Disneyland and Other California Adventures

Flamingos at San Diego Zoo.

     Our trip to California in April was lots of fun! London enjoyed playing with her cousins, and going on the rides at Disneyland. We took London to the beach for the first time! She loved playing in the sand by the water. She wasn't a fan of how cold the water was, but she would have kept playing in the sand all day long.  After three hectic days at Disneyland it was great to take it easy at the San Diego Zoo.



     So, here are some fun pictures from our trip.




London with the Panda at San Diego.

















 



London and Tinkerbell at Pixie Hollow.
 



And 5, 6, 7, 8

          Recently, London has enjoyed watching Angelina Ballerina. She started singing and twirling in our house. I posted the video on my facebook page. After asking her for a couple week if she wanted to go to dance class and learn to dance like Angelina, we went and observed a class for three year olds. London wanted to get out on the floor with all the other little girls. We decided to give it a try.


So, last week was her first day at ballet class! She was so excited to twirl and gallop with the other 3 year olds. She did really well for her first day.  We need to work on sitting still and waiting our turn, but we'll get there.
     She didn't want to take her leotard, tights, and dancing shoes off. It's took a little bit of convincing that our dancing shoes are only for dance class. and she's looking forward for the her class next Friday. It's so how amazingly fearless she is sometimes. They were jumping through some hula hoops that were laid flat on the floor and London was ready to go right on in. Here's my pretty ballerina!

A Stich in Time

       So I crochet...a lot. At least when I have the time, and the month of March I had quite a few projects to be working on. I made three baby blankets, a firefly hat, and tried out a new pattern for a My Little Pony.

London got some My Little Pony figures for her birthday. She loves them and even insists on sleeping with them. They are made of hard plastic, so I thought it would be a good idea to come up with a softer, more cuddily version. I still need to get the mane and tail in and eyes. I thought it would be good to start with a smaller pony that doesn't have cutie marks. For those of you who aren't versed in My Little Pony:Friendship is Magic (one of the benefits of being the mom of a three year old little girl) there is a group of littiler ponies called the Cutie Mark Crusaders that haven't gotten their cutie marks. Cutie marks are these designs that are one the back flank of the ponies.

 I also started on a Twilight Sparkle. I have all the pieces, but still need to sew them together.
    
If anyone out there embrodiers, or has any good ideas how to make eyes and cutie marks I won't say no to the idea.  The person I got the pattern from used felt to make eyes and cutie marks and glued them on, but I think that would last all of  twenty seconds with London. So, I'm trying to find a better way to do it. And once I do, I will probably list them on my Etsy store. https://www.etsy.com/shop/LondonBugDesign

      Out of the three blankets I made two were a ripple or chevron pattern. I made them with alternateing colors and varying widths of pink. I think they turned out okay for a first try and went ahead and listed them on my store.


Six rows of pink between each color change
and slightly ribbed



Three rows of pink between each color change
and ribbed

      The third blanket was one that I had made before. It's pink and with green shamrocks. I really like doing the instaria or picture blankets. I've also done one with ducks on wavey water and I'm currently trying to finish a teddy bear blanket. I added the bows to make it more girly since it's for a little girl. I still have to add eyes, noses and the mouth to some of the squares. I post finished pictures when I can. Hopefully I 'll have more time to work on some more project ideas.
 

3.1415...

               March 14 is one of my favorite days of the year. I think it should be a national holiday! Why? you may ask, simple PIE!!! Thankfully for me, I work with some like minded people in regards to Pie Day. For the last two years Piemagedon (the awesomest pie contest) has commenced at Ancestry.com.
      Rules are simple; anyone can participate, you may be supervised, but you must make your pie yourself. Everyone picks an anounomous name for their pie entry, and then the entire shift gets together to taste/score all the pies. What could be better than a night of eating pie?
        We have prizes for the best presentation, best tasting, overall best pie, and best pie name. It's always interesting to see the kind of entries that will come in and how original the names will be. This year we had some really interesting pies. Jeremy brought in a pie tin filled with mini bacon wrapped pigs in a blanket. It was called Little Piggie Pie ( or something to that affect). They were super delicious! So, it was no suprise that it won best tasting.We also had a Mile High Strawberry Pie that Jeri made. It looked like it could have been photographed for one of those pie/desert cookbooks and was the pefect combination of strawberries and the syrup stuff you use in the filling. Her pie won best pie overall.
       The pie I made was a chocolate candy crunch. It was a chocolate graham cracker crust, chocolate filling with crushed symphony bar(the kind with toffee and almonds), topped with whip cream,more crushed candy, and drizzled with melted german chocolate.

I ended up winning a Pie Bird Funnel for best presentation and the most misunderstood pie name. I entered it under 22/7. For those of you who are not mathletes 22/7 is a fractional representation of pie. Drew gave me the suggestion when I was trying to figure out what name to submit my pie under.

  





 So, it was a great day, not only did I get to eat lots of diffrerent kinds of yummy pie, but I also won a nifty gadget to help me continue on my pie making experiments. Happy Pie Day to all!!!

Take this Job and...

After 5 years of working for DirectPointe/Integratech Drew has left for hopefully greener pastures at Netwise.

Drew hadn't been happy at his job for quite sometime. I could tell that it was very wearing on him and he didn't feel very appreciated or valued as an employee. He had been casually looking for another job for a few months hoping that things at Integratechs would get better. No such luck.
     He was approached by a previous manager that wanted to recruit him for this new company in Murray. It is still IT/technical work, pays more money per year, and seems like a less stress working environment. After weighing the pros and cons (the biggest one that it is an additional 20 minutes to his work commute) we decided to take it. Which ended up being a good thing. When Drew let Integratechs know that he had another offer and would they like to counter, they responded with " We're not going to counter the offer, and oh, by the way, you're fired." Crazy right!?!?  He received his finally salary check plus what little PTO he had left, turned in his phone and laptop and came home.
      He wanted to take a little time off before starting his new job at Netwise and I agreed. It was nice to have him home during the day. London, I think was surprised, but liked it. She has a lot of fun playing with her Daddy.

So, Thursday last week was his first day at the new job. He spent the day filling out his new hire paperwork and getting set up to work there. Already he comes home a lot happier and less tense. And the best part, he won't be on-call all the time. We're adjusting to the new schedule and trying to figure out transportation. We're thinking that the new Frontrunner might be a good idea.  He wouldn't have to deal with traffic and crazy drivers.The Murray stop is about a 15 minute walk from the office and a little exercise everyday won't be a bad thing.

We're thinking this will be a stepping stone to better things for us this year.

Oops...I did it again and Bring on the burn

So part of my New Year's resolutions was to post to the blog once a week. Well, the first month of 2013 is practically over and I think I've posted all of one out of the three post that should have happened. One out of three isn't bad...I guess.
     But, it's not exactly a stellar start to my resolutions for the year. I re resolve to post to my blog at least once a week. I think the biggest problem I have is that I'm not sure what to blog about. I mean it gets a little taxing trying to talk about yourself all the time. And I'm not really sure who reads this anyway. If you are reading this, give me a shout out and let me know if there is any particular subject that you are interested in. That would be a big help and thank you in advance.

So here's what has happened lately...

     The Second Annual Ancestry.com DPS evening shift Hot Sauce Challenge of 2013 was an epic success!(Meaning I survived the burning sensation engulfing my entire mouth)
     I'm thinking I need to explain. My shift supervisor is always coming up with interesting and sometimes crazy contests/activities to help keep our work environment enjoyable and give us all a bonding experience with our co-workers (Honestly, I think he just like to find exotic ways to torture us so he can point and laugh at us later).
     This year's hot sauce pick was a bottle of special reserve Dave's Insanity Sauce. Each bottled of the private reserve is individually numbered and signed by Dave himself. Every year they formulate a special private reserve hot sauce with three times the heat of Dave's Insanity Sauce.

It is hand signed by Dave, numbered, vintage dated and laid to rest in a wooden coffin wrapped in caution tape. This hot sauce contains "Ghost pepper" which I believe is the hottest pepper on the scale.        
      The rules are simple: Each challenger takes a cracker with a designated number of drops of hot sauce and places it hot sauce side down on their tongue,lets it sit for about 10 seconds and then chews and swallows said cracker. Whoever consumes the most hot sauce with least reaction becomes the reigning champ.
      After hearing about the previous shifts champ I of course had to jump right in. Instead of just a few drops of this poison I filled my cracker with about a slightly bigger than a nickel drop and had at it. I'm proud to say that my reaction was almost nil. After several glasses of milk and ice cream sandwiches later the burning had ceased and I had almost gotten rid of the taste.(It doesn't taste pleasant). I was in the lead for my shift, until one of my co-workers, Josh, decided to give in to the needling from some of the others and give it a go. Of course he had to do a bigger drop than me. (I feel that I should mention that Josh is a former Marine whose been to Iraq and way tougher than me). Because I wasn't about to be outdone, I did another cracker.     
      This time I covered almost the entire surface of the cracker with sauce. Not exactly a good choice. My mouth was instantly on fire with an awful taste and all I could think about was making it stop. More milk, ice cream sandwiches and finally when I thought nothing was going to help ice cubes. After getting that under control I realized that I was shivering, visibly shivering, and couldn't get warm. Thankfully my co-workers are awesome and lent me some of their coats and I was able to get a normal body temp and get back to work. I believe I beat Josh...barely. We will both be receiving "Grow your own Ghost Pepper kits" as our prizes.
The hot sauce challenge is in no way endorsed by Ancestry.com. Participation is on a volunteer basis. No employees were harmed in the making of this contest.
It wasn't until about three hours later that someone said something funny that got me laughing and I had to high tail it to the restroom. But, I proved my mettle and actually feel proud of my somewhat silly acomplishment. Here's looking forward to next year!

Sims Top 10+1: A review of 2012

I am acknowledging that I am a terrible blogger. My posts are few and far between, so I thought this would be the easiest way to catch everybody up on what has been going on with us.

1. Survived the "end of the world" . Guess the Mayans and that other guy were wrong. The world didn't end we're still fine.

2. Birthdays had by all we're now old...er.

3. We have arrived at the tell end of the terrible twos and we're hoping the threes are better.

4. Drew went back to school at UVU. He's been working really hard in his classes and if the A's and B's are any indication it's paying off. He's registered for Spring and will begin classes shortly.

5.Directpointe was bought out and merged with Integretechs. They also moved their offices to American Fork making Drew's commute slightly longer.

6. Drew was "promoted" at work. He is now the Back-up and Storage Administrator. It wasn't much of a pay raise, but it got him out of having to answer phones.

7. Potty training attempts: 1

8. Failed potty training attempts: 1. 'Nough Said.

9.Survived Thanksgiving with inebriated in-laws. Also 'nough said.

10. 1st family pictures since London was 7 months old. London was more interested in playing at the playground in the park than sitting still for pictures. But, I think they turned out okay.

11. Summer opened an etsy store and actually sold some of her items. it's been an interesting learning experience, but I'm happy to be sharing my love of crochet and hope that my items have made the recipients happy. See my store at http://www.etsy.com/shop/LondonBugDesign

And that is pretty much our last year in a nutshell. Not alot of changes, but enough to keep us on our toes and keep life interesting.