A Thankful Weekend

I can't believe it has been so long since I last made an update. What is my problem?! Seriously I have been so behind on blogging so here comes the catch up....We had a most wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. We were so blessed to have the chance to be in Kanab with the whole Brown family!! We had a great weekend with TONS of great food and fun! Here are a few pictures to document the good times.

First of all I had a great time preparing my contributions for the big feast. For some reason I decided I would volunteer to bring rolls. I'd never made rolls but thought it would be a good thing to learn. So I did a trial run that didn't turn out amazing but my second try was a great success:)

Emily was a great help to me, we were so proud of our great work. These are some of our rolls ready to rise.

Here are some of the delicious finished product. I need to work on making them all the same size. Most importantly they tasted very good, I must say I was so proud:)

The big feast begins! We had so so much good food, the whole Brown family was there so we had about 55 people in all.

Here's Shaye enjoying dinner with Emily and Aunt Kristi. Good times were had by all:)

Shaye enjoyed playing basketball afterwards to work off a little bit of that pie!

All of us girls had a fun time later doing some crafts at my Mom's. Here is Aunt Tye, McKenzie and Aunt Kanani making some cute necklaces.

I was the happiest to see my best friend cousin, Brittany and her sweet little boy Blake.

Thanksgiving day was so wonderful to be with our family but it was also a very heartbreaking day when we found out that are good friend John Jones had past away trapped in the Nutty Putty Caves. We had the privilege of knowing John and his sweet wife Emily when we lived in Virginia Beach 2 summers ago. John worked with Shaye selling alarms. Emily was such a good and kind friend to me that summer and we thought so much of her and John. Many of you have probably heard about his heartbreaking story and I just wanted to pay tribute to such a wonderful person. John and his wife are honestly two of the nicest people I have ever met. They did so much good for others just by being who they are. John was going to medical school and I know would have done so many wonderful things in his life. You just don't find many people like him, he was the kind of person we would all aspire to be. My heart goes out to Emily and her daughter Lizzie. I know as does Emily that she will be with John again someday and I am so grateful for her strength, she is an inspiration.

I love you Em and I'm continually praying for you.

On a lighter note we were able to celebrate my birthday a little early while we were home with my family. We had a great dinner at Grandma's and then had a few presents to open. Nate was also excited about the gifts as you can see, he's such a good helper:)

Nate thought that my face was a good place for the bow:)

My mom got me some fun new jewelry and a cute new purse, I was so excited!

This is a gift from Shaye. It is an awesome photo album book he made on I-photo. I LOVE IT! The pictures are such great quality and it's fun to have our first two years together organized so nicely.

Thanks Shaye, I love it! You are the best!!

Bryce Canyon

It seems that each time I blog lately I am playing catch up. These events all happened last week. To start things off we had a very busy week last week with lots of visitors and fun! First off Grandma Alta and her good friend Glenda came up to visit us for a couple days. We had such a fun time but sadly didn't get any pictures of them. We hope they will come again soon.

Next up Shaye was going to go hunting with his family so I tagged along on a fun trip with my family. We went to Bryce Canyon to do some hiking and the next day headed up to Snow for Brandon's football game. Bryce was so fun and it was SO beautiful! I hadn't ever really been to Bryce and I very much enjoyed it. Here are a bunch of pictures of our most adventurous hike:)

Me and Em's enjoying the awesome scenery.

Nate loves it when we do little family outings.

Here is just some of the great scenery. It really is such a beautiful area, amazing how it ended up like that.

Mikkel and Traj found a little cave in the rocks to take a little rest.

Nate and Traj were getting to far ahead of us so we talked them into sitting down on this log and taking of few snap shots. Nate is always up for a photo shoot.

The boys posing with Grammy J:)

Dad was loving the hike too, love the balance beam skills. Very nice!

Too cute...

We had a great weekend with lots and lots of great family fun!

Enjoying the Outdoors

Lately we have been taking full advantage of the nice weather we have had and done some fun things outdoors. First off a few weeks ago we went on a fun hike up to the Kanarraville Falls. I had never been up there and it was beautiful! Thanks to Brooke and Mace for inviting us it was great!

Here's a beautiful view up the canyon.

The hike goes along this little stream and some of the time you have to walk through the water. I had got these awesome water socks when we were in Hawaii and would highly recommend them to anyone going on any type of water hike:)

Shaye loved looking for alternative routes along the way:)

Here we ALL are climbing up the little wood ladder. I must say I am glad that it didn't break on us.

So beautiful! I just love this area!

Shaye braved the freezing cold water to take the plug down the waterfall slide. And yes, he said it was absolutely FREEZING cold!

Our next adventure we went on a little weekend camping trip with some friends down to the sand dunes. It was a great spot and much warmer than any place around here, it was great fun.

Here is our nice sleeping setup. We love our awesome blow up mattress my parents gave us that fits so perfectly around the wheel wells. It is so genius and we slept great! Then we have our nice shade trap that goes over the top like a tent to keep out the little bugs and such. I was quite proud of myself because I set it all up by myself while Shaye was looking for firewood:)

Here's Shaye the mighty camper:)

The next day we went on a fun 4-wheeler ride and hiked down to the Indian pictographs. Here is just one of the many beautiful views we saw along the way. I love fall with all the pretty colors.

Here's J.R., Jana, Whitney, Chris and Shaye admiring the Indian drawings.

I have much more that I need to get caught up on but it seems I am always falling behind. Hopefully I will get a chance to do another update soon:)

Recent Happenings

Hello everyone! I am falling behind once again. My days go by so quickly and I have to many things I want to do that I never get to it all. Blogging has been one of the things that seems to always be put off. So here I am trying to catch up a bit. We have been staying busy and enjoying life. We are loving our new home and the fun of decorating and having our own place. Here are a few of the other fun things we have been up too.

First of all, Shaye is so excited and I am so grateful that Shaye got a deer last week!!! Shaye is excited because, well he loves hunting and I am grateful because now he can be done hunting for this year!! I am also grateful because now we have meat for the winter:)

Shaye was all by himself when he got this deer so he took this picture of himself, pretty good I'd say:)

Another fun thing we have been able to do is attend my brother Brandon's football games at Snow College. It has been fun to see him back out on the field and enjoy the fun football atmosphere and spend time with our family.

That is Brandon on the left #24, go Brandon!

This game was last Saturday and it was surprisingly a VERY hot day! Luckily Shaye and I accidentally got there a half hour early, (we thought it started at one and it really started at 1:30:) It turned out to be a good thing cause we were able to snag a seat in the very small corner that had some shade. Here's Callie and I enjoying the game in our little square of shade:)

Here we are with Brandon after the game. We love to cheer for our family and this game our cheering must have paid off, they won!

I don't think anyone enjoys coming to the football games more than Nate. He loves to cheer, yell and try to whistle:) Here he is trying out Brandon's helmet. We should send Nate out there I don't think they could catch him, he's pretty fast! Well that's it for the update for now. Life is good and we are so blessed.

We're Still Alive!

Well hopefully some of you are still checking in on us. I have been a very bad blogger for the past long while. It seems that life has been a little busy for us since we got back from California. So here goes the update on our whereabouts and recent happenings.

First of all the most exciting thing that has happened in the last month is we bought our first home! We are so excited to have a place of our own. It has been crazy and we hadn't planned on everything working out as quickly as it did but we are so happy! We are living back in Cedar City for those of you that don't know yet. We couldn't be happier to be back close to all of our family and friends. We LOVE Cedar and Southern Utah in general and it just feels so good to be back. Other good news is that the first week we were back I found a great job as an office manager of a dental clinic. I absolutely love it. I feel like it is the perfect fit for me right now. I have been working there for two weeks now and I'm feeling pretty comfortable with everything. The people I work with are great and I'm learning a lot! So everything is coming together for us here and we feel so blessed. Here are a few pictures of our new home. These are just a couple of the outside. After I get things put together I'll take some pictures of the inside to post.

Other exciting news, Shaye and I celebrated our 2 year anniversary this week. I can't believe how quickly the time goes by. I feel like I just blogged about our last anniversary. It has been another wonderful year together. I feel blessed to have Shaye as a husband. Now I can't imagine life without him, it would be so dull. Now we look forward to another great year!

Here we are showing our '2'. We stole this idea from our aunt and uncle, Jana and Brant. They always take a picture making the number of the year. Except I think they are even a little more creative and make the number with their whole bodies?...Fun memories.

We have had a few little campouts and mountain dinners since being back. Shaye couldn't be happier to be back in the hills. Here's Shaye, Rob, J.R., Jerron and Traj so proud of the nice lean-to they made to protect the dutch ovens from the rain:) Luckily it didn't rain to much and dinner turned out great!

Here's some of the girls chatting while the guys did the cooking. Me, Mikkel, Jana and Lauren.

Here's when everyone showed up to enjoy the dinner. We had fun visiting and enjoying the nice campfire.

Can't you just see how happy Shaye is to be home and in the mountains?! He's just glowing:) I am happy too and hopefully I can keep on top of things and blog more often.

Santa Cruz and a Night Out

I wasn't planning on posting again until we got back to Utah but turns out we did a couple fun things this week that I wanted to get on here before we left. On Tuesday Mikkel and I decided we should head down to Santa Cruz since neither of us had been there and we had heard it was the warmest beach in the area. Well since we were headed that way I called my dear friend Joni who lives down that way and invited her to meet us there. We were so glad she would come on such a short notice and it was so fun to visit and enjoy the beach. The kids had a fabulous time so it was well worth it to watch them have such a fun time.

Here's Joni helping the kids dig a big hole that they loved jumping into.

Eliza, Oliver, Joni and Trajen admiring their nice work.

Sweet little Eliza, such a cutie.

This summer has been great, I have seen Joni more this summer than I have in the past 7 years! Thanks for coming with us Joni and I hope it isn't 7 years before we get together again:)

Here's my summer buddies. What would I have done without these guys?

What a cute little family :)

Then on Wednesday night a few of us planned a night out for our friend Tosha's birthday! Tosha lives here in the apartments where we have been living. She has been a great friend to us and we have all enjoyed getting to know her. Here we are at the Old Spaghetti Factory. It was the perfect place we just walked there from our apartments and had a fabulous time.

Happy Birthday Tosha, come visit us in Utah. We'll all miss you! :)

Here we are after enjoying are wonderful dinner. I'll miss all the good times in California but I am excited to be heading home. We are leaving early tomorrow morning so I better get back to packing! See you in Utah:)