4th of July

The 4th of July is easily starting to become my FAVORITE holidays! I don't know what it is about it, but I love it! One of my very favorite parts is celebrating it in West Bountiful! Every year the West Bountiful parade goes right in front of our house! All we have to do is walk out to the front yard and we can watch the parade! It has always been a tradition with Ryans family to come over to Grandma Janes and watch the parade then have a pot luck lunch afterwards.......well why stop something that isn't broken? Just because we are the owners of the home now doesn't mean we should stop the tradition right? So of course we still had everyone over!

The parade pretty much starts right at our house. The best part of that is they throw the most candy at the  beginning of the parade which means we were LOADED with candy! It was so funny watching Maggie at the start of the parade. She didn't understand why people were throwing things at her, but then when she realized it was candy, well everyone had better get out of her way because she was going for it! Her bag was so full of candy at the end of the parade that she was wobbly just trying to  take it to the house!

Maggie loved watching the parade!

Maggie and her cousin (second cousin) Bella

Maggie and Suzie! They are so sweet together!



Maggie and Bella enjoying the pot luck together!

We actually have more pictures than this from the parade but unfortunaly they are with Ryan in Oklahma right now :(

I already can't wait for the next 4th of July!  Hopefully by next year Maggie won't be so afraid of fire works (Seriously she is terrified! Every time one went off she would cling to us with a death grip to either Ryan or myself, cry, and yell "owie"). Poor girl!

How did I get a 2 year old!!

My baby is two! How did this happen? Everyone always told me to treasure "those moments" because they go by way to fast, and to be honest I use to just roll my eyes at them because I got so sick of hearing it! However, I am now one of "those" people! I wish I could go back in time and re-live some of the moments I took for granted with Maggie because I felt like time was just, well,  taking it's time!

Anyways.....enough of my sob story!

This girl was the center of attention at her birthday party and she soaked up every minute of it! Seriously this little one is such a diva and it always sometimes drives her Mom and Dad crazy, but at the same time it makes her who she is and we love it! We enjoyed cake, friends and, presents! Thanks so much everyone for coming! It meant so much to us to know that Maggie is so loved!

Maggie with her best friend Suzie

Present time!

I don't think it matters where we are, or what we are doing, this girl ALWAYS manages to find some kind of mud or dirt to play in! Seriously she is just like her daddy!



I just adore this photo! Maggie loves her Grandma Jane!

A couple of weeks later Ryan's sister came down from Boise for a visit and we had a little photo shoot for Maggie and her cousin Tyson (who is only 5 weeks younger than her). Ryan's mom's side of the family has this wonderful tradition called the Two Year Old outfits! I absolutely love this tradition! I think it is so great! Every child and grandchild so far on the Gunnell side has had a photo in the two year old dress or shirt! I was really concerned putting Maggie in it because of how active she is! I could just see it turning to dust as soon as she decided to run! The dress is over 55 years old!

This is the only picture I could get of this little girl holding still!



It took a 4 man crew plus some fruit snacks and gold fish to get these two to hold still long enough to snap a few pictures! I just love watching them together! Where ever we go people always ask if they are twins!

Even though these two were such wiggle worms, we still had fun!

May St. George Trip

While Ryan was gone to Oklahoma for training (for 5 whole long weeks), I decided to break up the time and head on down to St. George for a week with my good friend Cherish and her daughter Suzie! It was some nice and much needed R&R.

We hung out by the pool

We had fun with our friends!


Cherish and I have been best friends since High School. I am telling you all this because she knows me so well and puts up with my crazy last minute adventures! I had this crazy idea while in St. George that we should go to Vegas one day and spend the night! Well lets just say that I didn't believe that Vegas wasn't very "kid friendly" until that trip. When we first got there we were on a high from this last minute decision! We immediately went to the M&M factory because we knew you could do stuff with kids there, Well that was about it! Cherish and I stuck out like a sore thumb in Vegas!

Add caption

After the M&M factory we decided to go to lunch to the Hard Rock Cafe. It was of course delicious!

My favorite story from this trip is after we ate at the Hard Rock we went to see Hello Kitty on the street because Suzie loves Hello Kitty. Well I didn't want to take a picture with Hello Kitty because I knew Maggie would probably flip out and plus I didn't have money to tip him. Cherish on the other hand took a photo, but did not tip him because she realized after that she didn't have any money to tip either so we hurried and busted out of the there! Just imagine us two moms with children in a stroller running away from a man in a Hello Kitty costume shaking his fist at us! I wish I had a picture of it!

It was still so early on the strip and we couldn't check into our hotel yet so we decided to walk around some more. It was miserable! It was so hot and even though we had hats and sunscreen for the kids they were miserable to and starting to get a little burnt. I wished so bad that we would have thought about coming later in the day so we could have at least checked into the hotel first, swam a bit and then been able to seen some of the shows that don't start until early evening (like the pirates and such) but me and my crazy last minute ideas are never really good ones so after FINALLY being able to check into our hotel we realized that we were so exhausted and just wanted to go back to the condo in St. George, so about 2 hours later from checking in we checked out! Crazy I know (and no we did not get a refund :( )

Our two tired girls wearing there matching jammies from the M&M factory!

Although Vegas was definitely a "bust" the overall trip was still fun and an experience we can definitely look back on! Thanks Cherish for being such a good sport and putting up with me!

We could not for the life of us get a good picture of the both of them smiling at the same time!

Home Owners!

Woot Woot! Sorry, but I don't think I can put it any other way! I am so excited and happy to announce that Ryan and I are officially HOME OWNERS! This blog post is a little behind schedule though because we have been officially home owners (or home owers for the next 30 years) since mid June! I am sure this sounds silly to most people, but I finally feel like a real adult!

Here is our Home Sweet Home!

We have actually been living here for the past 7 years in the basement apartment renting from Ryan's Grandma. She recently was moved into an assisted living center which is why we had the opportunity to buy. Grandma Jane (aka Ryan's Grandma) has always told us she would love for us to buy it from her someday so that the home could stay in the family. I got pretty teary eyed when we signed the papers, because after we had finished all the paper work and were ready to leave she told both Ryan and I that she thinks her husband John (who built the house 50 years ago, and passed away over 40 years ago) would be honored for us to make it our home! That meant so much to us both, and makes this home even more special to us!

Their are a lot of improvements that need to be made, mostly cosmetic, but that is our favorite part! Either doing these improvements together will draw us closer, or cause a whole lot of arguments! (Hopefully not the later :) ) I am extremely lucky to be married to such a handy man so that we can do majority of the improvements ourselves!

Their are going to be a lot of new changes coming to my blog and I am excited to be able to share them with you all!