Fun weekend with Paul, Erin, Joe and Teresa!

Jacob's youngest brother Paul has joined the Navy! We are so proud of him and are going to miss him! Just when we move back to Utah, he leaves! :( But we're excited for him! This weekend the family is having a get together at mom & dad's house but since Jacob works and we only have 1 vehicle right now we won't be able to go. Since we won't be there we decided to have Paul and his wife Erin over for dinner and games on Saturday. We invited Joe and his wife Teresa as well. It was an absolute blast!

They arrived Saturday while we were finishing the prep work for dinner. We did Steak, potatoes, grilled asparagus, and of course, the family favorite:

STUFFED MUSHROOMS!! (on the grill, Jacob's favorite way to make them, nice and smokey flavored! Yummy!!)
When I first joined the family 8 years ago I wouldn't even try these. I hated mushrooms. Jacob convinced me to at least try them and oh boy are they yummy!!! Incidentally, I now love mushrooms and asparagus, and I can handle tomatoes. I didn't like any of them before marrying Jacob but I love them now, well, I don't love tomatoes, but I will eat them now and I wouldn't before so that's saying something right? (I digress)
In April at Joe and Teresa's wedding I was chatting with Erin and talking about cakes. I told her about the monkey cake that I made for my friends son's birthday. She said she wanted a monkey cake so I told her I would make one. Now that we are back in Utah I was able to. I didn't get a picture of the finished cake but here it it being decorated:

I think Erin was thrilled when she saw I hadn't forgotten her monkey cake. :D
After dinner we took them on a tour of our house since Teresa had never seen it, and Paul, Erin and Joe hadn't seen it since the day we moved in. We played the card game BANG! till late in the night and laughed, talked and had a great time. By the time we realized how late it was it was almost 1a.m.

Seeing as how it was really late we invited them to stay the night and go to church with us in the morning. So we found some clothes for everyone (a skirt that I don't fit anymore for Erin and a dress Jacob bought me in Afghanistan that is waaaay too small for me- read a size 5- for Teresa and Jacobs clothes for Joe and Paul). After more talking until around 3 we all finally went to sleep. Joe and Teresa in our family room (since our couch is about the only thing that was long enough for Joe to sleep on, he's really tall, and Paul and Erin in Tammy's room). We woke up in the morning to a yummy breakfast of muffins, pancakes and bacon that Jacob made us and then went to church. We got back to our house, changed and played with the dog. Sirius loves Paul!

Tammy worked Saturday night at the Haunted House (Nightmare Mansion, she works there with her dad Nick and then stays at his house afterwards since they don't get done until late on the weekends) so she didn't get to see Paul Saturday. Paul is her favorite Uncle and she was upset she wouldn't get to see him. So we thought we'd call her after church to see if she wanted to wake up and come home to see Paul before he had to leave. We couldn't reach her (she was still sleeping) so we decided to play BANG! some more until we could reach her.

The first year we got married we started a tradition to buy a game for the family every year for Christmas. This game is so fun, I think this will be this years game.

We finally got a hold of Tammy and so I went to get her and brought her home (although I took her back to her dad's later because her favorite cousin on her dad's side was here visiting from Vegas) Tammy hates the camera and hates having her picture taken. But Paul was determined to try to get her picture. This is the closest we came:

Until it was time to say goodbye, then we got some pictures with Paul.

Paul and Erin

Jacob and his brothers (Paul was excited to be taller for once haha)

Being silly

Being even sillier (I don't know what's more silly, them all doing the "can can" or Jacob for wearing shorts when it was about 40 degrees!)

Paul was showing some leg!

Picture of Tammy with her favorite Uncle Paul (like I said, it was COLD!!!)

We all got a picture with Paul!

We will miss you Paul!! Stay safe!! We'll take care of Erin while you're gone! (Paul is going to training and then Erin will join him whereever they are stationed)

Updating the homestudy

We had our new home study on Friday. It went great! We love our new caseworker! Our old one was great too, so we're excited to have another awesome one to work with. Emily seems like she is really excited for us to add to our family. We talked alot about open adoption and we told her the reasons we are looking for an open adoption (if our future birthfamily is open to that, we will go with whatever they are comfortable with).

Tomorrow we are going down to get our fingerprinting done and then will turn in all our Utah paperwork. Once the background checks come back we're good to go and our profile will be back online! YAY!!!

In other news, we have been in our new house for almost 2 months now and LOVE it! We love our neighborhood and the people we go to church with. It's all very family friendly and everyone is so supportive of us. I was asked to teach a children's class on Sunday's. From what I'm being told it will be the 3-4 yr olds so that should be lots of fun! :D We had some family here this weekend. Jacob's brother Paul is joining the Navy next week and so we wanted to have him and his wife Erin come for dinner and games. We invited another of the brother's Joey and his new wife Teresa (they are the ones who got married in April). They only live about 45 minutes or so away but with Jacob still adjusting to his new schedule, we haven't seen them much. So we were excited to have them here. They ended up staying overnight and going to church with us today. It was a blast! I'll post about that soon. Till then! :D

Visiting in Logan

A couple of months ago my dad had knee replacement surgery on both of his knees! At the time we lived out of state and so we weren't able to go see him. Then he started physical therapy and wasn't up to visitors. So a couple of weeks ago, he was finally released from the hospital. My brother was going up to see him, so I decided to tag along and go too. We weren't there for long, but it was so good to see him. Next time I go I will take Jacob and Tammy too. This is my dad. Poor guy is still on like 20-30 meds a day. :( Hopefully soon he will be feeling better! The doctors are really impressed with his progress though.

This is my stepmom Sally. She didnt know I took this picture until after I took it. I'm sneaky. LOL

Kristina, my little sister, (Little, ha! She's taller then me now, but she's 15, so that makes her my little sister. *wink*) was sick and refused to let me take her picture. Next time. bwahahahahaha!


I did however get a picture of David, my little brother, who is almost taller then me (I'm not even 5'3, it's not that hard to be taller then me) is 13. He's a funny kid.


This is 1 of their 3 dogs. This one is Charlie. He's my favorite of the 3.

Hopefully next time Dad will be feeling better, and Kristina won't be sick and I can get a whole family photo. :D We are going to try to get up there in a couple of weeks. If not, we are planning on spending Thanksgiving up there so I'll get one then.

It's just temporary

Just a quick note, if you are trying to find our profile on our agency's website, you won't be able to.

It's only temporary. They are in the process of moving our file from New Mexico to Utah. So it should be back up in a couple of weeks. I'll let you know! :D

To those who feel like giving up

My Aunt posted this on Facebook this morning. It was so inspirational, I felt that I needed to share it.


(the sound is a little off from the picture on this, sorry!)

This is the Place

A few weeks ago we went to Jacob family reunion at This Is The Place park in Salt Lake City. We had hoped to go for at least several hours, but like my post said yesterday, installing the new front door took way longer then it should have. So instead we were only there for about an hour. Most everyone had left by then, but we still saw most of Jacob's immediate family. Which was nice since his brother Paul is joining the Navy and will be leaving for training in a month, so our time with his whole immediate family is limited.

Here are just a few pictures from that day:

Jacob's older sister Janele and her hubby and kiddos took a train ride around the park. Jacob went with them. They had fun!

Neice Melissa was just enjoying all the attention.

Neice Valerie got tired and caught a ride in the stroller. I love her smile!

one of our favorite things to do when we get together is chat and talk, and of course everyone takes pictures of the chatting and talking.

And of course we love being silly. Jacob thought the his sister Ruth needed the windblown look for her photo.

Unfortunately two of the people that had already left were Jacob's grandma and his Aunt Patty. They live in California so we were anxious to see them. Fortunately they were staying at Jacob's uncles house so we were able to go over there and see them after leaving the park.

Jacob with Grandma and Aunt Patty.

Despite the setback with the door, it was a fun day. It's so good to be near family again!

A new door meant, late to the reunion.

We have been busy little bees getting our house in order. It still hasn't sunk in being out of the Army and being back home in Utah. Being home owners still hasn't hit us. The other day the toilet wouldn't stop running and my first thought was, gotta call housing and have them come fix it. Then I realized, wait, we are housing, we are the owners. You see, where we lived, we weren't allowed to fix things, even some of the smallest things we had to call maintenance to come and fix it because those were "the rules". So it's been weird to be able to fix things ourselves.

We haven't had a lot of extra time lately, but we did go to Jacob's family reunion a few weeks ago. We needed to install a new front door that day and Jacob wanted to install it before we went to the reunion so that we could enjoy being there and not have to leave early to get home to install the door.

My beloved hummingbird door had cracks all over the stained glass part so we had no chose but to replace it. We replaced our kitchen door too, but that was the next weekend.

Anyhow, we though the door replacing would take 4 hours or so at the most, should have just been pop in out, pop the new one in. So there is a little more to it then that, but it shouldn't have taken the 7+ hours it took. The area for the door frame wasn't right, and the threshold was all weird, so Jacob ended up having to build a whole new threshold and area for the frame so the new door and frame would fit. (Luckily the kitchen door took 3 hours from start to finish, which is awesome!)

Tomorrow I'll post pics of from the little bit of time we were at the reunion, along with our visit with Jacob's grandma. :-)