Our Honeymoon...7 1/2 years late

As part of our spring break trip we headed up to Oregon to visit Jake's mom. She was kind enough to volunteer to take on the kids for a couple of days while Jake and I took off on our own. We never went on a honeymoon and never went on a vacation as just the two of us, so we were very excited. We left on my 27th birthday for our trip to Cannon Beach. We splurged on a great hotel right on the beach, and even though it was cold we had a great time. Tropical beaches can be fun, but northern beaches are just so beautiful and peaceful. It was just what we needed. Thank you Benita and Mark!!!!
On our first day we just walked up the beach and explored the town, then enjoyed lava rock massages back at the hotel (heaven!!) The next day we went to Seaside, up the road. It is the end of the Lewis and Clark trail. We have been to St Louis, which is the beginning of that trail, and now we've been to the end. We enjoyed shopping and scouring the beaches for sand dollars. We only found a few whole dollars, but we got a bucket full of 'half-dollars'. We were told it is really hard to find whole dollars because all of the birds dig them up and crack open and eat them. We also explored further up the coast and crossed into Washington for a bit before heading back.
On our last day we went into Ecola State Park (right in between Cannon Beach and Seaside. We did a bit of hiking on the main trails, and then we found a little-used trail that led down to a small beach in between the cliffs. It was completely deserted and we enjoyed the serenity there. It was such a beautiful peaceful place. We ended the day at the temple in Portland before heading back to see the kids.
I just put the pics in a slideshow because I had so many to share. If you slide your mouse over the pictures you will see the captions I wrote. Warning: these pictures will make you want to travel here! It was beautiful!!!

Our New Temple

A new temple has been built in southern Arizona! It is in Thatcher, AZ. It is officially meant to serve the members of our area, as we are considered to be one of the core stakes for this temple. It is pretty exciting for all of the people here. Right now we are supposed to go up to the temple in Mesa, it takes us over 3 hours to get there so we don't go much. This temple is still a good 2 hours away, but we'll take it. Hopefully it will be much less busy than the Mesa one. It is a very small temple, but beautiful. We are excited to officially attend it after the dedication. Jake and I went up to be volunteers at the open house for a day. We sat in the front of the temple under the white tent (that won't be there when the temple is officially open) and helped people put plastic booties over their shoes. Yes there were many bootie jokes thrown around all day. It was fun to get to be involved in that event. The open house goes for the rest of this week and then next week it will be dedicated by President Monson! We haven't had the chance to take the kids up to the open house to go through the temple, but hopefully we will get up there before the end of the week!! There were no good pictures without fingers, so I had to go with what I had. That's what you get when you ask a stranger to take your picture!

I'm Back!

So it has been quite awhile since I have written anything on this blog. It is bad because this is really the only sort of journaling/scrapbooking that I do. I hope to take pictures and posts from my blog and turn them into a family photo album, I am currently looking into companies that do that. So I need to get back on it. I have included a few recent pictures just for fun. We did get a new camera back in March, but have been having many computer issues that did not allow me to upload pictures. Now we have an external hard drive that we store our pictures on. It is safer that way anyways. This computer may be on its last leg soon. We've had it for 6 years or so. It still works though, so we probably won't get rid of it until it dies.
Jaxon and Kailey have become best best friends. I am happy to say that I do feel like we were inspired in not preventing any pregnancy after having Jaxon. Before we had him we said he would be our last, but we both felt strongly that we needed to have another one soon. Maybe Kailey couldn't stand to be without her best friend for very long. They just love each other and play very well all day with minimal fighting. (Though I can't say the same about Jaxon and his older sisters.) Here he is helping give Kailey a bath:

We usually throw her in with the rest of the kids, but she usually requires much more bathing than the others (like after every meal) so she still gets a quick sink bath now and again.

These are my helpers when I was cooking up my first ever batches of strawberry jam. Strawberries were on sale for 88 cents a pound (as opposed to 2 pounds for$5) so we stocked up. I made 14 jars of jam and froze the rest. It turned out extremely well (if I may say so myself). I am starting to get a hang of this canning stuff, if only I had a garden to can from!

These pictures are specifically for my relatives with extreme culinary talents (Aunt Hope, Amber) and for my mom who made me the apron that inspired my cake. I LOVE the color purple (though I've never seen the movie) and my mom made that apron for me for my birthday. They had a cake decorating class at my church a couple of weeks ago and I decided to make a cake to match the apron. It was my first ever time working with fondant. It is a LOT harder than it looks!! This took me several hours (and that was in coming to the class with the cake already made and frosted!) But I thought it turned out alright.
Me in my apron with matching hat and earrings:
It was a super fun class, and hopefully I can create something nice for Mckayla and Lyla's birthday this week!