Spring Break Getaway!

With little kids spring break doesn't have much significance. Our daily schedule doesn't change so we never feel like we have to take off and find an adventure to take advantage of the available free time. I'm sure that will change as our kids get into public schools.

This year we did have a little spring break getaway though when Justin's family invited us to join them for a few days up in Flagstaff, AZ. Of course Justin found us lots of fun things to do and cool things to see while we were there. I had no idea that there was so much to do in that area of AZ.

We visited Walnut Canyon where there are lots of Indian ruins built into the walls of the canyon with some steep drop offs right below. That was pretty neat to see! It was a nice little hike and the surroundings were very pretty!

Ethan was such a trooper!

We even found a little door that was just his size...

We also visited Grand Falls, or nicknamed Chocolate Falls. It was quite the hike down into the canyon but Ethan did it all! He was dead tired by the end of the day with all the hiking but he was quite a trooper!

Can you see why it is nicknamed Chocolate Falls? That water is not something that I would want to swim in but it was really cool to see!

I love this picture of Ethan standing with his big stick. He wouldn't let that thing go!

And I'm so glad that Davin is the adventurous type that climbed this ledge so I could get a cool picture out of it!

Justin and his siblings decided to climb a little higher on the falls....

The next day we went to see Meteor Crater. Ethan again did so good and as you can tell was enthralled listening to all the history behind this crater :)

He entertained himself in other ways I suppose. Here is a family picture in front of the crater.

Here is some trivia for you. This crater was made 50,000 years ago when an asteroid 150ft. across came crashing into the earths surface! Isn't that amazing that it was only 150ft wide?! The crater is 2.4 miles across and more than 550ft. deep! It is the world's best preserved meteorite impact site!

Then, we drove around for probably an hour trying to find the remains of a Ghost town from the late 1800s. Unfortunately, we didn't make it to the heart of the Ghost town but saw some remains of houses, graveyards, etc. on the outskirts of the town. It was an adventure trying to find it!

After that, we went to Sunset Crater where a volcano erupted around 1046-1100AD and left a whole lot of lava flow around the bottom of it. We walked the lava trail and learned all sorts of history from our handsome tour guide (or aka, Justin:)

I thought the history behind this picture is pretty cool. Do you see the point on the far left and the point on the far right? If you take those two points and trace them up diagonally making a point, that used to be what that volcano looked like- HUGE! Scientist think it blew it's whole top off!

I really enjoy little 3 day getaways and getting to see the beauty and history behind AZ! Big thanks to the Smith's for letting us tag along!

Justin Turns 29!

Whew. March is full of birthdays on the Smith side of the family! Today is my handsome husbands 29th birthday! I would love to do 29 reasons as to why I love him but I think I will save it for next year and do 30. This post originally started out to just be all about Justin but I forgot to add pictures on my last post of Ellie from the little combined b-day party we had, so I will do my best to not let Ellie take away the spotlight too much.

On Friday night we had the Smith's over for a combined bday party for Ellie and Justin.

Ellie got a baby stroller (from G&G Sims) and a baby doll (from G&G Smith). It's about time this little lady has something to play with besides trucks and cars!

She was so happy!

Here is Justin reading his happy birthday cards. His family is always so good about having each family member write a meaningful note inside the birthday card. They are always really sweet.

After presents, we sang happy birthday and had some yummy strawberry cupcakes. Nothing fancy but they sure were good! I made Justin his favorite No-Bake Cheesecake which he got all to himself :)

Ellie devoured her cupcake and screamed for more but she thought the ice cream was pretty darn good and settled for that instead.

This was Justin birthday card that they gave him at work. I laughed SO hard at this when he showed it to me.

*If you didn't notice, Justin's face is photoshopped in Justin Bieber's body!

At the bottom it says:

They both are named Justin

They both have March birthdays

and then......

The secretary at work, Melanie, stole this picture from an old blog post (here) and couldn't resist using it! I seriously laughed so hard. Thanks Melanie! It's fabulous!

It was so fun celebrating their birthdays and I'm so grateful for our little family. I'm not only grateful for my kiddos but also so my incredible companion. I love this amazing husband of mine for so many reasons and I consider myself a VERY lucky gal to have snatched him up. He is SO patient, kind and forgiving. He has all the qualities that I could have ever asked for in a husband. I am quite simply crazy about him!

Oh yeah, and he is a pretty rockin' Dad too :)

Happy Birthday Justin! Sure love ya!

Miss Ellie Turns 1!!!!

Our sweet little Ellie Bellie (yep, that's her nickname!) tuned 1 years old on the 10th! We just love this little girl to pieces. Here is what she is up to:

She is 20lbs 9oz- 50th %tile

30 in tall- 75th %tile

her head is 46cm- 75 %tile

She can usually always be found either climbing up the stairs or playing in the bathroom,

She LOVES to read books! She will always follow me around the house like this saying "Boooo" "Boooo" for "book." Book is actually her first word! I love how she will hand me the book and then scoot her little bottom backwards to sit on my lap and read.

Who could resist this? Not I. We spend a lot of time reading :)

Here she is on her birthday! I was SO happy that I finally got her to smile for the camera.

She loves to not only carry around books but also this picture of the First Presidency. It's a pretty beat up picture now but she loves it, so we let her. Is that blasphemy? :)

She is so much fun and is learning more and more things everyday. We sure love this little brown/blue/green/yellow eyed girl! She melts our hearts and makes us laugh everyday. We love you Ellie!

The Grand Canyon and Vegas Again!

Remember that time not so long ago when my husband was gone for 3 weeks and I had my parental breakdown moment? Well, I think the company felt sorry for me that I had been husbandless for so long and sent me with him on a trip to the Grand Canyon and to Vegas! Sure, we had about 20 other people with us from Turkey that Justin was taking care of but I didn't care. I was so excited to get to spend some time with my cute hubby.

My in-laws were so kind to watch our kids while we got to see the beauty of the Grand Canyon again!

This area below was really cool. It's a lookout point that is a 360 degree view of the canyon.

Here is the massive group of Turks that Justin took care of for a week or so. They went to Disneyland and Universal Studios as well and I can only imagine trying to shuffle this whole group of people around those places when they don't speak English, and only have 1 translator! I think that deserves a raise in and of itself!

It took a few tries to get this picture but it turned out pretty cool!

This picture would have been so frame worthy if the guy taking it would have only gotten the gorgeous sunset in it! I mean really, how hard is it to put us on the far left hand side of the picture?!? Oh well. I guess he was nice to take it for us.

In Las Vegas, we stayed in the Paris Hotel. It was so cool inside there with the fake ceiling, the gorgeous architecture, French smelling food (intermingled with the casino smoke, yuck), and lovely music being played.

The Eifel Tower they have there is pretty impressive. Unfortunately this still doesn't make up for our missed trip to Paris and London last year. That was a sad, sad day. If you don't remember what happened, you can read about it here. *Sigh* Someday.

There is not much for us LDS people to do in Vegas if we want to uphold any kind of standards so we always opt for going to a show. This time we went to see La Réve. This show was highly rated but honestly, I wasn't that impressed. We have also seen the show "O" and I felt the same. I guess I'm just not much into the modern art way of doing things. It was cool to see what crazy things they can do with their bodies but the story lines are always weird... like Alice in Wonderland type weird.

The stage was pretty cool though. It was theatre in the round seating.

It was a quick but fun trip and I was SO happy to spend some much needed time with Justin. I sure do love him to pieces!

Going Behind Enemy Lines

I caught this spy passing important items and information to those prisoners who had been sent to time out. Her punishment is still yet to be decided.

Here she is caught in the act. These photos will testify against her.

She thought she could fool us with her beauty but I could see right through those beautiful eyes and that snaggled tooth smile of hers from the beginning. We are now keeping a tighter watch on those prisoners and making sure that no more information goes in or out when time out is enforced:)

My First Breakdown

I have never felt super overwhelmed as a mom. Sometimes stressed when I am trying to get things done on a deadline with crying babies, but I can't ever remember feeling completely overwhelmed and breaking down crying. Well, it happened last night. I hit my breaking point. Ethan is such a sweet boy but he is at a very hard age for me. I can handle the busyness of taking care of a young toddler and temper tantrums don't even phase me but talking back, screaming at me, arguing with me and manipulating me are all new things for me and I'm not quite sure how to deal with them. And that my friends, is the stage Ethan is in.

I won't go into all the details (because there are many)of what sent me into breakdown mode, but after Ethan had been screaming for an hour and woke up Ellie while he was at it, I lost it and I shut his door and called Justin just bawling. * Side note: Justin has been out of town for work the past two weeks and won't really be home until this Saturday. 3 weeks of him traveling makes it kinda hard on me sometimes, even though I like to pretend that I'm superwoman. * Anyway, I told Justin that I just don't know what to do anymore, I've exhausted all of my parenting strategies and nothing is working, I had never felt anger like I did to Ethan in that instant and that scared me, and I just felt like a horrible mother. He assured me that I'm not a bad mom and gave me some advice on how to get Ethan to calm down, which was take him to the downstairs bathroom and let him scream it out in there until he was ready to go to bed. Amazingly it worked and after 15 min he stopped screaming/crying and when I went in he said, "Mommy, I'm ready to go to bed. And I won't scream and cry anymore" without me even saying anything. I was so grateful that it worked.

So anyway, I've had my head stuck in my Parenting with Love and Logic book reviewing some principles taught in there that I could apply to his age now but if anyone has any advice on some great parenting books that deal with this type of stuff, I love to read things like that! Just FYI for if you have advice: I'm not a pushover mom and I stick to my guns but that does not seem to work anymore with him. I'm not a huge fan of spankings. He isn't argumentative all the time. Taking away objects or privileges doesn't work with him yet either. He just doesn't care. We have always done time-outs but now that only sometimes works with him. Mostly, he still doesn't care.

So, go ahead. Congratulate me on having my first official parental breakdown. I think all of us moms are bound to and allowed to have them at one time or another, right? Hopefully I won't have another one anytime soon and I can learn how to get this situation under control!

Look Grandma! Fireworks!

I just have to blog about this before I forget it.

While we were gone in Cancun on our little getaway this last December, I was doing my daily check-in with Grandma Smith to ask her a billion questions about the kids, ask about their dietary habits, to make sure they are still alive etc. (I'm not the only mom that does this, right? :) She told me of how Ethan came running down the stairs that day and said, "Grandma! Grandma! Come see the fireworks!!" I'm sure she was very curious as to what he was talking about so she followed him upstairs to find that he had CUT, with SCISSORS a PLUGGED-IN straightening iron and was seeing "fireworks" as he was happily chopping through the cord. It blew a whole in the scissors and I think blew a few plugs in the upstairs area. I think they had a LONG talk about how "Scissors don't cut cords, only paper." Or at least, that is what Ethan told me. I think we felt very grateful that this lucky little boy is still alive.

So anyways, I walk into Grandma and Grandpa Chapman's house today and I saw this picture up on their fridge...

And although what he did should probably be no laughing matter, I couldn't help myself and laughed right out loud! He is holding the scissors and the straightener that he cut. Isn't this picture hilarious? It totally looks like a mug shot with the evidence in his hands and as if he is trying to say, "I didn't do it!"

I sure love this little mischievous boy and I am SO glad that he is still around to brighten our days!

Movie Night

So since my husband has been gone for a while working, on Saturday I decided to have a movie night/date night with my favorite little boy! We watched Princess & the Frog but fast forwarded through all the scary shadow man parts (don't you think those parts are creepy?!), and we ate fruit snacks, stayed up late and cuddled on the couch. I sure do love that I still have a pretty cute guy to watch a movie and cuddle with me when daddy is gone!