Happy 12th Birthday Ali

Ali turned 12 this year.  It is a big birthday.  No longer is she in Primary but now she is in Young Womens and that means she is treated like a Young Woman.  I think that the church expects a lot from the youth these days and treats them more and more like they are grown than they used to.  I explained to Ali that she had been taught all that she needed to know and now we would help assist her in applying what she had learned in to her life.  

She is a great young woman who has learned a lot over the years and I couldn't ask for a more responsible daughter.  She is always on top of everything... organization in her room or our house, school work, church assignments... anything she can do she tries to do.  She is a great help in our house, she baby sits, does a multitude of chores and can cook many meals all by herself.  

For her birthday she had a couple friends over and they did girly things.  One girl spent the night and she enjoyed it all.  We wrapped her presents up and secretly put her iphone inside a camelback we got her for hiking.  She was very excited but I forgot to take any pictures of the event...

face painting

Annika's friend, Eve, has a mom who face paints.  Annika loves it.  Here are some pictures of her in her face painting... 

Sea Life Aquarium in Draper

We decided that for our last day in Utah we would check out the new aquarium.  I was hoping it would be less crowded since it had been opened a while but it was still quite crowded.  We thought it opened at 9 but it opened at t10 so we took a walk along the Jordan River Trail first.  IT was such a beautiful day.  

 I thought the aquarium was pretty nice although not worth a season pass for my family... we wouldn't go enough from Heber.  We enjoyed ourselves although we were pretty much done after two hours.

 My favorite thing in the whole place was the sea turtle.  I really want to swim with these someday.

Classic Roller Skating

I took the kids to classic roller skating in Orem while on our trip to Utah to get a bit of their energy out.  They really enjoyed the time there and used roller skates, scooters, and played on all the slides.  They also used their own money to buy treats I would have never bought for them... lucky for allowances.  

Bike ride up Provo Canyon

One of my favorite things about the hotel in Orem was that we were close to Provo Canyon.  I rode up the canyon twice and Cameron did it one of the times with me.  We even managed to ride up south fork a ways to the upper park past southfork park.  I love Cameron having a bike to ride with me.  

Finally the House Sold

We found out that we were moving to Utah at the end of January and by the middle of February we had our house on the market and had made plans to have a house built in Heber City Utah.  We put down money for the house and picked everything out... but the house wouldn't be done for at least 5 months.... so we were not too anxious to have it sell.

At first we had hardly anyone look at it.. and that was fine.  Then we figured out ways to list it where it would be seen better... and some people looked and said the house looked great but no one made an offer.  Once it was April, I started to get a little worried... what if the house didn't sell?  I looked at our calendar and realized that I would really like it to sell by the second week of May... and then I told my realtor and my family that we needed it to sell then.

There were a lot of reasons that I wanted it to sell prior to our house being done... we knew it would be next to impossible to get the timing right, the new loan would be easier to go through without an old house, I was too stressed to wait and our summer plans would be complicated if we were trying to sell a house or move in the middle of it all.

Needless to say we came to the first weekend of May without a realistic possibility and I was worried.  An older man drove by our house on Saturday evening and took a flier and I offered to show him the inside of the house... although I never thought he would want it.   Sunday our family fasted and prayed that our house would sell by that Friday the 10th...

Tuesday Evening we got an offer and by Friday we had it all buttoned up... I was so grateful that our house could sell and consider it a huge answer to prayers.

We took the kids hiking up Rock Canyon.  It was the perfect temperature and the hike was beautiful.  The kids enjoyed climbing on all the rocks.