Tales of the Traveling Corset

One of the best gifts given this year was......

Can't beat that.

My great grandma's corset makes it's rounds in the Portela family. It's the eternal white elephant gift that we all can't wait to get on our birthdays, graduations, or sometimes for no reason at all. At times it will make it's rounds quickly, other times it will disappear for months, driving my Grandma absolutely crazy wondering where it is. A couple years ago we started taking pictures of the lucky recipients in said corset and made a book that travels along with it. Pictures of your grandpa in a corset, priceless.

So we took my great grandma's corset for a little trip into the mountains, where of course, we had a photo shoot of our own.

Gently sliding the corset down the rope :)

Hail to the Victors

After failing to get a good family picture at Temple Square we tried again the next morning. Again, we were ridiculous and decided that it would be a good idea to do this outside, in the cold, without our coats on. Chad was determined and we all decided to buck up and do this thing. And do it we did. Pretty adorable if I do say so myself.

Christmas 2013

Oh Christmas, you were wonderful. We headed up to Provo on Tuesday afternoon just in time to go out to our favorite sushi place. The parents were good sports and treated us all to one of our favorite dinners even though it wasn't necessarily their favorite.

Ashley had to work Christmas and the day after, sad day. So we hung out and chatted, slacklined, watched a horrible movie (R.I.P.D. anyone?), ate cookies, grocery shopped and counted down the minutes to when she would return :)



We opened presents and stockings and all of us kids were absolutely spoiled. It was fabulous. Not to mention the grocery shopping trips mom took us each on to restock our pantries. Merry Christmas to us! I was dancing around WalMart like a little kid the entire time! In addition to Christmas spoiling I have a birthday in January so I also got a few extras at Target, hello polka dot jeans!

Speaking of birthdays, my dad's is the 27th. So there was even more celebrating! Dad took us all to Salt Lake where we shopped our hearts out at the new mall. After he reigned us all in we went up to the Joseph Smith Building and ate dinner at the very top, overlooking the Salt Lake Temple. SO FUN. Afterwards there were multiple attempts at pictures at Temple Square but it was cold and Tay and I may have had a hard time holding still. We managed to pull our ish together for some pretty awesome pictures on Saturday though.

We saw Enders Game (loved), ate our hearts out at Chuck-a-Rama, and played Pictionary until Dad couldn't take it anymore. The boys escaped at one point to go climbing at a gym and do some shopping of their own at REI. While the boys slacklined the girls got crafty and did some easy sewing projects. I can now crochet a square... and a rectangle. Bam! We all got our craft on and decorated our own ornaments this year, it was a good time.

Hopefully you guys had a wonderful Christmas and could spend it with those you love doing and eating all the other things you love. In other words, hopefully you had a great Christmas love fest like we did :)

Where are we, Vegas?

It was a whirlwind of a weekend. Chad and I drove up to Provo as soon as I got off of work on Friday. Not only did we get to play with Pat and Ash, but my dad was there too! He was on his way home from visiting his parents in Idaho and was going to fly home Saturday morning. So we got to hang out all Friday night and Saturday morning. It was awesome! We ate way too much food, burgers and ice cream, and had a good night just hanging out!

I was still trying to get over my cold and unfortunately Chad caught a little of it. So we weren't the most peppy over the weekend. I was more of a zombie. The boys managed to jump off the platform at the BYU pool and the girls went scrub shopping and were the big winners at the Nicklecade. Ashley channeled Grandma's good luck and hit the jackpot twice! Now to channel that luck for our next Vegas trip... We threw in some Mexican food for good measure and some delicious lettuce wraps, just to off set all the donuts and ice cream.

Just in case anyone else is in the same cold boat as us, Ash and Pat introduced us to the most fabulous cough drops ever. They are called Cepacol and they have Benzocaine in them, so they seriously numb up your throat. They were a dream come true for Chad. You won't be able to feel your itchy, fiery throat any more, because you won't be able to feel your throat. Again, perfect for Chad but panic inducing for me. If you have any sort of weird issues with feeling like you can't breathe these aren't for you though. But they work SO well if you don't have some sort of weird anxiety about that.

Classy pictures of us eating some Classy Candy.

Sunday morning we were back on the road headed home. Provo decided to send us off in style. We couldn't wait to get home and out of the horrid snow. Our tires aren't really equip to deal with snow, they don't particularly like the rainy roads we occasionally get in St. George. We made it back safe and sound, then promptly spent the whole afternoon/evening sleeping and watching Netflix. Which is the very best way to end the weekend.

Looooooong Weekend

Wednesday of last week Chad and I decided we needed to do something for the long weekend. As you already know from all my recent complaining, we've been sitting/laying around our house doing nothing waiting for my back to get better. Now that it's tolerable we needed to get out of the stinkin' house. Las Vegas or Provo?

Rukia knew what we were up to and refused to get out of the car

Provo was our easy choice :) Chad finished up some things for school, we got a part on our car fixed, found an awesome dog sitter and away we went! We even left at the time I told Ashley we would be leaving and not 2 hours later. Although it was 2 hours later than Chad thought we would leave. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices to sneak in a Kneaders breakfast though.

Once in Provo we proceeded to eat our way through the weekend. We started with sushi, then moved on to Krispy Kreme, ice cream, cinnamon rolls, an amazing amount of Mexican food, In-and-Out, and lots of energy drinks, at least for me and Chad.

As a side note, the Mexican food that we got at the mall that Monday was more delicious than any Mexican food we've ever had in St. George. #StGeorgeProblems

Speaking of #StGeorgeProblems, we have no hard ice cream places. Unless you want to count Baskin Robbins, which I don't. I'm not paying 10 bucks for a quarter of a cup of ice cream, no thank you. I'll make do with frozen yogurt at that point. So Pat and Ash took us out for some real hard ice cream. Unfortunately they were all out of strawberry, Chad's favorite. After trying all the other flavors he asked the guy if he could just scrape out as much of the leftover strawberry ice cream as he could. Instead he just gave hime the whole tub. For free. It. was. Awesome.

We played our favorite nerdy game, Munchkins. I came out of left field to win the first round, although it may have been because my kind husband let me win, even after we wouldn't allow Patrick to let Ashley win. Sorry guys :) Chad didn't want Pat to win so I got to. Patrick did make up for it by winning the second round.

On Monday we wandered around City Creek Mall in Salt Lake. Chad was on the hunt for a new computer bag for school. And while we never found the bag he did discover Etsy. So it all ended well! The trip up there wasn't for nothing though, we all got our free piece of chocolate for the month from Godiva and Chad found a sweet new bike on sale at REI on the way home. We are easily having to buy gas at least twice as often as we did this summer, if not more, now that Chad's back in school, so the bike should be the solution to that problem!

Finally Monday night around 11 we headed out. I'm sure Ash and Pat were a little surprised to get a phone call just 10 or 15 minutes later that we were coming back! The wheel bearing that we had a mechanic check out and okay for our trip was done. It sounded like we were driving some sort of broken down space ship. It was ridiculously loud as well. In fact it was ridiculously loud going 40, 80 on the highway was out of control. So instead of risking getting stuck in the desert in the middle of nowhere with possibly no cell service at 1am we opted to turn around.

Chad had a nice chat with BJ the next morning who said we could try taking the back roads home (what back roads?) very slowly until he heard how far away we were from home and then just laughed. Clearly we had made the right decision. So we got it fixed at some janky place, and got an extra day off work and school!

We had a great weekend and can't wait for Ash and Pat to get their booties down to St. George!

Awkward and Awesome Thursday

So apparently I had some funky setting so that only the privileged few could actually leave comments. Awkward. It has now, hopefully, been fixed so everyone can leave comments. Sooooo I am now expecting comments from everyone! No, but really, it has been fixed so if you would like to leave some comment love you now can. It's always appreciated ;) Plus that way I'll know if it's really fixed!

Awkward:

• While driving up to Provo last Friday we saw a lighthouse.... on the side of the freeway... in the middle of a desert. What the? I'm still confused over that one.
• Chad and I decided to wander around and take pictures at one of the new buildings on BYU's campus while Ash and Pat were at church. The sign said the section we wanted to go to was closed but that didn't stop us. What did stop us was the crazy alarms that I set off. Seriously, building wide crazy loud alarms sounding. I'm hoping we end up in the police beat section of the newspaper.
• On the drive home from Provo we got stuck behind some crazy California driver. He couldn't keep a consistent speed so we tried to pass him. All of a sudden he decided that he wanted to go 100 mph. Sweet. It was a fun game passing, then being passed. The strangest part was how he used his turn signals. He wouldn't use them to signal a lane change, that's ridiculous! Instead he would be driving in he left hand land and then turn on his Left signal. Where you going buddy? Or would be passing a semi and turn on his Right signal. As soon as he would pass the truck he would turn it off. Is there some sort of special way to use your turn signals in California that I am unaware of because this guy seemed nuts-o.
• Dancing in my office to Kelly Clarkson because I was sooooo bored, then getting caught by a patient dropping something off. Don't be jealous of these sweet moves. At least I wasn't singing.
• Pulling out an armful of charts (seriously about 40) only to find a GIANT black bug sitting on top only inches from my face. I did what any normal person would do. I screamed, threw the charts in the air and ran away (still screaming) flailing around a bit. Maybe a lot. There was a lot of jumping and waving. My manager though I had hurt myself. She hung up with the insurance company she was talking with and came running over only to find me laughing hysterically now. There were charts everywhere and one fat, black cricket (yup, just a cricket) hiding behind the filing cases laughing at me and my crazy.

Awesome:

• Spending the weekend in Provo with Ash and Pat! We are overly excited to have them close by.
• Getting a package from the parents! Including a new Jeffery Deaver book. woot. 50 more pages and I'm done. His books are the best!
• Monsoon Season! The rain and the storms are intense. The thunder and lightning are crazy! The roadways are turned into rivers and the thunder bounces around and rumbles for a long while. The weather has put on quite a show for us.
• Jury Duty. More spefically for the Dr. Jury duty for the Dr. = Happy Danielle at work.
• The new building on Dixie State's campus is awesome. It's super modern and has all these glass walls, balconies and all sorts of fun things. It's pretty impressive.