Moving Out, Moving In & Tons of Family Fun in Utah

Our last dinner in our apartment in Texas. We had sold our table and all of our big furniture was out so chicken nuggets on a cardboard box on the balcony was the dinner setting. The kids loved their "picnic" :)

Our move helpers! I was in the young women presidency before we moved so for the youths Wednesday night activity they came over to our place and helped us move all of our stuff out. They were amazing help and it was the fastest move-out we have ever experienced! (and we have experienced it a lot)

 

 

My Girls! They were such an awesome group of young women and I miss them a lot.

This was the awesome YW presidency that I got to work with: Debbie, Cristie, & Leslie. I love these amazing women!

Our new place! Packing up and moving reminded me how exhausting, time-consuming, seemingly never-ending and draining moving can be. I hope we don't have to move too many more times before we can settle down for a while. One upside to moving is the chance to de-junk and reorganize.With moving in I love it when it gets to the point where you feel like you are settled in and everything is newly organized and lovely :)

Yes I do love the color red :) And I do need to give a shout out to my parents for all of their help in moving us out and in. They flew to Texas and then helped us drive to Utah. My dad drove the big truck and that was so nice because we certainly did not want to have to drive that monstrous thing. They helped us get moved in as well. They are always so kind and generous and I love them so much!

The kids room. We have a 3 bedroom apartment (and it's townhouse style which has been such a nice change after living on a third floor. Jake got me Just Dance as a move-in present because now we can jump and dance and run around to our hearts content without worrying about people below us. yay!) We decided to have the kids share a room and make the downstairs bedroom a toy room. It was a great decision because now the kids have more fun playing together than ever before in the "toy room". It isn't "my room" it's the room to play in and have fun in.

The toy room

They have a lot of fun playing with Dal's legos and Star Wars toys and some of Braelyn's Dora toys as well

Mckayla & Braelyn. One of the best things about moving here is that we have super fun family to play with. And we have played hard these last couple of weeks :) We have played with my brother Collin & Tiffany and their family a lot (they live less than 20 minutes from us) yay!, and my brother Chase that lives in Provo,we have played with my cousin Juli & her little family and her extended family-the Hill's. They were our most favorite cousin family growing up and we became really close with them and made lots of fun memories with them. We live about 5 minutes from their house now and have played with them a few times already too. Dal & Braelyn have been introduced to a whole bunch of new Hill cousins and have had a blast playing with them. We have also played with my cousin Jenny & her little family (she grew up in New York so we didn't get to see them as often growing up, but we had a blast every time we got to see them, and then we got to reconnect at BYU and were in the same major and even took some classes together, which was awesome :) Now we get to reconnect here. That's the thing I love about having awesome friends that are also family- you will always reconnect!  We've also played a couple times with Jake's sisters Gabby & Sara that live in Provo (they came and stayed the night at our house one night and we stayed up way too late and had a lot of fun!) Also Jake's sister Catherine and her family (that live in Colorado) came and stayed a couple nights with us, which was really fun. I'm not done yet..... We also went up to Bountiful and got together with Jake's aunt & cousins and their families that live up there. It was really fun to reconnect with all of them. And our next weeks schedule is pretty booked with playing with family almost every day until we head to Arizona for our family reunion. Then more playing! It's a good thing that we have had a little time before I start school because we have needed to catch up on playing with family time:)

Nana's Play Day to Antelope Island. My Aunt Fern plans lots of fun summer outings for her grand-kids (and their moms or whoever can come along) and so they have invited us to be a part of it all. We got to see some cool buffalo/bison. They are huge!

The kids enjoyed playing in the sand

Here is Braelyn with some of the Hill's. We ventured out to take a little wade in the Great Salt Lake.

It's crazy to see this road built right up through the lake so that you can drive to the island

The kids started soccer this week. They are pretty funny to watch.  Dal is really into it and excited about it but at times it seemed he was in his own little world, but he has a great time being part of the team and running around. He is very vocal and animated on the field which is funny.

Dal was super excited about being goalie. Before they started he was doing his own little goalie warm-up moves which were really cute.

He made a lot of nice stops & is a great goalie! He also has no problem diving for balls. In fact, we are pretty sure he prefers it!

Braelyn also plays. She is pretty funny. Most of the time I don't think she knows where the ball is because there is always a herd of bigger boys swarming around it, so she just kind of runs around the field and smiles and waves to us.

The only time she really gets to touch the ball is when the ref lets her do the kick-off and she likes that a lot. She is also super cute out there on the field so at least she has that going for her :)

Good-bye Texas! We'll miss y'all!

 These past couple of weeks we have been very busy packing, de-junking, etc. and it has been a long and exhausting process. I've realized that it was easier when I was studying and Jake was doing the packing :) We are moving this week and it is with bitter sweetness that we do. We are excited for our new adventures and opportunities that await us in Utah and for the family we will be able to play with there, but Texas has gained a special place in our hearts because of all of the wonderful people that we have met here, especially from our ward at church. There are so many awesome people in our ward and we have come to love them so much. Today was our last Sunday with them and it was sad to say good-bye. I have been serving in the Young Women presidency for a while and have come to love the amazing young women and young women leaders here. I will miss them a lot. Luckily they are coming to help us load our moving truck for their combined activity this week so I will get to see them again and we will greatly appreciate the help :) Hopefully our paths will cross with these amazing people again someday!

In Young Women's they gave me these fun going away presents: A Texas cookie cutter, magnet and mug. They will be great reminders of our good times here in Texas.

Jake and I have been attending the Spanish Sunday School class (all the Spanish speakers here attend our ward) and Jake taught the Marriage and Family class in Spanish and Elders Quorum in Spanish. Today in our class they brought a chocolate and flan cake to eat in honor of us and another nice lady gave us this box of yummy chocolates. They were so sweet. We felt really loved today and that we will be missed.  We will miss them all too!

Graduation & Cancer Center Tour

On May 11th I graduated from Radiation Therapy school. Woohoo! This is what Braelyn thought of graduation-she slept through the whole thing

Dal managed to spice things up a bit with some of his signature dance moves

There were 700+ graduates so it was a long ceremony

Some of my wonderful classmates-Jonathan & Sharan

My parents were so nice to make the trip out to Texas to be there. It was so great to have them there!

My amazing little family!

On Saturday they had a little reception and open house for us at the cancer center where I spent a lot of my clinical time. So I got to take the fam and give them a tour and show them how everything works. It was really fun. Braelyn loved to ride on the table while I moved it up and down and all around. This machine was my favorite machine to work on-it is a Varian Trilogy machine and it can do a lot of cool stuff-some of the top of the line technology in Radiation Therapy.

Braelyn enjoyed being the model so that I could show my family how the patients laid on the table in the CT-sim room. The mask is a typical mask that a Head & Neck or Brain cancer patient would wear if undergoing Radiation Therapy. The mask gets hooked to the table so that the patients head remains completely still.

This is the CT simulator. Patients come in here on their first day to get a CT scan in their treatment position. Then the CT scan is used to make a treatment plan (which is what I will be doing next year in my Medical Dosimetry training at the U's cancer hospital)

Awards & Date Knight

They had a special Honors awards ceremony at my school.(This is my program director, Tony, who presented me with my awards.) I was chosen as the most outstanding student in my program and was given an award for maintaining a 4.0 GPA.  I thought I should share this for posterity's sake :) and to recognize how blessed I have been and how much help from on high I have been given through this schooling experience.  It has been a crazy adventure, this past semester has flown by, and I am beyond excited to graduate (next month)! Then off to Salt Lake for an extra year of schooling to specialize as a Medical Dosimetrist.

 My amazing little family has been such an incredible support to me. I love them so much!

 At Chick-fil-A they had a special Mother-Son Date "Knight" where we were supposed to dress up. So I was a black and red princess and Dal was my matching black & red knight. We had a great time together. We ate food, played little games, talked, he gave me a rose, and then he played in the play area with some friends from church who were also there. It was a great date with my sweet little Dal.

 Of course Braelyn had to get a picture of me and her and the rose also :) Love that little happy face

Then Braelyn wanted to take over the camera and do a photo shoot of me with the rose, so this is one of the pictures she took :)

Easter & B-Rae Ready For School

For our Family Home Evening before Easter we decorated these eggs Star Wars style. Dal was quite excited about it all :)

On Saturday one of our grocery stores had a candy hunt for the kids. They dumped a whole bunch of shredded paper in a couple of the aisles and then dumped candy in it and then the kids hunted through that. They both had a lot of fun. We also had our own little Easter egg hunt at home, had the missionaries over for dinner, and watched one of those neat Bible videos on lds.org about the resurrection of Christ. It was a great weekend!

On Sunday Braelyn was very excited to wear her "princess dress" to church

A few nights ago Braelyn came walking out of her room looking like this and said she was ready to go to school. (She had 3 babies in her hands along with the balloon. Notice the sweat band around her thigh and she put all of those hair things in herself :) She then went in our room and sat on our bed with her babies and pretended like she was eating breakfast at school. I just love that girl-she is so funny!

Littleton, Baseball, Link & Pink Wigs

The rest of my spring break was spent playing with family in Littleton. It's always fun to be there because there is so much fun family to play with. We had such a great time!

We had fun enjoying the beautiful outdoors

Playing baseball with cousins

My sister-in-law Miriam is very talented at crocheting and while we were there she made Dalyn this amazing crocheted toy Link (from Zelda). He has been wanting a toy Link for a while now so he was beyond excited! It was so sweet of her to do that.

Miriam, Dal & Link

After seeing Dal get his picture taken with Miriam and Link, Braelyn wanted to get her picture taken with Miriam and Pink Baby, so we did :)

While there Braelyn and I got to participate in the ward talent show (She's the short one in the front with the pink wig and I'm behind her in the pink wig) Our group was called "The Not Ready For Prime Time Dancers" Braelyn got really into the dancing. She was so cute and funny.

Here are a couple of short video clips of Braelyn dancing. Doing the blender in the first one and I love the second one of her doing the running man and raising the roof (the video quality is terrible though)

This is what happens when Dal hears music that moves him :)



A 5 second video clip of Braelyn being friendly and saying hi to a little girl she just met at the talent show. She is just too cute sometimes :)