Happy Birthday Satya and Lucia!!

I just wanted to wish a happy birthday to Satya and Lucia (even though their birthday is almost over). They are two of my most favorite people in the whole world!!

Happy birthday Satya!!! You are one of the most beautiful people on the inside and out!! Thank you for always being willing to do anything to help me. You are always so selfless, even though I know that you have a million things of your own going on!! You are an amazing mother and wife and you are one of the most organized people I know!! Thanks so much for always listening to me when I am struggling with things and for always making me feel better!! You are always one of the first people I want to call when I am having any problems. I love you so so much!! I hope you had an awesome birthday!! I am so blessed and thankful to have you as my friend!!

Happy birthday Lucia!!! You too, are so so beautiful on the inside and out!! You are such an amazing mom and wife as well!! You have always been such a good example to me. I have looked at you so many times and by watching you I know what choices I should make. Thanks for always being so quick to help. You are one of the most service oriented people I know. You are so much fun to be with and I am so grateful that we are still so close after all these years!! Thanks for always being there for me for anything I need at all. I love you so much as well and I am very grateful to have you in my life!!

I love you both so much!!!! You have so many of the same wonderful qualities, but you also have so many of your own unique talents and qualities as well!!

Bowling with Liz!!

My sister, Liz, had her spring break this week, so the kids and I went to hang out with her for a couple days. She had the great idea to go bowling. It was one of the slowest games (we only played one game) of our lives because it took the kids' ball about five minutes (at least it felt that way) each to get all the way down the alley, but it was so much fun. They had so much fun as did we and I think I had the best time cause I actually won and that never happens!!

Here is Liz with her awesome bowling form!

Jackson getting ready to bowl. . .

Arwen getting ready to bowl. . .

Apparently I am an intense bowler!!! (warning: the following image is slightly frightening)

These were taken after Liz's strike!!

Here are just a couple more random pictures from bowling and from our trip. . .

As you can tell, we had an awesome time!! Thanks again Liz for hanging out with us!!!!

We've got the power!!

We are so excited because we finally got our power (SRP) turned on!!

I don't really know these guys, but I am quite sure that I have rarely been as excited to see someone in my life as I was to see them!!

We have our C of O as well so we are finally llegal to move in!! I am so excited to finally see the end in sight. We have some touch ups to do and we still need to work on our yard, but things are finally calming down for us!! Thank you all for your constant support and prayers on our half. They really did help. It was a long road, but things finally all worked out!! Here are a couple pictures of the house (since the house was semi clean :)

Happy belated birthday Aunt Kris!!!

My Aunt Kris shares her birthday with St. Patrick's Day. Since we had not seen her in a long, long time, the kids and I decided we would go to her work and surprise her on her birthday. We had so much fun visiting with her (we probably stayed longer than we should since she was supposed to be working), but we were so glad that she let us hang out for a while!! We had so much fun meeting all her coworkers and getting an awesome tour of her work!!

Going back in time . . . I remember when I was younger, she was always the "FUN" Aunt (no offense to the rest of you). All the other aunts and uncles would be visiting with each other and she would be hanging out with all of us kids thining of clever ways to try to embarrass us or inventing fun games to keep us entertained. There was even one point when she had a bunch of us hormonal girl cousins come stay at her house for a week (certain times during this week got pretty ugly), but she found a way to make it so much fun, even though some of us were not getting along with each other!!

She is such an amazing example to me. She is so smart, beautiful, hilarious, independent, etc. Even though she has had some hard things come her way, she always seems to get through them stronger than ever!! I love you so much aunt Kris!! Thanks for always being such an example to me!! We love you so, so, so much!!

You rock Sian!!

I just wanted to share, for anyone who does not know, that the St. Johns basketball girls are now state champions!!! I am so proud of all of them, but especially my little sister Sian. She played like a champ even though she had a stomach ache and strep throat!! Liz and I were so happy that we could live through her state championship victory since we never got one!! I just wanted to post a few pictures of the game!!


I love my sisters so so so much!!!

Our awesome cousins came to support Sian as well!! Thanks guys!!

We were sad that Richard and Daniel could not make it, but it was right during work. Richard did go to the other two games before that!!

Way to go Sian, you rock and I love you!!!!

So close!!

Our house has taken a lot longer than we ever imagined, but we are so so close!! In fact, all we are waiting on are SRP and city of Mesa to come and hook up our electricity and water.

Thanks to some of our favorite people in the whole world (Amaron and Satya), we have been living in a toy hauler in front of our house since our appliances were stolen and we have not had any problems since then.

We also have really nice neighbors who are letting us use their water and the generator can now be plugged in to turn the lights in the house on. It actually feels pretty real except for the fact that we have to go elsewhere to shower.

A longer post. . . sorry! - I usually try to keep them short!

What do the following have in common?

If you guessed that these are all the things that have been stolen from our house since we started building it, then you are right. I hesitate to put this on here for two reasons, one being that I don't want people to think that I want them to feel sorry for me and the second one is that I don't want people to judge us and call us idiots behind our back because this happened over a few break-ins.

In fact, once all of our windows and doors were put in we thought that we could leave some tools (the generator, the tile saw, the drill), but boy were we wrong. The first break-in occurance happened a couple months ago (this does not include the wire theft where they did not have to technically break in). We obviously learned that we could not leave the power tools there, but little did we know that the people who had robbed us would be back for anything. The second time they took a first aid kit and my MP3 player that I accidentally left on the counter there. I guess I kind of figured that they had left the extension cords and stuff the last two times (my mistake) and that they did not really want it, but no more than two or three days later they came back for some broken (they did not know this) work lights, a beat up shop vac and our extension cords. We realized that they were popping our master bedroom window open each time to get in so Richard cut up some boards to stick in every single window. We hoped this would keep them out for about one more week until we would be getting carpet and then we would start sleeping there. (Just for reference, our appliances had been in our garage the whole time and we probably should have moved them, but we really did not have a good place to store them). We went back to work on the house on Saturday morning, and the last time we had been there before that was late Thursday afternoon, and we discovered that our garage door was wide open and our appliances were all gone. I am not going to lie, I bawled like a baby and I felt like this house was too much and I did not know how I was going to be able to finish. It was one of the hardest things I have been through in my life - I do realize I am blessed if this is one of my hardest trials, but it still was very devastating.

The real reason I wanted to share this was because I just wanted to share a little bit of the positive experience that came with this trial. Like I said, Saturday was very hard for me, but I had one of the most spiritual experiences of my life and although I feel like parts are too personal to post online, I can say that I felt the love of my Savior and my Heavenly Father more strongly than I think I have ever felt it! I felt so comforted! I know that Heavenly Father knows of me and that he loves me so much. I know of the power of the priesthood and that priesthood blessings come from the Lord. Richard was able to receive the most wonderful, comforting blessing from his dad and I was able to receive an amazing blessing from Richard. This reminded me how blessed I am to have such a wonderful husband who honors his priesthood and to have two beautiful, healthy children. I was also reminded of how blessed Richard and I are to have wonderful parents and siblings and other family members and we also have the most amazing friends (even though I consider them family). People were not hesitating to offer help (babysitting our kids so we could get some relaxing time, letting us live in their trailor in front of our house, letting us use their house nearby whenever we want to shower, sleep, do laundry, etc. since we don't have electricity or water yet) and to pray on our behalf and I can testify that the prayers help so much and I could feel the strength from those prayers and I am still continuing to feel the strength. Like I said before, I know that my trials are nothing like a lot of people are going through (and I am very grateful for that), but I do know that my Savior loves me and I love him and as I was so upset by everything I was reminded that Jesus Christ knew exactly what I was feeling and that gave me great comfort. I am so grateful for this Christmas season when we can really reflect on our Savior, Jesus Christ and on all of the wonderful sacrifices he has made on our behalfs.

Sorry again for the length of this post and if you did not read it all I completely understand, but if you did thank you!