Last week was busy but fun. Tuesday night we had dinner at Nana and Grandad's house. It was a fun time! Mikayla was dancing to music and was such a clown. She thinks dancing is totally da bomb-diggety now, but it mostly consists of jumping or kicking her legs. Actually, it's better than my attempts. LoL

Thursday was Dusty's birthday. Holy cow, he's 18 now! My little brother. Sheesh, not so little anymore! My mom treated us all to the Roadhouse for dinner in honor of his birthday. I tried to resist the delicious rolls, but failed miserably. At least they made a spectacle of his birthday though. :) Afterwards Mikayla and I jumped on the trampoline. She loooved it! Especially when Misty jumped up too. Good times. My mom wrapped a present for Mikayla to open while Dusty opened his presents. It was a 'Littlest Pet Shop' dog with stickers. When I pulled out the stickers for her she opened her mouth in a face of surprise. It was sooo cute, I've never seen her do that before. She promptly started putting stickers all over the puppy and herself. See picture below. :) Both pictures on this blog were taken with my phone, so not as good as with the real camera.


Sometime last week I discovered we had baby grass hairs in the front yard! My little seeds started growing, and hopefully we get some grass in the dead part of our front yard. Woo hoo! I've never been into yard work or caring for a yard. It was all I could do to keep flower pots at our townhome. I couldn't keep many plants alive inside the house (although it turned out to be from Pocky eating them), and even when we bought our house last year, the yard was the furthest from my mind. Now I suddenly enjoy it -- WEIRD! LoL I haven't enjoyed pulling weeds necessarily, but I have enjoyed being outdoors and beautifying our home. There's something relaxing about it too.

We should close on our refi this week. She's supposed to send out the papers tomorrow, and we'll sign them and Christy will notarize them (thanks!) tuesday, and we'll send them out wednesday. By the end of the week everything will hopefully be done! Unfortunately we weren't able to drop our mortgage insurance. :( We're only going to be saving about half of what we originally hoped per month, but hey, it's in our pockets and not theirs for the next 360 months!

Saturday we went to Home Depot to purchase the materials for our gate. The one on the side of our house was broken when we bought it. (How did they keep their giant dog in??) We bought some fence boards, posts, 2x4's, and other misc gate items. We also got our new front door!! The one we had been eyeing a few months ago was in the clearance area, so we got it almost half price. I'm excited to have LIGHT! We also got... a table saw. Tools are SO awesome. It's nothing terribly fancy, but it rocks none the less! It can also do miter cuts which will be handy in finishing our kitchen trim. We spent a pretty penny in the end, but considering I'm always in line for a deal, we paid less than we would have otherwise. My poor van, it had a 100lb (?) door in it, tons of wood, a 65lb saw, and 240 lbs of concrete. Don't get me started on that...

Okay, I'm started. The HD dude told Ian it'd be about a bag of cement per post, and all you had to was pour it in and add water. Okay, sounds good. Well, first of all just adding water didn't really work out. Better to premix and pour. Second, it was only half a bag needed, so we'll have a bag and a half left. Which is kind of annoying because they're 80-freaking-pounds each and worth less than $4. Not even worth the effort of returning, but what else are you gonna do with it? Here's poor Ian pouring some concrete last night, in the dark, and it starts raining! Not to mention the bag had torn a bit, leaving some concrete powder on the sidewalk, which when it started raining... Ian had a fun time washing it off before it stuck. As of today there's two posts in, and tomorrow we'll probably do more. But, we'll have an awesome new MAN-made gate when it's done!

Today was Stake Conference at church It was nice to be in the Relief Society room listening, where the kids wouldn't disturb others. It was rough trying to entertain an almost 2yr old for two hours though! Mika decided it was okay to start stealing people's stuff again... seriously, she even upgraded to wallet. Thank goodness the woman wasn't in there and we put it back as it was before. LoL Luckily the people next to us shared their crayons and coloring books with her. She loves to color now. She decided she liked it as of last week. Unfortunately this evening she thinks she likes the taste of them. :( Crayons and cat food, mmm mmm good! She did enjoy putting her crayon bag on her head tonight. See picture below.