Kiersten's Award

Kiersten was nomiated for the Mayor Youth Recognition Award. I am soo proud of her. One of her teachers nominated her because she is such a hard worker and tries her hardest in all that she does. She was given the award during one of the Tooele City Council Meetings. They called her up and Jacklynn Sagers read what the teacher and wrote about her along with a quote from Mom and Dad.

We said:

"Kiersten has overcome many struggles in her life. She has done so with courage, strength and positive and cheerful attitude. She has such a giving and friendly personality and strives to do what is right no matter what anyone else is doing. She is our happy, laughing, frolicking daughter who is an irreplaceable part of our family and we love her with all of our hearts."

 Mayor Patrick Dunluvey and Police Chief Kerby gave each awardee a back pack full of goodies such as: a water bottle, candy, letter opener, a stress ball and some other little things.We are soo proud of her!!

 Emalee photo bombing!!

Blessings

It has been a whole year since my parents left for thier mission and now they are back!! Their mission was for only 12 months, but living in a 31 foot motor home for 12 months probably felt like 3 years!! I am soo happy to have them home. They went to the Farmington New Mexico Mission and spent most of their time in Crown Point New Mexico which is about an hour from Gallup. Then they were transfered to Thoureau New Mexico which is closer to Gallup, but smaller than Crown Point, which is saying A LOT!
I was lucky enough to go down and visit them twice while they were on their mission (which is totally ok to do if you are a couple missionary and totally against the rules when you are a young missionary). Mert, Monica and I went down in May to visit them and then my little family went down in August for Ryan's Eagle Project.
Crown Point is about the size or Stockton Utah, with one little gorcery store, schools and 2 gas stations. I Thoureau was even smaller. They lived in their motor home which was parked next to the church buildings. In both places there were Elders who lived in a single wide next to them so they weren't completely alone.
Well, now they are home!!! Yesterday was their homecoming! And talk about a busy day!! Saturday night my brother Doug called as said he was talking in church and if I wanted to come and listen to him that church started at 9. Well I didn't think anything about it and said sure! I figured Donnovan wouldn't sit through two sacrament meetings so I just went by myself to Doug's ward. Well as soon as a got there I realize that this was not a normal meeting since everyone was talking to Doug and Katie. It finall dons on me that they are calling him to the bishopric. Sure enough, they call Doug to be Bishop!!! I am so proud of him!!! He will be an awesome Bishop. I have sympathy for Katie who now has to be the "Bishops Wife".
Well after that we ran down to listen to Mom and Dad talk at their homecoming, which they did a great job. Mom tried to wing it and was so funny standing up their showing off her Navajo velvet dress and all her jewelery. She was soo funny. Dad always brings the spirit and did a great job.
We then had a party at their house and had family pictures taken. Later that night Aaron was set apart as a Missionary. He leaves on Wednsday for 2 years to the Richmond Virginia Mission!!! This last past Spring Ryan and I went to Washington DC on a class trip so we have been back to that area. One of the places we visited was Williamsburg which will be in his mission. I am soo excited for him!! I will miss him a ton, but he will have a great time.
Needless to say, We have been soo blessed lately. Heavenly Father has been blessed us with soo much.

Super Silly Saturday Supper

So now that the Summer has come to an end, I wanted to tell you about some of the fun things we did this Summer. All over pinterest there are a ton a pictures of Summer Bucket Lists. We decided to make one for our family. We went camping, made sock puppets, did Ryan's Eagle Project (I will post that at another time), Mick Movies, made a Lemonaide stand (again will post on this later), run through the sprinklers, have late night with cousins, go to Lagoon, and Super Silly Saturday Supper.

Super Silly Saturday Supper is where we all dressed up in different, off the wall, get ups and went out to dinner. We had coupons for America Burger here in Tooele and decided to so this at the beginning of August. Dad wore a knight in shining armor with a black plastic vest and a green leprechaun hat. I wore a Rapunzel wig, Minnie Mouse ears, a skirt, and a blue cape.

Ryan wore a loin cloth, hooded cape, leather vest, and a Indiana Jones hat.

Kiersten wore silver pant suit, a Raggedy Ann sock, high heels, Tutu, an "avaiable" tie, and green hair.

Emalee wore a princess dress, a apron, a scarf, a princess cape and cat mask.

Donnovan wore monkey legs, a pink leotard, green apron, tool belt, Raggety Ann hat and a viking hat.

Needless to say we all looked silly. Soo silly in fact that one of the employees wanted to take our picture with her phone. We were honored to oblige. After dinner we had to go to Macey's for ice cream and add to the fun. We got a lot of compliments. We will do this again next year. Hopefully then we will actually get everything on our bucket list done.

Scarecrow's

I am soo excited that it is finally fall!! It is my all time favorite time of the year. I am tired of the 90 degree heat and have really enjoyed the cooler weather. We had Young Women's a few weeks ago and I was in charge of the activity. Years ago in Moab ( we're talking about 10 years ago) I was a craft leader for 4H. I loved doing it and was sad to have to stop doing it up here in Tooele. One of our projects years ago was making these cute little scarecrows. I had about 13 left over and have been storing them for all these years. Finally I had a excuse to use them.

 Here is the list of supplies that you need if you want to make these. a small pot, green foam, small dowel, raffia, foam pumpkin, burlap, moss, pinecones, peice of string and leaves to decorate with. You will also need your handy dandy hot glue gun.

 First of all I cut my green foam so it would fit into the pot. I just used a butter knife and then hot glued it to the bottom of the pot. Make sure you put the hot glue on the pot first and not the foam or it will melt. Learned that one the hard way.

 Then I cut a hole in the foam pumpkin and inserted the dowel and glued it in. I got the pumkins at Walmart on clearance last year. They came eight in a box so it was super cheap, plus I bought them when they went to 50 cents a box.

 I then cut a retangle peice of burlap. It doesn't have to be perfect. I then folded it in half and made a tiny cut in the middle of the fold and pushed the dowel through it.

 I then hot glued it to the top of the pumpkin. I then took a handful of raffia and tied them in the middle with a peice of wire. Then tired the wire to the dowel and hot glued it in place.

 Once that was done I put glue on the wood and stuck it into the foam.

 I then hot glued the moss to the top of the foam covering it and decorated it using small pumpkins, pinecones, and fall leaves.

We used a sharpie to draw a face on our scarecrow and a small peice of string to tie the burlap around the dowel. And there you have it! Super easy scarecrows! The one in the left I made, middle Emalee made and the right Kiersten made.

School and Stress

I have decided to go back to school and have been back part time for 2 years now. I just realized I still have 2 more years. Grr!! I wish I was done. This semiester I am taking 3 classes so that is better than just part time, but with having two jobs, the paper route, a calling at church that takes up Wednesday nights AND 4 kids... I am feeling a little overwelmed. I have been blessed with great kids who do a ton of babysitting for me so that makes things a lot easier. I am taking a family fiance class, natural disaster and math 1050. To tell you the truth the most stressful of them all is the finance class. I am going a little crazy and hyperventalating over how much money I should have saved by now to be able to retire. Retire!?! I haven't even begun to work yet and I am supposed to have tens of thousands of dollars saved by now. I have a total of maybe 5 in the account right now. GRR!! Hopefully someday...


OK. Enough of the pity party. I need to get back to homework. Someday I will be smarter than a 1st grader!

72 hour kit!

I am taking a Natural Disasters class is semester and as one of the assignments I had to make a list of what I would put into a 72 hour kit. Well, once I get a bee in my bonnet I sometimes can’t let go. (Just ask my hubby all the things I have him do on short notice.) So I of course go to my favoritest web site, pinterest and start looking up 72 hour kits. I found one that I really liked here. She put her kits into milk jugs so they would be easy to grab and go, leaving room in the backpacks for the clothes and blankets and other fun things. I used my own list of food though. I put things in it that my family would actually eat!!

1. Day one:
1. Breakfast: mini box of cereal (since no one eats it with milk this works!)
2. Lunch: cup of soup
3. Dinner: Chef Boyardee mini ravioli
4. Snack: cookiea

2.     Day two:

1.     Breakfast: 2 granola bars

2.     Lunch: fruit strip and pudding cup

3.     Dinner: ramen noodles

4.     Snacks: crackers and cheese

3.     Day three:

1.     Breakfast: cookies and raisins

2.     Lunch: Lipton chicken noodle packet

3.     Dinner: ramen noodles

4.     Snacks: fruit roll ups

5.     Hot cocoa

We cut the clean milk jug as per the instructions and instead of printing off the list I just wrote them on. Saves paper, just not my wrist. It took about 30 minutes to do this and only minor fighting about eating the fruit snacks now. Robert wants to try living off of what is in the jugs, but I told him next March when we will exchange it out. We plan on doing it over conference next Spring and then next Fall. I might wait on the fall one till after Halloween so we can put all those hard candies in it.    

 

Donnovan's 4th Birthday! My baby turned four and he wanted a Car's themed Birthday. We kind of threw his birthday party together last minute (ok so the night before isn't exactly last minute but close enough). We bought cupcakes from Macey's, and I had seen on pinterest here where she used donuts to look like tires. I decided to then place the cupcakes around a pizza pan and put the "tires" in the middle. It turned out super cute!

 Dad hung streamers from the ceiling in the kitchen and we took down the boys' curtains in their room and used them as a table runner.

 We also stole from the boys' room the signs and all the Cars toys. The picture isn't that great because the signs reflected the light. Someday I will take a class and learn how to take great pictures. Until then, please forgive me.

                                        Here's the mantle with more signs and more Cars.

 We had the fourth of July Banners still up, but I thought they kinda went with the whole Cars theme. You know like the flags at the race tracks.

Ryan and cousin Trevor

Here is the Birthday Boy Blowing out the Candles!!!

 Activities for the party were as follows:
      1. Color Lightening McQueen or Mater coloring page.
      2. Cars bean bag toss (we threw bean bags into a Cars garbage can which we got from Aunt Mert)
      3. Cars Secret Agent Mission (treasure hunt)
      4. Pin the lightening bolt on Lightening McQueen
      5. Cars race (used Donnovan's Halloween Costume and had the kids race between orange cones)
      6. Treasure Ball ( go this idea from a lady at church. She rolled up in streamers a bunch of different toys and had the kids take turn unrolling to get their prizes.)

Favors we gave were: McQueen tops, kaleidoscopes, mini cars, and bouncy balls on strings. We also had a piniata filled with fruit snacks and Cars candy. We gave out Bubbles that we had written Rusteze Car Wash. They also for the treasure hunt found Cars Sour Spray with a charm (found them at Easter and knew I would need them someday).

 We had invited our new Neighbors, Christopher, Aria, and Aaron and our cousin Trevor.

 Donnovan got a bunch of toys including: a Cars mat with Lightening McQueen.

Christopher, Aria and Aaron gave Donnovan a 24 piece set of Playdoh!!

                                                                                                   Trevor gave him a Car's puzzle mat!

Kiersten gave him a Mater Car.

Emalee gave him some puzzles!

Ryan gave him some Car's Friends to play on his new mat!

 And Mom and Dad won by giving him a fire engine Robot! Well he seemed the most excited about it. Although he plays with all of his presents.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DONNOVAN!!!