Beautiful!

We really got hit yesterday with lots of snow. First thing in the morning, we scraped ice caused by freezing rain off of the cars. Dd#4 was late to school. It was an ice rink on the roads. It reminded me of Portland and their ice storms. The snow just kept coming and cleared the gunky air. It's beautiful this morning. Here are some shots of the snow. The sun will be melting the roads today just in time for another pretty good storm tonight. I love watching the pieces of snow drop off the tree limbs to the ground. Christmas will soon be here!

Happy Birthday

It was Grandpa and DIL's birthday this past weekend. We had a nice visit with Grandpa on the phone. With the family that was available, we had a birthday party for our DIL. Here we are serenading her with our recorders. 

    The night before, dd#4 went to her first teen dance. She met a few there that went to her school and she had a good time. 

We were able to put together our dining room over the weekend. With two leaves, it will fit twelve. I am so happy with how it looks. 

Masquerade Ball

Saturday night was the high school's masquerade ball. It was girls' choice and dd#3 went with a wonderful young man. They went with three other couples. They had an afternoon of ice skating first. DH and I went to Ikea to purchase a few things, came back and saw the beautiful gown with the beautiful girl inside. How fun are masks!( I should have taken a picture of them with their masks.) They went to the dance and ended the night playing games and watching Phantom of the Opera.

Young Woman Medallion

Wednesday night was our ward's Young Women in Excellence. Our #3 daughter was able to receive her medallion. The YW President invited the mothers of the girls to pick a flower that reminds them of their daughter, explain why, present her with the flower and give a minute or two talk about her. I was so honored to to that for her. Her dad and I chose the sunflower. The condensed version of the talk centered around the ability of the sunflower to follow the sun. They are a symbol of radiant warmth, loyalty and pure thoughts. No flower can lift spirits quite like the sunflower can. They are bright and cheery. Our daughter is a prime example of these qualities and she does strive to follow the "Son."

She had her wisdom teeth taken out only five days before the meeting and she looked and felt pretty normal for the night's activity.

DD#4.....so proud of them!

The girls with our wonderful friend and their YW leader in our other ward.

October Fun!





Men folk hard at work!

 October just flew by as we were so involved in getting the kitchen finished. We had a lot of help with the flooring and putting in the appliances. Thank you all so very much! As of tonight, Halloween, we still need to install the backsplash, mouldings and purchase area rugs and a dining set. I will be spending quality time with all of the instruction booklets for the appliances this week. I will soon discover all of the bells and whistles before the big turkey day. Last weekend we had a birthday celebration for dd#2. She came from college with a room mate and we also had grandpa and grandma here. The kids went down to "Witches Night Out" at Gardner Village too.


Happy Birthday sweetie!





Birthday guests



PROGRESS!

Status on our kitchen:

Slow.

Slow.

Slow.

however, the cabinets have come!

Our kitchen before:

 Our kitchen from the front view:

The installer came on Monday. Voila!  Isn't it beautiful?!!!

 South wall, looking straight on...

 The bar in front will house the stove top and there are lots of drawers and a spice rack. The paint on the back wall is a Kwal paint called "cement". It is a beautiful color. I was a little concerned by the dark value but I love the color now that the white cupboards are against it. My dh and father have done a wonderful job making it just what I envisioned. Next up, the countertops. They will be here in a week and a half. More to come... 

Rights of Passage

Another daughter is on her way to fun and learning. We took dear daughter #2 to college on Saturday. She is gonna have the experience of her life! She has a great attitude and she has some fun classes. She has been emailing her new roommate and I know she will really enjoy the girls in her apartment. I am envious of her new opportunities and fun times she will experience. Needless to say, I got a little choked up as we drove off leaving her there. It's all apart of these kinds of transitions and I will never be good at it. We love her tons!

Hard at Work

Well, remodeling is going slow. DH has been working a lot in the evenings. Not much here being done while he is gone. We ordered the cabinets, appliances and countertop. The next step is to get the "box" out and have him build up the east wall a few inches, bring in the tape-man and then paint. Here DD#2 is hard at work pulling up the tack boards and base boards.

DH has been doing a beautiful job up on the ceiling. He is here putting on a second coat of paint.

The paint color is called "cement". I really love it! He hung the lights in ready to take the scaffolding down. 

Last Day 14

Time to head back home! This vacation totally rocked! We checked out of our hotel and headed for a nice brunch at a Diner on the Triple D television show. It didn't disappoint. 

The Red Arrow Diner

Lots of famous people had their names engraved on the counter where they sat. We headed over to drop off our van and a shuttle took us over to the Manchester airport. 
  Our flight took us down to Atlanta where we had a two hour layover. There again, good old McDonald's for dinner and a dark journey back to the Salt Lake Airport. 

Day 13

Happy Birthday DD#3!
Unfortunately we had the biggest driving day of the whole vacation on her birthday. We left the Hotel and went down to tour the Philadelphia Mint. Enjoyed it! Drove towards New Hampshire stopping a little above Providence at an Ice Cream Parlor. We sang "Happy Birthday" over a cone. Had troubles finding ice cream parlors on the good ole' GPS. One of the places she led us to was directly on someones driveway in the middle of no where.  Heck if the owner of the home knew where the ice cream parlor was. We had a laughing time finding a place. We checked into the Manchester Sheraton and the girls went swimming. 

Day 12

It's Sunday. We slept and slept. We slowed down the day because #2dd had a horrible cough. She has been sick the last couple days. We are in Philadelphia. It's a pretty city, at least where we are staying. It's the 5th largest city in America. I can attest to that! Sure has some beautiful old buildings too.
   We drove uptown to see the Liberty Bell. It was very hot today,(and humid).

We didn't get tickets for the Independence Hall because they were so limited and the crowds are many. We took a few pictures. 

    From there we went back to Lancaster for a Sunday drive. We saw Amish buggies and lots of families on their porches. TOO COOL.  The countryside is just beautiful like a post card! The beautiful large white homes, red barns and grain silos are a sight. 

   We drove back to the hotel area and found a place where we ordered pizza, Philly sandwiches and chicken wings. Good food and nice people there. We went back to the hotel and watched a movie. Good relaxing day.

Headed toward Providence, RI

Day 11

We checked out of our very nice hotel rooms and found a grocery store for some breakfast. We set a course for Gettysburg.  When getting out of the van, the heat and humidity just smacked us in the face. We watched how the armies loaded the cannons. So interesting. They also mentioned that the loaders probably suffered hearing loss.

We had DIL's cd of the audio tour of the area so we jumped back into the van and took the driving tour. The Gettysburg area is very green with rolling hills. It is easy to imagine the battle fought there in that area. 

After the tour, we drove through Harrisburg to the Hershey factory. Come to find out there was a One Direction boys band concert. There were girls and their moms everywhere. After the concert started it wasn't so packed. We took a little boat tour to see how Hershey makes their chocolates. Thought about buying some but didn't because of the extreme heat.

   We had our GPS take us through the back country of Lancaster. We saw beautiful farms and barns. So much corn and green rolling hills. We saw Amish farms and a few cute bunnies in fields. Again, I wished we would have had more time at Gettysburg and the Amish area. We got on to the Pennsylvania turnpike and pulled off again at a rest stop for a Philly sandwich. We headed to our next hotel. We were very tired!
   

Day 10

I am writing this at 1:30 a.m. Wow, are we ever bushed! We walked miles today. We drove the van to the Greenbelt Metro Station and bought everyone an all day Metro pass so that we could go everywhere on one pass.
   Our first stop was up by the Capitol building where we went to the Library of Congress in the Jefferson building. We had a tour guide take us all over the library.

Library of Congress

Library heart....

Main entrance in the Library of Congress

Metro trains....tunnels under the ground....cool!

Some of the metro exits were very steep!

She was so knowledgeable. We need to take the virtual tour online again to see what we've missed. Loved seeing the Gutenberg Bible and Thomas Jefferson's library. From there, we walked across the street to the Capitol visitors center and then took their walking tour with audio earphones. That was super great.

Wished we could have had more time there to walk around and explore. 

It seemed smaller than on television, but beautiful. There were activists across the street as we passed. Something about Egypt. We hadn't seen news in so long we weren't sure what that was all about.

    We walked  to Chinatown and ate. We got back on the metro and went all the way down to the Pentagon Memorial and walked around to see the 184 plus names on the memorials.

Each of the wings came from the ground with names on each representing each person that died. Under the wing is water and lights. It's supposed to be very beautiful at night.

That took a long time to walk. #1dd was pooped on by a bird on her back and hair. We went down to the metro again and then on to Arlington. On the way, the girls saw their first glimpses of fireflies!  The cemetery was closed for the night so we again walked and walked across the Potomac Bridge over to the Lincoln Memorial  That is where we felt like we needed to pinch ourselves that we were there! We took pictures and sat on the stairs overlooking the mall and the Capitol. We walked over to the Vietnam memorial and walked the pathway of names. We then walked and walked some more back down to our Metro Station. We transferred twice and then on to the greenline and back to our van. Our feet felt like bloody stubs! 
   We drove ten miles or so to the Washington DC temple. Only one side of the temple was lit. It was HUGE and very beautiful. On to the hotel and to bed! Wonderful, exhausting day! 

Day 9

What a great day! We took our van into the train station because it was free parking for the holiday. We took the train in to L'Enfant metro station and then walked to the Air & Space Museum. Very cool airplanes, rockets, missiles ,etc.

Amelia Earhart's airplane

Grandpa would really have enjoyed that museum the most. We saw three missionaries on their P-day. We walked across the mall to the Natural History museum. Before that, we had our pb&j sandwiches at the McDonald's there in the food court. Dh bought everyone shakes to go with it. dd#2 and I really enjoyed the DNA exhibit there.

We zoomed over to the Museum of Art. There we took in a few famous artists like Renoir, Monet and Van Gogh. Very cool.

The Boating Party

Wished we could have had more time at all of these museums. They closed early for the holiday.

We found a spot on the mall grass and sweat until dark. We were right in front of the Washington monument. Only the umbrellas we brought protected us. What was strange to me was the lack of security. We saw no officers anywhere. Weird! The fireworks began around 9:15. There seemed to be thousands around us. It was packed! The fireworks were very pretty and was very over-the-top towards the end.

The crowds moved us toward the metro station. It was packed, hot, steamy, and stinky. We got on the train back to Greenbelt and then on to our van. We went to Wendy's and Taco Bell for a very late dinner, crashed at the hotel! Great day!!!