A few days past Halloween....

Gross carving pumpkins...Love to do it it is one of our favorite Halloween activities...Hannah was feeling very macabre this year. The pumpkin she carved for home was throwing-up and then she carved one at Papa's house that had it's brains oozing out the top of it's head! This from the kid that up til last year was terrified to walk near the Halloween aisle at the grocery store!?! Go Figure....We had a great Halloween - Hannah was a 1905's Bobby-Sockser, and she looked FANTASTIC!!

We also went to a great event at The Gateway called "Thrill the World" It was about one hundred people dressed up as zombies and synced around the world to all dance the Zombie dance to Michael Jackson's Thriller.

It was fun and while we were at Gateway Maxine and her cousin Stacy had some Halloween bonding moments as Chucky twins and presidents.

Hannah tried channeling Ozzy with glasses and her black finger nail polish....

Watch for more pics soon of the scary ghoul's we went Trick or Treating with.....

Draper Elementary ~ Day 1

Rainy morning on the first day.

Mrs. McBride..HJG's New Teacher

HJG at her table with her new friends (the little girl behind/next to her shares the same birthday!)

Fourth Graders from Dilworth...She will miss her crazy class-mates!

This week has been "Red Ribbon Week" we have dressed in crazy hats, clothes inside-out and sweats so far. Tomorrow is School Pride so she will wear Blue and white...She loves the Mac computers in the computer lab, they went on a field trip to the pumpkin patch, and she get to ride the school bus home to Papa and Grandma Karen's 4 days a week with all her friends and she LOVES that!! The move has made our commute much easier and our mornings much smoother and HJG is really liking her new school, teacher and friends!!

I SCREAM! YOU SCREAM.........

Kids eating Ice Cream....

BIG SMILES!

Oh No a messy FACE...

mmm a BIG lick!


Grown Ups(?) love it too!!!

??Why??

??WHY??

That is the question I ask....after having spent a good majority of Sunday night in the Emergency Room. One of my dearest friends/sisters hit the bottom of her barrel and tried to take herself out of this life-that is the small part of the issue. There is a bigger part to the issue at hand called Alcoholism and drinking lead to her "blacking out" NOT "passing out" and while she can not remember many of the events that unfolded Sunday afternoon they are forever burned in my memory as well as 3 others. Seeing one of your best friends unconscious, lying on the floor with the equipment from the ambulance scattered around her, seeing her shirt covered in her partners blood because her partner got cut while struggling to pull the knife out of her hands before she could hurt herself and then hearing she doesn't remember is a scary thing. Scarier though is to hear this friend say "I am jealous others get to get out of this life and not deal with the shit." I'm sorry but WHAT THE F*CK!?!?! I don't care who you are or what you've done YOU are needed here in this life by someone! My friend has beautiful children that NEED their Mama, she has brothers and sisters that need her, parents that need her, friends that need her and besides people that need her people these same people love her and would go to the ends of the earth for her!

I watch and hear on a daily basis as 2 of my cousin's (both chose to leave this world for their own sad, selfish reasons) children struggle everyday to survive in this world with 1 parent permanently ripped from their lives, I watch a teenage girl struggle at learning to become a confident beautiful woman in a house full of boys, I watch a teenage boy struggle with out the soft warmth a mommy gives in the same house full of boys. On the flip side I still hear a 6 year old sobbing at his daddy's funeral he has no understanding as to why his Dad is gone, he just knows he is gone and NEVER coming back....Never to sit at another soccer game, horse show, school play, high school graduation, wedding or birth of a grandchild. As a mommy I could never dream of PURPOSELY ruining those days in Hannah's life by taking my own life. I have watched my parents struggle through the loss of my brother due to a motorcycle accident - The pain they carry every day is real I can't begin to imagine how much worse it would be had he taken his own life. I have watched over the last month as my Aunt and Uncle STRUGGLE every moment to understand WHY their son chose to take his own life knowing that they will never be able to answer that question in this lifetime.

Please remeber there is someone in this world that LOVES and NEEDS you more than you can ever know or more than they can ever express to you. Reach for their hand because it is ALWAYS extended for you to grab hold of and they will help pull you out!!!

As the Seasons Turn.....

Wow it has been a long time since I blogged. Life as always is crazy busy. I have a new job at Cybersource with Maxine she is on the online fraud team and I am on the payment gateway side. We commute to American Fork which aside from the horrid stench of dead chickens boiled in horse pee that seems to linger in the air its not to bad! The job and company are great. Hannah is still at Dilworth Elementary for a couple more days/weeks. We are thinking of moving her to Draper Elementary because it is on the way to work for us and she has friends at that school as well as Papa and Grandma Karen where she would ride the school bus to after school. More to come on that though......

As for the rest of life....I had another cousin commit suicide on 2 September 2009. This is my second cousin to do this in just over a year on the same side of the family. In talking and crying with the few cousins that are left my cousin Travis pointed out some VERY FRIGHTENING (not often talked about) statistics:
*Over 33,000 people in the United States die by suicide every year.

*Suicide is fourth leading cause of death for adults between the ages of 18 and 65 years in the United States.

*Currently, suicide is the 11th leading cause of death in the United States.

*A person dies by suicide about every 16 minutes in the United States. An attempt is estimated to be made once every minute.

*There are four male suicides for every female suicide, but three times as many females as males attempt suicide.

*Every day, approximately 90 Americans take their own life, and 2,300 more attempt to do so.

These really caused he and I some major thought process, internal review as well as external review...We both have kids and don't want to see their lives completely messed up because of (not just the suicides) but the amount of death they have been effected by in the last 4 years beginning with my brothers motorcycle accident, then both great-grandparents, then 2 cousins. We have always been a close family so each loss has been a major blow. As a family we did the Out of the Darkness suicide awareness walk for the second year. It is a very healing event but this was the second year we have done it and it was very sad to see how much bigger the walk had gotten and how many more families have and are affected by suicide. REMEMBER FRIENDS, FAMILY and BLOG STALKERS.....Someone will ALWAYS be there to share a light when yours is out!!!

The walk and the reason.....

On to some happier musings.....I turned 40...(NOT sure that is really happier - pretending to throw-up) Actually it wasn't too horrific I did survive and Maxine put together a fun party with most of our crazy friends showing up to celebrate! We also took my dad to dinner at The Melting Pot because his birthday is the day before mine.

Hannah spent a FANTASTIC weekend in St. George with her best buddy Logan and his family over the UEA weekend. They went shopping in Vegas, hiking in Zion's, then I joined then Saturday night and we went to Tuachan Theater and saw Aida. Hannah my little musical princess was in complete rapture for 2 1/2 hours, she cried at the end and said "Mommy, that was so beautiful!" and we have been listening to the sound track non-stop ever since. I am so glad she has such a love and understanding of music and that it stirs such emotion that she recognizes. She has ALWAYS loved music and finds a song in everything. When she and Logan were little (4-ish) Hannah did not stop singing and Logan would look at her and say "MOM, Why does she do that?" (She still does it we are all just used to it now -lol) It was so fun to spend the weekend with the VanHorn's and to see my cute friend Karen truly happy...she deserves it and it has been a long time coming!!

The Motley Crew

Lindsey and Maria are CRAZY!!

This weekend we get to move furniture and clean house.....So excited to start putting together my craft/sewing room and finally have a dinning room table to eat on...lol!!!

Happy Rainy June

What a fun filled weekend we had.  It started Thursday with a trip on The Front Runner Train up to Ogden with Maxine, Zack and Rana. 

Friday was a trip to Boondocks with Hannah and her best buddy Logan..

A little mini golf:

Some Bumper Boats:

Saturday was met with a double header on the Softball field - The Blue Angels won one and lost one. Then it was off to Hannah's Great Grandma's 80th Birthday Party and  fun playing with cousins.

Sunday was a day out with Papa....He knows were every crazy, interesting thing to see in Utah off the beaten trail is.  So off to Promontory Utah we headed to see the Golden Spike,     the Spiral Jetty on the very north end of the great Salt Lake,   We did some Geocaching and went to ATK - Thyokol to see where they build weapons of mass destruction and rockets and boosters to get into space.    It was a fun weekend and we managed to stay dry through it all!!!

Our future Tony Winner....

Hannah has been taking Speech Level Voice Lessons for 2 years from an awesome lady Named Teri Stock.  Last night Hannah had a recital and she was AWESOME!!  She sang "My Favorite Things" from the Sound of Music.  You can check out her video on Facebook.....