Girls' Trip 2010

Almost ten years ago, February 2001 to be exact, my favorite girls in the world and I made a time capsule. Jessie was leaving on her mission to France, and the rest of us were all on the brink of doing great things in our lives, so we made some predictions for the next ten years and added some of our best memories from our years as friends.

Last weekend we all loaded up in the family van and headed to Huntington Beach to open up the time capsule and spend some girl time together.

We started our trip with lunch at In N Out.

Sarah is lucky enough to already reside in southern California, so she met us in Huntington Beach. We got to stay in John (Julie and Jessie's brother) and Michele's apartment which was a few steps away from main street and just up the street from the beach. The weekend we picked happened to be windy and cold, but we still found some fun things to do that kept us out of the bad weather.

Some highlights from our trip:

• After we got there and met up with Sarah, we walked down to the pier. We were greeted by a group of pro-pot protesters.

One of my favorite protesters was this man:

Notice the oxygen tank. Looks like smoking marijuana hasn't been too kind to his body, but he was still out there fighting for it.

My other favorite protester was this girl:

Jessica borrowed this poster just for us to get some cute pictures for our blogs.

• We attempted to go to the beach, but it was FREEZING outside.

Instead we did some shopping and tried out Ra Sushi, which was recommended to us by our host Michele.

Our picture didn't turn out great, but the sushi was awesome.

And I can't forget about the McGyver/MacGruber job Jessica did on our way to Ra. She fixed Sarah's window with salad tongs and some playing cards:

• We opened the time capsule:
  
  

Yeah we opened it a little early, but with Jessica starting her residency in Atlanta and Sarah maybe moving back to England, we had to pick a time when all of us could make it to the opening. Life gets more complicated when you have to grow up.

Here's a collage of some of the embarrassing things we found inside. Hopefully the pictures are small enough that you can't really see any of them.

This is just a tiny fraction of the stuff we had in there, but these were some of my favorites. There's a ticket to No Doubt which was the best concert Julie, Jessica, and I had ever been to, some pictures from the Idaho ranch and Jackson Hole, a picture from Julie's supermodel days, and an oldie of me running with my Super Big Gulp that had to have come from our favorite 7-11 on Russell and Mtn. Vista.

And most of our predictions looked like this:

This is Jessie's. Notice 7 kids for me. In ten years. Seriously? And I'll be living in Utah? Everyone said this...except me. I knew better. No snow for me thanks. And poor Sarah got picked by all of us to have the ugliest kids just because she's English and the men she gets to choose from have notoriously bad teeth. Jessie even drew a picture of the bad teeth in case we didn't quite understand. We were pretty mean with our predictions ten years ago, so we made some predictions for our trip in 2020 that were a little less harsh.

A lot has changed since ten years ago when we were all in college or finishing college. Julie got married in December the same year we put the time capsule together and had Riley two years later and Ridge four years after Riley. I left BYU at the end of 2001, which was not something I had ever planned on doing. I met Kevin about a month after leaving and got married in August 2002. I then had three kids in five years. Jessica graduated from UCLA and went off to Baltimore to do her pre-med schooling. She just graduated from Emory University as a doctor and starts her residency in anesthesiology right now. Jessie finished her mission in France and got home just in time to be a bridesmaid at my wedding. She met Chris and married him after turning down proposals from the rest of the world. She finished law school, passed the bar exam, and had three kids in about four years. Sarah went back to England after graduating from SDSU. She did well there but always felt the ache for her American home in San Diego. She came back to SD a year and a half ago but plans to go back to England since things aren't working out for her to be able to stay. If we could just find someone to marry her for a couple of years, she wouldn't have to leave. But we know she'll be back as soon as she makes her money from the business she's inheriting from her grandma.

And that's our lives in ten years in a nutshell. I'm excited to see what adventures await us in the next ten years...

My William is 3

Today my son is 3. We took him to Chuck E. Cheese to celebrate, which he has been asking for since his birthday there last year. I didn't get any pictures from his little party, but I did get a video of my future hockey player playing air hockey:

A few fun things about William right now:

• He is still very sensitive. If his sister even looks at him the wrong way, he cries.



• Going along with being sensitive, he is not aggressive at all. Lately his baby brother likes to hit him and his sister with toys, and instead of hitting back, William stands there and takes it while saying, "Don't, Braden."



• He has been potty trained for a couple of months now, and training him was a breeze! We knew he was officially potty trained when we took him to Disneyland in April and he had no accidents.



• He's still my little lover. Whenever I'm sitting or resting, he likes to climb into my lap or lie next to me:

• Lately he wants Kevin or me to read to him every night, and he likes to sleep with the books after we read them to him.



• He loves Cap'n Crunch. Whenever we have it, that's all he wants to eat all day long.



• He's becoming pretty good friends with his baby brother. Recently Kevin caught them "talking" to each other in their room after he put them to bed. I'm sure as soon as Braden starts talking, they'll stay up late having some fun conversations.

I'm sad my boy is growing up so fast.

Happy birthday, Bubba! We love you!

Happy Mother's Day to Me!

This is what I got:


That's right. No flowers for this mama. Kevin knows I would rather get a 24 pack of Dr. Pepper.

Hope you all had a Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day, Mama

I hope you have a good day today. Thanks for everything you do for me.

Vote for Emily

I've shared my sister-in-law's singing talent on my blog before in this post. She's amazing! She's auditioning for the show Glee, and I'm not being biased when I say that her video is the best one on MySpace - it really is.


Glee monologue

Glee MySpace Video


Glee song

Glee MySpace Video

If you have a MySpace account, please go here and give her a Gold Star. Good luck, Emily!

Happy Birthday, Jessica!

I can't wait to see you next month!

Sleeping Not-So-Beauty

I've been wanting to change my Facebook profile picture, but as the blogger of the family, I don't take pictures of myself - just Kevin and the kids. So I didn't think I had any recent pictures of myself to use.

While looking through my pictures for other posts recently, I've noticed that Kevin uses the camera more than I thought, but only to take pictures of me while I am sleeping:

This might look familiar. I found this first picture when I was looking for pictures of Rebecca with Dolly. I'm wearing maternity jeans, so this has to be from when I was pregnant with Braden.

I found this one about a month ago when I was putting my pictures on the computer from Braden's 1st birthday party. When I asked Kevin about it, he said that he liked how I was cradling my Coke like it was one of our kids.

I woke up to this one today after I heard Rebecca say, "I want to see it" and Kevin say, "Shhh!".

Apparently I am only cute enough for pictures when I am asleep. I guess I could use the second picture on Facebook. I'm sure my friends on there who don't read this would love to see how I sleep with my mouth open.