dancing, sweaty, and just wanting more Britney!!!!