Day 4 (1/4/11) Maelen's Home!

Maelen's home! When we left Utah, we left Maelen behind to help her "bestie" move into her new apartment in Provo. She came home a few days later, but we sure missed her while she was gone.

Day 3 (1/3/11) Hot Chocolate

Nothing is better on a cold Family Home Evening than a nice cup of hot chocolate. We love these new travel mugs we received for Christmas.

Day 2 (1/2/11) Dirty Car

This is what our poor car looked like after one week in the snow. Only problem is, when we returned home, it was raining so we couldn't wash it for another week.

Day 1 (1/1/11) St. George

So I decided to take the photo a day challenge to journal a year in the life of our family. Unfortunately, either my vision is worse than I thought, or my camera is worse than I thought because the pictures so far are blurry! Ugh! I can already tell my issues will be with posting the pictures.

Day 1 (1/1/11): Traveled from Matt's parents house in South Jordan to St. George, Utah. View from our hotel room at the Marriott and Matt & Jared relaxing after being cooped up in the car for hours.

Griffith Park Observatory

Since we were unable to go to our family reunion due to our kid's crazy schedules, we decided we would take a few day trips. Well those trips even had to be scrapped, but at least we got one trip in. We headed up to Griffith Park Observatory after a quick stop at the Citadel Outlets. It was an extremely smoggy day, but I guess that was to be expected.

Maelen, Jared & Kendall love to pose like any statue they are near. This is a monument of the following astronomer's: Hipparchus, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Herschel.

I'm not sure why, but we were wildly entertained by the kids making crazy faces between these two pillars.

I'm not sure what Jared is even doing here, but it sure captures his personaltiy.


The kids thought this should be their picture for our Christmas card this year. Too bad it is so smoggy you can barely see the Hollywood sign and Maelen has her sunglasses on. Oh well....we will wait until Maelen gets her braces off!!

Catalina

This past weekend we had the awesome opportunity to go to Catalina on our friend's yacht. Tom & Kelly Olds were kind enough to wait until Maelen returned home from camp so she could come along. Jared was off on a Scout campout, so he missed out. Eliot and Heidi Mason also came along with two of their kids, Ty & Aubrey. The yacht is 82 feet and beautiful from top to bottom. Here we are leaving Newport Beach.

The kids enjoyed the view from the top deck. They also were entertained by Captain Josh.

Here is the back of the boat. Stacy our housekeeper/cook/friend is waving at us.
This is Eliot showing Kelly, Tom, and Maelen his form on the mini golf course. Apparently this used to be very run down, but it has been redone and was really beautiful We had so much fun.
I took a picture of the kids in the theater at the casino before we were told that was not allowed. Apparently casino is an Italian word for entertainment. This particular one was built in 1929 and has a theater and a ballroom.
We took a golf cart tour of Avalon. Their were many beautiful homes and tons of nature to take in.
Here is the view from our bed. We had it shut at night to keep this riff raff out.
Here is the bedroom we stayed in.
Here is our bathroom.

Check out my mad photography skills taking a picture of Maelen jumping off the top of the boat. Wow. Way to capture the moment. Kendall made Matt go in with her and then we couldn't get him out. The water wasn't terribly warm, but it was sure clear and beautiful.


On the way home we cruised for quite a while so we could find dolphins. We lucked out and found two separate schools of dolphins. They were so fun and playful. They love to swim along side the boat and jump up over the waves to get to the boat.

What an incredible weekend! Even though we felt like we were still rocking all Saturday night, we would love to have the opportunity to do it again.

Jared - Part 2

I couldn't resist taking a picture of this. This is Jared's version of making his bed. To the untrained eye it may seem he is still in the bed! It never ceases to amaze me that my kid who is so responsible about getting assignments done not just on time, but early and also takes pride in the work he does, makes his bed in this haphazard manner. I guess some things are just not as important!!