San Carlos Beach

Sorry for so many posts in 2 days but we are here in Mexico and Justin had a change in plans last minute and instead of heading to our apartment in Culiacan, like we were originally going to, we are here in Hermosillo for a few days staying in a hotel. This means that while Justin is out working hard all day long, Ethan and I get to try to find things to do while being stuck in a hotel for 3 days. Which means lots of movies, reading books, playing airplanes, and playing catch up with blogging :)

One good thing about this sudden change in our plans was that we had a whole day this week that Justin didn't have to go into work and we all got to play at the beach! We stopped at a quiet little town called San Carlos and enjoyed the beauty of this small beach town.

Ethan and Daddy started out just playing on the shoreline since the water was pretty cold

And we also had fun throwing shells into the ocean... (this is Ethan's "ok, big smile" pose)

But soon enough, Ethan realized that he has no inner body thermometer and didn't care/realize that it was cold. So, he quickly realized that it was a lot of fun to fully emerge himself under water and Justin was a trooper to get wet with him. I was perfectly content taking pictures on the sidelines, however....




The sunset was beautiful and I'm so glad that we got to have a fun family day together. Those are very rare when we are here in Mexico and we will take them when I can :)


Quick question unrelated to this post- As I prepare for my big Europe post, and yes I feel as if i have to prepare for such an insurmountable task, I would love for someone to tell me how to arrange a collage of pictures. I really like how my friend heather has done hers but I can't figure out how to do it. Help please?! Thanks!

Gingerbread House- Only a Month Late

About a week ago Ethan and I decided to bust out the gingerbread house kit that our home teacher so kindly gave us a few weeks before Christmas. I guess with all the holiday hustle and bustle we just didn't make time to do it! After I put the house together, I pretty much gave Ethan free reign to decorate it however he wanted. Here he is showing us his awesome decorating skills...

As you can see, some of the icing accidentally didn't make it on the house...

And here is the finished product...

Ok, ok so mommy definitely did offer a little bit of decorating advice to this little toddler but you can totally tell that a 2 year old did most of it, right?! My favorite part of the house was finding half bitten off peices of the candy stuck to the icing. I guess Ethan just couldn't resist :)

Halloween

Yes, I know that I'm like 3 months late with this post but better late than never right?!
So our little buddy was Buzz Lightyear for Halloween this year and he had SO much fun. Actually, I'm not sure who had more fun, Ethan or Ethan's parents, but one things for sure and that is that this stage he is in makes all the holidays a blast! He got the hang of trick or treating real fast and was not shy about sticking his candy bucket out and saying "trick or treat!" This is pretty much how every door step went...

Ethan runs up to the door, knocks, basically throws his bucket at them and says "Trick or Treat!" Then says "Dank- ku" and runs back to us saying, "Whoa! Look at all the treats!!!" with a look of pure elation on his cute little face.

Here is a picture of our little Buzz.... He had just woken up from a late nap and was still a little grumpy...


He even met up with another Buzz Lightyear. These two were so funny checking each other out. This Buzz had a much cooler costume with the wing pack.. sorry Ethan, your parents are just too cheap to buy a $40 Halloween costume :) When it was time to go we said, "Ok, say Bye-bye Buzz" and both of them said at the same time, "Bye-bye Buzz!" It was pretty cute...

Everything was going great until this little 10 or 11 year old girl with the most hideous Chucky mask catches up with us and scared the living daylights out of Ethan. Seriously, this kid was completely terrified and was crying and burying his head into our shoulders to try to hide from her. It was so sad. What kinda parents would let their young girl run around with that kinda mask on anyways? Geez! So, thus ended our trick or treating extravaganza. Hopefully we won't run into any scary mask next year :)

Here is a video of Ethan telling us about the scary mask, all the witches and ghosts that he saw. He is also showing us how to correctly eat a sucker, just incase you didn't know how to....

Feeling Crafty

Well, its one of those rare rainy days here in the Phoenix valley and I love it! It makes me miss the thunderstorms of back home in southeast TX! I love rainy days because I'm forced to stay home and be productive and boy does our house need some serious cleaning and laundry done!

Justin is out of town this week working in beautiful Costa Rica, enjoying perfect weather and some yummy food. When he is gone during the weeks, I have lots of time at night to do whatever I want and I usually stay up late at night doing so. Yesterday I decided to make this bow/clip holder for my friends baby shower this Saturday. I don't think she reads my blog so I'm pretty safe to post about it :) Isnt it cute???

I would definitely not consider myself a crafty person at all and this was a really easy project that took maybe an hour to do. You can find the tutorial here. I would have taken a picture showing how you can clip the bows on but I still have no little girl accessories... I'm working on it though :) Anyways, I love it so much that I'm going to make myself one as well! I would also like to make one of these once I run out of room on this one. (Thanks Kristina for letting me use this without your permission :)

Next on my list of crafty things to do?? Burp cloths that actually work!!

A Saturday at the Park

This last Saturday Justin decided that we needed to do a family activity together (and I couldn't have agreed more) so he took Ethan and I out to Freestone Park in Gilbert. This park is so nice and so fun for kids of all ages! There is a cute little mini amusement park there with rides for just the kiddos. There was even a choo choo train there that Ethan got to ride. This kid was in heaven I tell you. We all had a blast!

Ethan and daddy in front of the the only ride he didn't want to go on, the carousel. I'm not sure why he is scared of them but he made it very plain that he did NOT want to go on it...

But he did love riding the "boats" or jet skis...

And he absolutely loved riding the ferris wheel! He was really adamant about going on it and I was thinking " Oh brother, he is just going to get scared once it starts moving and is going to scream his way off of it," but we were pleasantly surprised! Look at this kids face! He loved it!


Daddy and Ethan watching the choo choo train go by again....


We had so much fun and have decided that we need to go on family outings more often. That is when we are home to do them, right? :)

8 Months

32 weeks is finally here! Here are some pictures to document this week of pregnancy...


Sorry about the shadows on the wall. They drive me crazy! Someday we will get to painting them.

I think you can see my growing tummy a bit better with just the undershirt...

As you can see, I've grown a lot in just the last month!

Somewhere in week 29 or so, this little girl stopped moving for a few days. After day #2 of feeling hardly any movement, I got a little worried but decided to give it till the next day. Well, apparently she must have been having a growing spurt during that time because what were her little fluttering movements turned into powerful kicks and my stomach moving from side to side when she moved. It's been a lot of fun to feel her taking up every bit of space I got in there!

I'm feeling fabulous and everything is checking in great with the doctor! We get an ultrasound this coming up Monday to check on her growth then we are off to Mexico for 2.5 weeks or so. It's crazy to think that when we come back, I will only have 3 weeks left till my due date! Ahhh! Am I ready for this baby?! I still dont even really feel pregnant, although Im sure in the next few weeks reality will check in with that one! I'll be sure to post some ultrasound pics of our growing little girl next week!

New Years Goals

Ashleigh's Goals 2o1o:

I figured I should write these down somewhere so I can feel more accountable...

-Daily morning scripture study- make it my first priority before I do anything else
-Sincere morning & night personal prayers
-Become more Christ-like- especially more charitable and less opinionated

And that's it. Short & sweet. I figure if I can come close to perfecting these areas in my life, everything else I want/need to work on will fall into place :)

Here are our Family Goals for 2010

The first 4 have been and will always be goals we make for our family and the last 3 we came up with after evaluating what we need to work on...

* I know some of you who read my blog are not LDS and may not know what the heck I'm talking about in some of these goals. If you are interested in knowing what I'm referring to, I have found some simple definitions that may help ya out :) Just click on the link. Thanks!

-Family scripture study and prayer every morning
-Planned weekly Family Home Evenings
-Attend the temple together at least once a month
- 100% home & visiting teaching
-Have one planned date (with no kids) a month
-Invite at least 1 family over a month (Why? Because we seriously need to get to know our
neighbors and people in our ward)
-Plan for the week every Sunday

*One thing that we really like doing is giving our home teachers a list of our family goals (or we choose the most important ones) and have them ask us every month how we are doing in those areas. This helps us stay accountable and work harder to accomplish those things. Justin's family has always done this and I love it.

Thanks for reading and here's to a brand new year!

Oh There's No Place Like Home For The Holidays

This year we were actually home for the holidays! Well, most of it anyways. We got back from Europe on December 15th leaving us only a week and a half to get all Christmas shopping, decorating, etc. done. After a few days of recovering from jet lag, I was back to my less zombie self and did what I could to get it all done. First up, a Christmas tree!

We were planning on getting a nice, big real tree this year since we have space to put it but seeing as we would have only had it for 10 days, it didn't seem like it would be worth the money. So through a series of events, I was able to recover our old rinky dink BYU apartment Christmas tree that I had donated to a friends garage sell. This beauty didn't sell so I was more than happy to at least have something up for Ethan to have fun decorating and redecorating, and that he did!

Somehow this smarty pants knew that there was suppose to be a star at the top of the tree and reminded me of it about every 5 min that day, so we had to make a quick run to Wal-mart to get him his star. It was cute that it was so important to him..

We also had fun decorating Christmas cookies! Ethan somehow just couldn't manage to get very much icing on the cookies at first.. hmm...I wonder why...
And for those of you who know me and how healthy I like my kid to eat, it took great will power on my part to allow him to eat pure frosting! He was in heaven and talked about it for at least 2 days after! I guess it was the holidays, right???

This was the first time in 4 years that all 8 of the Smith kids were together at the same time. I'm pretty sure they loved every minute of being all together again!
Christmas Eve- We read from Luke 2, had a mini family talent show, opened up one gift each and ate way too many sweets!
Caryn & Nate singing a hymn for their talent

The boys singing and playing the guitar. Even Ethan had to show off his amazing ukulele skills

Chanda singing "Peace, Peace, Peace." What a beautiful soprano voice this girl has!

Christmas Day!

We all woke up late from a late night before. We had set up this train set from Ethan's great Grandma & Grandpa Sims the night before so it was the first thing Ethan saw when he went to see that Santa brought him. He LOVED it and had pretty much no interest in opening up any other presents. It took a lot of bribing by us to get him to :)

This toy was a hit and he still continues to play with it constantly!

Christmas morning at the Smith home- we were all spoiled by Grandma & Grandpa Smith and the kids! Thanks you guys for making our Christmas so great!

Justin and I weren't going to get each other anything expensive due to a lack of funds from all our traveling. I held up my end of the bargain, but Justin, not so much. He bought me a beautiful leather bench for our entryway and some yummy smelling perfume! I loved them! I fixed his old watch by putting a new battery in it. Lame. I know. But I surprised him by digitizing all his mission pictures (since he served before digital cameras came out) and will eventually make an imovie out of them. He loved it :)

Playing on the new trampoline that the kids got for Christmas

On the 28th, we attended Barrett's homecoming talk ,(Justin brother who served in Budapest, Hungary), and then the next day we left for a mini family reunion in Indio, California. You didn't actually think we would stay in one place for more than a week did you?! Of course not!
We had fun playing together at the Worlmark Resort there...
We played basketball...

Ethan found the video arcade... and thank goodness he is content to play with it without having to put money in!

We played at the park...



Played some tennis....

Justin and I were quite the dynamite duo :) Undefeated!

And played a fun, what must be a AZ middle school game, called "Poison"

After a few days in Cali, we headed back to AZ. Once Chanda & Davin left back up to BYU and the guys went back to work, the holiday hustle and bustle settled down. We are home, well Ethan and I, until the end of January and are enjoying the time we have to just relax at home together. What do we do with all the free time we now have you ask??

Well, we ride Ethan's cool, new bike to the park that Santa brought him for Christmas..... (Note- this bike is really only cool because I bought it for $5 brand new at a garage sell!)

And we have fun jumping off things we probably shouldn't at the parks.....
But it makes for fun pictures right?!

We play with Daddy as much as we can....


And we love to be goofy and have fun while eating lunch together!

We are SOOOOO happy to be home but had a wonderful Christmas being with family. We look forward to next year with a new little girl to spoil and my mom and dad joining us out here!