A little boating...

The day after my birthday we went boating with my cousins on their new boat (my 2nd time this summer!)...  I just love being out in the water, listening to some tunes, and watching someone being pulled behind.  I did wakeboard for a bit and almost jumped the wake - it usually takes me all summer to get back up to speed and then I have to learn it all over again...  Anyway, then I got to to watch my D behind the boat with Sean and Tony on the hot dog :)  It was hilarious to watch and yet they had a blast too so that is great.

Thanks guys for letting us tag along!  What a great addition to our 4 day weekend!

It is my birthday!

Happy Birthday to Me!!

I took work off on my birthday on Friday, and took Monday off too for the 24th of July, so I got a 4 day weekend!  David took it off too so we finally had a break from busyness for a couple days.

So, Friday morning we slept in and just took it easy.  David kicked me out so he could wrap presents and I went to the gym.  Then I opened my presents - David got me a laptop case that I'd been hoping to get for awhile, and also these fun cozy red pillows too.  I loved my gifts, and the rest of the gifts came from the whole day David had planned for us!  (I also got some fun gifts from my family and friends, they sent wonderful things like clothes, purse, jewelry, a willow tree statue, etc - thanks everyone!  I felt so loved).  As for the day date, David had a theme planned for our outing, so cute.  It was a surprise but I did guess it after a bit.  We first re-visited our first date again (happened on Aug 1, 2 years ago) at Memory Grove with Jamba's.  It was pretty hot out, but very enjoyable to walk and chat on our trails.  Then we went to our first mall visit together at the Gateway, there we walked around too and played in the Apple store.  Our first dinner was at our favorite Italian place, Settebello, and we went there for dinner on my birthday too!  Wow I was hoping to eat there :)  David did good!  And it didn't end there... next we drove to Bountiful and went to where we watched our first sunset at the Bountiful temple together.  We were a little early so we had a chance to rest our feet a bit from all the walking.  We drove to our first kiss place, and then went home to watch the first movie we watched together, Father of the Bride 2, while eating cake David made for me.  The theme was "our firsts together" if you couldn't tell.  And I've realized that all of our firsts are my favorite things to do or see, David spoiled me 2 years ago when we started dating, and he's still doing it today!  Thanks sweetie!  The day couldn't have been better.

Love this one of us....

 This was a drawing I made on an IPAD during our visit, I'm so talented huh?  It's David and I on our walk from earlier...

I've decided birthday's are simply the best because it's all about ME only for a day.  I get calls or messages from family and dear friends who care.  I'm thought of on that day and how cool is that.  Yeah kind of "all about me" but I'm not usually one for the limelight so it's strange I love birthdays but I guess I just love being spoiled sometimes, don't we all?

Thanks everyone for making my day so wonderful.  Especially my dear husband, it would have been another regular day without all of your planning and showering me with your love.

Fourth of July! ! ! !

Happy Fourth! So we had a busy holiday with lots of family...

First we got up early (why?!) and watched the Murray Days Parade with the Evans/Speirs family and my mom.  It was crazy weather with sprinkling rain looming over every once in awhile.  We also sat further back which actually was nice rather than the continuous candy and water being tossed at us.

I needed a nap afterwards, but we pressed on... On to the Clark's with our tray of red, white and blue strawberries.  They could have looked like the magazine pictures, but somehow I am not so good at white chocolate and sprinkles also...  There were a lot of strawberries and it took the 3 of us awhile to get those all done.  We did the bbq with the Clark's and hung out for a bit afterwards.

We stopped at the Evans party but basically missed it, so they planned a pizza and swimming party the next day anyway, so we went to that. 

We then headed home and got our gear for fireworks!  This year the fireworks were HUGE all over.  Utah is now allowing the big aerial fireworks!  So, while this is awesome...  if you recall the last few times I've been around fireworks (24th last year and new year in Italy) there have been some close calls with my L I F E... so yeah, I was a bit jittery.  And luckily, I survived!  David sometimes tried to scare me when we would walk around and saw neighbors fireworks exploding the wrong way, but I just hid behind him :)

So we watched the fireworks in Murray and it was a great show!  So beautiful and bright.  I needed sunglasses!

Another Visitor

My mom came to visit over the 4th of July.  We kept her very busy between all of the family pulling her different ways.  She spent one evening with us overnight and a few other times out and about.  We did boating with the Speirs, cooked for mom (tried some new recipe called Lasagna Rolls, yum!) and then we all made a whole bunch of 4th of July Strawberries for each family party.  Also a bit of swimming and shopping was fit in the schedule between the other holiday activities.  It was great to have her visiting.  Love you mom!  Thanks for spending time with us!

Boating...

 Yummy Lasagna Rolls!

All the atrawberries for the 4th of July!  That was some work since white chocolate doesn't melt the same as our regular chocolate strawberries I guess...

Toes that Glitter

All the Clark girls took a trip to get our nails beautified a few weeks ago.  Mine are still going strong.  The only thing I didn't realize was that to take off glitter nails you have to file it off basically or wait...  But we had fun showing them off afterwards and getting ice cream cones.

David & Goliath

So in my church I serve in the Primary, over the 8-11yr olds; teaching them each Sunday... if that's what you call it.  I'm not a teacher professionally and never hoped to be, but I'm learning a lot.  And David comes in for my lesson each week and sits between some of the rowdy boys or even helps teach sometimes.  Well, the whole Primary had a Saturday activity based on our theme of the Scriptures this year.  We signed up to do a David & Goliath teaching/demonstration.  Little did we know that our lack of art skills and our OCD tendencies would keep us up into the morning...  Maybe easier to explain in the photos.  We drew a huge picture of Goliath for the kids to see how tall he was (over 10 feet), and then we brought frozen peas for them to sling shot with a plastic spoon, or just throw.  Some little ones weren't sure what was going on but once David said - hey kids, today is the day you can throw your vegetables... they all got way into it!  Pretty fun idea huh?!?!

 We laid the paper in our home and David drew the left side and I drew the right... all the way down!  Pretty good that we did this free handed and it looks awesome :)

Visitors

We had some visitors over Father's Day weekend!  I felt pretty lucky and privledged to have my Dad come to UT - making it possible for us to celebrate with him and Diane!  They took me up on the "Come visit Grandma" post I wrote about earlier this month.  And on top of that, my previous roommate, mission bud Court was here that weekend too.  Talk about busy busy!

With Dad we did a lot of visiting grandma, eating, flowering, etc etc.  We spent a lot of TIME together, and as my Dad reminded me of a good quote from conference....  Love is spelled t-i-m-e.  I like that comment and idea.  It was a very packed weekend for sure.  Grandma loved having us, she wasn't sure who we were most of the time, and as her eyesight is getting worse, she kept saying - what are we doing out here in the middle of the night!?!?!  And Diane and I would continue to try and convince her the sun was up.  Dad just laughed at us.  We took her to look at and pick out some flowers from Home Depot so she could have another activity to do at her new home.  She loved them and I'm hoping she remembers they are alive and not like her fake plants.  We had Dad & Diane over for dinner and then the rest of the time they took us out to eat and even made steaks at grandma's one evening.

As for Courtney she was busy with weddings and seeing nieces/nephews until Saturday night so we hot-tubed with her and friends.  And Monday we spent time at breakfast and shopping around the Utah valley (I was sickish so decided to take the day off - I think I wore myself out and caught a cold)...  It was great to see her even though we were both so busy we only had limited time.

I didn't give David a lot of down time for homework, or even grocery shopping or anything!  No wonder we got sick.  But I sort of blame it on the Primary Activity we also attended (pictures coming on that one too, pretty fun)....

Thanks everyone for visiting!  Come again soon.  It is the perfect weather right now finally and if I were somewhere else I'd be visiting Utah too!