We're back from the Hurricane!

We made it out of the hurricane alive from our Bahamas cruise!! Luckily we were not too affected by Hurricane Irene other than being rerouted to a different island, but we definitely saw how it was affecting many other poor people who had to leave their homes. Our cruise was supposed to take us to Nassau and Cococay but Cococay was being hit directly by the hurricane so they took us to Key West instead. I'm going to post just a few pictures of the many adventures we had while on our trip, it was so nice to get away for awhile!

We're on the boat!

 This was our first excursion in Nassau. Those yellow things there are the submarines we went under the water in. You can kind of see the bubbles at the top which is where our heads went and then we sat down on the lower part of the machine and scootered around under water! We saw TONS of fish that were huge and even saw a barracuda!!

 Us with Lyle and Claudia, love them! They were such a fun couple to travel with!

 This is on Key West

 We rented a scooter to ride all over the island. Tyler is a CRAZY driver and I think we almost tipped over like 20 times but at least he was having fun terrorizing me :)

 Virgin Margaritas... sooo good! This is also the start of the Love and Marriage Game Show. Tyler and I tried our hardest to get on as the Newly Wed couple but didn't make it :( Lyle and Claudia made it for the 5-30 years of marriage couple though!!! It was so fun watching them up on stage and now we know all of their dirty secrets and so do all the other people on the boat... ;)

 Belly Flop Contest!

 Getting ready to rock climb! The rock wall was on the top deck of the boat and as we were climbing a storm was starting to blow in which meant lots of wind blowing at us as we reached the top of the wall!

 Towel Animals!!!! I was obsessed with these,  this is how i will fold my kids towels one day!

 Formal Night... not so formal eh?

 Our first picture in Harry Potter Land (Magic Potter Land...  haha Lyle). We went to Universal Studios in Florida after we finished our cruise and it was such a surprise to me that we were actually going to Harry Potter land!! I was ecstatic as you can tell and was taking pictures of EVERYTHING.

 Does that castle not look real?!?!?! There's good old HogwErts!

 Pumpkin Juice! We actually didn't try this but we tried the actual Harry Potter butter beer, oh my goodness, so good! I'm addicted, must find the recipe.

 This is Fred and George's joke shop and yes those are the puking pastils!

 Honey Dukes Candy Shop. They had everything!! including the chocolate frogs with the wizard cards and Bertie Botts every-flavored beans. I had to refrain from buying all this candy.

These are just the highlights of the trip. I did not include the pictures of us driving to Vegas to catch a flight to Texas to catch another flight to Florida so that we could meet our cruise boat, that was definitely not planned :) I did not include pictures of our boat being tossed to and fro by the waves that were an after affect of the hurricane. And I did not include pictures of the FREE spa treatment that I WON the very first hour of being on the boat. It was called an Ionithermie treatment, I'd never heard of it before and wouldn't even know how to explain it to anyone but it was cool! I've never won anything before like that so it was super exciting for me. 

And here's the cute couple we owe this trip to. Thanks guys for inviting us and letting us tag along with you!!

Cruise Time!

We're headed off to Bahamas in a couple days ya'll! See ya when we get back!

Owen

Found this little gem while looking through my camera, describes owen perfectly!! Pure joy making cookies, his favorite :)

Crazy weekend

Tyler didn't have to work this Saturday, finally! So, of course, what do we do but go on a hike. We decided to go up Big Cottonwood Canyon and hike to a lake that they have up there. We did this hike last year and loved it, so we decided to do it again. We were lucky to have our cousin Angela come with us, she is darling!

The flowers were beautiful this time of year!

 lovely....

 Tyler breaking the law as usual ;)

If only our weekend would have ended there! Lately my car has been having lots of issues, including about 3 flat tires in the past few months, randomly not starting due to the need of a new battery, and so forth. It's going to die soon :( Well, unfortunately, Tyler's car was the one to get a flat tire this time and we ended up needing to buy 4 NEW TIRES!!! That took a wad out of our pockets! But, it is something that is needed and we can't expect to own cars without having to make purchases like that right?

So after we got Tyler's car taken care of we went apartment hunting. We're looking for a place to live in Salt Lake so I had a huge list of apartments to check out. Needless to say, we did not find one that was decent and in our price range. So for now we will stay in Bountiful till we can find something we like.

Searching for apartments can be exhausting, though!! We had a sweet fun date planned for the night, but we were super tired. So we went and got some "dinner" at the waffle place by Pioneer Park (I say "dinner" because it mainly consisted of sugar). These things are ginormous!!

 They ended up being way too much sugar for me so Tyler, as always, ate the rest of mine.

Love him!

After dinner, we drove to the Dollar Theatres thinking there would be something good out to watch, but none of the times matched with our schedule so home we went! Date nights not turning out always work out better when you're married :)

SALSA!

I am going through a salsa making phase!! But first of all, may I just recommend THE BEST cook book ever: Our Best Bites:

Everything that I have made out of this book has been way easy and very delicious! I love it and want to try every recipe in it! Tyler and I always joke about whenever you come to eat at our house, it's always an experiment because I'm always trying different recipes. You never know what you are going to get! But this book has been a miracle for me to help me make delicious meals!

They especially have some very delicious and easy salsa recipes that I made this past week. I started with a Bean Mango salsa and then last night made Pico de Gillo (is that how you spell it?). Thanks to Holly Hyde for the brilliant idea, we put the pico de gillo on grilled hot dogs Tyler prepared for us and it was delicious!!! Who would have thought to put salsa on a hot dog?? Loved it!

 Doesn't it look delicious?? And I am not much  of a cook, so if I can make it, anyone can make it!

P.S. look at this adorable picture of Tyler and Elle playing together :) cutest thing ever.

California Lovin'

As Tyler and I plan out our future together, California always comes to our minds. It is one of our dreams to move away by a warm beach for a little while, not too long though, we still love Utah. Who knows if this is where we will end up in the next couple years, but whenever we take trips it usually results in a road trip to the west coast. WE LOVE IT THERE! To make matters even better, Tyler served his mission there so it's pretty much fate that we live there for a couple of years :)

We've been to Newport Beach, Monterey, San Francisco, Sacramento, and some other places in between. It is my most favorite place ever! Now, if we can just move there I can convince Tyler to go to Disneyland!!!! and we can make our way to Southern California to see places like the San Diego Zoo. SO FUN! I really hope we live there one day, it would be bliss! Just look at how happy we look in these pictures :)

Water Zumba

Also, anybody tried water zumba yet? I tried it out last week, pretty fun! Though I don't know whether i liked it as much as normal zumba....

Here's a pic of what it's kind of like. The instructor stays out of the water so those who are in the water still do a lot of that hip swinging stuff.

Catch Up

And once again, zero pictures! Ugh! I'm going to do better....seriously.

So this past week has been full of family and fun. Tyler's sister, Lindsey has been visiting from Colorado with her cute kids, so we've had the opportunity to hang out with them a ton and do lots of fun things while I bring my nanny kids along. It's been good for owen and elle to have more kiddos to play with! Also, my Aunt Karen and her kids are all coming out to Utah this month so we get to be doing a lot of catch up and a lot of playing Elfer Haus (a German card game that brings an on-going family championship).

We had a weekend full of birthday parties! Aspen turned 2, yay!! She was darling and got super excited about all of her presents. It was also Luke's birthday, he turned 1 AND took his first steps! Holy cow! Holly went all out at Luke's Rubber Ducky Party and I am officially inspired! Just picture blue and yellow everywhere, with delicious hot dogs and essentials, and LOTS of rubber duckies. SO CUTE! She is amazing.

I also had to play doctor a little bit with Tyler this whole last week with the help of Jesse (Owen and Elle's dad). Tyler has something called a stye. I'm not sure of all the medical terms but basically it's an infected eyelash and it makes his whole eyelid swell up and get really painful. So with my daily reports to Jesse he would tell me what to do about his eye and we've been able to avoid the overly expensive medical bills and got rid of the infection ourselves. It is slowly, but surely, going away, woo hoo!

We finished our super fun week by going up to one of our good friends' cabins. He has a sweet zipline there where I seriously feared for my life, but here I am alive and well! Picture me and Ty hanging onto the rope together for dear life and about to crash into a tree and me screaming the whole way down while Tyler is laughing at me. Classic. Then, Tyler and Bass thought it would be pretty hilarious to freeze a bee and then tie a hair around it so that when it thawed, they would have a bee on a leash (boys....). The bee didn't quite make it, so they ended up with a dead bee on a leash, brilliant! There was a campfire, lots of games and, of course, the joys of being away from the city and out in the woods with friends! We loved it and are seriously loving our life!