Ohhh, how cute!

This past weekend, as part of our weekend activities, we went out window shopping. We window shopped at many different stores for many different things, all just for fun. One of the things we like window shopping for these days is for appliances for our "dream home." On this particular Saturday, we decided to go to Sears and look at their refrigerators, freezers, wall ovens, stove tops, etc. But before we left the store, Ammon wanted to go check out the tools.

Now, I've often heard girls say, "Ohhh, how cute" to things, a lot of times they're baby sized things (Ex: baby shoes, a small stroller to push a doll in, a cute outfit for a young child, and maybe even a tool belt for a little boy who wants to look like their daddy). But let's face it, it normally comes out of the girl's mouth. Not this time!

So we're looking at the tools, we're on about the 4th row and Ammon says, "Ohhh, how cute!" I smiled, "Did you just say this tool is cute?" And Ammon responded, "Ya, it's a miniature Jointer." So I just had to take a picture of the tool. Now you know what can make a man say, "Ohhh, how cute!"

Stay-Vacation with the Eggett's

So my family (Dad, Mom and Kimberly) drove into town on Thursday, April 19, but we didn't see them until Saturday. Saturday morning Ammon and I drove to San Clemente where my parents treated us to our annual Income Tax Return meal out. It's always been dinner in the past, but because of schedules, this year we did breakfast at IHOP! While looking at the menu, Lina learned that Americans can eat ENORMOUS (in quantity and calorie) breakfasts!

Saturday was the day before JD and Maia's 1st birthday, and the day of their birthday party! After breakfast, we ran a few errands then headed to Alan and Shelly's house to help set up for the party. Elise had planned a very cute Circus themed party!

On Sunday we went to church, then visited some local San Diego places. First we went to the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum because Kimberly loves airplane everything :)

Next we went to Balboa Park, not remembering that it was Earth day. After about 20 minutes in bad traffic and a VERY quick walk around, we decided it wasn't worth fighting the huge crowds and headed to Children's Beach to see the seals and to La Jolla to see the paragliders. We had Ross and Jane McCollum over for dinner that night. That night our feet were tired, but we were looking forward to another day of fun!

Monday we went to the Carlsbad Tulip Festival. The colors were beautiful and we had a wonderful time! After the flower fields, we went to the beach and ate lunch.

Whole Family Picture

Enjoying the good weather and company

JD absolutely LOVED being swung!

Beautiful Flag of flowers

After lunch, we headed back to San Diego to visit the Midway Aircraft Carrier.

In one of the Captain's seats

Kimberly and Dad did a pilot simulation and had a lot of fun!

There was a plane that you could actually sit in. Kimberly loved checking out all the airplane gadgets!

On Wednesday, the Johnson's came to San Diego and we all went to the San Diego Zoo together.

We had such a wonderful time with my family! We're so glad they could come and we could show them the beautiful city that is our home! We're already looking forward to their next trip here in August!

San Diego Scene - Update

I realized today that I haven't posted on here for quite a while. It's not that we're boring people, but Ammon's been in this funk lately of not wanting to take his camera places. And what's a post without pictures? We still get out almost every weekend! Last weekend we went to Elise's house and Ammon built a temporary wall. He had a lot of fun creating it. In Ryan and Elise's new home, there was a pass-through that they didn't like. A pass through is like putting a window on an interior wall (between to rooms inside a house), except that it is just open, no window is installed. A couple of weekends ago, we did a bon fire on the beach. We ended up having it on the beach of an ocean bay because it was packed that night at the actual ocean beach. But we really liked the spot! In the distance you can see all the lights of downtown SD. We're going back to have another bon fire this weekend! A few weekends ago we went to the Safari Park and walked around there. We went through an exhibit of butterflies. There were hundreds and hundreds of butterflies flying around the aviary!It was pretty cool! Anyways, that's a few of the fun things we've been doing. Sorry about no pictures! We'll try to get some this weekend!

3D House Project

So this weekend Ammon got a fun new toy that we've both had a blast with so far! It was great yesterday, because we had plans to go out and explore more of San Diego, but it rained all day long, so we couldn't :( So for our adventures today, this is what we did! It's a designing program where you can design a house. Whether it be your dream house or a current house. We played around with a house that Ammon's parent's own in IL. Here's the results of lots of fun, hard work!

Crafts

I've been doing some fun crafts lately. The first one I started was a menu board. I saw the idea online and really liked it. At the time, I normally planned the weeks meals out, but just wrote them on a plain old index card and put it on the fridge. This is much cuter! At the top, it says MENU in green sparkly letters. There are meal cards, which I chose to color code (yellow = chicken, pink = ground meat, red = fish, etc). Each card has a main dish, a side and a vegetable on it. The yellow box holds the meal cards that we haven't eaten yet. Then they get moved to the clips when they're on the weeks menu. After we've had it, the meal card gets put into the pink box. Keep going till you've used all the meal cards, then start over again! On the back of each meal card is a list of all the ingredients I need to make the meal, it helps when I'm making my shopping list.

From 2012-02-23 Alli Crafts

The other craft I made started at a Relief Society activity. They taught us to make these hot pads that have the "rag" style of sewing on them. They told us to just let the edges have the "rag" look as well, but I really didn't like them. So I bought the boarder tape stuff and sewed that on. It was my first time ever using boarder tape stuff; it's harder than it looks! My stitch lines are FAR from straight! With practice I'll get better :)

From 2012-02-23 Alli Crafts

San Diego Scene 5

Saturday, February 18

Today's SD Scene adventure started off with lunch in Ocean Beach. We went to a local burger shop that is supposedly ranked in the top 5 hamburger shops in SD. It was really good, we liked it! The atmosphere was fun, the walls were covered in license plates from all over the US, actually, there was a small handful from other countries as well. After we ate lunch, we walked out the Ocean Beach Pier. We had a lot of fun on the pier! It was a GREAT spot to watch surfers. We surfer-watched for quite a while, it was fun! There were also a lot of fishers on the pier. After the pier, we went a few blocks away to Sunset Cliffs. They were definitely beautiful!

After that we went to the SD Zoo Safari Park. We had a lot of fun there! We liked it TONS more than we thought we would! We really liked how open everything was, they tried to make everything feel natural. All the fences were made out of wood logs, birds just waddling around the pond, etc. Another thing that was a favorite was the remote control boats. Ammon bought me one turn (like 3 minutes), I tried to hand him the token so that he could put it in the machine and start off with it, but he said no, he bought it for me. So I put in the token, and before I could even touch the steering wheel, Ammon was showing me how it worked (as if I couldn't figure it out on my own - it was very basic!). It was very cute how much fun he had with the boat, watching him concentrate and play. After a while he gave me a turn, but it shut off a few seconds later. He promised me that next time we'll both get our own boats :)

San Diego Scene 4

Saturday, February 11, 2012
We celebrated Valentine's Day today, because it's just too crazy on the 14th! We had a wonderful day!

We started off the morning by going to Torrey Pines to watch para-gliders. It was really cool to watch them. It looked like a lot of fun!



Then we went to a beach called Children's Beach. They originally built this beach for kids to swim at. They built a wall to help block the huge waves, thus making it more safe for younger kids. However, after building the wall, they found that something else liked this beach...seals! So now Children's Beach is also known as Seal Beach! There is also a walking path that goes around the park. It was a colder day today, and the wind didn't help!



Next we went the SD Zoo and almost finished going everywhere! There are only a few areas left that have been unexplored by the Dietz family! As the seasons change, so will the exhibits though, so we won't get tired of the zoo! There's always something new to go see! We first took the sky tram to the back of the zoo, then walked to the front. Then we took a bus tour of the zoo. We learned some interesting things, one being that Flamingos are not naturally pink. But wild flamingos eat a type of shrimp that turns them pink. At the zoo, they don't have that type of shrimp (they didn't say why) so they feed them a flamingo feed that has pink dye in it! Interesting, huh!



After the zoo we went to Olive Garden for a wonderful meal! We had a fantastic Valentine's celebration!