Pool Time!

Hello again! Today has been such a fun day here on this beautiful island! I got to sleep in until 7:00! (as opposed to the the last few mornings where ive had to wake up at 4:50 for my dives! ah!) And i have just been chilling all morning and i am lovin it! I went to the beach for a couple hours this mornin and also made my rounds to all the pools! Ive only had like 3 strawberry daiquiris so far today though.. strange. Well my dad went diving at cozumel today and kenni and i decided to stay behind so we could go skyriding today woot woot! its a little windy though so weve just been waiting for the wind to die down and then we are gonna go!!! im so excited!!There is a big pirate ship in front of our hotel with water slides and pools and all sorts of piratey related fun and it is a blast! Its actually the kids club and its meant for kids like ten and under, but me- being obsessed with pirates and any/all pirate paraphernalia, i just LOVE it! madi and carter are down there playing right now and i must admit, i am a bit jealous. I could go down but earlier today at the beach i got a little bit toasted so i am in the room just chillin to avoid burning and damaging my skin anymore than ive already managed. :) WELL it is still a bit windy so i think im going to put off the skyriding until a little bit later today, which means that it is shopping time!!! never thought youd hear those words come out of my mouth, did ya?! normally, i HATE HATE HATE shopping with a bloody passion and i would rather drink drain-o then step foot into a store, BUT im in mexico silly and i absolutely LOVE going to the flee markets down here and just buying everything!!! I love everything about shopping in mexico! the funny mexicans who want you to buy everything , the dumb american tourists who think they got a good deal on a mexican dress for 40 pesos when in reality the store owner was willing to take it down to 20, and if the cards were played just right, maybe even 15. I love all the bracelets (i buy like 50 every time i come down here) I love the hand sewed dresses, I love the feather eirings, I love the food, I love the drinks, I love the smells, and i love the atmosphere! (though a bit frightening at times...) but I just LOVE this place! I would live here if i were fluent in my spanish :) no but seriously... when i was here a few months ago, i just really learned so much about their culture and their traditions and i have just learned to love this place so much! Especially after visiting all of the ruins and orphanages. I am so much more greatful for everything i have after coming down here and seeing what goes on here and personally witnessing all of the poverty and crime that takes place, and experiencing what it is like to live in the midst of all of it. I am going to the orphanage tomorrow and friday and i absolutely can not wait!!! i am so excited!!! I love it so much! Its gonna be hard especially knowing that my big brother was here just a few short months ago serving these kids and knowing that hes not here now, but i think that it will still be an amazing experience and im sure ty will be there with us in spirit. WELL i am off to the flee markets soon so cross your fingers that i will get you something good! I am quite the bargainer actually.... :) p.s. i am DYING for some fresh fruit! I hate going to places with loads and loads of fresh fruit and not being able to eat any of it... ugh! someone fed-ex me a lemon!!!!!!!!

WERE HERE!!!!

We are finally here in the beatiful cancun mexico and we are LOVIN it! We flew in on saturday and let me tell you, that was kinda the flight from Hell. haha well we had to wake up at 3:45 am to start with then when we got to the airport we had a 2 hour delay. ugh once we got on the plane and in the air it was ok... but have ya ever had to share a row of 3 seats with a 5 year old an 8 year old and three year old twins? it was kinda crazy... but fun cause i got to play with payden and bailey ( the three year old twins) and with their little sisters chloe and aleah (11 month old twins) they are SOOO stinkin cute!! they are all 4 girls and so much fun! can you imagine having two sets of twins under the age of 4?! and ALL girls?! CRAZY! it took a lot of books and treats but i think i kept them pretty entertained while we were delayed. Well once we got here, the fun took off! the second day (yesterday) we upgraded to a hotel suite and it has a beautiful deck over looking the ocean and it is equipped with a hot tub AND a steam room! SO nice! i love this hotel! it is all inclusive and i have had so many specialty drinks that im pretty sure i peed pina colada this morning... haha. This morning was our first scuba dive down here and it was amazing!! my dad, my mom, kenni and I all went and we all four got super sick on the boat cause there was some pretty rough waves out this morning and kenni up chucked her breakfast all over the boat! nasty! but when i went on my second dive today, i puked in my regulator 3 times while i was 60 feet under the water! it was scary cause i started choking on my own puke it was so gross!! then for the rest of that dive, all i could taste was puke. SICK! but it was well worth it. I saw 3 sharks, some baracuda, 2 eel, a HUGE sea turtle and millions of fish! i loved it!!!! well im feelin a strawberry daiquiri so im out like a trout but ill update as much as i can and post some pics soon!!! happy tropical holidays!

BEST FRIEND DAY!

So me and my BEST friend realized a couple years back that we just couldnt ever quite find the right presents for eachother on any given holiday. (birthdays included) SO we decided that we would just forget about presents and we wouldnt get eachother anything so basically it would just even out. WELL after a while we came to the conclusion that this plan SUCKED! So we have decided (for Christmas at least) that we would treat eachother to a full day of mani's/pedi's, food, sugar, and a crazy night out on the town. For you see- that is what we do best. (I officially dub this Christmas tradition as "best friend day".) We go absolutely CRAZY everytime we are around eachother and we are complete freaks but we have the freakin best time doing it! We get so hyper and do the funniest stuff when we hang out! Lately (over the past couple of years) my bestie and I have not been able to see eachother very much and rarely get to hang out due to both of our hectic and demanding lives. Our freshman year we were seperated after going to school together for 5 years, and we have spent our whole high school lives at different schools from eachother. So Sad. I always miss her :( But lucky for us, we have one of those relationships where we can go without talking or seeing eachother for a month, then the second we get back together its like we havent skipped a beat! We pick up right where we left off the month before! Well, since i will be in Mexico for Christmas, we have decided that tomorrow would be our ''best friend day'' for the year. So we are going to pamper ourselves then have a lovely meal at Olive Garden and i couldnt be more exited!! This is a rare treat and i honestly cant wait! I highly recommend best friend day for everyone with a best friend :) after all, what would this world be without your bff's? I freakin love my best friend and we will be friends till the day we die!!!! (yes, we will die on the same day) We have been through Hell and back with eachother and it has strengthened our friendship so much to where it will be impossible to ever seperate us. I love you SO much Miss Karine!! CANT WAIT 'TILL TOMORROW!!!

60 MORE?!?!

ahh! Every Christmas my family makes different flavored cream cheese apple dips and we send them out to our neighbors, teachers, family, friends and my dads insurance agents. (Random, i know) And this year my dad decided that we would make over twice as much as we did last year making a lovely amount of 750 little 8 oz. plastic containers fillied to the top of this cream cheese deliciousness. (3 different flavors, 250 containers of each flavor.) So much for skipping Christmas, eh? Well this year we had a convenient assembly line consisting of Steve, Jacque and myself. Steve is our neighbor/friend/employee, and Jacque is..... well, she's just Jacque. haha jokes! We love her lots! She is our neighbor and our good friend. She's pretty much the most amazing chick you'll ever meet. I look up to her so much! She's freakin amazing! And, not to mention, she is responsible for the stinkin' CUTEST baby alive!!! I love little miss charlotte!!! Anyways... The line went like this. Steve made the dip, I squoze the dip into the containers (which by the way, looks a bit like a soft-served terd when squoze) and Jacque made the bows on the bags. Then we assembled the bags so they each had 8 apples, 3 dips, 1 knife and a plate. (its harder than it sounds, ok?!) We made 250 bags total and we finished them last week. WELL this morning my father broke the news to me that we have to make 60 more. And by that, he means that I need to make 60 more. 60 more bags.. ugh thats 180 more containers of dip... eh. Steve and Jacque are both gone, so I will be spending today making the rest of this dip all by myself. tough, i know. It gets turbo boring though... It's a lot more fun when ya have Jacque and Steve around. And it really tops it off when Token comes over (ASIAN JOKES) But now im left to do it all on my own. Gross. Im over it. Im off to finish my lemon before the apple dip nazi comes home and sees that im not working!

Swimming VS. Sledding

Wondering why i have a tropical beach scene as my layout rather than a Christmas-related template just 10 short days before Mr. Clause pays me a visit? Well, I am SKIPPING Christmas this year! You heard me. This year for Christmas my family (parents, sibs, grandma & step-grandpa) are spending this holiday season in a little place i like to call CANCUN, MEXICO! whoo! We are staying at an all-inclusive resort on the lovely tropical island of Cancun Mexico. It is a 5 star resort with pools and beaches and clubs and spas and parasailing and snorkeling and every activity possible on this sandy slate of heaven! And ALL of the activities are included in the "all-inclusive" pass I so conveniently possess, so i can do ANYTHING i want!! (well, for the most part...) And do you know what the best part of that little gold wristband shimmering in the 90 degee weather for all to see is?! ALL THE SPECIALTY DRINKS YOU WANT!!! Holy freak! Anybody who knows me will know that this is Heaven on earth for me... I am OBSESSED with pina coladas and strawberry daiquiris! I love them almost as much as i love tropical fruits!!! (Almost...) But seriously!!!! What more could a young girl my age ask for then the warm sand between her toes and all you can drink AMF's and endless fresh pineapple chunks for Christmas?!?! (jk about the AMF's.. im not like that, i swear!) Oh and i almost forgot to mention the best part (and purpose) of this whole trip!!!! I get to spend Christmas day in the Cancun Orphanage!!! I am looking foward to this the most!!! (well, its head and head between this and climbing palm trees.. haha) Anyways! I had an amazing opportunity to visit this same orphanage last June and i LOVED every minute of it! Best experience a person could have.... very emotional but SO worth it!! I love those little kids... Im not yet fluent in speaking spanish so its quite hard to communicate with these angels, but lucky for me, love is a universal language and that is all i need to have a great time with these adorable kids :) ALSO! These past couple of months i have been working on my scuba diving certification. And though it took me 6 long weeks; 2 night-time deep water dives at the Midway Crater, 350 boring pages of reading in the PADI diving book, and 1 nasty 50 question final (that took me 3 and a half painful hours to complete.... ugh) i FINALLY passed scuba school! yay! So im also going scuba diving while down there! I am really excited for this trip, mainly because i was very worried about Christmas this year and didnt know how well my family would be able to deal with it (seeing as that its our first Christmas without Ty..) But i think that we made the right choice by going away this year. The memories are just still to fresh to stay here, and i know that Ty would want the best for us, and i think that this is what he would want. haha That sounds funny, but im not talking about the luxurious tropical part of the trip.. I say that because the whole reason for this trip is to bring down the money that friends and family and even complete strangers so genourously donated in Tylers name specifically for this orphanage that Ty, myself, and my parents were able to serve at in June. Thats what Ty would want. All of the other activities are just a bonus that we added in, but this year i am determined to experience the real meaning of Christmas. To remember Christ. That is what this is all about. To remember and honor him. Which is exactly what im hoping to get down there at that orphanage. Acting selflessly is a great way to respect Christ's life, and that is my goal this year. (And hopefully for years to come..) After all, "When ye are in the service of your fellow beings, ye are only in the service of your God." This trip will be a great time for my family to bond and have fun, as well as forgetting ourselves and serving others while growing closer to the Savior and coming to a fuller and better understanding of the Gospel. This will be a great trip and hopefully a growing experience for my family and myself!! i am oh so excited :)

Finally!

Yeah, thats right. I FINALLY have a blog! After a lot of convincing from a couple of crazy friends, i decided i would give in. And i made myself a blog :) its actually my second blog believe it or not, but unfortunately my first blog didnt make it to far... I created it and uh yeah thats about as far as i got before i forgot my password! ahh I have a terrible memory as you all should well know by now! but ive finally smartened up (is that a word..?) and decided i would just use ONE grand password for ALL my accounts. I realize that doing this could really come back and bite me in the butt if someone by chance found out my password because they would then have access to all of my accounts (hotmail, facebook, messenger, ect..) but it was a sacrifice i was willing to make. Well hopefully ill be able to stay on top of this whole blogging thing and blog regularly but with my wonderful luck (and memory) i will most likely either forget this website, or possibly even forget that i have a blog at all! Well since i just created this blog today, i have a grand total of NO blog followers. So. Follow my blog. Read it regularly and ponder the lovely insight you recieve while reading my posts. And if you get ONE THING out of this swell first post of mine, have it be this valuable information i share to you from my very favorite quote. Read and ponder this quote. Maybe even pray about it..... :) "When life gives you lemons.... EAT THEM!" I love love love lemons! Go figure, eh? Now how is THAT for a first post?! :)