{Books I read in 2015}

Lately I haven't been very good at keeping track of books I've read, but I think I've cleaned the cobwebs back enough and got most of them for 2015. About halfway through this last year my love of reading has really kicked into gear as well, which has been awesome.

Here's what I read this last year :

Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome by John Scalzi
Sean recommended this book to me. It was interesting, and a pretty quick read. It's a scifi book, which isn't normally my cup of tea. But, it was a great change of pace and an interesting concept for sure.

The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict by the Arbinger Institute 
I read this book for a book club. Also, not another one that I'd pick up on my own, but interesting. It's a self-help kind of book, that taught it's principles through a cheesy little story. Despite the cheese factor and it's predictability, I enjoyed this little book. .

Is Everyone Hanging out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling
This was such a fun read. Laughed out loud multiple times over. Mindy is hilarious and I love her and I want to be her friend.

Princess Bride by William Goldman
Sean has been recommending this book to me every since we got married. This is seriously one of my favorite movies, and so I'm embarrassed to say it took so long for me to get around to reading it. So, the movie is amazing and practically perfect, and the book is a million times that. It is hilarious. The narrator makes everything that much more hilarious. Even if you've already seen the movie, I highly recommend this one, but it makes everything that much better.

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
My sister-in-law, Natalie gave this book to me for Christmas last year and I'm so glad she did. It was a beautiful book with a couple different, unrelated stories within in. All the stories were intense and beautiful and thought provoking in their own way. Life, love, loss, hurt... every human thing. It was an incredible read. All the feels - I cried a good number of times throughout this book. Huge fan.

The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan
Natalie also recommended this book to me. It was an intense hard read about a Chinese woman's life - we followed her story from birth all the way to "current" times where she's a grandmother. This is an intense and very graphic book at times. It was a hard story - I also cried a lot during this book. Made me grateful for my life - opened my eyes - taught me a lot. I recommend if you are of a strong constitution.

Women at Church by Neylan McBaine
My brother recommended this book to me and I loved it. I highly recommend this book to all LDS people. This book talks about gender issues within the LDS church. Whether you think there are gender issues in the church or not is not important - there are and you just might not be aware of them, or they don't concern you. Many people and concerned with these issues and this book addresses them, explains them, helps us know how to empathize and love those that are struggling with these issues, and provides practical ways (within current church doctrine) to help those gender issues dissipate. If you are a female, or married to a female, or have a mother/sister/cousin/aunt/friend/stepcousin 4 times removed that's a female in the church - this book is applicable to you (that means you).

Ketchup is a Vegetable: And Other Lies Moms Tell Themselves by Robin O'Bryant
This was a fun book. It is a hilarious book written by a mom of 3 about her life and kids. It helped me to know that I'm not alone on my motherhood road and ridiculous things we mothers do to keep our kids alive and ourselves sane.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
I listened to this book on audio and it was great. It got me into Christmas mood this last season. I've seen a number of movie renditions of this book, but it was nice to get the original story. I'm just going to say that I'm impressed at how close the Muppets Christmas Carol  is to the book! Happy little Christmas book.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
I had a couple different people recommend this book to me and it was thrilling! I love the writing style and the different points of view that the story was told. That just made it more intense as the story was unfolding. I loved it. The language is strong at times and the story is intense and graphic, but it is intricate and very intriguing. I'm just going say I called it about half way through! Great book!

{Christmas XVI - Last Day}

On Sunday the girls wore their matching Hawaiian dresses that Aunt Natalie got them for Christmas to church. Which was beyond adorable.

Mom doesn't have church until 3pm so we had a lot of time to kill that morning.

We went over to Papa and Gigi's house to visit and say goodbye to them that morning, too.

Then we met my family at church. I also snuck a picture of my mom being a babe and playing the prelude during Relief Society, after I took this picture she turned and scowled at me - but look at her cute face in this pic! She's the best.

Dan and Kim came to church with us, too, and then stayed for dinner and games afterwards.

Last nighttime snuggles with the Mimi - these guys have such a special bond and I love it so much.

After dinner and games and Dan and Kim left, we stayed up way too late doing a puzzle - pretty sure we were just putting off the inevitable of our ridiculously early departure the next morning and having to start real life again.

Rachel was kind enough to drive us at 4 am to the airport so we could fly back home.

It was really a remarkable trip. I think sometimes Sean and I forget how blessed we are to have our families live so close to each other, that they get along so well, and that neither side of the family is the "weird in-law" side. We are so grateful that we got to spend so much time with some of our favorite people!!!!

{Christmas XV - Galveston & Games}

On Saturday we packed up and drove down to Galveston to hang out with Brenden and Natalie and Baby James for a lot of the day. Unfortunately, when we were about 20 minutes from their house, Miriam decided to throw up all over herself. So Sean quickly pulls over and I am catching vomit in my hands and throwing out the door of the car. When she stops, we take her out in the freezing sprinkling rain and strip her down naked and wipe her off with baby wipes. Poor thing. Luckily, she had a jacket she wasn't wearing when she threw up so we put that on her and Sean walked her around while I cleaned out the carseat the best I could with baby wipes. We packed her back up and made it to B&J's house. 

Our plans had to change a little bit, as we had to do a load of laundry first thing and and to hose out the car seat as well. So we hung out at their house for a while and then had some lunch.

We then visited a cute little children's discovery museum there. It was fun place and the kids had a blast going from room to room and trying all the things.

We all wore green shoes that day, which is awesome.

We next visited the library and the little museum there as well.

  

And the traditional Brenden with the babies photo...

Dec 2014

 August 2013 

Next a little candy shop stop to end the day.

We loved being able to spend some time with Brenden and Natalie in their neck of the woods and for the cousins to be able to spend some more time together!

Miriam picked her nose the whole way home....but I'll take that over vomit any day. 

  Also, in case you were wondering, Evette is queen of the dinosaurs.

Dan's girlfriend, Kim, came back into town that day and we got to spend the evening with her and the family playing games and hanging out. We had a great time!

We also had way too much fun playing with photobooth app on the ipad...

You're welcome.

{Christmas XIV - Boots & NYE}

Let's just note how adorable this little baby hair is. Miriam has recently started to let me actually do her hair, which makes me extrememly happy. It's adorable.

For Rachel's Christmas present I forced her to spend an entire afternoon with me. It was awesome! We went to the Cheesecake factory for lunch and then we went boot shopping for her mission. We went to the woodlands mall and went into every place that carried boots. Well, if you know my sister, you know she has extremely long, model-like legs, which is awesome. What is not so awesome, is having difficulty finding shoes that feet your feet that are long to support those long legs. Basically, every shoe only goes up through size 10... and she needs an 11 or 11.5. That made our afternoon tricky. I thought about ordering her boots before hand for Christmas, but I didn't know which kind she would want, if they'd fit, etc... so I decided just to take her shopping. But NONE of the stores had any decent boots in her size. Ridiculous!!!

Anyways...we left the mall and hit a few different stores as well, around 10 stores in one afternoon, I think. We got to DSW and then had a pair of boots that she liked, ALMOST in her size, it was a miracle! They had an 11 and a 12, but no 11.5... and she needed an 11.5. So we went to the front to ask and the nice girl said that they didn't have in store, but that we could order them and have it shipped to the store. Great. Turns out, no shoe comes in a size 11.5!!! It goes from size 5-10.5 all in half sizes, then goes straight from 11 to 12 with no 11.5! What is that!? Anyways, I was ticked. Because this fun shopping day just turned out to be a wild goose chase and we weren't getting any goose!!!

The lady could tell by my less than happy demeanor that I was not thrilled at our options. So she said we could order a bunch of boots, ship them to the house, try them on, and return the ones that don't fit. So we decided that that was the best that we could do at that point. So we spent a good long while at the store on their ipad looking at shoes and writing down the ones we want. After we had 3 boots in 2 different sizes (11 AND 12.....no 11.5) we went to go check out and order them. 

Well, it took a while to look up and order all those boots, but we eventually got it. Then it came time to pay for them. I confirmed that if I paid by credit card, that my sister could come and return them in a week and not need the credit card because I would be back in CA... and I really needed her to be able to return them because I don't want hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of boots that don't fit me. SO, that was confirmed and I swiped my card. Denied. Well, that's embarrassing. Try a different card. Denied. A different card, denied. By this point, I was sweating bullets. I have excellent credit. The banks and credit card companies LOVE me. For goodness sake, my husband's title at work is "Credit Card Expert" - we do credit cards, and we do them well. So well in fact, that our credit card providers love us so much that they are extra great at protecting us against fraud. That means that my big purchase out of state when I hadn't used my cards at all since arriving in Texas (husband always used his card) was not going to be approved. 

There I was after hours and hours and hours not able to pay for the Christmas present I had promised Rachel. I was mortified. All this while, Sean was texting me and calling me asking why I was trying to spend exorbitant amounts of money at DSW (because he had be texted from the CC company about potential fraud..) while at the same time the manager of the store and the worker were throwing a million and a half ideas at me about how to split the payments and make it all work. It was a nightmare to be honest. I was sweating bullets and about to burst into tears. Poor Rachel just stood there petrified, unsure of what to do. Anyways, we were running late because Rachel and Mom had a dinner date with some friends... so we just left. I just explained that we had absolutely zero time left to sort this out and we walked out. I felt bad for the lady who had been so kind to help us, but oh well - gotta do what you gotta do!

Later that night I called the CC company, told them everything was fine, and went online at home and ordered them myself. SIGH. It was a long day!!!!!!!

But aside from the shoe fiasco, well, also probably thanks to the shoe fiasco, I will always remember the sister date I got to spend with my favorite sister before she left on her mission!!!

Thursday was New Years Eve! My girls had no idea what that was except for fireworks.... which was awesome. Evette was entranced and Miriam was terrified. She kept saying, "No more! All done!" 

We had some good ones and only almost destroyed the neighbor's house once! Luckily they were not home, so they couldn't even get mad at us! Hooray! 

 

We let the girls stay up a little bit so they felt like they were a part of the celebration and then put them to bed at 8. It was nice.

Sean and I left for a bit to run over to a party that his parents were at. A bunch of people that we love from our days of living at home were there so it was fun to be able to chat and visit with our previous teachers and mentors and now friends. We have good people in our lives.

Uncle Dan was jealous that I was always doing the girl's hair... so he made me do his, too.

Also, a good number of hands of poker were played that night. Pretty sure I'm addicted. 

The next day we helped Mimi pack up her Christmas stuff so that when she went back to school on Monday she'd have her house back in order.

Look at these cute babies and how much they love their Mimi.