oh Pandora

why must you mock me? Every day it stops at 4:40 and asks me if i'm still listening... of course I am! I have to work till 5 and so do you. Stop trying to quit early!

Love,
Star

My Mom is 50!

My mommy turned 50 yesterday! To celebrate we had a SuRpRiSe PaRtY for her on Saturday, and she was so surprised. It was a lot of work, but so worth it to see the look on her face.

Thank you to all of her friends and family who came to make her day special - it is just what she wanted- each of you!

Mom and her cute parents - thanks for driving all the way from Manti!

Every party needs lots of yummy food.

Have I mentioned that my husband is an amazing cake maker! The cake was beautiful and tasted divine!

Loved the Italian Soda Bar.

I feel so blessed to have my mom as my very best friend! Mom - thank you for your sweet spirit, your strong example, your gentle kindness, and your eternal & unconditional love! Here is to 50 more... love you to the moon and back!

Best Friends

One year...

One year ago today...ok one year and 3 days ago today, I said YES! 

Let's face it, that was by far the most wonderful decision of my life up to this point, and  I am so very very grateful for every day i've had with the man of my dreams! 

9/20/2012 Chance is a little nervous at this point in the evening...

I feel so very blessed to have him by my side in all that we go through and have such a comfort in knowing that the challenges we face in the future can be faced together.  I am also thrilled to spend the holiday season together without the stress of planning a wedding. 

I can honestly say I don't know what I would do without this strong, loving, generous, spiritual, handsome, smart man in my life. He makes me so very happy and is such an awesome example to me. 

Sure do love ya babe!

So proud of my EMT

For those of you who don't know my husband too well, let me just say he is a bit of an over-achiever.  I know every woman probably thinks her hubby is Superman, but I Know!

Even with two jobs, and school he still has time to visit new families in the neighborhood, help out {a lot} at our aunts weddings, take my brother Jaden to soccer practice and take care of me after surgery.

And to top it all off - he is now a certified EMT!

Way to go babe! I'm so proud to be your wife!

This one time I won a ...

Telly Award!

Oh, you don't know what that is?  Well, that's ok - I actually didn't know either until my boss submitted a project I produced for the competition.  

I'll spare you the details, but if you are really interested in what the award is for, go here.  But for all intents and purposes, I think it is just to look cool in our conference room, and to make the 'big boss' really happy! 

If you look closely you will see my name on there - pretty exciting. 

Yup - we also got a certificate.  This is pretty legit people.  ;)

But what I would really like you to see is the video I produced that won the award.  I'm actually pretty proud of it and I hope you enjoy it as much as some swanky judge did. 

Go HERE now... please

My Secret Garden

Every now and then I sneak away at lunch to spend a little time in my secret garden.  

Oh how I love summer!

The Trek

A couple weeks ago Chance and I had the wonderful opportunity to go on trek as a Ma and Pa! I was so excited to go on trek again, and especially excited to share the experience with my man!

Pre-trek ~ look how clean we are.

 Last week Chance spoke in church about his trek experience, and for his talk he created the Top 10 lessons he learned on trek.  I'll share them with you because he already wrote them out and then it will feel like he's contributing to 'our' blog. ;)

10. New perspective on the song, Pioneer Children Sang as they Walked.  Our pioneer children loved to sing - all the children enjoyed singing.  Even if the adults had wanted to join in, we didn't know half the songs...

9. We never knew there were so many variations on hugging! As a family we had all sorts of fun hugs like the 'cinnamon roll' and 'one foot in'.  I quite liked it, but it was a little much for Chance.

8. Porta Potties are not ideal! Ok, so we already knew this, but what we really learned from them was how important everyones role is in the church. Our stake YM leader is a federal judge and a rather important man by the worlds standards... yet on trek he was in charge of cleaning and transporting the porta potties. Many men (and women) would have felt that they were given a calling below them... but Bro. Therman was an amazing example of doing whatever is needed within the church

We were always somewhat relieved to see the porta potties. 

7. Surrounding yourself with good role models and people who inspire you is very important. We were lucky to not only have amazing YM & YW in our family, but our adult children were wonderful.  We even had a member of the stake presidency in our family, and though he didn't want to be there at first (and we were rather nervous to have him), his opinion of trek quickly changed, as well as our opinion of him! :)

The Oscars! We all had names from movie characters.

6.  It's OK not to finish first...This was a slightly more difficult lesson for my husband, as he has the competitive spirit!  For me the lesson was more about the importance of family.  We were about to cross the finish line at the very end of trek (and trying to figure out how we could pass the one cart in front of us so we could be the first to finish) when our children pointed out that we didn't have our whole family.  One of our adult children - Paparazzi - was in charge of all the pictures for trek.  She was rather far behind, so we pulled over and waited for her. It was fun to cheer all the other handcarts into camp, but it was priceless as we saw sweet paparazzi coming over the hill and our whole family ran towards her.  Crossing the finish line as a family was so much sweeter than it ever would have been to finish first!

5. We CAN do Hard things! This was a lesson we continued to learn.  We learned that our pioneer ancestors found that they could do hard things, and we became more and more aware of the hard things in life we are capable of!

4. Our families theme was a quote from Elder Maxwell: God does not ask us about our ability but rather our availability and if we prove our dependability he will increase our capability.  We learned a lot about the importance of making ourselves available for God and His will.

3. I learned the lesson of the power of one in a very sweet way!  During the 'women's pull' we had less women than many of the other families. As we were pulling along I could see some of the Kitchen Crew watching on the side of the path and counting the women on each handcart. As we passed them I felt this extra serge of strength coming from the back of our cart - all my girls noticed and were greatly appreciative.  I really don't know if we could have done it without her. Never underestimate what little help you can give - it may make all the difference.

2.  The magnitude of God's love.  Over the space of 2 1/2 days we came to deeply love our 'family' and had a glimpse of how much our father in heaven could love each of us.  If we could learn to love perfect strangers that quickly, imagine the love from someone who knows us perfectly!

Paul (my son) and Brock - photo bombing.

1. The power of Jesus Christ in our lives is the main lesson we (and hopefully our family) learned. My favorite scripture has been Matt 11: 28-30 for some time and I truly think it is from my experiences on the trek.

There were many other lessons learned, fun times had and wonderful friends made. I feel so blessed to have had this opportunity!