Spring Break + San Diego = one HAPPY family!!

March 2010

Back in August we were invited to go beach camping at South Carlsbad with a group of other families, having done it once before I jumped on the phone and reserved a spot. We loved it last time and were looking forward to it again!!
Spring break crept up so quickly it seemed kind of surreal. A lot of things had changed between August and March like the fact that some jerk stole our truck!! We didn't have a way to pull the trailer. We were going to tent it, then we were looking for a vehicle to tow the trailer, then back to a tent and then finally a couple weeks before we were leaving we decided to get a hotel close to the beach. It proved to be a great plan!!
After checking into the hotel Saturday afternoon, we grabbed some dinner and then headed down to the beach to say hi to everyone. The Ames, Halls, Crumps, Dorseys, Nilda and her sister, and the Smiths all had camp sites. throughout the week we also had another Smith family, the Moores, Lemoines, and Dutrys also join in the fun. Needless to say there were friends for everyone and the kids had a blast!! After spending some time chatting with everyone we headed back to swim at the hotel and head to bed.
Sunday we took the kids down to La Jolla beach to watch the sea lions and walk around a bit. Then we went to Sea Port Village to walk along the pier and see all the ships in the harbor. The whole time the kids were whining they just wanted to go to the beach, so to the beach we headed. The rest of the afternoon we spent relaxing and socializing with all the friends. It was a good day.
Monday the plan was to spend the entire day at the beach. I really had not planned on the kids getting in the water very much on account of it being cold , boy was I wrong. They loved it!!! Skim boarding, playing frisbee and football, digging in the sand, jumping off the cliff, looking for shells....they were in heaven. We had one somewhat minor incident when Jacie got stung by a sting ray. Not so fun. But it was funny listening to everyone else give there 2 cents on how to treat it. The majority thought we needed t0 pee on it, thank goodness no one did before they figured out that only works for jelly fish stings! We soaked her foot in HOT water for quite a bit and it really seemed to help, poor girl. That night we had a huge group BBQ with lots of food. It was another great day!

Tuesday was the big outing day.Half of the group went to Disneyland for the day and the rest of us headed to Sea World. The last time we went to Sea World Braydon was 5, Kiley 3 and Mal was 1 but we didn't bring her. The Dutries and the Ames joined us. It was a WARM day but we had a blast. We caught most of the shows. All the kids sat in the prime soak section and got totally drenched and loved every second of it!! the other big hit was the Journey to Atlantis ride. They all rode it like a dozen times. Malerie was suffering from a sunburn from the day before and she was kind of miserable so her and I were hanging out for a bit and got our own private dolphin show while the trainers were working with them. It was awesome!! After the park we headed to Sea Port village for dinner, I love that place!! We were all pretty tired but we went swimming back at the hotel again!

Wednesday we were heading home but not before getting in a little beach time! After meeting up with our group at the camp sites it was decided that we were going to head to Oceanside beach for the day. It was suppose to be a little less rocky! We grabbed lunch and made ourselves comfortable. It was an absolutely perfect beach day!! It was so hard thinking about heading home. We ended up staying till evening time and then went back to the camp sites. The adults went to a fun restaurant for dinner to celebrate Carl's birthday and the kids hung at the camp and played games etc. When we got back we finally hit the road to go home. It was going to be a long night of driving but totally worth staying the extra few hours!! It was a fabulous trip in every way and hopefully something we will repeat again soon!!! We are so thankful to have so many good friends to do fun things with.

Just for fun we brought along this guy on our trip! Sure made for some funny entertainment!!
Seaworld-Tuesday
BEACH FUN!!!!

the kids dug at this hill for hours and then spent a couple more hours jumping into it and sliding down it with their skim boards. Cheap entertainment.
poor Jacie being treated for her sting ray sting and no we didn't pee on it!!!
Abby, Taylor, Braydon, Kamrie, Kiley, and Jacie
Taylor, Kamrie and Braydon
Dad getting in on the skim board action!!

Ragnar...finally!

Team For The Run Of It

February 26-27, 2010

I blogged my excitement about signing up and participating in something like this way back in the summer. I started training lets say August or September-ish and did pretty well staying consistent and making progress for a while. Then I would get busy or distracted by other things and slack off. Then I would kick it into gear and get back with it, then I would slack off. You get the idea. Well then the holidays rolled around and it just seemed like I could never get back in a good routine. All these months of working towards a goal, I went through all these different stages. Excitement, anticipation, motivation, fear, frustration, doubt, the closer I got the more nervous I was that I wasn't prepared enough, I was feeling a little stress and anxiety to just get it over with!
When I got back from my sisters trip I really tried to be consistent with my running schedule because I only had 2 weeks left. I was able to get a little training in but definitely not as much as I would have liked!!

It was FINALLY time!!! I totally had fun getting some things together for our team "For the Run of it". With the help of my good friend we designed a pretty cool looking shirt that everyone seemed to really like! The shirts came in handy for our race because they were easy to spot! We could usually find our runner pretty easily! I made some funky headbands, decked the Tahoe out, bought an air horn, some pom poms, charged all the camera batteries, everyone brought enough snacks to feed a third world country (banana anyone??)!! It was go time!

Van #1 was Jessica, Amanda, Katie, Shannon, Alyson, and Mary. We were Van #2 with myself, Alisa, Rachel, Misty, Laree, and Stephanie. We all met up in Prescott early Friday morning. Van #1 started us off. We didn't have to run for a while but we hung around for a bit to cheer on our team and just get the hang of things since we were all rookies at this! The weather was absolutely perfect and everyone was pumped! The first 2 legs were pretty mild but Katie's #3 leg was a doozy not only was it a longer one it had some whopper hills!
If I am remembering correctly it was about 3pm when it was our vans turn to take over and we were up around Hillside somewhere. While our runner was out we would leap frog and offer them water and yell obnoxiously out the window to cheer them on. Alisa definitely had the killer leg in this round. I was exhausted just looking at the hills she was running!! What a woman! I was starting to get real nervous, just one more runner and it was my turn!!

Getting all garbed up!

Passing the band From Misty to me, ahhh! I was so anxious and focused I didn't even realize I hadn't turned my Ipod on for like the first mile!!
this is my running face apparently!! We had so much fun cheering each other on and making our runners laugh as we drove past them, it was very motivating and entertaining, especially on the very last leg when they come driving by windows rolled down, blaring Bust a Move and totally rockin out!!

By the time it was my turn it was getting close to sunset so I had to get all garbed up in 5 pounds of equipment it felt like! I was not loving running with that blasted head lamp cutting into my skull. My run wasn't nearly as bad as I had anticipated. It did get dark about half way through but it wasn't to bad. The worst part was that the entire thing was on a dirt road and all the vehicles are driving past kicking up dust like crazy, it was nasty and I felt so dirty, disgusting when I was done! Our group made pretty good time and finished around 9:30-10 pm. We decided the hotel rooms that one of the girls had booked were just to far of a drive to get there and back in time for our next runs so Misty's in laws graciously agreed to let us shower and crash at their house for a couple hours. We had finished around Wickenberg so it was still a good 30 min drive to their house. By the time we got there and a few of us showered it was late! I think I may have slept 30 min to an hour maybe by the time we got the call that we needed to head out! It's not easy peeling yourself out of bed at 2 in the morning when you just got in it but at least I was clean! It was a mad rush and we were hauling to try and make it to the exchange in time. when we were turning off of Lake Pleasant Pkwy. on to Carefree Highway there were highway patrol and roadblocks set up. We had to pull over and learned from the officer that there was no way to get through to our exchange because a runner had been hit by a car. It was extremely upsetting and unsettling news. After waiting there a while we got word that ALL runners no matter where they were in the race were being routed to exchange 24. So basically we just skipped all 6 of our next runs. The first van was done and headed (the long way) back to the hotel to rest, shower and sleep. Our group headed to the exchange to find out what the new plan was. I can't even imagine what a logistical nightmare that was for them. The school parking lot they had us all meet in was a sea of white 15 passenger vans and tired. dirty runners! The short of it is that they gave everyone the option of calling it quits then or resigning up and starting from that point. We definitely wanted to finish but obviously had to do some major readjusting. We all were now running different legs then what we had planned on.Our new start time wasn't until 7:30 am. So basically we burned over 4 hours not sleeping, not running and really tired! We went to Einsteins got some breakfast and our luckily our second wind!

(I played chauffeur for pretty much the entire weekend, poor girls and Alisa was my copilot!!)

We finished the next 6 legs without incident thank goodness. The last 6 we split up among us and had van 1 meet up with us so Katie could run 1 of them.
The coarse of this race took us from Prescott, down through Wickenberg, up the Carefree Highway into Scottsdale, then Fountain Hills, Mesa and eventually at 4:30 pm finishing at Tempe Market Place. Personally I was so exhausted at that point I cannot even imagine if that horrible, tragic accident hadn't happened we would have still been running till probably 8 or 9pm? Despite the accident and rerouting business and a few other minor details our van had an absolute blast together and cannot wait to do it again!! We laughed our heads off, talked, cheered, danced, rocked out, ran, ran some more, laughed a whole lot more and became really good friends and made some unforgettable memories! I admire these women and their amazing skills and am inspired to work even harder for next time! Seriously one of the funnest (in a very deranged and twisted way)!

Laree!! Love this girl!
Oh the stories, I mean nightmares we could tell about the Ragnar porta potties!!!
I'm not sure why Misty is smiling I was usually a little nauseous coming out of there!!!
Why do I stand next to the tall skinny one???

FINISHED!!!

Sisters ONLY!!

Like I mentioned before this last minute impromptu trip to Utah with my sisters was maybe a little inconvenient in the timing but the prospect of having my sisters to myself, going on a road trip (which I love!!) and visiting Utah (which I really love!!) was all very appealing and worth the effort!! Aubrey, Carli and Becki left Arizona sometime Friday evening and drove through to Vegas where they got a hotel for the night down the street from where we were staying. Saturday morning about 8 a.m. they swung by to pick me up and we were on our way to Utah. My kids are actually pretty easy and fun to travel with but man it was awesome sitting in the back seat with no responsibilities or kiddos! We chatted and laughed the whole way there. It is only about a 5 hour drive from Vegas but we were sooo excited to surprise Missi that it seemed like it took forever!! To ensure that our surprise was not ruined we told NO ONE that we were coming. When we got to Salem we pulled into Missi's house on the dairy and her car was't there. We were frantically trying to decide what to do to find out where she was and came to the conclusion that we should go ahead and go in the house her kids would be able to tell us where she went and we could go from there. When we walked through the door our nine year old niece was standing there and it took her about 30 seconds to get over the shock of who walked in, she squealed and jumped into our arms lightning fast. The best part was, it turned out Missi was laying down with her youngest daughter down the hall. The 3 of us quietly snuck in her room (she was laying there with her eyes shut and said "you are going to be in big trouble") she thought it was her other kids!! We started singing happy birthday at the top of our lungs, her eyes pop open and she is looking at us with the most stunned, bewildered look on her face and then she was out of the bed jumping up and down hugging us and screaming!! She was so surprised, it was awesome!!!!! After visiting for a bit we talked her husband into letting us kidnap her for the weekend. I thought it was so awesome how he was so supportive and sweet about us surprising her and taking her away with no warning!!!

We made a couple pit stops and headed up the mountain to surprise our parents (our brother Michael who is Missi's twin and his family were staying the weekend at my parents so it was really a 2 for 1!! My mom and dad live up on the mountain in Midway. The roads there are not graded so we have to park in a parking lot and ride a snow mobile in but since they didn't know we were coming we decided to hoof it up the mountain. It was quite hilarious and I'm surprised they didn't hear us coming a mile away from all the screaming and laughing we were doing. I had no jacket on and flip flops walking up the snowy, icy hill in the dark. We were all slipping and sliding all the way, when we got to their door it was open except for the screen so we started singing We Wish You a Merry Christmas. My mom could see us but it was like it didn't register, she just had this blank stare and then said Aubrey is here, my dad is saying NO WAY all the way to the door. They were crying and hugging us in total disbelief it was awesome!!! The element of surprise made the whole trip worth it!! My dad was somehow able to convince our youngest brother Brad (Becki's twin) to change his plans and come up to the cabin. I'm pretty sure he suspected but he was still surprised. He changed all his plans for the weekend and hung out with us. Later we drove around the corner and surprised our Grandma and Grandpa and visited them for a bit. It was an exhausting but perfect day!Sunday was amazing! We all got ready and went to church at our parents ward (which is also my grandparents and aunt and uncles ward). All of my siblings were there except our brother Kory. It was also Fast Sunday so we enjoyed some moving testimonies including my grandpa, and mom. We feasted on a classic Sunday dinner, played games watched movies and just vegged. It was AWESOME!!!

Dad, Mom, Brad, Elisha, Mike,Missi, Carli, Aubrey, Becki

Monday, Brad treated us to a personal tour of Sundance Ski Resort where he works and a round trip ski lift ride. I'm not going to lie I wasn't really excited about the idea at first (I'm not a big fan of the heights!!) but it was sooo awesome. It was a gorgeous (chilly) day and the view was breathtaking. Becki and Carli were so freaked out it kind of took the edge off my own nervousness and we had fun torturing them by making the chair swing!

We then headed into town to have lunch at a fun little Mexican food place and then to the mall to do a little shopping! Part way through our shopping trip Missi and Aubrey left to go pick up Missi's youngest daughter, when they were almost back to the mall they were in a pretty good accident. We got the call and luckily it was close enough to walk to because we now had no car. It was a total blessing that no one in either car was hurt. The Village Inn that was on the corner of where the accident happened was so kind and gracious. They gave us a booth that we could wait in till Missi's husband could come and bring us another car to drive for the time being. They served us pie and hot chocolate and we were able to just relax and talk while we waited. Not exactly what we had on the agenda but thrilled everyone was ok. When we finally made it back up to the cabin we just watched movies till wee hours of the night!Brad, Becki, Me and mom (the others were in a chair behind us)

WHAT, Tuesday already??? Unfortunately time flew but we definitely packed in as much as we possibly could!!! I needed to run a couple quick errands in town so I made a run to one of my most favorite Utah spots, the Provo Bakery!!! YUUMMM! Everyone had chipped in so I think I seriously bought one of everything for us to try. Not exactly on the healthy side but so dang good! It was a pretty low key day. That night we drove down to see Mike and Kelliann's new house and see some of our cousins. We stayed the night at Missi's so we could get an early start home to rescue our husbands. It was so fun to be free for a few days (a week in my case) but we all missed our families dearly! We decided this is something we will definitely do again!!! Great trip, Great memories, I love my sisters!!The Zermot Resort down the street from my parents has the most amazing, breathtaking display of man made ice castles and at night they are illuminated! Simply amazing!!

On the way home we got to St George right at dawn and as we were driving up the hill we had to pullover to take in the view of the gorgeous St George temple!!!