Life is Beautiful

Motherhood, Sewing, Family

things that are making me happy right now.

~ Etc.

1. our christmas tree. 
2. yoplait light(planning on making these w/ my girls)
3. the way adi eats her apple. 
4. finding a suspicious bite mark on the butter when opening the fridge.
5. seeing my front cover on the magazine stand.
6. husband coming home from work with boxes of haagen-dazs.
7. a delicious korean/hawaiian restaurant that just opened.
8. the use of stickers by adi.
9. watching daddy play random things with the girls.
(the girls are taking turns being inside a pillowcase while daddy spins it around)
10. grilled avacados. 
okay, so i just realized more than 1/2 of it are of food.  
but what can i say?  food makes me happy! 

a date with my husband: motab christmas concert.

~ Etc.

my sweet sister-in-law offered to babysit our two girls and even gave us their tickets to the mormon tabernacle christmas concert, which is awesome since we don’t get to go out on dates much.  i felt giddy like i always do when i know i’m going on a date with my husband.  so we drove to salt lake city and after 30 minutes trying to find parking, we barely made it in.  then after the concert, we walked around temple square and saw the display of lights and then went and tried crown burgers since it had really high reviews(5 out of 5 stars!).  it did not disappoint and their fries are the bomb but i think i still prefer my western bacon cheeseburger from burger supreme.  i mean, it has bacon & onion rings inside the burger, can it get any better than that? 😉
then we went to the maverick’s gas station so i could try these beef sticks that my husband always talks about.  he says he means to always save one for me but it doesn’t last all the way home.  so we bought two and it took everything in us to save a little bit for our two girls.  it was so good!  so we excitedly talked about how we should order them online since they’re much cheaper but before we did, we had to go to another maverick’s gas station near our home to try out the other two flavors they had(peperoni and teriyaki), just to make sure we were ordering the best kind.  but the original flavor triumphed over them all, so we ended up eating the rest of our beef sticks we originally saved for the girls and gave them the peperoni & the teriyaki kind(shh, don’t tell the girls, k?).  and once we picked up the girls and put them to bed, we ordered 125 beef sticks online.  yes, 125 beef sticks, ya’ll.  we’re a little obsessed.  and we ain’t sharing.  
what?  what did you say?  christmas spirit?  what’s that? ;D

nu skin christmas party.

~ Etc.

we went to nu skin’s annual christmas party 
where kurt bestor was the performer.
jay and i get pretty excited to go every year 
because they hook their employees up!
jay was especially excited that he(which = mine, muhaha)
 got a kindle fire to take home after the party.
can you tell he was a little excited? 😉
s.t collection headband giveaway winners announced here!

happiest place in UT. for us anyway.

~ Etc.

i’ve been feeling pretty crappy the past few days.  don’t know what’s been in the air but i was just moody and bitter and feeling low, which is really sad because it’s almost christmas!  the time for happiness and love, right?  so since the best way for me to get out of my self-pity party is to forget about myself and do service for others, i did a few acts of service and i feel much better.  it really works everytime.  and it’s not because i’m a great person, but more so for a selfish reason, since i knew doing acts of service would make me happier and feel better.

and looking at this picture and the video makes me happier too. you might wonder what that black stuff is on my older daughter’s face? she snuck in some of my black eyeshadow on her face and was adamant she left her “pretty makeup on the whole day”. so i wasn’t going to tell her it wasn’t really pretty, how could i? so I just let her be. 🙂

our favorite fun place to go is the kangaroo zoo.  
and the reason why i say “our” instead of the “girls” 
is because it’s my favorite place too.  
i’m the only mom going down the slides and the rides with the kids
but i don’t care, i have so much fun!  
sometimes i want to tell all the starring mothers, 
“hey!  you guys should try this slide!  
it goes down really fast and i think you’d love it!” 

i hope you’re having a non-bitter, non-moody season that’s filled with lots of happiness and love. but if you’re feeling down, feel free to come and do a service for me. haha, so jk!

the curse of taking family pictures.

~ Etc.


warning: these are the extras from our christmas family shoot
and it’s a guinness world record for the highest number of pictures in a blog post.
i deleted quiet a lot(like three or four 😉 but i love them all so i have to post it all!

congratulations, you made it!  
there are way more pictures of A1(oldest one) than A2(youngest one) because A2 wasn’t in the best mood to take pictures.  oh, wait!  just like her dad!  i think we have a curse in our family.  the curse is that i get mad and cry every time we try to take family pictures.  remember our last year‘s pictures?  go back and look at how happy my husband looks.  oh boy!  we got in another fight this year and i cried and cried and cried.  it was probably the pain built over from the last year’s incident too, so it hurt x2.  i decided we’ll take individual shots since i was taking them myself and i can never get the self timer to focus good.  anyway, so after much thought on deciding the outfits we’d wear, i started snapping the pictures away with our girls.  A1 was a good sport, A2 was mad about something but she started to warm up for a short while, and then it was my husband’s turn to take pictures.  i thought his would be the easiest.  I wanted each of our personalities to show up in the photos so after taking some shots of him just looking at the camera with no personality whatsoever(and he has a lot of personality, one being really funny and witty), i told him to show his personality and he would just laugh and not even try.  i kept trying to encourage him like, “yeah, that was good!  i liked it when you looked to the side.  maybe look to the side and look tough!”  and he just continued to laugh and he would attempt at it, and then just start laughing.  i was so hurt!  i took that as, “i don’t care about these stupid photos, this is all a joke, so i’m not even going to try.”  pictures might seem like it’s just pictures, but to me it’s more than that.  it’s a whole year of happenings summed up in one picture.  that our family endured a year with happiness, hardships, health, imperfections, love, and forgiveness.  that we won’t be taking another family picture until a year later when our kids are a year older and they won’t look the way they look this year.  so i got snappy, and then got mad, and then he was mad that i was being snappy and pissy, and then i started crying and said forget about it and walked out of the room.  i continued to cry out loud in the livingroom while my girls came and hugged me and told me it was okay.  
it wasn’t until a few hours later, after they came home from church(which i stayed home because my eyes were like a puffer fish), and my attempts at giving him the death stare in trying to scare him(it never works, shesh!), we made up.  and guess what?  i was mad for no reason!  it was just a huge misunderstanding!  after communicating, we realized and understood why the other person was mad.  i told him what his actions were saying to me and he told me that wasn’t his intention at all.  that he was really trying his best but he just had the giggles!  that he really tried his best and he was more so laughing at himself in trying so hard.  ah.  only if i had not gotten emotional about it and we communicated correctly right then.  yes, yes, husband, i’m admitting that i’m sorry and that i was wrong.  it doesn’t happen often that i’m wrong, so you better embask in the moment. 😉
so the next day, he came home during his lunch break and he was great when i took pictures of him and he was wonderful at taking pictures of me.  and we were happy.  until next year’s family pictures.  hahaha.  haha.  ha.