Exciting News!

Just this last Wednesday, July 8, Garret Proposed and I accepted! The big day is October 2nd so mark your calenders and let me know if you would like an invite.

A Lot of Catching up to do!

Well...... it's been a while since march 31 so this may be a long one. Over General Conference weekend we had a huge family reunion to celebrate my Grandma Carolyn's 80th birthday. It was a great time and way too short. My dear friend and old college roommate Malisa Twelves did some amazing family portraits for us. Here are a few of those pictures on the left. Malisa really did a spectacular job of capturing all the different personalities in the family.



































May was the month of road trips and traveling for me. May 8th was my nephew, Carter's birthday so I drove out to Colorado for the birthday party. Can't believe how big he is getting! My sister Tracee and I stayed up late the night before the party and made a scavenger hunt for Carter's party the next day. It was such a blast. Not sure who had more fun, the kids or the adults.

































The following weekend I went to Sacramento to visit the mission with Richie Uminski. Unfortunately I was too lazy to take pictures when we got there, but on the way there we drove by the salt flats and we had a great time taking pictures of that.































Finally, for memorial day weekend I went to Seattle to visit family. My dad was in town from Germany which made getting out there even better. I stayed with my Grand parents in Gig Harbor and then ventured out to a few places during the day. Luckily my Crazy Grandma Mary had a show that weekend so we got to go see that as well. Here are some photos from my adventure down town with Uncle Jack and Aunt Mary:
















Uncle Jack took us too his favorite part of Seattle, the Sculpture park. On the left is his favorite sculpture. On the right is us being rebellious and pretending to touch the sculpture even though the sign says not to.









The Space Needle

















And last but certainly the most important was that last friday, June 5, was my birthday!!!! Yup I turned 25. I'm a quarter of a century old. I don't really feel like I'm that old which could be a problem because here in Utah that is ancient. Some friends and I went out to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. I had no idea how popular that place is. I think we waited for our table for almost 2 hours! It's ok, the cheesecake made it worth the wait.


































After a whole life time of searching, Olivia finally found a real life Dingle hopper. Now she can comb her hair just like Ariel did in the Little Mermaid!

Holi- Festival of Colors!

My English teacher would kill me for using Wikipedia, but it just says it way better than I ever could. According to Wikipedia: Holi, also called the Festival of Colors, is a popular Hindu spring festival observed in India, Nepal, and countries with large Hindu diaspora. Diaspora meaning a large body of Jews living in countries outside of Palestine. The tradition behind this festival is to celebrate a young man who defeated an evil witch by killing her. At the festival they have a huge fake witch in the middle of the crowd and they set it on fire and then everyone starts throwing colored chalk everywhere. I think they intend for it to be an enlightening experience of sorts for everyone, but most everyone just shows up for the colors and then they leave as soon as that is over. It was definitely a blast. I'm pretty sure that for at least a week everytime that I cleaned my ears the Q-tip came out purple or hot pink, every time I blew my nose my snot was purple and my nails were permonantly pink for a while as well. That's not the worst of it. Some of my guy friends' faces were permonantly pink because the were sweating and the color stuck to their faces and died them for a few days. Too funny.

Here are some pictures from the event:

The Witch:

Thunder Down Under

Nothing says Valentine's Day with the girls like Las Vegas, WOOT WOOT! Some girlfriends and I decided that sense we are single, why not just skip the worst day of the year all together and go to the city of sin and be super sinful (ok well not super sinful, and maybe not sinful at all, but I'm sure I had you guys going there for a minute). Being single kind of sucked at first, but I'm slowly realizing how awesome the freedom is!
We drove down on friday the 13th and had a blast the whole way.



There are supposed to be 4 of us in this picture but Kayti had a hard time with her aim and she kept cutting herself out, luckily someone in the gas station came to our rescue and took a picture for us:



To be completely honest we had only three goals for this trip: 1) Take a lot of pictures, go crazy with the pictures. 2) Get married at the drive-thru wedding chapel....... to each other. 3) Eat at a Buffet. So only goals 1 and 3 happened. Unfortunately we could not marry each other. I just don't understand this! :) We also went to the temple first thing, we figure we might as well feel the spirit for at least two hours of out trip. The Las Vegas Temple is gorgeous. Who would have thought "Sin City" could have so many not so sinful people.




Here we are at goal #3. We ate at the Rio Buffet. It was so good! Clearly Olivia loved the Dessert table:

We also met these way nice guys, Trammel and Chris, in line while we were waiting to get in and eat:



The best part of the whole trip were the Thunder from Down Under boys. It just doesn't get any better than this: