Happy Birthday, Jessica!

I know it's not your birthday in Atlanta now, but it's still your birthday here, so I'm not too late. I hope you had a great day! (Do you remember where we took this picture? Julie, you were also there.)

I got tagged...

...twice by Valerie, and I'm doing them both.

Tag #1

Jobs I've Had:
1. file clerk for an insurance office (Thank you, Cynthia, for giving me your job.)
2. salesperson at a kiosk in the Provo Town Center Mall selling camping gear (Most people don't go to the mall to buy camping gear, so it didn't do very well.)
3. BYU Math Lab tutor (I learned a lot more math doing this job than I did in any of the classes I took.)
4. hotdogger at Hot Dog on a Stick
5. substitute teacher for the Clark County School District (I subbed 10 days for Emily right after she had Spencer, and it was a nightmare! Emily, your sixth period class was the worst!)
6. Currently I clean Kevin's dad's dental office.

All the Places I've Lived:
Las Vegas, NV
Provo, UT

4 Favorite Movies:
1. Napoleon Dynamite
2. Ten Things I Hate About You
3. Grease
4. The Wedding Singer

4 Favorite Foods:
1. pizza
2. any kind of pasta
3. Reese's peanut butter cups
4. Coke

4 Weird Things About Me:
1. I'm ambidextrous - I write with my left hand, but I do everything else with my right hand.
2. I have three piercings in one ear, and two in the other, and I did the second and third holes by myself. (My mom wouldn't let me go get them done, so I did them myself.)
3. I'm the youngest of six kids, and my oldest sister is seventeen years older than me. I went to her high school graduation when I was three months old.
4. I pluck my eyebrows and shave my underarms every day. If I don't, I'm a hairy beast.

4 Favorite TV Shows:
1. The Office
2. Project Runway
3. 30 Rock
4. So You Think You Can Dance

4 Places I'd Love To Go:
1. Paris
2. London
3. New York City
4. Edinburgh, Scotland



Tag #2

1. YOUR ROCK STAR NAME (first pet, current car): Fifi Camry

2. YOUR GANGSTA STAR (favorite ice cream flavor, favorite type of shoe): Banana Adidas

3. YOUR NATIVE AMERICAN NAME (favorite color, favorite animal): Blue Cat

4. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME (middle name, city where you were born): Ficklin Las Vegas

5. YOUR STAR WARS NAME (first three letters of your last name, first two letters of your first name): BowEm

6. SUPERHERO NAME (2nd favorite color, favorite drink): Red Coke

7. NASCAR NAME (the names of your grandfathers): Ted Andrew

8. TV WEATHER ANCHOR NAME (your 5th grade teacher's last name, a major city that starts with the same letter): Sankuer San Diego

9. SPY NAME (your favorite season/holiday, favorite flower): Spring Rose

10. CARTOON NAME (favorite fruit, article of clothing you are wearing right now): Pineapple Pajama Pants

11. HIPPIE NAME (what you ate for breakfast, your favorite tree): Lucky Charms Driftwood

I tag my Mtn. View Ward girls - Lizzie, Becky, Cynthia, Heather D., Julie, Leah, and Rachel B. Pick which tag you like best, or haven't already done, and do that one.

Can't Hardly Wait

I think I've mentioned how big a fan I am of the Twilight series, and I'm so excited for the movie to come out. I check stepheniemeyer.com almost every day, and today I was so ecstatic to see that a link to new movie footage had been posted. Here is the video from YouTube.

I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I know Ashley and Valerie are with me on this one.

Baby Chewbacca

Lately William has been doing a lot of this...

He did this for about ten minutes straight while I was in the shower. He sounded like a baby wookiee singing a wookiee song. Whenever I try to get it on camera he stops doing it, but when I don't have the camera he'll go on and on.

In the past week, he's also started doing this...

He's been shaking his head "no" for a while, and I think it's hilarious, so I got it on camera this week. (Sorry it takes a little while before the action begins in this next one.)

Whenever he starts doing this to Rebecca, she says, "yes, Brother, yes" over and over again. Whenever I hear her say this in the car, I know he's back there shaking his head at her.

Can you tell from the last two videos what two things I say to my kids all day long?

Surprise!

Twice in my life I have been surprised for my birthday, and both times I have been very surprised.

When I turned seventeen, my friend Jessica called a few days after my birthday to let me know she had gift certificates to Roxy's Diner that she had to use, and she wanted me to go with her. I was so excited because I loved Roxy's, although at that time they had gotten rid of the singing and dancing waiters and waitresses. I think they've since brought back the singing and dancing, but I haven't been there in so long, it might not even be open anymore. When we walked in, Jessica stopped at the front to talk to the host, and I noticed a bunch of our other friends sitting at a table. I said to Jessica, "Look! Stephen and Kellie and everyone are here, too. What a coincidence." It took me a few minutes to figure out they were all there to celebrate my birthday. (I promise it is not an act. I really am quite slow most of the time.) I felt so special that my friends all got together for me, and I'll forever be grateful to Jessica for throwing me my first surprise party. I was completely surprised.

Ten years later, Kevin surprised me again.

It started Saturday when he let me know we were going to watch my niece Kennedy play soccer.

Kennedy did so well. She's quite the defender!

Her game was out in Seven Hills, and I really wanted to go the Nordstrom Rack while we were out there. As we were getting ready to leave the game, Kevin let me know that Travis and Wendy my brother and sister-in-law wanted to take Rebecca and William so that we didn't have to deal with them while we were shopping. I told them we would keep William, but they insisted on taking him, too.

On our way back to Travis's house to get the kids, Kevin missed the exit, even when I told him it was time to exit. He said, "It's okay. I'll take Blue Diamond." As we got closer to Blue Diamond, he was in the left lane, and there was so much traffic there was no way he could have gotten all the way over to the exit. By this time, I was getting very upset. A little background about Kevin: He is the oldest in his family, and he is quite the tease. He gets worse as the person he is teasing gets more upset. I really thought he was teasing me because I was mad at him for missing the first exit, and I really was not happy with him wasting my gas all so he could get a rise out of me.

Finally he pulled a small piece of paper out of his pocket and said, "This is our confirmation number." I FINALLY started to figure out something was up. The paper had a number and "4/5 - 4/6" written on it. Travis and Wendy had gotten us a hotel room for my birthday to pay us back for watching their kids in February while they went on a cruise. I was totally surprised and felt a little silly about getting so angry with Kevin.

We stayed at the Mandalay Bay, which is my favorite hotel because we stayed there for our honeymoon. We got a picture of our posh room.

We even had a jacuzzi tub and a TV in our bathroom!

First we went to the pool. The Mandalay Bay has a wave pool with a sand beach for their main pool. They also have a lazy river. Since we were there 5 years ago, they've added a cafe at the entrance, a casino you can go into in your swim suit, and a topless beach. We didn't make it to the topless beach. It was still a little cold, so we only stayed at the pool for an hour. We went to dinner at Metro Pizza, which was my favorite hang out in high school. We went shopping at Mandalay Place which I've wanted to go to since it opened. It wasn't as big as I thought it would be, so we were done shopping there after about 30 minutes. It was still early, so I begged Kevin to take me to the Palazzo, which is the add-on hotel to the Venetian. He helped build the Palazzo when he was in the carpenter's union, and I really wanted to see the finished product. After we got there and he noticed some of the work he had contributed, he was more excited than me to be there. He even knew his way around really well. We found some back stairs that led to the pool, which is on the FOURTH FLOOR of the hotel! We had a nice date night on the Strip, and it was relaxing to be away from the kids. It was my first night away from William, and I think I did really well.

Thanks, Travis and Wendy. You guys are so good to us. And thanks, Kevin. This really has been the greatest birthday ever.

Nice Treat

I turned on the TV at 9:00 pm last night to watch The Office and was pleasantly surprised when they showed one episode, and then another, and then two more. And I hadn't seen three out of the four episodes I watched. I'm so excited for new episodes to start next week. The Office is the one show I truly missed during the writer's strike.

As I was searching YouTube for a clip to post, I found this one. It turns out this clip is actually one of my all-time favorites. It is when Michael is going through all of Dwight's office complaints about Jim.

Enjoy!

Celebrity Sightings

Since I saw Carey Hart last week, I've been thinking about all of the celebrities I've seen just roaming the city. I've actually seen quite a few. I guess that's a perk that comes from growing up in fabulous Las Vegas.

When I was a junior in high school, Wynona Judd was in town doing a concert. I'm not a fan, but my friend Christa was a huge fan and had tickets to the show. I was at the mall with another friend Jeanette, and we saw this over-the-top looking woman. She had the craziest red hair, tons of make-up, and big black sunglasses. I actually thought this person was a Wynona impersonator. I whispered this to my friend, and all of a sudden this woman called us over and said, "I saw you looking at me. I was wondering if you were going to come over." It really was Wynona Judd. It was crazy because we saw her at the most ghetto mall in the city - the Boulevard. We shook her hand, and she seemed really cool. She's very short. She had these black boots on with a huge chunky heal and a platform, and she was still a couple of inches shorter than me - I'm 5'4". Needless to say, my friend Christa was not very happy that she wasn't there with us.

My senior year, my group for prom went to dinner at the Forum Shops in Caesar's Palace. As we were walking out of the mall into the casino after dinner, I saw Ryan Phillippe and Seth Green walking into the shops. At the time I had a big crush on Ryan Phillippe. I really wanted to go chase after them, but I didn't think my date would have been very happy about that. All I can remember is how gorgeous they both were and how fast they were walking, probably trying to evade crazy people like me.

One summer when I was home from school, I was at church with my dad sitting in the back where we usually sat. About ten minutes after the meeting started, Steve Young and his brand new, pregnant wife came walking in and sat in the row in front of us. (This is them with Ross the Intern from Jay Leno.) Notice how she is almost the same height as her husband? And he is very tall.

The most recent celebrity I saw wasn't in Las Vegas. I actually saw her at Disneyland. I was in line for the Tower of Terror with Kevin's little brother and sister, and we were standing next to a group of very chatty girls. There were about seven of them, and most of them talked to us the whole time we were in line. There was one quiet girl with her hood up, but I didn't really pay any attention to her. As we were doing a switchback in line, I looked at the girl's face, and it was this girl. Her name is Anna Sophia Robb. I had just seen her in Bridge to Terabithia and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When she looked back at me, she gave me a look like, "Please don't draw any attention to me." I quickly looked away and didn't tell anyone until we got off of the ride. This girl is strikingly beautiful in person. She has the biggest eyes.

I'm totally into celebrities, and I love People magazine. Next I would really love to run into Justin Timberlake. Seems to me celebrities are just like us, except a little better looking, and a lot more people know them.