Road Trip Through Brent's Mission

The day before we left on our road trip, our pool opened. I think these pictures show how excited Ava was about it:

Since Laura came home from her mission at the end of April, my family planned to meet in Nauvoo for a vacation so we could see her. Since Brent served his mission throughout Kansas and Missouri, we left a few days early to have time to trek through his mission so he could introduce me to his favorite people and show me where he served.

I counted 16 families that Brent had contacted that we visited with on the trip. SIXTEEN! There were a mix of converts, members, and non-members. I kept asking him, are you sure they are going to remember you after so long? (He completed his mission 12 years ago, and as you know, lots of missionaries come and go!) But all of the families were so excited to see Brent and told me, "he's just so memorable, how could we forget him?" Brent was so excited to show me everything and I got lots of reports on what an amazing missionary he was. I fell in love with him a little more :)

The first day we drove to Wichita, Kansas. We visited a few friends, then went out to dinner with some others:

Brent took me to the first ever Pizza Hut. A video:

We slept at a friend's house, and then the next day drove to Iola, Kansas, which has a population of about 5,000 people. This was Brent's favorite place to serve and we met with a lot of families here. We visited the Smeeds who live in the middle of nowhere, in a 100+ year-old school house turned into their house. It was so unique, I took lots of pictures. She also makes soap in a little shop behind her house.

We ate dinner and stayed with the Taylors, who were the sweetest family.

More friends, but I forgot to get pictures with some:

 This man taught art at the community college and gave us prints of his artwork:

Driving around Kansas, this place is FLAT!!

The next day we drove to Kansas City, and visited with my cousins who live there:

Singing Let it Go :

That night we went to the Kieffers from the mission and had dinner and slept there. Ava had a blast playing with all their fun toys and Brent had lots of fun talking about memories. No pictures, oops! They live really close to the temple so we went there the next morning and walked around and took pictures.

After this, we just had a short time until we were meeting a friend for lunch. So I took Ava into a little farm for kids while Brent waited in the car. It was a Friday, and apparently the missionaries in that area volunteer at the farm every Friday! It was fun seeing missionaries everywhere. For example, one elder sold us a bottle of milk to feed the baby goats:

After the farm we went to lunch with Brent's friend, and then we went to Kaleidoscope, which is a craft center for kids run by Hallmark. I remember going here when I would visit my aunt, and I was excited to take Ava. She loved it! We also got to meet up with my cousins there too, which was fun to see them again.

After this, we started heading toward Nauvoo. We stopped in Marceline, Missouri, which is where Walt Disney was raised.  Here is the wishing tree, where Walt would lay under and day dream and come up with ideas. It's nearly dead now, but kind of cool still:

 A barn re-built in the spot where Disney held his first performances as a child:

Main street at Disney land is patterned after downtown Marceline:

After this, we were on our way to see Laura in Nauvoo and I was soooooo excited!!!  I will save Nauvoo and the drive home for another post.

Last week of school

I didn't put this post up from the last week of Brent's school, which was the week before we went on vacation.

We bought Ava these number magnets and she started learning how to sort by color. She was working on her magnets and put her baby on the chair and was making the baby watch her and give her high-fives when she was doing a good job. Then when Ava was sitting on the chair, she fell off, and as soon as she landed she yelled, "baby, I'm oh-tay!" I could not stop laughing about it for so long.

Another day we were working on her magnets, and practicing the "abc" song. Here's a video of her singing along.

It continues to rain and rain and rain here. People that have lived here for 15 years have said this is the most rain they've ever seen in a year. I took this in a field by our house to show how much water we have. Lately this road, which Brent takes to get to school, has been closed because the river on the other side is flooding it. Here is what should be an empty field:

Our friend from the ward that always is so nice to give Ava hand-me-downs from her daughter, brought Ava some Disney dress-ups one day. Ava was so excited and I loved the look on her face when I helped her get dressed. She felt so beautiful, which she is :)

Speaking of being beautiful, one day when I took Ava to the park, I kept taking her picture because she looked so beautiful to me and I wanted to capture it.

I hope she will always know she is beautiful, in a good way of course :)

The last week of school was stressful for Brent with all of his finals and final papers, and then grading students' essays. He did a great job though and I'm proud of him for getting straight A's this whole year!  Ava snuggling daddy while he grades papers:

The day after Mother's Day Brent said, "I'm sorry Mother's Day wasn't anything special for you." I told him it wasn't anything special because he treats me like it's Mother's Day every day! He cooked dinner for me, did the dishes, cleaned the house, and watched Ava while I took a nap. He does all of these things regularly for me. Luckily I married a multi-tasker because he did all of this for me all year, took care of Ava while I worked, and did so well on his school-work too. Good job Brent! One year down, one to go for the Master's degree.

Tornado Land

One of the main reasons why I wanted to move to Texas was so that we could have better weather. WRONG. The humidity made it still feel cold here in the winter, we had ice storms, and now I'm learning Spring in Texas is not the best. We have had thunderstorms almost every day for the past month, with lots of flooding, and now we're entering tornado season.

I'm trying to enjoy the thunderstorms though, and this week we had a really cool one! We turned off the lights in our house and opened the blinds, and watched the lightning show while we ate ice cream. The thunder sounds like the sky is ripping open. We did have some pretty strong winds with this one, and I noticed this poor tree in our neighborhood the next day:

We had Rita, our neighbor, over to dinner two times this week. First on Monday, when her sister had a wig-out and Rita (and her brother-in-law) needed a little rescuing. Then on Wednesday we had Rita over with the missionaries.

On my day off I took Ava to the grocery store and she was especially good. When we were getting in the car, she asked me for fries (she asks for fries every day). But since she was being so good, I decided I would spoil her! I took her to McDonalds to get a Happy Meal. She was soooooo excited, it was cute!

A video showing her excited for fries:

On Friday Ava and I went with Brent to his last institute class since the missionary couple that serve here are returning home to Utah. Every week they have a speaker and then the sister missionary has prepared lunch for the students. So we got to eat lunch with dad and it was fun! Ava was especially good and quiet during the institute lesson. When we were leaving, I asked Ava if she had fun with dad at school. Ava said, "yeah! I eat!" We like having an institute near by!

After institute I took Ava to the library where a little boy saw Ava across the room, ran up to her, and almost looked like he was going to kiss her. He was completely mesmerized with her and followed her around. I snapped a couple pictures and sent one to Brent and he was like "run!!!! Creeper!!!"

We had a little bit of a sad Friday night where I had to work and Brent had to work on essays. This weekend is crunch time for Brent. We did get out on Saturday afternoon for a little Mother's Day celebration at Red Robin:

Ava thinks those baby rings are her bracelets and it cracks me up. We also went shopping at Kohls since I had Kohls cash but I couldn't find anything there at all! We got a few random things for Ava. So Brent let me run into Old Navy and I found a few things I liked! One was this shirt. Happy Mother's Day to me :)

Brent stayed in the car with Ava so I was texting him pictures of what I was trying on :)

Today for Mother's Day our tornado siren went off for the first time. We had just laid Ava down for a nap and I didn't know if we should get her up and go into the bathroom like we've heard you're supposed to do. Brent looked out the window and said, "naahhh, we're fine. If I see a funnel, I'll let you know and we'll go to the bathroom." Ummmm.  People at church said in the 40 years they've lived here, a tornado has never touched down in Denton. I just don't want this to be the first year!

So Brent and I looked out our bedroom window to assess the situation. Brent said, "this is not tornado weather, the sky will be green if a tornado is coming." A couple seconds later, I said to Brent, "green like over there?" Brent: "yeah, that's it!" Here's out our bedroom window:

We kept an eye on it and it didn't ever look like a funnel was forming. It passed by pretty quick too. Here's a video I took:

(You can't hear the siren very loud in the video since I think it was mostly picking up our voices, but it's pretty loud, like if a car was honking in front of our house.) The funnel formed a couple miles west of us, where our friends live. I stole this picture from Facebook:

Ava would like to wish a Happy Mother's Day to both her grandmas! We are so grateful for you and love you!!!

I Lost the Car Keys in a Field

Last Thursday was one of those horrible, terrible, no good very bad days when I lost the car keys in the field. But before that...

One day I made Ava play dough that has a jello mix in it. She liked playing with it until she started smearing it in the carpet. Then it was all done with the play dough.

On Wednesday, the long-awaited day came when Laura came home from her mission! I was so excited I could hardly work all day! It has been so fun talking to her through FaceTime since she got home!

On Thursday I went to Flower Mound to run errands and also to take Ava to a blue bonnet field that some girls in the ward told me about. At the flower field I took Ava out of her car seat and locked the car (I had Brent's car that day) and she was so excited to run around the field. She was going crazy! It was so hard to get any good pictures. Here are the best ones I got:

Here are some out-takes showing how she wouldn't hold still:

After we ran around for about 15 minutes I reached into my pocket to get the car keys... and they were gone. I ran back to the car to make sure I didn't lock them in there, but they weren't in there. They were in this huge field! I started panicking and called Brent. He told me to keep looking. I sent him this picture to show him I could be there all day and not find them:

I looked for a little longer and Brent started the long drive from his school to come save us. Ava fell asleep for a while:

 We looked and looked and couldn't find them. It was time for Brent's next class to start. I took him back to school and came home to eat lunch. We had gotten sunburned and were starving!

I got a metal detector from someone in the ward and picked up Brent from his class with just enough time in the day to go check the field one more time. Brent's friend Chris came out to help. We searched for about another hour and a half.

I kept praying and praying, and all of a sudden I thought, if they were going to fall out, it had to be in the very beginning by the car. I told Brent that. It was getting dark, so he walked over to Chris, who was by our car, to tell him we were giving up. Just then, in the middle of the field, closer to our car, Brent found the keys! It was a major celebration :) From this picture you can see how we had run out of daylight when he found them.

 We went out to Mexican food even though it was 9pm with Chris to celebrate. We were so happy we didn't have to have the car towed to a Mazda dealership and have new keys made for it!

Now any time Ava sees any of the pictures in the field she says "keys!" She was a good sport the whole day.

Ava has been excited that Laura is home, or at least she mimics my enthusiasm (I don't think she remembers Laura) :) Here's a cute little video:

On Saturday afternoon Brent went to "man-richment" with the Elders Quorum. They went to see the Avengers at the theater. (Brent is in the EQ presidency- I wonder if he had anything to do with that plan?) He had lots of fun with his buddies. Then that night we got a babysitter for Ava and Brent and I went on a real date! It was so nice. We went to get pizza and then to a play at UNT.

On Sunday we had our Disney night with a couple friends from the ward at our house. It was a good end to the week!