A Wedding at our House!

So I did say I would tell why I have been so busy, and now I have the chance to do that. We had a wedding in our backyard last weekend. I was the designated wedding planner and decorator for the event. It was for our very close friends Kyle and Hana Smith. She is from Japan and came to America to go to school where they met and dated. They had pretty much decided they would get married, but she only had a student visa so she had to go back to Japan since she had graduated from school. This past December she came back and enrolled in school down here so she could be with Kyle. They kept waiting to see if her parents could come out from Japan and it just never happened. So at the last minute they decided they would rather just go ahead and get married instead of waiting any longer. Plus she had to get married or start school in the next 2 weeks to still be considered a legal immigrant, and school as an international student is extremely expensive and pointless since she already has a degree and would only be going so she could stay in country. Anyways so we threw together a backyard wedding in our backyard in only 2 weeks. It was a rough and busy two weeks because several of the people that would have been helping me were not able to help. Two of our other extremely close friends were out of town visiting family because he is leaving for Afghanistan this weekend, and Jono went to CO to see family, and I usually rely on him for help in lots of ways. Also Jake has been really busy with a huge thing at work that had him working late hours; plus his best friend (that also would have been helping me out wherever he could) got really sick and was in the hospital for over a week. So Jake was working really late and then going to the hospital to spend time with him and support him however he could. I was kindof on my own (with the help of the bride and groom of course.) Aside from arranging wedding decor and ordering food (no, I wasn't going to take on cooking as well), we also did our own DJing, and we had a lot of stuff to borrow/rent. We also did a complete overhaul on the yard. At first it didn't seem so bad, but once we got going we had a lot of work to do. We had to prune and trim every tree and bush, plus weed pulling, and raking up lots and lots of pine needles. We had about 10 bags of yard waste picked up on Wednesday and by Saturday Jake was taking another 35 bags of yard waste to the dump! It was a lot. But now we don't have to do yard work for a long time:) I had a lot of help on the yard thankfully. Everything came together in the end with only a few panic attacks here and there. It turned out beautifully and the weather was so unbelievably wonderful. It wasn't blistering hot, or rainy or windy. Just perfect. So here are the pics from the wedding in total random order:

Here are Kyle and Hana in their Kimonos. Hana has her own family Kimono in Japan, but she couldn't get it here in time, but she was able to borrow one. She was married in a wedding dress because it was an American-style ceremony. She said she didn't want to wear a kimono unless she was having a very traditional Japanese ceremony. Plus, it is traditional for the bride to change attire 4 or 5 times throughout the wedding celebrations. So they changed to Kimonos for the dinner and speeches. Then back into wedding attire for dancing and the rest of the party. It was really neat to watch the little Japanese ladies dress her in the Kimono. It is such a complicated process. It was really beautiful and none of the pics I got do it justice.

Here's our reception set-up for the dinner. It looked so awesome at night with all of the lights.

Here's a picture during the ceremony. They were married by my stake president even though they aren't mormon. They all work at the same place, so Kyle felt more comfortable asking someone to marry them that he knew. They aren't church goers, so he didn't want to just get some random priest. The coolest thing was that during the ceremony a hummingbird came and hovered right between them during their vows. It was so beautiful. I wish I had caught that on camera, it was such a neat touch.

They didn't have a wedding party, but they did ask Mckayla and Lyla to be flower girls. They looked so cute and concentrated so hard on their flower-scattering duties.

Here's the reception set-up without people in it yet. We didn't have enough chairs to have them in both places so we had to ask people to take their chairs over to the reception. Kindof tacky, but oh well. I don't think anyone minded.

I had to show off the centerpiece Hana and I came up with. We also rolled the silverware and made the wedding favors.

Here's the ceremony set up. Jake has worked so hard for us to have green grass, and here we are putting it to good use.

I meant to take some pictures of the food, but I forgot. It was amazing! Hana is friends with the owner of a Japanese restaurant in town and she catered the event. She brought everything on big Japanese platters and it was delicious! She brought a lot though. There was a lot of sushi and spring rolls, tempura, potstickers, rice, teriyaki chicken, and a few other things. It was really really good. Anyways we are so happy for Kyle and Hana and their marriage! I am also so happy for all of the people that helped out and let us borrow things to make it nice, and I am so grateful for the perfect weather. We really are becoming quite the party house, but this was our biggest event to date. I don't think I'll be topping it anytime soon.

Summer is Officially Over

The girls have started school again. We can no longer go anywhere or do anything except for over school breaks. They started last Thursday. They are very excited about being big First graders. They now are allowed to walk home from the bus stop by themselves, though I am usually "taking a walk" down the street around the same time they get to the stop. They are disappointed that recess is so much shorter for first graders. But I think it is shorter for the whole school. This year there have been many drastic changes made to decrease costs. They have cut all of the art, music and PE for all elementary schools in the district and shortened the school day. It is practically half-day compared to last year. School starts at 7:55 and ends at 1:45. I am very disappointed with the changes and I hope that the voters in our district will wise up and see the problems they have created. Hopefully we will get to vote again and maybe have a shot at changing the budget now that we have seen the consequences.
Mckayla and Lyla are very excited to be back in school and hanging out with their friends again. It is funny that they have gotten the same type of teachers again this year. Last year Mckayla had a very structured class and we got frequent communications from the teacher, her teacher appears to be the same this year. And Lyla's teacher last year, although not the communicative type, was very loving and still a great teacher, though maybe a bit less structured and we were a bit more in the dark. Her teacher this year appears to follow that motif as well. But it really works for their personalities, so I think it is great. It is just funny how that worked out the same again this year. Here's hoping I can keep up again with getting the girls to school on time, and doing homework every night which they have now that they are big first graders.

Our Big Trip Part Three: Chicago!

Though I was born in the midwest and have been back there many many times I have never spent any time in Chicago. We've driven past a time or two, but I've never actually gone there to do sightseeing. We had one extra day to do stuff in between the reunion and our flight home so we decided to go see Chicago. It was really cool. I am sad we were so limited on time and didn't get to do much. But we did hit a couple of hot spots. I can not get pictures to show up in the order I want, or move them into a good order, so it is just random and I'll explain as I go.
We decided one thing we had to do was go to the top of Sears Tower, (or what was formerly known as Sears Tower). The thing is, that is the one thing that a lot of people decide they have to do, so the wait was really long. We ended up in line for at least 2 hours, and we were not prepared for it. The kids were starving by the time we got to the top so we bought some nasty overpriced popcorn at a gift shop. Still, it was an amazing sight. They had these glass balconies that you could step out on and look straight down. It was so freaky. Here is Jaxon on the balcony:
Here is a view from the top:

We also ended up going to legoland. It was pretty cool and the kids had a really great time. The thing is that if you go on a trip with kids everything has to be geared towards kids. Jake and I would love to go back and do grown-up things like visit museams, go to shows, and do more sightseeing. Legoland was still fun though.

The last thing we did was to go down to Navy Pier. They have the biggest ferris wheel I have ever seen there, but we didn't get to ride it because it started to rain soon after we got there. Everything shut down right as we were going to buy tickets because there were reports of lightning. We still walked down it and looked out over the lake and back at the big city. It was really neat. Here's a view of the city at night from the pier:

We went to this 50's style diner in downtown that not only served up some good food, but they served up a big helping of Chicago attitude with it. It seems as though people are proud of their rude population like the south is proud of their "southern hospitality". Our waitress yelled at us a few times, and got more than impatient if we took too long to decide. There were signs on the wall that said things like "eat and get out." It was all in good fun though and we were entertained by the rudeness of people and how some people got all offended and the servers didn't care. Here's Kailey in one of the hats:

Here's Lyla modeling a hat:

Here's all of us at the top of the tower formerly known as Sears Tower: (not sure why Mckayla is making that face).

Here's Jake and the kids on the glass balcony:

Here's some of the mini-Chicago at legoland:

The entrance to legoland:

There's a view of the tower formerly known as Sears Tower from the highway. We were at the very very top of that huge building! And it took less than 2 minutes to get to the top!

Here's Jaxon and a buddy in the jungle adventure part of Legoland:

And that is it for our big trip! Our flight home went really well. The kids slept the whole way because we had to wake them up so early to go to the airport. Plus it was a non-stop flight which made our lives so much easier. Then we got really busy when we got home, which explains my big delay in posting this last post. More to come.....hopefully soon.

Our Big Trip Part Two: Michigan

Wow lots of pictures! Too many to choose from! After Indiana we headed up to Michigan for a reunion with the Maple side of the family. We all split the cost of renting a lodge-type place that was just a 20 minute walk to the beaches of Lake Michigan. We stayed up there for 3 days and we had such a great time. Everything could not have gone any better or smoother (kudos Maria!), which was such a relief after the disasters of our last reunion. Some of the awesome things we did: blueberry picking, beach, family talent show, beach, campfire, beach, ect. I loved the blueberry picking, they were sweet and delicious, unlike the ones you can buy in the store. All of the kids left with purple stained mouths and hands, plus we had ample blueberries to eat for the rest of the week. The beaches of Lake Michigan were so nice! The water was surprisingly warm, and it feels like you are on the ocean minus the salt (which is a good thing). It wasn't crowded and there was plenty of sand for kids to roll in. I would definately love to go back to swim there. Our Family Talent Show turned out to be a huge success. We did our own version of "thriller" as a Micheal Jackson tribute. Everyone came up with creative fun acts. I think we will be doing that again. We also learned how to make our own jewelry and the girls and I made a few different jewelry sets for ourselves. We took nice family portraits that I will be sharing once I can copy them from Katie's picasa. The following pictures are in a completely random order.

Here's the Thompson family doing their act for the talent show, can you tell what dance they're doing?
Here's the Price family's act, they lipsynced to "lime in the coconut"

Here's Mckayla in the sand:

Here's Katie and Amber who FINALLY got into the water:

Here's some random guy I saw in the water who I thought was incredibly sexy so I snapped a picture without his knowledge, then put it online without his knowledge, but you have to admit- he's pretty dang sexy!

This is my mom and her older sister Jo being lifeguards.

Here's my cousin Maria holding Kailey. Ps-she planned this whole thing plus had to move to another state the next week, so BIG KUDOS to Maria for such an awesome reunion!

Jake with our baby fish Jaxon. He has shown a natural ability to swim and a love for the water. He will already swim across our pool by himself (with a floatie on, but no one helping him) and our girls wouldn't do that until just this summer after they had taken swimming lessons!

This is my niece Megan. I caught her doing meditative sand angels.

Here's Jessica's hubby Luke with Jane and Kailey all in red:

Here's Jaxon devoring a smore by the campfire:

Here's our gathering at the campfire behind the lodge:

This is my uncle Larry reading a bedtime story to all of the kids. One of the grandparents read a bedtime story every night. I thought that was a brilliant idea.

Here's Gabriella, Eve, and Lyla in the lake.

After 3 full days at Lake Michigan we headed off for the last part of our trip. It was so fun to have everyone together again under happy circumstances! We had such a great time with everyone and it was actually a relaxing vacation because we just played together and hung out and didn't try to over plan on activities. So then we were off to............