5.11.13 wedding day!

My brother is finally married! I can't even believe it, this has been a long time coming. Him and mckenzie have been together for about 7 years I think, so we are happy to see them finally tying the knot! 

It was the perfect day with 80 degree weather and everything turned out gorgeous for the beautiful couple. It was a wedding for the movies. 

I'm just going to do picture overload so you can see for yourselves. The first pictures are of the rehearsal the night before the wedding and one is at the rehearsal dinner with Karen and Ty snarfing some oranges after it was over :) love them. Then the following pictures are of everyone getting ready at our house before the wedding, which was at 5:00. And then we jump right into the big event! 

Official Beekeepers!

One day Tyler came home from school and told me that he thought it would be cool to keep bees... My initial reaction was, sure lets keep some bees! Thinking that we probably wouldn't go through with it this year, but maybe in a few years down the road. Well, we're doing it this year folks! Tyler has a buddy who got us all set up and now we have a nice hive of about 10,000 bees in our backyard!

Tyler and my mom went to pick up the bees on Saturday (I refused to ride in the car with a box full of bees) while Hillary, Owen, Elle, and I waited for them to bring them back. They picked up the bees at the U and in the car there is all the other boxes of bees that Tyler's buddy brought with him.

Once Ty and my mom finally got home, Ty got all suited up!

He set the beehive box up in our backyard on the side of our house.

Here's Ty holding all of 'his girls' as he calls them :) 10,000 in there people!!! So crazy! Within all those bees is another little box that contains the queen bee. Before we even dump all the other bees in the hive we have to make sure our queen bee is alive and place her in the hive first. She then has to eat her way out of the box and the bees eat their way in so that they can get used to that queen.

While Tyler was putting all the bees in the hive, he felt one little honey bee climbing up under his shirt! He eventually got stung in the ARMPIT, ouch! The look of surprise on his face was priceless :) but now he has a nice big swell going up his arm and he itches like crazy. Poor guy. I kept my distance while Tyler was doing all of this work. My mom and I were filming everything, Elle and Hillary were attempting to keep the bees off of us and Owen was scared and ran into the house. We were quite the crew.
Now the bees are in and we just have to let them be so they can build their hive, which is harder than you think. We are constantly worrying about them and hoping that they are surviving and getting enough sugar and that the queen hasn't died... oh man there are so many things that can go wrong but I guess we won't find out until the end of this week! I'm sure we will have more updates to come!

As of late...

So much has been going on I have not had time to blog! Now that spring is here, it's time to dive into our major landscaping projects for our house. Pictures to come. In the mean time:

Ty playing broom hockey with his friends. Loved watching everyone fall on their butts :)

Elle turned 3!! I cannot believe it! She is getting way too big for comfort. I started being her nanny when she was 5 months old, she couldn't even hold her body up by herself and now look at her!
We went to the party store to get balloons and the kids put a nice fashion show on for me.

Then Hillary, Elle, and I headed to the nail salon for Elle's first pedicure! That girl was born for pedicures, she sat still the entire time and let the lady do her magic on her feet. Right before we went into the salon she said, "We're getting our toenails painted!! I'm gonna cry!"

The next day was her birthday party where she was showered with tutus and jewelry. Such a girl, I love it. I think in every picture she has changed her outfit, whether it's her tutu or her shirt. That girl does 50 million outfit changes in one day.

She was riding around on her new bike with her new dance bag saying, "I'm going to dance class and you guys are making me late!"

Last year when I took Elle to the dentist she would not even sit in the chair by herself. Now that she's three it ain't no thang! Look at how relaxed she is!

Now on to our Easter filled weekend. Saturday we spent the day with Amy, Linda, Kip, and the girls to dye some easter eggs! Adyson has been loving on Tyler so much lately, she will not leave his sight! I've got some competition with that girl ;)

Easter morning I meant to wake up early to make Ty breakfast. Woops, I totally slept in! But I still made it for him after church. Creamed eggs on toast just like my dad used to make when we were little.

I failed after this picture to take other pictures of our easter but it was a great day! We had easter dinner at our house with my family and the Chrastils were able to come over too. Owen was dying for another easter egg hunt so my mom gave Tyler the eggs and the candy for him to hide. Hillary said it perfectly when she said, "You know it's a good easter egg hunt when the adults have to get up and help too." Nice work Ty! Then we went to the park and played on the playground and threw around the frisbee. Such a nice relaxing day! I just love Easter Sundays not only because of the wonderful family time but also because of who we are celebrating. 

Another event that I have no pictures of but should be documented were Randy and Linda's birthdays. They had a joint birthday party and Linda made the most delicious pineapple cream pies that are to die for! Then we went bowling on a different day to celebrate Linda's birthday. Gotta love having two parties! We are so grateful for Linda and Randy. The family would definitely not be the same without them!

Well that is all for now. Hopefully I can keep up on taking pictures of our yard so I can show the progress that we cough*Tyler*cough have made :)

Final Oregon Post

Our fifth day of the trip was our day to drive to the coast. This was the first time we had rented our car for the whole trip. We felt pretty accomplished that we were able to get everywhere we wanted to go using public transportation.
Our first stop was Cannon Beach. It was yet another rainy day so the beach was very cold and windy but we still loved it. In these pictures is Haystack rock which, if we heard correctly, is in the movie Goonies! Love that show. Tyler got brave and walked through all those rocks and waves to Haystack rock. I had to borrow Tyler's shoes to wear at the beach so I wasn't risking falling in the water!

We continued our long drive down the coast toward Tillamook. These are some of the pictures that I got along the way. It was gorgeous!

We stopped for some pizza in Tillamook and it was ginormous! That mountainous half is the taco pizza. It was interesting... :)

If anyone recognizes the name Tillamook, then you probably know of their cheese. Driving past the Tillamook Cheese Factory, we decided that we should stop in and check it out. Plus we knew we would get free samples. Can't pass up on that! It actually was really interesting seeing how they make the cheese and package it and store it. I tried every sample, even the squeaky cheese, which was a bit unnerving for me. We also got their super yummy ice cream and ice cream soda!

Tyler had booked our hotel for our coastal stay in Depoe Bay. I was so excited to stay there, it was a cute little inn whose inn keepers were a nice old married couple that made breakfast for us in the morning. I would definitely stay there again. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of it, bummer. We checked in at about 6:00 and the whole town was so quiet, especially our hotel, we felt like we had to whisper. Such a sleepy little place. 

The next day we were off to the coastal aquarium. That Japanese Spider crab you see below is a baby! The picture with Tyler in it is how big that crab is going to get! Eek!

The Shark tunnel was way sweet. They even had glass on the floors, so you really were surrounded by sharks. This made me want to get scuba certified so bad!

On our way to the aquarium we had seen a lighthouse, so after we were done we headed back to see if we could find our way there. Once we got there, it was awesome. They were cleaning the lighthouse at the time so we weren't able to go in it, but it was still fun to walk around outside of it. 

As I was looking around I heard some people oohing and ahhing so of course I had to see what they were looking at. Over the ledge were tons of seals! They are kind of hard to see in this picture, but they are just lounging on the rocks, catching some sun. There was a baby seal that just went off on its own into the water and I was so concerned because where in the world was it's mother?!?!?! I stayed there waiting for it to come back for like 10 minutes and it never did. Hopefully it's ok!

Also below the lighthouse were some tide pools. This was way more exciting than the aquarium just because how cool is it to find starfish in their natural habitat?

Probably the highlight of the whole trip for me was turning around and suddenly seeing this crazy octopus stalking some fish. Seriously the coolest thing I have ever seen! I was freaking out! He was moving pretty fast and I had to snap a quick picture before he went under that rock there. There was a man who was in charge of the tide pools and we told him that we saw an octopus and he said we were way lucky because he rarely ever comes out.

After the lighthouse we started heading back to the hotel, looking for some caves along the way. Well we found some! So then we, of course, had to find a way to get down to them. I wish I had taken a picture of the crazy climb I took to get down to these caves. Seriously, there was a rope tied to the tree and everything to help you get down. Oh the things I do for my husband ;) Once we got down, the trek was worth it. The caves were awesome and we got to watch a pretty sweet sunset from our spot too.

There was restaurant right above the caves that we found, so we decided to eat there. It looked like a complete hole in the wall, but once we got inside we loved it! This picture isn't very good but at least it shows the cool view that we had of the ocean, sunset, and the caves we went to.

Oregon Trip Continued

Day 3 of the trip we hopped on the bus and headed to a bike rental place (or so we thought). We picked this particular rental place because it was closest to Forest Park, which is just out of the downtown area. Well we showed up and they said they don't rent bikes anymore! Darn it, that's what we get for not planning in advance. We had hoped to ride their mountain bikes through Forest Park so we just hiked instead.
Forest Park is a ginormous park! We probably only saw about 1/8th of it with our hike. There are millions of hiking, biking, and running trails throughout it and it is incredibly gorgeous! You feel like you are in a rain forest, the trees are just covered in moss and everything is green.

We were hiking along this creek for awhile and all of a sudden came across...

this random building (also covered in moss). It was was so cool!

As we were doing our hike through the forest, Ty was telling me about this other hike that he wanted to do that took you up to Pittock Mansion which had a great overlook of downtown Portland. I thought it sounded sweet so we were going to do it after we were done at Forest Park, but as we got to the top we ended up running into Pittock Mansion! We had been hiking that trail the whole time. Killed two birds with one stone (and I didn't mind not having to do another hike that day :) ).

It was a BEAUTIFUL mansion and, not to mention, I tried some yummy pepper jelly there.

After our lovely hike, we got back on the bus and decided to do a little more shopping. Luckily Tyler loves shopping just as me, especially when he finds Patagonia, Columbia, and Mountain Hardware all within a block of each other. Tyler heaven!

The next day we woke up to some rain! Finally, the Oregon weather we were expecting. We had wanted to go to the zoo and the Japanese Gardens that day and I am so glad we did not let the rain stop us. But, first things first, we had to hit up the famous Voodoo Doughnuts.

I had read about this place online, but I did not expect it to be so GOOD! They had millions of flavors of doughnuts and I wanted to try all of them. I limited myself to get two and that was enough of a sugar overload. I had to try their bacon maple doughnut, since I have been hearing enough about it in utah, and then I got a mango doughnut that had mango filling and some sort of tasty marshmallow, candy, sour topping on the doughnut. No idea what it was really, but it was good! Ty got a chocolate doughnut that had crushed oreos and peanut butter and other stuff all over it and then his mustache doughnut pictured below. I seriously wish we had this place in Salt Lake, it was so good!

Then we headed to the zoo and were pretty much the only people there, it was great! Ty and I were like little kids watching all the animals and being fascinated like we had never seen them before. This little black monkey was being a total show off with us and loved our attention.

This lady behind me in the picture really wanted us to pet her goats :)

We ended up spending like 3 and a half hours at this little zoo and had a blast but then ended up not having time to see the Japanese Gardens before they closed. Guess that's another reason for us to go back to Portland!

Our final stop of the day was the aerial tram. This tram is the only one in the US that is used for public transportation. It doesn't take you anywhere except for the hospital, but you can see all of Portland when you are on it. Well turns out it was $4 a person to ride that thing and the whole event probably lasted like 3 minutes. What can we say, I guess we're suckers for these kinds of things.