Reflecting on 2012

Here's a collage of some of our memorable moments that may or may not have made it into a post, but things I that I still wanted to share. Sometimes I took pictures and thought, "hey I'd like to blog about this!"

Spring 2012- Finding the hole in our air mattress.
We miss the Pierces, who used to live in Salt Lake. They would come over sometimes on Sunday for "Sunday snack". On this particular Sunday Matt mentioned, "we need to find a leak in our air mattress. We think we should take it out back on the pond." If you dont know Eric, you should, he's kind of spontaneous and the fact that he did this is not a surprise. In response to Matt's crazy suggestion, Eric, in his very "Eric-like-manner" said: "Let's do it right now!" So withouth further thought, they did.

At this point I wondered if Eric was going to be stuck. :)

Eric is trying to listen for the "hole"

Here's a picture of the Pierce's cute kids, Kinsley & Aila.

They let me babysit their kids.  We finger painted and Kinsley, the oldest, thought it was great, Aila on the other hand was pretty excited to see mom walk through the door when the night was over.

They love my son and I love watching them talk to him. They use high pitch voices and make everything sound "cute". Aila keeps calling him Baby Boston. :) (She has a cousin about the same age that is named Boston.) They're always trying to get him to look at them and play with them. I'm sure one day he'll appreciate all the female attention.

REAL Salt Lake. We were kind of hoping we'd go a lot but this seems to have been our only game of the season. 

Trying Something New 2012
We got to do somethings for the first time.

I roasted a marshmallow over the stove

Shot a gun (and being pregnant was a first too!)

We made these reflecting light things at boyscout camp (that was a first too!)

Matt's first with his wet suit in icy cold water!

 Second Grade 2012
I taught my last year of second grade. Man, I miss those kids! We took a field trip to the zoo.
We studied about animal habitats and then went to the zoo to "examine" if the animals had everything that they needed in their habitats at the zoo. My kids for the most part thought the zoo was doing their part but a lot of them were pretty unhappy about the elephants, giraffes, and especially the bats.

They thought the elephant enclosure was too boring. The elephants needed real toys and not just fake ones.The zoo had failed the elephants. They also thought it was unacceptable that the zoo had a "fake" tree for the giraffes. The giraffes needed a real one. As for the bats, the enclosure had too much light. The bats needed to be in a room that was pitch black.

My super cute class. We told them to all wear white shirts and blue pants that day. It made it easier to spot them at the zoo.

This particular class was a lot of fun too. For example, they were tired of being called "little kids" so as a class we thought we should write letters to the "bigger" kids and tell them what we think. They wanted to impress the older kids by using big words and decided to use the word "colossal" (we saw this word in a text we were reading once) to describe themselves. I told them they weren't really giants and couldn't call themselves colossal, so they thought to use it in another way.

They wrote, "we may be little but we are colossal learners!"

Teaching second grade is really that much fun.


Out doors 2012
We definetly got our share of national parks this year.

Zion

Arches

Glacier

Yellowstone

Jackson Hole

For Thanksgiving we headed down to Moab and did some mini canyons and camped out. My sister came along with us too. 

She really "digs" dirt. :)

We camped under this arch!

Baby 2012- Probably the biggest change of the year!
This little  man is SO MUCH FUN.  He is pretty easy to keep happy and I believe he is SO SOCIAL. If it's just me and him he seems pretty bored until someone new walks through the door and then he's all smiles. When we take him out he loves looking at the people and loves it when someone stops to talk to him. These pictures were for my sister's birthday. I took them and then posted them on her facebook page.

                                         

 

Baking 2012
With my recent discovery of Pintrest I've started trying out a lot of new recipes. My most favorite this year has been the donuts.

Making donuts!

Get this... chocolate eclair cake. Best cake ever! SO GOOD.

 I was so proud of myself for making Matt this bouquet for V-Day.

Biggest Excitment of 2012 (next to having a baby)

Seeing a bear!

Christmas

Christmas? Where to begin.... well this was a year of firsts. 

1. First Christmas with baby.

  

2. First year we put lights up on our house!

 3. First time we checked out the Christmas scene in S-L-C.
I didn't take any pictures but we did witness a "live" nativity. Fully equipped with a live camel, sheep, cow, baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and a mini Bethlehem market place. It was pretty awesome. KSL also had a "Christmas Light" google map where they made it easy to drive around the city and see some pretty awesome displays. We saw quite a few light shows put to music. Those are my favorite! Where you turn on your radio and hear the lights twinkle to the beat in your car.

  One block had the whole Christmas story (from the Bible) on display as shown below.  Each house had one of these huge signs sitting on their front lawn with a scripture and a picture.

 One street had every single house with a cool light display. They had this banner, as you entered the street, that said something like "Welcome to Christmas Street" or something like that. I liked this one the best. The dragon I thought made a great substitute for reindeer.

3. We got to spend Christmas with Matt's family this year too. Not the first time we've spent Christmas with them, but the first time we spent Christmas with them in... Pocatello! (They moved a few months ago.)

My super cute niece.

I told her it was cool to put a bow on your head. :)

Matt lighting the candles for this awesome nativity.

Grandma Elton Christmas morning

Matt showing off Tomatillo's bath toys.

Auntie Kim

Cousins. :)

Ainsley got this tunnel as well as this pink back pack. She loves them both, as you can tell.

 As for our son.... I dont think he really cares about Christmas. I think all he cares about is if he can get it to his mouth or not.

 

Luge

Earlier in December, Matt got the chance to try out luge!

We have a friend who competed pretty seriously in luge. He's traveled around, competing, quite a bit when he was younger. He's now a coach and spends his days teaching English and his winter nights coaching luge. At the Olympic Oval, in Park City, they let people pay to pretend they're in the Olympics too! (Okay... not really "pretend to be in the Olympics" but at least see what it's like!)

Here's a video of Matt going any where from 47 to 52 mph. He's at the very last bit of this 30 second clip.

  A snap shot of Matt going REALLY fast, in case you missed him in the clip above!

Matt posing like an Olympian with his sled.

He's pretty excited.

  I'm not sure if you can read his red hat, but it says "Team USA". Matt was SOOOO excited about this red hat when he found it at home. He thought it only too appropriate for the event.

The excitement was too much and Tomatillo decided he'd rather sleep.

 Iara is married to the luger that brought us here in the first place.

She's pretty into this sport too. Every Thursday she comes up here for practice.

Home Improvements III- Success!

Back to the dishwasher...

 

Because of our water filter the water tastes WONDERFUL. Come on over and I will proudly get a glass of water for you out of our refrigerator! So as frustrating as the water filter was, you will understand that when I realized the insulation to the dishwasher wasn't going to fit around the dishwasher and fit under our counter, I gave up. I did call around and get some tips and advice but nothing worked so I decided it was Matt's turn. 

After a month I was fixing something else and felt so good when I was done I thought, "Hey! I should just install the dishwasher without the insulation." So I did. I made sure the electricity was turned off so I wouldn't take on a little shock again.

It's really not that loud. I figured we could probably substitute newspaper for insulation if we really cant stand the hum. I'm just grateful that it worked. Those blue lights below are the inaugural usage of my dishwasher. :)

My biggest complaint though is that because we bought one of those "eco-friendly" dishwashers, the thing takes 3 hours to wash one load! YIKES.

I am still interested in becoming a renter again.

Home Improvements II

 If we're friends on facebook maybe you remember this picture I posted:

Quite honestly it was a glorious day for me. I didn't think it was possible but I was able to disconnect the dishwasher all by myself. It did take me about an hour or so but after watching several clips on youtube and reading forums and blogs I was able to do it. Matt was at work and called me in a panic reminding me that Lowes was coming by to pick up our dishwasher in the next hour. Usually when you arrange for someone to drop things off and they say "between 1 and 4" you assume the worst--- 530. At least I do. Nope! These guys came 15 minutes before 1 o'clock. Eek! The dishwasher was not uninstalled and they would not help me.

After they left I called in to "complain" I told them that they told me they'd come after 1 and that my dishwasher was not ready to be picked up because they came early. (Like 15 minutes early.) ;)

So they agreed to come get it when I was "done".

Heh.

Now here's the commercial break on the dishwasher and a story of why I hate puddles.

Man, I was just happy to finally have a dishwasher and the chance to install it! So one Saturday when I decide that I'll do it Matt says: "you know the water from our fridge tastes gross, if you're working behind the fridge anyways you should try to figure out how to make the water taste good." His request was simple, but it was the beginning of the end.

Matt & I looked up some options online and to make a long and painful story short we decided we needed an inline water filter and so we bought one. Those were the two easiest steps! I thought installing it was going to be pretty easy but every time we put it in and adjusted it, sooner or later, we found a puddle. There was a lot of turning on and off the main water line to our house and a lot of hair pulling.... A LOT of hair pulling.

 Below is my first attempt. This whole system needs to fit nice and snug in the hole in the wall next to the black pipe you see. I had a hard time trying to get the copper wire to sit snug around this filter so that every time I tried to move it into that hole in the wall it would leak out on one of the ends and I would undoubtedly find a puddle of water. I hate puddles!

I anonymously called several plumbers in the Salt Lake Valley searching for advice. I'm not really sure if that is acceptable but I figured it was a nice way to get my questions answered. Is it okay to ask them questions if you're not paying them? 

I got this tip off of a plumber. Someone suggested I purchase these gray bendy pipes. They worked GREAT! No more puddles! I put those at the end of the pipe instead of having the copper pipe go directly into the water filter and VIOLA no more leaks. These bendy pipes though came as a result of many days, hair pulling, and many puddles----oh the puddles!

Ta dah! The final product!

As I'm looking at this picture I see the black and white electrical wire for the dishwasher. Need I mention that I was standing in a pool of water when that wire touched me? :) Why yes, I did receive a little shock. I think it was the rubber pliers I was holding that could have saved my life.  Earlier I had turned off the electricity to those wires, or at least I thought I had turned it off. Whoops?

This took a week to install. After doing this I decided to take a break from the dishwasher. As a result of this experience I think it will be a while before I can step in a puddle of water and not feel my heart break and the desire to cry.