Birthday Pictures

I had a really nice birthday evening.

Except for the part when my kids asked us every two minutes when we would sing Happy Birthday and eat the cake.  And then they argued about who got what piece and who got what strawberry.

Seriously...it feels like I have 30 kids surrounding me at times...not four.  

Are girls just extraordinarily loud?  

The answer is yes.

But enough complaining about my extremely loud household.

The cake was compliments of my parents...even though they have been back in the LBC it seems they have taken on the tradition of ordering the cakes for us when they can't be here in person.  Yes, I now expect you do this all the time...just kidding...but seriously, I will totally let you.

 Like I said before...my big birthday surprise was a new bike!

Here she is...what a beauty!

It's a Garneau...fairly new in the states and I'm pretty darn excited about it.

And then Jeffy gifted me this shirt from Snowbird.

Cute huh?!

Oh, and I can't forget to mention that we got SNOW this weekend!!

It actually snowed on my birthday too!

In fact, we got snowed in at work on Saturday.

Just a few of us chillin' in the yurt.

I guess it had been too long since the last storm and everyone forgot how to drive in snow.  A car ended up in the river in the canyon and a UTA bus slid out too.  It was huge mess getting the tow and plows up to clear everything out...so we were stuck for a good three hours at Sundance before we got to leave.  

Good times....well, not so much.

Anyway, I hope everyone else had a great weekend!

Happy Monday!

Weekend Review

This is what we were welcomed to when arriving to work Saturday morning.  This would be the path leading to the infamous stinky yurt.  Don't worry, this yurt is not open to our guests...but this is the yurt that houses all of the instructors gear, and when you get 60+ ski and snowboard boots stored together, well, you get the idea.  But don't get me wrong...I am very grateful for that yurt.

So yeah, snow, and lots of it.  The problem:  we had lovely powder snow earlier that week and then Saturday we got wet heavy snow...the perfect recipe for avalanches.  There were road closures throughout the day, and people were getting stuck everywhere...it was a mess.  It snowed ALL day and I was soaked to the skin by the end of it.

It rained all day Sunday in the Valley...it was awful.  All of our snow in our yard as melted away and we are now left with lovely mud pits everywhere, which are so much fun when you have dogs.  Yuck.  I usually welcome warmer weather, but this year I would rather have snow.

On a different topic Ryan and I were invited to a special screening for the movie "Rising from Ashes" last Friday.  We got a babysitter and everything so we could go, and I'm I glad we did!  If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it!  It's so inspiring!

Ryan with Abraham and Obed, two teammates from the movie.

This week we're gearing up for Valentine's Day!  The girls have their parties at school and I'm teaching Piper's Preschool tomorrow and having a little party.  And of course I'm super excited for my traditional Valentine's dinner on Friday!

The past week or so.

Seems like life just got crazy...or crazier anyway.  

I decided to do a quick update with some photos from the last week or so.

Rory's very impromptu birthday party.  Seriously, it was so spontaneous that Ryan and I ran out and bought her a present literally an hour before it...with her in tow.  Thanks to my mom who was totally cool having all of us bombard her house to celebrate last minute.  And the only reason it was last minute was because the rest of the week was too crazy, plus my dad was flying out of town...it was kind of then or it wasn't going to happen.  Hopefully she won't remember it being too lame.

She did an awesome job at blowing out the candles...only a little bit of spit hit the cake.

We have been getting slammed with the snow fall the year!  And the temps are crazy low!  Like highs in only the teens and lows in the negatives!

Of course the dogs love this time of the year because they now live in the house.

And of course Haley spoils them rotten.

I started working on Friday...I'm currently three days in.  Still finding my groove, but I enjoy it.  Although, being on the mountain when the high is only about 10 degrees is a bit out of my comfort zone.  When I get home I'm I cannot warm up...it isn't until I take a very hot, scalding shower that I feel better...and hot chocolate helps too.

Sunday afternoon we finally decorated.

It's very Christmasy in our living room now!

And we picked a different kind of tree...I love it...although we had to chop the top off to get it to fit in the room.  But I think it's so pretty!

Tomorrow, it's more skiing.  Haley's class is coming up to Sundance for the Ski Utah program...so that should be fun!

Happy Monday!