One of Many Goodbyes

As I type, we are currently housed in a lovely little hotel room in Albuquerque NM.  I figured I might as well start the onslaught of posts regarding saying our goodbyes to home sweet home in Arizona and welcoming a new beginning in New Hampshire.  We officially left our family and friends and embarked on a new and exciting journey across the country to our new soon to be friends that will become our make shift family {hopefully}.

On Monday the kids and I were able to visit Costa Vida for the last time in awhile with one of my bestest oldest friends, Becky.  You know you are great friends when you can go months without seeing each other, but when you get together it is still like no time has gone by.  Within moments of arrival we were chatting away and laughing at silly memories from younger years, as well as swapping kid stories back and forth. It is crazy to think that we now have five kids between the two of us! 



Although we never seem to get together as much as we should, I will definitely miss you Becky and cannot wait for lunch again when we come to visit! {it makes me bummed to see how our two boys are finally getting to the friend age of life and now we will be separated again}



I seriously don't know what we did without cartoons and games on our phones for the little ones before...it has been a total lifesaver!

Cousins swim time

I think one of things we are probably going to miss the most about Arizona is cousin time.  Although our kids don't have very many cousins, they sure love the ones they've got.  Kaylin and Zacky were some of their favorite people and they all loved to spend time with one another.  Kaylin idolizes Miss M, and thus Maddie loves to be around her.  Eli has a special smile that he reserves only for when he sees his buddy "Zacky" and would run right over to play with him.  The last few weeks before our move, we were able to get together a few extra times to sneak some playtime in.  Our highlight was probably the infamous cousin sleepover we hosted at Grandma's house.  Kaylin felt like such a big girl having a sleep over with her cousins and kept saying "it's time to go to bed ALLLL together for sleep over!"  We celebrated with popcorn and movie night watching "Princess and the Frog" and then promptly went to bed.  The next day the kids were all so excited to eat breakfast with Katers and Maddie had a ball dressing Kaylin in some of her clothes.  We cannot wait to see our Hamelwright family again!

 Maddie showing off her swim team suit from Perry Pool

 Kater bug hanging out in her favorite spot...the spa otherwise known as "the little pool"

Eli has LOVED these diving toys which are known in our family as the "swimmer buddies"

More Goodbyes

Before we left Arizona, we were able to stop by our old street one last time and have the kids say goodbye.  It was pretty sad to see Robby so upset as he said farewell to his two best buddies, Luke and Jack.  I am so grateful for our neighbor friends we have lived so close to the past three years {and the same neighborhood for the past seven years}. They have all been so wonderful to our family and had become such an integral part of our lives.  We will never forget them and hopefully we can visit them next summer!!

Robby with his buddy Luke {pronounced Luke-y by Robby}

Jack and Maddie {he has been our next door neighbor for 3+ years and the kids have had so much fun jumping the fence between our two houses for playtime. We had the perfect friendship between our two families and they will be sorely missed}

Jack and Robby

Maddie with her girl pals, Ellie and Abby

Gymnastics

I think that one of things Maddie misses the most about Arizona {besides family of course} is her gymnastics lessons.  She LOVED her coach, Jason, and has loved all the girls she has been in class with the past year.  Not only that but this summer was a great summer for her.  It seemed like she was constantly learning new tricks and just really became more focused and passionate about the sport.  The last day of her gymnastic class she came home crying because she was so sad that she would no longer be taking classes at her gym.  Because she was so sad, I decided to try to go in and do one last day of open gym if we could fit it into our schedule.  As luck would have it {or unlucky in other instances}, we ended up postponing our move by a whopping 7 days and so I was able to take her back to gymnastics one last time.  The kids all LOVED it.  They all were able to run around and play, release some of their pent up energy and Miss M was able to practice some more gymnastics one last time.  This time it was all smiles from my Maddie as we left.  One of our items on the to do list once we get settled in NH is to find her another gymnastics club to take classes at {I think this may be at the very top of M's list, along with picking berries}.

 Maddie and coach Jason

Goodbye, Olympic Gymnastics.

Hello, new unknown New Hampshire Gymnastics, I hope we like you.

Some of my besties

I don't know why it takes us moving across the country for certain events to take place, but this is another of those things.  My friend Carla and I have been friends since way too long to even really remember.  I have a vague memory of being in the same seminary class at some point my freshman year of high school, but before then she was my sister's friend from band.  They started out best buddies and I was kind of the tag along younger sister that would go places with them.  Such as to YSAP activities when I was really not even a senior in high school, or on combo date nights with the older super cool {or sometimes not so cool} boys, or just to hit up Jamba Juice/ Bahama Bucks and chat about life together.  Somewhere along the line we picked up our friendship and became besties as we worked through boy drama, wardrobe malfunctions, hair dye jobs gone bad {at least I had my fair share of these}, growing personal testimonies of our Lord Jesus Christ through life challenges/trials, dealing with college schoolwork, etc.  The amazing part about our friendship is that we grew the closest while Carla was at NAU and I was down in the valley attending ASU.  I can remember multiple phone conversations we had together about real and meaningful things.  I have frequently told my hubby that out of all my non-family friends, I am able to connect strongest spiritually with Carla.  She tends to bring out the best in me, the non-selfish side, and I frequently admire her willingness to not settle for anything but the best!  She held out and found a great man that was worthy of her. Another great part about Carla is that she introduced me to another great friend of ours, Janelle.  Although we didn't meet until college, we have also formed a great bond together.  It seems like we have done almost everything together the past ten years.  We both dated our husbands at the exact same time, ended up getting married six days apart, had our first child two days apart, had our second child three months apart, and had our third child within six months of each other.  We also each have two boys and one girl.  It has been so fun to share so much in common with each other and I can still remember all the phone calls back and forth when we were pregnant with our first. 

So, when we found out we were moving I knew that we needed to get together with each other.  Somehow we managed to plan a date night and after we got there, we realized that this is our first date night that all of us have gone out together.  The icing on the cake was that my sissy, Loriann, was also able to come with her hubby.  We went to dinner and laughed and talked as if we went out every week together, instead of once in a blue moon.  It was such a fun memory to spend some extra time with these ladies and I sure miss each of them :)

 Janelle, Tiffany, Loriann, and Carla!

 "Girls definitely take better pictures than boys, right Jesse?"



Snowflake....take TWO

After taking a little hiatus from blogging, I thought I would once again attempt to document our trip to Snowflake in July.  Jesse's father grew up in that little town located in the middle of Arizona.  Every year they have a huge celebration the weekend of July 24th to celebrate when their town was founded as well as Pioneer Day (the day the LDS pioneers arrived in Salt Lake City). Jesse has memories of going to this celebration from the time he was a little boy and remembered the parade, kid races, rodeos, barbeque, and the fireworks.  Somehow in the 8+ years of marriage I have never been able to go up to this celebration due to work, church young women's camp, etc.  This year as we prepared to move across the country, I knew that if I didn't go up it would probably be years before I could make it up to the Pioneer Days Celebration in Snowflake.  So we fit it into our crazy schedules months in advance and were seriously so excited to go.  It definitely did not disappoint; I felt like there was always something to do pretty much at every moment of the day.

{taken at the gas station in Payson on our way to Snowflake.  J and I just got brand new phones and are LOVING all the fun editing options available!  For the moment we have completely abandoned our regular camera in place of the phone cameras....and yes, Miss thing knows how to strut her stuff}

{Eli with all his golden locks}

{Rubba....love the most recent battle wound right?!  Apparently he tried to jump backwards off the diving board at my parents house and didn't clear the board.  He scraped his chin down the board as he fell.  He is such a tough kid and didn't cry when it happened. Jesse freaked me out because he sent me a picture of R right after it happened and I thought he had a huge laceration below his lips.  Luckily no stitches required, just time to heal}

We drove up with our little family on Friday evening and arrived around 8:30/9pm to our hotel.  First thing we did was take the kids swimming at our chlorine infested indoor pool at the hotel.  I was at least glad that all the kids enjoyed themselves. I have to admit that I wasn't too thrilled about their super chilly pool and toxic level of chlorine in the spa. Seriously major gag point.  The next morning it was off to the children's races at the old church chapel on Main street.  It was fun to see all of our kids participate in their age race.  Eli refused to run when they said go {surprise surprise} and instead hit his head in Papa's leg.  Finally when Jesse walked out onto the grass Eli ran over to him.  He was much happier when he found out he got a piece of candy for running :)  Robby did really well, although his age category had so many children crammed in, he really could hardly run.  Afterwards he was a little bummed because he really wanted to win!  Maddie did really well and placed second in her age division and was only beat out by one of the boys.  Afterwards they were all a little confused that there was only ONE race per age division, so we had to have a few of our own on the sidelines to keep the troops happy :)

 {I refused to get all the way into the pool, and luckily with some persuasion Daddy took one for the team and  hopped in the water and played with the bigger kids for awhile}

Robby was showing off his Kung-Fu fighting skills to Nona and Papa

 Mr E absolutely refusing to run across the grass after they said "Go"

 {You can't see Robby very well in the picture, but if you look closely you can see that his hands are already in fists so that he can run "super fast" as he puts it}

{Miss M running with pigtails flying!}

After races, it was time to get ready for the main street parade.  I loved the parade! It was the perfect size for our little family and we all loved how we could sit right on the side of the street to watch.  We also enjoyed having so many family members with us....Nona, Papa, Abby, Joanna, Grandma, Grandpa and of course tons of J's cousins and Aunts/Uncles as well.  Maddie and Robby became experts at running out to collect candy.  My parents decided to come up for the celebration kind of last minute and after driving half the night to get there, they elected to sleep in a little while and came toward the end of the parade.  We were glad they were able to meet up with us at the parade and Grandma was nice enough to buy the children each a popsicle.

 {Miss M and Cody, her "Toronto cousin".  Funny thing is that these two cute kids share the same birthday, Sept 9th.  Cody is exactly one year younger than Maddie.  This fact cracks me up because M is obviously petite for her age and Cody is definitely big for his age}

 {Papa and Eli}

 {R and Abbs}

{the scene on the street during the parade...kids running everywhere to collect their precious goodies}

{Funny story:  Miss M kept dragging her grocery bag of candy on the ground, until it wore a small hole in the bottom.  Her candy kept falling out of the hole but for awhile she didn't realize it.  When she would look down at another piece of candy laying at her feet, her eyes would light up and she got this huge grin on her face as she carefully picked up another treasure and then would tuck it into her "goody bag".  After this scenario repeating for approximately 10 minutes she finally realized that it was just candy that had fallen out of her own bag.  She was pretty upset when she learned this piece of information and quite irritated that other children had also been scooping up some of her candy}

At the end of the parade the kids loved how the fire truck soaked the road with their water hose.  Literally flooded the street, it seriously took about 15 minutes for all the water to head farther down the little hill and aware from our kids feet.  Luckily we walked away with just a few muddy shoes....there were some other kids that ran out and soaked themselves in the water.  Once we were finished at the parade, we walked over to Jesse's cousins house and all kids ran wild in their backyard for awhile.  Sam and Vandee (cousins) bought J's grandparents home after his grandma passed away in 2005.  It has been so fun to see the updates/changes they have done to the place and particularly special to Jesse that someone in the family still owns the place.

We met my parents back at the old chapel grass for an authentic Snowflake barbeque complete with Beef, coleslaw, corn on the cob, rolls and of course watermelon slices.  I am not a beef eater, but the coleslaw and corn on the cob was delicious.  Did I mention the coleslaw?  Probably the best tasting slaw I have ever eaten.  Then it was back to the hotel for naps and relaxation with the children while J and his family went to the Snowflake temple to do some ordinance work.

Late afternoon we headed over to Aunt Ruth's house for an outside dinner eating, horse riding, tramp jumping, cat chasing good time.  Miss M was in heaven with the kitty cats and would carried every cat she could catch around, until they managed to escape her arms. Robby and Eli LOVED the barn in the backyard and took particular pleasure in climbing up the hay stacks and then jumping off onto the floor.  They also ALL loved riding horses.  I think it was the first time for all of them.  The only downer to this dinner was that we found out partway through that Jesse's cousin, Ron, had fallen while hiking earlier in the day and was stuck down in the canyon and waiting for helicopter rescue to come get him out.  It turned out to be this horribly long, scary evening for the family.  They finally managed to get him out early the next morning and he was transported down to Phoenix.  He injured his wrist pretty badly and required multiple surgeries, amputation of several of his fingers but thankfully he is now doing much better and has made it back up to Snowflake as he begins the long healing process.

 {Robby with his Papa}

 {Miss M and Uncle "Bert"}

 Maddie loving on another kitty 

 {Eli and Abbs...gotta love those pucker lips.  He does this whenever you tell him to say cheese}

 {Eli, Abby, and Maddie}

{Picture taking Daddy}

After dinner was complete we headed over to the rodeo.  At this point we were pretty tired and not too enthused about dragging all of the kids to a stadium and expecting them to sit.  I was so glad that we went anyways.  We all had a great time and they had some really neat things to watch: bull riding, calf tying, a musical barrel game, fireworks, etc.  The kids sat well for most of the show and ended up crashing big time in the car.  {Miss M insisted that I did her hair curly for the Rodeo, because at the Parade earlier in the day the Rodeo Queen had lots of curls in her hair and M wanted to "be just like her"}

{cute E at the rodeo wearing daddy's cowboy hat; just makes me want to walk over and give him a squeeze when I look at this pic}

{Grandpa, Robby and Maddie in the stadium at the rodeo}

{another funny/not so funny story:  After the rodeo I walked down to a large construction digger truck per the boys request and Maddie saw a little girl riding a horse.  It was obvious to me that this little girl had grown up around horses and probably been riding them since before she could walk.  M on the other hand didn't realize that and threw a HUGE tantrum because she wanted to ride a horse all by herself as well.  It was almost funny to see her kicking the dirt, stomping, pouting, and spouting off every mean thing she could think of.  She was so tired that when we finally got to the car, she fell asleep with her hand folded across her chest and a pout on her face.  Gotta love that girls spunk right?!}

The next day we took them to church with some of the family and then headed back to the Valley afterwards (the kids were so tired from the weekend that it was a rough sacrament meeting for us)

Frustrated

I had literally spent hours typing up my journal entry for our trip to Snowflake and it just DELETED itself.....beyond frustrated. Dear blog: I thought the whole reason you have your auto save function was to prevent this from happening.  Why is it that you constantly auto-save normally when I never need it, but somehow you fail to save my material for the time that it really matters.  You suck, in a major way.

Tid Bits

Maddie:
**Has done AMAZINGLY well this summer at gymnastics and has now learned- back handspring on tramp, back walkover, front limber, back hip circle on bars, handstand on balance beam.  It made me so sad when she had her last day of classes this week.  She is intent that we will quickly find a new gymnastics place in New Hampshire and was so sad to leave coach Jason.
**Participated in swim team this summer.  Although it was difficult at the beginning for her to swim 25 yards she stuck with it and learned how to swim much better.  She learned breast stroke, butterfly, back crawl, and freestyle (front crawl).  She was so excited to place 7th in breast stroke at one of her last meets instead of eighth.
**Can be a real stinker.  She asked me the other day if I had a baby in my belly.  I quickly told her no and asked her why she said this.  Here was her reply, "well your belly feels all soft, so I thought there was a baby in there."  Gee thanks little Missy, love you too.

Robby:
**Has also done really well at swimming this summer.  He only took one round of lessons, but has learned how to swim down to the deep end in my parents pool and retrieve objects, can jump off diving boards and swim to the other end of the pool in front crawl, can swim back crawl for a short distance, and basically monkey around however he chooses in a pool.  I love how all my kids are little fishies!
**Has been so excited to move to New Hampshire, but the other day I guess he was having second thoughts.  He came up to me and said, "Mom, I was thinking. How about we just VA-cation to Ba Hampshire {how he pronounces NH} instead of moving there." I had to laugh at his smart thinking, too bad it is a little late for that idea.
**Has found some new loves in life: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Star Wars.  He begs us to watch these movies and loves to pretend he is a Ninja Turtle or a Jedi.

Eli:
**Is really growing up these days and talks sooo well.  Like full sentences almost all the time well.  Once again I am not ready for him to continue to grow up.  Good thing he still likes cuddling in my arms with his blankies and pacifier otherwise I might really lose it!
**The other day I was getting ready for the day and he made me laugh.  He immediately said "You not going to work today, you not have work clothes on, yeah!" I had to smile because I actually did work that day, I just had a doctors appt before then and had to get ready.  He was pretty bummed to find out I actually did have to go to work.
**Despite his best efforts to NOT learn to swim this summer, he has actually learned how to swim quite well.  He took lessons at my parents pool by our ever favorite "Miss Darla". He spent a good portion of the time scared and crying but has not become quite the little swim floater.  He has jumped off the diving board a few times and loves to have me push him to the bottom of the shallow end and he will retrieve swim buddies.  I love seeing him conquer this fear of his and move past it!

I love my kids so much, they truly bring me so much happiness in life.  As hard as motherhood can be, just one little hug or smile by them can wipe away any frustrations I may have.  I am kind of lame, in that I LOVE to be with them.  I revel in my time I get to spend with them.  Whether it is building a puzzle, watching a move together, going to McDonalds, or reading books together I love to be with them.  I have especially cherished the one on one time I have gotten with them.  Robby and I went to Jamba Juice the other day after his dentist appt on a Mommy-Son date. We had so much fun and he keeps asking when we get to go on another date together! I can't wait to do more things with them!

Summer Movies at Harkins

One of our favorite parts about summer in Arizona has been the awesome summer movie program that Harkins theaters has every summer for 10 weeks.  10 kid friendly movies, one each week, for the entire summer for a whopping $7 per ticket bundle.  Eli was still free this year so I paid a grand total of $21 for an entire summer's worth of entertainment every Wednesday.  The best part about the program is that we had lots of our friends join in and also buy the tickets.  We tried to meet up with each other every Wednesday and the kids got to sit by their friends.  It was so nice to be able to get the kids settled in their seats and then run out and buy popcorn without the hassle of all three kids hovering around me in line.  The kids also love the end of the movie when they all run up to the front of the theater and dance to the end song that plays with the credits.  I will sure miss meeting up with the Potter, Padilla, Grave, and Fagrell families to name just a few. 

 Miss Maddie and Rubba have become much more interested in taking pictures. One of the benefits to this is that I finally have a few pictures of me for once :)  One of the downsides is that you get to catch me in another one of my "no-do hair-do" sort of days.

This picture was taken by Rob.  It only took five tries for him to learn how to not cut off my head in the picture....classic.