Marissa gets her braces off in 21 days!!! December 3rd to be exact! She is super excited! After having them on for three long years, we can't wait for her brace face to be gone too, so we can see those beautiful pearly whites!!
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Cantaremos Honor Choir
Noelle is taking choir this year at Highland and loving it! She has learned so much and is continually singing and talking about soft pallates and solfeg and stuff we don't know much about here. In September they had try outs for a special Honor Choir. They had to do a solo audition and they chose about 5 kids from each voice range (soprano, alto, etc.) to be in a choir made up of kids from all over the valley, even some as far as Safford and Marana. They all had their parts to practice at home and several times a week after school. Then this past weekend they all got together and practiced all day long to get ready to perform a concert for us that night.
The concert was beautiful! They had three groups, some 5th and 6th graders, a boys choir, and 7th-9th grade girls. They all did really well! The saddest part was in the youngest choir, they were in the middle of their last song, and a girl right in the middle threw up on the stage. Nobody really knew what to do. The kids just scooted away and kept on singing, but kept a careful eye on the throw up girl. They did a good job to continue, and you might not have noticed if the mom of the girl wasn't sitting behind you in a total panic, like us. So sad for that girl!
We are so proud of Noelle and her amazing singing abilities! Also, her hair do-ing abilities are pretty amazing too. She searched for a week to find the perfect style, since the girls had to wear their hair back away from their face. After several different tries, we did a small french braid into a messy bun. We think she is beautiful inside and out!
Halloween
Halloween has come and gone, so maybe I should blog about it. This year was fairly lame in the costume department. Liz had wanted to be a painter, the kind with overalls and a paint bucket to collect candy in. Well, surprisingly, white overalls are hard to come by, since we don't live in the '80's. She had a hard time understanding why I didn't want to shell out $40 for overalls to splatter paint on. So I was a mean mom and just made her pick something out of the costume box, and she decided on being a darling Little Red Riding Hood. She even had goodies in her basket when she went to her activity day party.
Then Brynn had wanted to be a '50's waitress, complete with rollerskates. I decided we didn't want any broken arms, since she doesn't have or know how to rollerskate, so she found a flapper dress and got to be a flapper girl instead.
Marissa and Noelle thought they were funny when they dressed up like Dora and Diego for our ward trunk or treat. I made them backpacks with faces on them to make them official.
Kirk also needed to dress up for work, so he dressed up like the guy from the Asian band that sings "Gangam Style" and got his team to dress up like others in the music video. Kirk amazingly looked just like him! We got a white suit coat and tried to dye it, but polyester apparently doesn't dye, so we ended up spray painting it. It was so disgustingly stiff. Then I sewed the black trim to it and made a cute little bow tie.
We went out to Kirk's office where they were having a family party thing where the kids could come trick or treat to everyone in the office. Kirk's team had come up with a pretty impressive dance like in the music video that they showed us. (Sounds to me like they have too much time on their hands at work...) Kirk won for "Best Costume" out of the whole office for the third time in four years.
My poor kids have the most boring mom who never dresses up. Each year I say that next year I will, but I just don't like to. I'll just enjoy everyone else's costume.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Fall Break in San Diego
During the girls' Fall Break we wanted to take a little vacation as a family. It was a little tricky though because the older and younger girls are in different school districts, who for some reason had different Fall Breaks this year. So we took off early Saturday morning to spend six days in San Diego, and the little girls just got to take a few extra days off school.
We decided to camp on the beach for part of the fun, so packing our car with all the "needed" things was quite tricky. You try packing camping supplies like tents, sleeping bags, lanterns, along with beach stuff like umbrellas, beach chairs, boogie boards, fun extras like five bikes, a long board, and kayaks with life jackets, along with clothes and stuff for four girls. Pretty tricky - but Kirk amazingly got it all to fit!
The first day we went to Old Town San Diego and went to the Mormon Battalion Visitor Center where we watched a fun interactive movie about the people in the Mormon Battalion, then the girls got to pump water, pan for gold, make bricks, and all sorts of fun stuff.
Then we went to the Natural History Museum, where the girls learned all about skulls, bugs, horses, and dinosaurs. The funniest part was when Brynn saw a sketch pad and container of pencils and markers on a bench, and assuming it was part of the interactive experience, she drew a nice picture of a snake. She was so so embarrassed when a guy came up to her and told her that it was his sketch pad that he was using for a college assignment. Whoops! Don't ask her about it because she will still turn bright red and get embarrassed.
We watched a 3-D movie too which put me to sleep. All in all, the museum was kinda lame, I thought, but I was comparing it to Washington DC's, and New York's Natural History Museums which are amazing. Our girls thought it was pretty cool though.
Then we just walked around Balboa Park for a while.
The beach was definitely one of our favorite parts of the trip!
We loved kayaking around the Bay where we were staying. We had contests to see who could go out the farthest without getting eaten by sharks. Kirk and Brynn are pretty far in this picture!
We roasted hotdogs and ate smores. Our newest yummy find was to use Nutella on the graham cracker for your smores - it's amazing.
Marissa had brought bubbles and glow sticks to make glowing bubbles, like she had seen on Pintrest, but they didn't work. Whaa!
The next day we went to the zoo.
The first place we went was on the Monkey Trail, where we were wowwed and amazed by all the monkeys, gorillas, and orangutans that were so close and so interactive with us. One little gorilla kept banging on the glass right in front of us, I think just to make us jump and laugh.
The zoo was really neat! There were so many animals that we could actually see and were moving around and doing stuff. But by the end of the day after walking miles and miles up and down hills, we were ready to just sit and relax and eat a massive snow cone.
And wish that we had a lion to take us where we wanted to go.
The next day we hiked Torrey Pines with our girls.
The view was awesome, and it was so fun to hike down to the beach and play in the waves at the end.
The rest of that day was spent playing on the beach.
The girls all boogie boarded a ton. They all got to be really good, especially with Kirk's help. I was amazed they would all get all the way in the freezing cold water!
The next day we went to Sea World.
We got our fill of sharks,
seals,
and wet rides.
The girls wanted to sit in the soak zone at every show. This is them sitting front and center at the Shamu Show, just waiting to get drenched. Crazy girls!
One thing about this vacation was that we got to spend lots of time together! We haven't had a vacation with just our family in quite a while. Also, since we were camping, there was no TV or other distractions. We had some fun talks around the campfire about favorite memories, boys, and silly jokes. It is always great just to be together!!
Saturday, October 20, 2012
We're still alive...barely
My sister, Sara, and I decided we wanted to take advantage of the semi-nice weather and take the kiddos on a hike. We went to hike Wind Caves in Usary Pass. We were thinking it would be a nice little walk/short hike, but we obviously hadn't looked closely at the map where it said it was a difficult trail three miles long.
The only kids that wanted to go were Oakley, Liz and Brynn.
After the about the first mile of the hike with a steep climb and having to climb over big rocks, we had pretty much had our fill of fun, but we kept going until we got to the top, where the kids were impressed with a couple bee hives that were attached to the cave wall. They gathered a bunch of dead bugs that they wanted to take home.
What a view! And we made it and only had to bribe them with whatever treat they wanted from QT when we got done. Awesome!!
Choir Girl
Noelle is part of the 7th grade girls choir at Highland. She loves it, loves her teacher Mr. Hickman, and has learned so so much! Being the fashionista that she is, she was super bummed that they had to wear slacks with their choir polo (yuck), black shoes that covered their whole foot (yuck), and wear their hair back with no jewelery (double yuck) to their concert. It's amazing she survived!!
She had a concert the other night where they totally rocked the house. The concert had an Olympic theme, so they started out with opening ceremonies with the passing of a real looking torch, then all the choirs sang songs from different countries. It was really neat!
Afterward we went and gorged ourselves on Pazooki's at BJ's for a treat. Yum!!
Also, she tried out about a month ago for Honor Choir, and recently found out that she made it!! We're so proud of her and her beautiful deep alto voice!!
Marissa's is 14!!
Marissa recently had a birthday and turned 14 years old!! She is so excited now because she can go to the stake dances - and dance with guys!! Yikes! She started the day off right with homemade cinnamon rolls for her birthday breakfast.
For her birthday she got a "real" camera, so she can work on developing her photography skills.
She also got some new running shoes, so she can blow past everyone in cross country coming up.
She had a great day at school, where she got sung to several times, a friend brought her a cake, and then the cutest boy in 8th grade ate some of her cake and then gave her a plastic spider ring. Wow! That's pretty awesome for a 14 year old!
After school Grandma Nielson came over with her cousin Julie and brought her tons of junk food, just for her, and also lots of fun Justin Bieber stuff.
That night she chose to go to Panda Express for her birthday dinner.
Marissa is so much fun and loves to be silly and always have a good time.
Since getting her camera we have at least a million of these self pics.
What is your favorite food? Chinese chicken
What is your favorite sport? Cross country
What is your favorite TV show? Modern Family
Who is the coolest person? Justin Bieber
What's your favorite subject in school? life skills and cooking
I'm awesome at: playing the ukulele
If I could change my name it would be: Paige
If I could go anywhere in the world it would be: Hawaii
What is your favorite color? Purple
What do you want to be when you grow up? photographer
What is something your parents are too strict about? chores
What is your favorite song? As Long As You Love Me
What is your favorite book? none
What are three words that describe you? random, creative, awesome
When I was little I used to: play with Belles
What is your favorite scripture story? When Jesus blesses the people
What is your favorite season? Fall
What is your favorite snack? cookie dough
What food makes you want to barf? Pea soup
Who is your BFF? Noelle and Lauryn and everybody
I wish: that I could meet Justin Bieber
What is the best thing that has happened this year? Going on the Stratosphere
What is something you want to learn more this next year? more songs on the ukulele
What is something you need to work on? patience
What is the most important lesson I've learned this year? to be nice to others
We sure love Riss and can't believe she's getting so old! We're glad to have such a great biggest sister in our family that is always setting a good example for her younger sisters!
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