So this post is Way past due, sorry everyone, I have been slacking on our blog!
So let me catch everyone up on the past 2 months.....

April

In April I was able to participate in a 5k run for a fundraiser to help raise money for a family in need in our community. I ran it with aunt J. and a lot of my family participated as well. It was a great turn out, and I am grateful that I could be a part of it.

 Notice the hand brace... ha I decided to develop tendinitis in my right wrist and thumb for about 3 weeks in April, which became quite a hindrance with most things. It made me realize that I am not very ambidextrous!

 Rachel and Becca

Dad, Jake, Taylor and James

Dallin's Graduation

Also in April Dallin finished his LPN school year and had a really nice graduation ceremony for it on April 29th.

 LPN students. Dal is second row from the top, in the purple, you can't miss that handsome man!

 Dallin's class reciting the Florence Nightingale Pledge

 I'm so Proud of you babe, Congratulations!

 Thank you to both sides of the family for supporting us through Dal's LPN year.

Here is the giant stack of assignments and papers Dal had to do this year.... Yikes!! We used the toaster to compare how big the stack was. Poor guy, he spent every single day and every free hour studying for his classes, I am really proud of him, and also really glad this school year is over. Glad to spend some quality time this summer together!

Also in April, Josh and Kelly gave us my first niece on my side of the family, Marissa! :) And she is very beautiful, sadly we will not get to meet her until maybe Christmas time.... I hope we will get to meet her then! But we get weekly updates of Marissa on their family blog, which we look forward to seeing every week. So that makes our niece total of 2, and nephew total of 8 and 2 more nephews on the way.

May

In May, I started the first practices for Drill Team. I am the assistant Drill Team adviser for Gunnison's High School drill team, the G-Gettes, and I am very excited about it! This is going to be a fun year, and I'm excited to work with the girls.

Dal took a week long IV class that he successfully passed. He had to practice doing IV's on someone for it though, and gratefully his brother Devin practiced on Dal when he was taking the class. So Dal practiced on Devin for his class. Payback!

Thank you Devin for letting him poke you, glad it wasn't me! :)

Good Job Dal, I'm very proud of you! You are going to be a wonderful Nurse and you will help and touch the lives of many, love you!

May also brings many graduations, Jess graduated from Seminary and High School and Matthew graduated from 2 Pre-schools, and Taylor graduated from Pre-school as well. They all worked so hard and we are very proud of you three!

We had a really neat opportunity and were able to go through the temple with all of Dallin's family for his brother Drayson to receive his Endowments. It was really neat to have all of Dal's family in the temple together. (We also took some family pictures, as soon as I get some I will post them.) Dray is preparing to serve a mission, he leaves June 22nd for the MTC, he will be serving in the Merida, Mexico mission, and we are all so excited for him! But of course we will miss him and can't wait to write him and support his service in Mexico.

So now we are caught up for April and May. Mostly anyways, obviously the down fall for not keeping up our blog is that we forget lots of memories... But I will do better this month, so we can look back someday and read about all of our memories. It's nice to have a fun, picture blog/journal so that we can share our lives and adventures with our family and friends, and that we can read theirs as well.

April Fools!!

So I love April Fool's Day! For the past few years I have become quite the prankster, but I have to be careful because what goes around, comes around. Last year, I called Dallin up at work and told him I was pregnant, which was news that he was shocked about, and kind of panicking with because at the time we were living with his parents, and I didn't have set hours at work. In other words, we were completely not ready for a baby. So, I let him panic for about 30 mins, then I texted him April Fools! hehe It was kind of mean, I feel bad about it now....

So for this year, i had to go about it from a totally different aspect because I knew he wouldn't believe a word I said that day. So I had to plan out an action that would completely surprise him. So I master mined a few great ideas, but I finally picked the perfect one... Here it goes.

So every day my sweet husband sits down with a mountain dew in one hand and his sunflower seeds in the other and watches some baseball and basketball games on tv. So I thought, I should definitely do something to this daily ritual of his. So when I got home from work I poured out some of his sunflower seeds and replaced them with some pinto beans (which are about the same size as a seed and close enough to the spotted coloring.) The prank being when he grabbed a handful of seeds and tossed them in his mouth, bam! April Fools! Now I had to wait, and wait, and wait. Because when Dal got home after his clinicals he wanted to take me to the movies. We went and saw Hop, which was so funny and a great movie, by the way. But it resulted in him not doing his ritual that night.

But! While we watched conference today he got out his mountain dew and his seeds. Yes, my plan will prevail! (although it was the day after) Dal threw a handful of seeds in his mouth and pow he realized there were beans in his seeds. I wasn't really paying attention to him, because conference was on, but I noticed that he started picking out all of the beans and he didn't say anything to me!

Hum.... what was going through his head?
Well, I asked him what was wrong and Dal honestly thought that the seed company had screwed up and put beans in his sunflower seeds! I played a long for a while, "Oh ya, we should call the company and make them replace your bag" etc. I was about to burst with laughter, I couldn't handle it anymore, so I caved, "April Fools!!" He couldn't believe it! I got him so good, I achieved the element of surprise. Once again, I did it. He was completely shocked so I know he is gonna get me back someday for all of this....but I just can't resist.

 April Fools!!

Spring Break! (March 8-10)

The Flamingo Gardens at Flamingo hotel.

So for the past 6 months I haven't seen Dal very much because of weird class, clincal and work hours. For example, one weekend he woke up at 4:15am and left for his clinical in Payson, (which is a little over an hour away) he then got home at 4:15pm, showered and ate real quick, and left at 4:40pm for work, which he didn't get home at all from! He drove straight from getting off work at 4:30am to his clinical at Payson at 5:30am and then finally home at 5:30 that night. In the mean time, I was at work both days, and home alone that night. Although this is not how our exact schedule goes every week, it does suit it pretty closely. And, it also means that when Dal's spring break at school finally came around, it meant that we needed a break from work and school, and that we needed to spend some good ole quality time together!!
So where better to spend that time, then one of our favorite places to visit... Vegas! So we got a few days off work, packed up our bags and left for Vegas. A much needed vacation and together time. We stayed in the Imperial Palace, which is not very well known and not one of the main hotels, but we got it for $25 a night so we weren't complaining. It was a fun hotel with a great location; it is right in the middle of the strip so we could walk to lots of things without Too many blisters. However, one of our favorite things to do there is walk the strip holding hands and see the billions of things there, so we are bound to get blisters no matter what.

While there we went to the Flamingo gardens at the Flamingo hotel, which was so beautiful. There were white and black swans, flamingos, gigantic fish and best of all they had turtles!!

I guess that one's name is Amy.

 Later that day we went to the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay.

Some random big fish, which we thought was cool that he is in the tank, ALIVE, with all those sharks.

Ooo scary!! The tank was under us, over us, all around us and there were probably about 30 sharks in it. It was really cool!

Petting the sting rays. I was completely afraid it was going to bite me or something! ha pretty ridiculous I know, but aren't these things poisonous, and they are letting us pet them?? Well Dallin loved this whole idea, he got to pet some pretty awesome creatures and also get some good laughs as the many children around me were practically diving in to pet the sting rays, and I was squirming to even get near the water. Needless to say, I touched 2 sting rays and also some crab-like ray! Pretty neat experience.

More Turtles!! The sign said they are about 300 lbs. Funny story, Dal let me watch them for about 20 minutes and during that time they went from being friends, to lovers, to fighters. We watched them dancing together and then the one bit the other right on the neck! It held on for a few minutes as the other one that was bitten struggled to get away. It was kind of funny and sad at the same time. But it was a once in a life time thing for Dal and I to see a 300 lbs turtle bite another turtle.

 We spent every morning at the pool, which was so relaxing, and the weather was warm and hot! Which was Absolutely Wonderful!

Lady Gaga!!! I wish! At our hotel there were a lot of Dealertainers. (They deal at the tables dressed up like a celebrity and every night they put on a singing show) Dal and I sat and listened to them while eating ice cream. We saw Lady Gaga, Tina Turner, Bret Michaels, Michael Buble, and Pink perform. They looked and sang just like the celebrities, it was so fun to enjoy that together!

One of the nights we cuddled and watched/listened to a few of the Bellagio water shows, Very Romantic!!

A very happy couple, the result of a wonderful 2 day getaway with the one you love!!

spring, where are you?

So I am getting really antsy for warm weather! I am like etching in my drawers every day, scoping out my shorts and summer skirts, oh how i long to wear them.... I remember learning in elementary school about that ground hog that if he see's his shadow then spring will come quicker, and guess what? I remember watching the news in February about that ground hog seeing his shadow. So where is spring? It teased us. At the beginning of this month we felt the warmth for about a week, i believe it got up to 60* here in Ephraim, so Dal and I thought, Spring is Here. Then the next week, what to we get? Teased, that darn snow came back!

I mainly want spring to come so I can start running outside. It gets slightly boring to run in circles around a blue gym every morning. Also, running around a gym you seem to lose track of how many laps you run, so you have no clue how far you have actually ran for. Jen and I are training for a 5k on April 16th. Before yesterday we had no idea how far we were running. But gratefully yesterday the temperature got up to about 40* so aunt J and I bundled up and ran our booties outside! It was wonderful, great, exciting, and all of those other words to express happiness! I felt so free and alive, so here is my simile; I feel so cooped up during the winter, like a bear. And also similar to a bear I seem to always gain weight and eat a lot more in the winter. So when spring comes and I come outside of my cave(apt) and show myself, I'm all puffy and have an enormous belly, just like a bear. Except I seem to be really white, not brown. So in spring i work on losing that 10 lbs i always manage to gain.
Every year I usually wait til its warm to start working out, but not this year. This year, I started my journey to losing those 10lbs in January! I haven't made much progress yet because I still have the winter munchies, but I will get there. Jen and I ran a 5k on Saturday! Needless to say, it was really hard trunking around my giant bear body. But I did it and I will hopefully lose that 10 lbs a lot quicker this year. My other goal is to run a 10k this summer, so spring get here quick so I can!

My Man

Happy B-Day Lover! 

Dal turned 23 last month, and we had a really fun time celebrating it. I made him one of his favorite meals for dinner and we finished the puzzle we were working on all Christmas break. Might sound boring to most, but we love doing puzzles together.

For his B-Day I decorated his room with some of the reasons that I love him, and thanks to my new Cricut, I was able to cut out some cute decorations.

Since it was a day to celebrate Dal, I thought I would share a little info about my wonderful hubby! One thing for sure is that he always makes me laugh and I love him very much for that. Another thing I love about him is that he has a few "loves/passions" in his life that make him very unique and help make who he is. It's so cute how passionate and OCD he gets about things.

One of his passions is to chop wood and build fires...He absolutely loves it, and is very precise about it.

Here are a few pictures from a camping trip we went on with my family last year to show you what I mean.

 Notice the intricate piles of wood, placed in size order.

 He cares very deeply about how perfect his fires are. 

It's quite comical. My family got a good kick out of this.

Another thing he is passionate about is Mountain Dew, (which I am not very fond of.) But for Christmas I bought him some Mtn. Dew pajama pants, very suitable for his love.,
and now he never wants to take them off.

If you know Dal you know that he is obsessed with sports! Let's just say that our t.v. doesn't know any other channel than ESPN... So for me to be able to spend time with him or have conversations with him, I had to learn to love sports too. Which might be surprising to most, but I am really happy that I get to share that passion with Dal. For Christmas and his B-Day I got him a Phillies shirt, and Duke basketball shorts, which are his 2 favorite teams, and look how cute he is in his new get up!

 Dal is really passionate about his nursing career and loves his job at the hospital. He is a really good nurse and is working so hard through his nursing program and I am really proud of him.

Here is a picture of his first day of nursing school this year. Isn't he so handsome!?

These are just a few of Dallin's passions/characteristics that make him who he is. And I love all those things about him and more! Happy B-Day Dal and I can't wait to celebrate 100's more with you! Love you!

1st year pictures

Dallin and I had some 1st year pictures taken by my sister in law Becca. She did/does such a great job, and we are really grateful she endeavored the cold outdoors to take lots of pics of us :) We love them, and love how they capture our silliness too, thank you so much Becca!

 We had a lot of fun taking them!

 My hamsome man :)

Woot Woot!!

 

 He thought that the straw made him look "hick" or "country". I just laughed and let him do it, 

and it turned out to be one of my favorite pictures of us!

 These pictures were taken at the end when Dal was losing his patience, and I was trying to get him to be good and do what Becca wanted us to do. They turned out really cute and playful and I am glad she captured these for us.

 We were laughing so hard. It was a really fun day.

 This picture kinda depicts our relationship; Dal always goofing off and 

acting like a little kid and me trying to get him to be good. .....which never works, and I'm glad it doesn't because I love who he is!

Thanks Becca! We love our 1st year pictures :)