Jacob and Elise

I have a bunch of pictures so I'll get right down to business. We went to California last month. We were planning on going to visit Jacob's grandparents right before school started again since early this spring, but sadly his grandfather passed away the weekend before we were going to leave. So we ended up leaving a few days early to make it down there in time for the funeral. It was a wonderful service, and it was good to spend time with family. I'll explain a little more as we go. So, without further ado, here are some pictures:


Jacob was happy to be out of the car and in our hotel room. (if you look in the mirror in the bottom left, you can kind of tell he was dancing...)



These were some beautiful flowers we kept in our room for the funeral the next morning.



After the funeral, most of the cousins went to the park down the street.

We didn't see any mountain lions, but there was a miniature zoo in the park that we did go explore.

Jacob and Adrian were cute.

Jacob, Brian, and Adam played frisbee and then...

Everyone played duck-duck-goose!

Adrian's shoes were not cooperating when it was time to leave, so Jacob helped.

This was at Herschel's burial. We almost didn't get to go to the grave site because it was considered a 'construction zone', but they eventually arranged things so we could go. Jacob also had the opportunity to dedicate the grave, which was really great.

My frozen yogurt

vs.

Jacob's frozen yogurt.

Hooray! I love Penzeys. I also love my husband for taking me clear out there and not complaining no matter how long we spent there :)

My monkey in an awesome tree just outside Penzeys.



We went to the beach with Brian and Katie

Who were very cute.



We found this flower on the way to the beach from our car that we had to park 3 miles away. I couldn't believe it wasn't plastic.

Jacob built a sand castle.

...and threw Finding Nemo fruit snacks at the seagulls.

...and took pictures of me.

Jacob picked me this flower, and since it was too huge to put in my hair, we ended up using it as an "air freshener" in the car.

Hollywood Walk of Fame.

It couldn't keep our interest for too terribly long, but it was cool.

I mostly took this picture for Ethan.

I mostly took this picture because... um, what the heck?
If you can't read it, I highly recommend enlarging it so you can.

We went to the farmers market and The Grove outdoor shopping center across the street. Both were right up my alley.

This was right outside a toy store at the farmers market.

While we waited for it to be dinner time, we had a guy on the pier draw our caricature which was funny. We played skee-ball at the arcade, watched a swimsuit model get a bunch of shots taken in the freezing water (funnier than you'd expect), dodged seagulls, and had a great time.

A big seagull swooped down and snatched the churro right out of this lady's hand about a minute after we took this picture. She was pretty freaked out, and it was hilarious :)

Jacob had the camera on the day we went to the zoo. This is me in line.

This is me being happy because I have a huge bag of kettle corn :)

Pretty.

The giraffes were hungry.

...and a little desperate.
This one was the baby, and was very cute.

The gorillas were cool too. Jacob took some good pictures, no? yes.

I've always loved flamingos. Just not in my lawn.


Our last day in California, we didn't feel like doing much.

We went to the park down the street again and jacob hiked around a bit while I read in the shade for a while. It was very nice.

These lizards were all over the place!

Tangelos waiting to ripen.

There are no words to describe how happy this tree made me.

Her backyard. We swam a couple of times, which was fun. We laughed a lot. I think swimming makes us giggly.

Jacob picked some of the harder to reach Tangelos.

Walking back from the tree along the wall.

Mission accomplished.



On our way back to Utah, we stopped in Vegas for a couple of days. We decided to do this because Green Day (Jacob's favorite) was playing there. Actually, they were playing in Salt Lake the day we left, and in California while we were there, but it would have been a long drive and we'd have gotten back at like, 3 in the morning, so we decided Vegas was our best bet. Besides, neither of us had actually stayed there before. So, turns out I'm not the biggest fan ever of Las Vegas... at least the Strip part. Maybe it was sensory overload, and maybe I was just really homesick, but I couldn't really see the appeal... Don't get me wrong, there's some really cool stuff there. For example, we did go visit the Coca-Cola store and M&M World, both of which were fascinating. We had some cheap all you can eat pizza which was delicious, and spent a good hour and a half driving down 6 blocks of the strip admiring the lights (and the traffic). I can say that the Green Day concert was the most awesome concert I've ever been to though. We both enjoyed it immensly :) We had a great time in Vegas, even though we cut it a little shorter than planned, and we didn't get to visit with family there like we wanted. Another nice part was that driving home from Vegas seemed like nothing compared to driving straight from Utah to California :)

Hope your summer was as awesome as ours was!

Posted in: on Saturday, September 12, 2009 at at 2:10 PM 1 comments  

The diarhea's aren't exactly why we haven't blogged since Easter, but it's a good excuse from an even better movie, so we'll take it. We've done a lot since Easter evening. My ankle is at about 85% I think, still hoping for a little more movement, but I can't complain (especially since I didn't go to physical therapy nearly as often as prescribed).
Of course as most of you know, we bought a wonderful home in Harbor Park. We've been here for a couple months and quickly realized that everyone's prophecies about home ownership were all too true. I believe 5 different types of plumbing have been required so far: Sink leakage, toilet not flushingage, spinklerage, installing new gas lineage, and a little bit of dishwasher malfunctionage. Fun stuff, but I do feel good about knowing how to fix/install more things! Also, as you can see, I didn't exactly want a sandbox right below our deck (see Jacob childhood section on finding Indian clay), so I had fun covering it with pavers in my spare time. So far, the best perk about having a 1/3 of an acre lot is the big garden space, no matter how much morning glory (bindweed for some of the Williams' folks reading) there is. Elise and I have had a lot of fun with our plants, and have even got a surprise yellow squash, mystery melon (honeydew?), and another zucchini that we didn't plant. (each picture is just one day's worth)

I realize some of you may have noticed that one of the previous pictures is not from our garden... I had to give Ethan (Elise's little brother) a shout out because he is officially in the MTC headed to Fresno, California. He is really doing well and is the District Leader over his MTC District. I realize this is a boring blog for a very eventful 2 months, but Elise is packing for Kung Fu camp and left the uncreative one to do the writing. Although I'll have you know that she didn't think you could resize pictures on this thing and this blog would not have been possible without being able to do so! We will try and blog more often about smaller things in greater detail in the future so you all can blog stalk us, but for now this will have to do.

P.S. I killed King Kong and his brother in the same week with my bare hand in our basement, take that world!

Posted in: on Wednesday, August 5, 2009 at at 9:05 PM 3 comments  

This probably will have nothing to do with Easter aside from the fact that it IS Easter today... It may have nothing to to with much of anything for that matter. I will start off, however, with some general updates.



Jacob and his ankle are doing better each day. Some days a little too much better for my liking... The days like yesterday when he decides to jump on my parents' trampoline on one foot for example. Or the days like yesterday when he decides to skip all my parents' front steps when we he's hopping down them to leave. Or the days like yesterday when he asks if I think he can touch the rim of the basketball hoop jumping off of one leg and then does it no matter what I say... Luckily for us he's been pretty skilled and agile on one foot.
The swelling is finally down so much that it almost looks like a regular foot most of the time.

Though it's feeling much better, Jacob still enjoys grossing people out by showing them where the screws are poking out of the inside of his ankle. They're not through the skin, but they're still pretty disgusting for some folks. Having grown up in the house I did, and especially having the mother that I do... It's a little harder to gross me out than a couple screws on an ankle. So luckily for you (and since half of you readers grew up in the same house I did, with the same mother I did) I'm posting a photo! So thanks mom for thinking gross things are fascinating (and usually worth discussing at the dinner table), and thanks to my younger siblings and cats for the endless supply of disgusting things to desensitize me (shout out to Erynn for barfing in my hands while I was babysitting! you're the best). You've all made me who I am today.




See? Not that gross. The other side, however, with the big gaping hole they sliced in him to put the screws in, IS a little gross for most tastes. So I won't post a picture of that one. You're welcome.



I wanted to post the video we took of Jacob's birthday, but our computer and our video camera have been fighting for the past little while, so till I can convince them to play nicely, looks like I'm out of luck. For now I'll suffice it to say that we ate lots of cake, Jacob got lots of wonderful gifts and well-wishes, and we had lots of fun with family and friends. Thanks to everyone who made it great!

Two more exciting things happened! One, half of the Bush family came over to my apartment and played Scum with us on Friday night! It was great fun for us, and I thank them for hanging out with us and making us feel more awesome, and also for not complaining about the icky store bought cookie dough cookies. Two, I found my shoebox of pictures from Europe! I've been looking for it forever! Jacob and I went to see if we could find some college textbooks that I need again for this Spring semester (hooray for finally going back to school!), and as we were rummaging through a billion boxes of my random stuff in the storage locker, ta-dah! My beautiful Nike shoebox full of European memories. *happy sigh* I'm not sure how thrilled Jacob is going to be about going through all of them... but that's too bad for him :)


James owns a Zelda shirt. Jacob loves James' Zelda shirt. James tried to give Jacob his Zelda shirt once. Jacob is 1/2 the size of James. Jacob felt bad about taking such an awesome shirt from James. James kept his Zelda shirt. James came over last weekend. James had a new awesome shirt. James' new shirt was Ghostbusters. James had been to WalMart. James had another shirt too! James' other shirt was another Zelda shirt. James other Zelda shirt was for Jacob. Jacob was happy. James and Jacob wore their awesome shirts to see Monsters vs. Aliens in 3-D. James and Jacob looked good.






Oh, and I went too....





Obviously Jacob thinks it's pretty funny to poke me so I make weird faces while we're trying to take awesome pictures.






So, 3-D glasses are pretty cool. You can tell how exciting our lives are by 2 things. One, how often I post and the awesome content I deem worthy enough to blog about, and two, the fact that 3-D glasses made the cut.



But hey, it's not every day you find two people who look so good in them, right?

Happy Easter ya'll!

Posted in: on Sunday, April 12, 2009 at at 9:07 AM 2 comments