Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

At the end of January I flew up to Portland, OR (all by myself) and spent the weekend with some of my favorite people in the world - The Uppers (roommates from college). Five of us were able to make it together (coming from AZ, NM, TX, Washington DC) to Jamie's house in Washington. We spent one day driving along the Columbia River Gorge and stopping at the all the waterfalls. Beautiful! The next day we walked around downtown Portland (Powell's City of Books - a bookstore covering an entire city block and walked along the waterfront and got dessert at Papa Haydn's - Delish) and stopped at the temple to walk around. But the best part was just catching up and being together. These girls are fantastic. You know you have a solid friendship when you can come together after a few years without seeing each other and just pick right back up.




Sean held down the fort while I was gone. They had so much fun I think the kids will be excited for the next time I am out of town: donuts for breakfast, trip to the zoo, getting corn dogs on the way home and staying up late watching movies. My husband is so GREAT!







PS. In our nine year of marriage I can think of maybe 2 or 3 times either of us have gone on a trip alone without the other or the family (that wasn't work-related), so it's super odd that we happened to have two within a week.

Magic Carpet Ride

Sean went with Tim (a good friend he grew up with) to Utah last weekend for a little "guys trip." They had a nice drive catching up together. Sean saw Jenny and Kelly and fam as well as Lani while he was in town. They took a trip to Temple Square on Sunday and then watched the Super Bowl that evening (with all the tasty foods that involves). Then on Monday they went snowboarding. Sean hadn't been snowboarding in about 10 years. He loved it and came home in one piece (with only a little soreness). He flew home the next morning.

I'll take an order of Sunshine Please...

What have we been up to the last two weeks?....Keeping warm. We've had a couple of weeks of some record breaking temperatures. Freezing, I tell ya. I'm not sure that even in all my years in Utah we ever got as cold as we got here last week. There were a couple of nights down in the negative twenty degrees (before windchill, which made it feel about 10 degrees colder). Thank heavens our house is pretty well insulated and our pellet stove works well, because our heater decided to stop working. We managed to stay warm enough though. The cold temperatures came in with a snow storm (not a ton, but a decent amount). School was canceled for 4 days last week (and since it was so cold and the roads were pretty icy, we were pretty much confined to our house). Then there were parent conferences on Mon and Tues of this week, and wouldn't you know another snow storm came on Tuesday afternoon, which meant school was canceled on Wed too. If we would have known, we could have taken a week long trip....to somewhere nice and toasty. I'm really lucky to have kids that LOVE to play together so much, because after days and days of staying inside it's hard to not melt down. We played games, made cookies, played with play dough, made Valentine's for Megan's preschool class, watched movies, danced and sang and tried to keep busy. The weekend temperatures were nice, so I took the kids to the cheap theater to see "MegaMind" which was pretty fun. We are supposed to have several days in the 50s this next week. I'll take it.