Creepy

Davis: This vampire is not too creepy.
Mom: Good because I don't like creepy.
Davis: I do!
Mom: What? No you don't!
Davis: Yes I do! You look creepy and I like you.

Erik & Sarah's Sealing

Erik and Sarah were sealed on Sept 7th and it was a great weekend! Their reception was really beautiful and Sarah looked amazing. It really is touching to see how far she and Erik have come in a year. We will miss them a lot now that they have moved away.

Falling in love with Fall

The kiddos are all at school and I am surrounded by a beautiful mess! I have about 1 week to transform my house and make a whole bunch of cool projects. Its overwhelming, yet this morning I don't feel overwhelmed.

I love that my boys love school and come home flushed with excitements and bursting to tell me about all the things that have happened. Learning is so exciting and I love to see them learning.

I feel a routine taking shape again. Fall is coming, I am ready for cooler temperatures, cozier nights snuggling with John, bike rides, baking, and most of all the holidays and all the excitement, peace, and focus that it brings back to our lives.

Fall brings such anticipation! I should feel overwhelmed about all that is ahead of me in the next few weeks but mostly I just feel excited!

Huntington Beach

We has such a fun time at the beach with our cousins! I forgot just how much I love to play at the beach! I love the waves, boogie boarding, catching sand crabs, drip castles...okay I don't love the massive sunburn I got! I am so happy that my boys seem to love it just as much as I do!

Legoland

Seriously our boys just keep getting more and more fun! It was awesome that almost every ride all 5 of us could go on! Vacation is starting to feel more like vacation :-)

JPL Tour

Mark took us on a tour of JPL and it was so amazing! It was so fascinating and especially fun to see Mark succeed and shine in his career!

We had to get our high tech badges. After 8 hours the lines behind will show through so you cant reuse passes another day.

 The control room.

This room is cool. Its call Team X. Each of the computers have a tag of a different department and specialty.They get 1 person from each department and then have a big group discussion and bounce ideas around to make progress. He compared it to the floor of the stock exchange where people are just shouting out ideas.

Where they test the duplicate model Rover. You can see the difference in size here. On the top right is the Opportunity Rover and then you can see the Curiosity's wheels on the left bottom. I love that Marvin the Martian is sticking out of the wheels.

 Mark helped design the Mechanical Design Center. It was a sweet building with lots of toys!

 This was cool. He could use his body to make the model on the screen move!

 More toys in his office!

The mars yard. They basically can rebuild the surface of Mars and then using the duplicate Rover see how it will handle the circumstances the actual Rover is going to hit. It helps them before they upload the new commands to Mars each day.

The Rover was in the building but luckily Uncle Mark has connections so they opened the doors for us and then moved the head around. Pretty cool since it was only the second time Mark has ever seen it move its head.

Just a piece of the moon :-)

Gotta love this - only at JPL does your ice cream get dispensed like this!


Thanks Uncle Mark for the sa-weet tour! You are amazing!