Shari's 70th Birthday Celebration

Danny's mom celebrated her 70th birthday this year. They had a party to celebrate. All of her siblings and some of her longtime friends came to town for the celebration. There were a lot of people from their ward there, too. Danny helped a lot with the decorations, set up, and take down. 

They did a short program where Shannon read a tribute she had written. Danny's dad also said a few things. Mostly, people ate a visited.

She enjoyed the party and that was the important thing. With the way her health has been these past years, we feel like we should celebrate every time she makes it to another birthday. My kids sure love their "Gawbie" and we feel blessed to live close to her so that we can see her often.

Ashley at General Conference

Ashley had the opportunity to attend General Conference with her aunt, uncle, and cousin. They went to the Saturday morning session, which also happened to be the session when they had the solemn assembly to sustain President Oaks. They rode the train up to Salt Lake, so she left nice and early to give them plenty of time to get there. 

We didn't hear anything from her and jokingly watched for her in the few crowd shots that were shown on the broadcast. Fortunately, this one had more crowd shots than usual because of the solemn assembly. And Ashley happened to be wearing a very bright blue dress, which in theory would make her easier to spot. We still didn't think we would find her, until we did...in the 2nd row!!! 
Here's the story. Their tickets were in the section on the front right side, the section behind the place where the families of the apostles sit. When they got there, they found room for the 4 of them further back in the section, but Ashley's little cousin wanted to sit closer. She and Ashley went in search for seats up closer and found 2. They went back to ask Shannon and Adam if they could sit up there separate from them and they said yes. But when Ashley and Kennedi got back to the 2 seats, someone had taken them. When they went back to Shannon and Adam, someone had sat in the seats there, too. They were starting to stress that they wouldn't be able to find seats. They went back up front, right past the ropes blocking the general public from going up where the families of the general authorities sit and as they were looking around for a place to sit, a kind woman told them that they could sit next to her. She said that there were some from their family that couldn't make it that morning, so they had extra seats. So Ashley and Kennedi sat there on the second row, next to the family of Elder Gilbert. LOL. We were shocked when we saw them up there during the solemn assembly. We figured that they were able to get away with it because they were young. After the session was over, they couldn't leave right away, so they stood there for awhile and watched Elder Gilbert and Elder Gong come down and greet their families right next to them. Later that day, we saw Ashley on President Oaks Instagram. HAHA!

Since they were stuck there for so long after the session, Ashley did not make it home before the next session started, but she had quite the story to tell and an amazing experience at conference. She will never have the opportunity to sit so close to so many apostles again.

A New Car and My Birthday

We have been in the market for a new car for about a year now. We had settled on a Grand Highlander, but the Toyota dealership that we were working with didn't really care to have our business. We had given then the specs for the car we wanted and put some money down to have them reserve the first one that they could find available. And then we waited and waited and waited....for 6 months. We finally decided to get our money back and pick a new car. The one we decided on for our second choice was the Hyundai Palisade. We had originally planned on getting a hybrid, but while talking with the sales guy, we realized that we would have to own the car for over 10 years to make up the difference in the price from a gas car. And there were a lot more options for gas, as well. The one that we deciddd on was a green one with a light interior. 

We loved the car, at first, but have been frustrated with a couple of things (a dead battery and a warning light that keeps going on, even though we have taken it into the service department to have them fix it).

For my birthday, Danny took the day off and the boys were off of school. Ashley had a special event at school that day, so she couldn't miss, but it meant that I didn't have to go into work either. The boys did a good job planning a whole day of fun for us. We started at Top Golf. The boys had never been there before and they thought it was a lot of fun.

I didn't get pictures of any of the other stuff, but after TopGolf, we ate lunch at home and then went and played pickleball together. The boys had never really played before, so it was a little slower paced than usual for Danny and I. After pickleball, we played some games at home. Camden had to go to a play rehearsal that afternoon and the boys both had their Ninja Warrior class. But then we went to Tucanos for dinner together (this was my request). We had my birthday treat the night before since I knew that we would all be stuffed after dinner, which we were. It was a fun day.

Lindon Temple Open House

On St. Patrick's Day, we took our kids to the Lindon Temple Open House. We decided to go in the late afternoon in hopes that we would be able to have fewer crowds. It worked because the line was twice as long after we got out than it was before we went in. It still took us an hour and a half to get through the line and the tour. 

We got out a little before 7pm and decided to grab dinner at the Pizza Factory on the way home, rather than try to make something after getting home. The sunset was amazing when we came out of the restaurant after eating.

We feel fortunate that our kids are able to attend so many temple open houses.

Press Start

Camden participated in his school play this year. It was called "Press Start." It had a lot of video game characters in it (with different names: Marco instead of Mario, Speedy instead of Sonic, Spikey Turtle instead of Bowser, etc). Camden played the part of Guisseppi. He was the cousin of Marco the plumber. There were 3 different groups in the play - The heroes, the villains, and the sidekicks. The songs were fun and the costumes looked pretty cool on stage. Camden's character saved everyone in the end by collecting the final ring that they needed to save the show. He enjoyed participating, but I think he got bored of all of the rehearsals because he has already decided that he doesn't want to do the school play next year.

The full cast

The sidekicks (Camden's good friend is the boy in orange.)

The final part when Camden hits the block to get the final ring.

We each took turns going to the show so that Camden could have someone at each performance.

Photo Shoot with Ashley for Senior Pictures

 Before we were leaving on the cruise, I asked Ashley what kind of background she would like for her senior pictures. I was thinking the beach might be nice, but she said she wanted a snowy background. No problem, right? We live in Utah after all. However, anyone that is familiar with Utah weather this winter is well aware that we did not get a single significant snowfall all winter long. When Ashley was off school for winter break, we had a night of snowfall that left maybe an inch on the ground at our house. That meant that the mountains might have a little more, so we headed up AF canyon to get some pictures of Ashley and Lula. They looked really good on my phone and her fancy camera when we were up there, but they looked blurry after transferring them to my computer. I'm not sure why. My favorite is the one where Ashley is down close to Lula hugging her.

Ashley has been such a joy to raise. She has made us laugh a lot with some of the things she did as a kid. She has also made us super frustrated with some of those things. But she is a beautiful young woman with a heart of gold and such a love for God's creations. She loves Jesus and her family, and I look forward to seeing the great things she does in the future (even if she isn't ready to accept that it is time to grow up and adult).

Mexican Riviera Cruise - Cabo San Lucas

 Our third and final day in Port was in Cabo San Lucas. We booked a 2 hour dolphin encounter to start the day off. We had to ride the ferry from the ship to the shore since it is too shallow for the cruise ship to pull all the way up to the dock.

We met up with our excursion leader and he told us to wait under this canopy until they were ready to go.

Then we walked through the town past all of the people trying to sell us goods and rides for the day to the dolphin enclosure. Honestly, we did a lot of waiting around without even being able to see the dolphins or the pool where we would meet them. We had to remove everything except our swimsuits and a lifejacket. This included jewelry, hairbands, watches, etc. We almost had to leave Ashley behind because she refused to take off her necklace. We decided not to force her to remove her ponytail, too, after it was such a struggle to get her necklace off of her neck. We were finally led up to the pool after all of our belongings were stowed, including our cameras. Yes, this was another excursion with a professional photographer to capture the experience for us (which also included a hefty price tag at the end). The 20 or so people on our excursion were split into 2 groups. We were with a different trainer and dolphin than Brian and Maryn's family. We had 2 ladies added to the group with our family. The encounter was all that we had expected. We had lots of opportunities to touch our dolphin (named Lokai, or something like that). We also each had opportunities to get in the water with the dolphin to dance with him, hug him, and get a kiss from him. We also got to stand on the side of the pool and have him give us each a high five. And we also had a water fight with him, which he won. LOL. It was really cool and we learned a lot about dolphins during the experience. One interesting fact is that dolphins are really soft because they shed their skin like every 2 hours. It must come off in little pieces because I certainly have never seen a dolphin skin floating by in the ocean. We had considered buying this photo package since we passed on the last one until we heard that it would be over $400 to have our pictures. We quickly told them no thank you and moved on. They tried to talk us into just the pictures of the kids for like $350, but we still were not interested. We don't have any photos of the experience (except our memories). We really enjoyed it, though.

After we were done with the dolphins, we walked through the town to a public beach. We had brought some snorkels to try out in the water. The kids did not last very long with their snorkels, though. We overlooked lifejackets, so they couldn't go very far out. The adults tried it out after the kids were done.

The kids played on the beach in the sand.

Most of us were not able to see very much sea life with the snorkels. I swam all the way along the deepest part of the water that we could swim towards the rocks at the side of the beach and I actually saw quite a few different kinds of fish, especially over by the rocks.

After the beach, we walked through town and got some more souvenirs on our way back to the ferry. We also saw a lot of sea life on the shore. They were obviously not scared of people.

That is a huge fish hanging behind Tyler in the picture below.

We took these pictures right before getting on the ferry.

As we were heading out of port a couple of hours later, we were out on the pool deck. We never made it out to the famous arco in Cabo while we were there, so we got a look at it as our cruise ship passed by.

We really enjoyed our cruise and it didn't even get the kids too far behind in school, being out for a week. We really missed having Alyssa there with us. She would have loved all of the beach time, warm weather, adventures, and tagalog speaking (LOL).