Dear Regan...

Dear Regan,
I want to thank you for the new camera you gave me for Christmas!!! {Canon Powershot}
If it weren't for your wonderful gift, there is NO way I could have taken some amazing pictures in Australia, and definetly NO way I could have taken pictures at night time! My darn old camera would not take good pictures at all, and would NOT take pictures in the dark!!
So Regan, this blog post is dedicated to you! Thanks for being such a thoughtful husband. You know that pictures are important to me, and it is not worth it to compromise pictures of our kids for blurry ones!!!
Love, your wife

Australia, the Land Downunder

Well, Regan and I went on a FABULOUS trip to Australia, the land down under 3 days after we moved into our new house!!! It was a much needed vacation since it had been a pretty stressful few weeks leading up to the trip! Regan was in Wisconsin for work the week we moved, so I was the one in charge of the move {luckily we had a moving company helping us!!!} If it weren't for my friends helping me clean the Herriman house and my mom helping me SO much with the South Weber House & kids, I don't know what I would have done! I can always rely on my mom to help me with anything!

Here are some of the highlights of our trip:
1. Sydney opera House {watching the Sydney Symphony!!!}
2. Seeing the CUTE Koala's up close!!! {They made me miss my little Elle SO much!}
3. The Beautiful beaches!!!
4. Having 9 days to ourselves and exploring an amazing Sydney!
{Regan won this trip as an agent and we were so grateful to go somewhere that we probably would not have ever gone if it weren't for this award!}
**It took 16 hours to fly to Australia!!!

Aussie Animals

So a few interesting things we saw on our trip to Australia:
1. HUGE spiders!!!
2. The CUTEST Koala Bears that sleep in the strangest positions in the trees!
3. Blue Jelly Fish-Regan got stung a few times from one of these at the beach
{he was riding a wave with his mouth open and felt the jellyfish on his mouth, then sting him on his stomach and ankle!! He said it hurt SO much!}
4. Emu-When we were feeing Kangaroos, there was this HUGE emu that wanted the food instead, and was seriously about to attack Regan just to get the food!
5. Bats-during the day there was fruit bats sleeping in the trees of Sydney, and then at night, they would fly around the city. At first, we thought they were big black birds, but later found out they were BATS!!
6. The Kangaroos with the Joey's in their pouches were So amazing!!!

Before the Craziness!!!

Before we moved, here are some things we squeezed in:
1. Sunny went to her very last dance class with her friend Kayci and her teacher Miss Brittany! She has loved taking tap, ballet and tumbling, so we will have to find a new dance studio around our new house!
2. I went out to dinner with 2 of my friends from Middle school! I have not seen these 2 girls since middle school which was 15 years ago!!! In middle school, I found these 2 friends and it made the whole middle school experience so much better! We had the funnest times together and getting together 15 years later was like nothing had even changed! We are all married now, and still had so much in common! WOW-isn't that amazing that we can still keep friendships up 15 years later?
3. I took Riley & Sunny to a Cooking Class at Gardner Village Bakery. They had a tour of the bakery, rolled out cookie dough, cut out designs, baked the cookies and decorated them! They LOVED it!!!
4. Riley's 6th Birthday!!! I HAD to have a big friend birthday party for him, so honestly, the DAY BEFORE we had the packers come, I had 13 kids at our house for his birthday party!!! Call me crazy, but I couldn't leave until he had one last fun party with his buddies! It was a pirate party and Riley LOVED it! I sent all of the kids home with pirate Loot & a picture of Riley with his new address so he can have some penpals!

Oh How I LOVE Matchy Dresses!

I think my weakness in life is...Matchy Dresses! I really have a hard time containing myself when I see 2 outfits that are the same in Sunny & Elle's sizes!!! Since the odds of me having twins are very slim, this is the next best thing to twins: Matchy Outfits!!!!

Our BYU day!

Riley is offtrack, Regan was out of town all last week, so I decided to take the 3 kids to my parents cabin for 2 days! The first day, we relaxed at the cabin and played tons of games {You have to be very creative when you play hide & seek with a 3 and 5 year old in a 2 bedroom cabin!} I loved just being away from our phone, cleaning the house and the stresses of the last minute details of selling our house and just being on the ground playing with my kids!! We all fell asleep in the family room watching the Olympics! Shawn White was amazing!!!

The next day, we all got ready in our BYU colors and headed for BYU campus! Regan and I really want our kids to absolutly LOVE BYU and have great experiences there since we both graduated and met each other there! We started at the Wilk for a game of bowling! Pretty pathetic that Riley beat me! I even took a bowling class with my roommates at Ricks! I'll blame it on being preoccupied watching the girls!

We then went to the Cougareat to get some lunch, along with tons of students! It was so funny to look at all of the students at their tables, while I was sitting with 3 kids under the age of 5! No longer a student--but still in my 20's!!

From there, we went to the Art Museum for an hour. The kids did a great job not touching and being quiet in the museum! Then, Riley really wanted to walk up the circular ramp up to the Bean Animal Museum, so thats what we did! The kids always love the Animal Museum! We listend to the Bell Tower Chime, we looked at the Cougar in the wilk, and I showed the kids all of my stomping grounds {I used to work at Jamba Juice inside the wilk when I was first married!}

We ended our BYU experience by getting an ice cream cone at the good old Creamery! I told the kids about how my dad used to work at the creamery filling huge buckets up with Ice cream and sticking a cup underneath every once and a while to get a treat! They loved those stories!!

What a fun day at BYU! The kids honestly did not want to leave! They especially did not want to leave the cabin, so I am glad we were able to get a fun getaway for 2 days at least!!!

A Dream Come True

Most of you who read this will think, Andrea is totally crazy! But for me, what I am about to blog about was simply a dream come true! I was able to do a 24 hour scrapbook weekend with my friends! My friends sister was the organizer, and so she rented out a hotel banquet room for 55 ladies to scrapbook! We had hotel rooms to sleep in, and a huge scrapbook room to do our thing! I started scrapbooking at 5:30 Friday night until 2:30 AM! For those of you who know me well, you know that I am a 10:00 girl! I am usually hammered at 10:00, so the fact that I made it until 2:30 AM was pretty much a miracle.

Our table decided to call it quits at 2:30 and head to bed! My mind was racing with tons of ideas for scrapbooks, so I didn't even get to sleep until 3:30! I was the first one to wake up in my room at 8:15 am! I got dressed and headed down for more work! On Saturday, I scrapbooked from 9:00am-4:00!! Let's just say with 16 hours of scrapbooking, I was able to produce 112 completed scrapbook pages!!!! For every page you finished, you could put your name on a paper for a drawing of a really cool scrapbooking bag!!! With 112 pages done, I was the WINNER and I won the bag since my name was chosen!!! With only 5 hours of sleep, I have no idea how I was able to function for our Valentines Date, but somehow I made it!! I am ALMOST caught up with my scrapbooking which makes me feel SO GOOD!!!

Valentines Weekend

So we had a great Valentines Weekend! My brother came home from College to open his mission call on Thursday night--he is going to Mexico!!!

On Friday, I took the girls to Riley's kindergarten class to do the craft for the Valentines Party! The girls were so cute in their matchy red outfits!!! Afterwards, we made the rounds and visited family to deliver our chocolate suckers we made for Valentines Day!

On Saturday, it was my turn to plan Valentines Day. Regan and I take turns every year-one of us is Valentines Day, one of us is Anniversary! This probably sounds lame to everyone, but one of our favorite date nights is to simply get dinner and see a movie, so I thought it would be a great idea for our Valentines Date. We went to our new favorite place to eat: All you can eat Sushi! Seriously, that is the name of it! Sounds gross, but it actually is the best sushi--and all you can eat! What is there not to love about that? Regan has converted met to sushi and I now absolutly LOVE it!

After our fabulous dinner, we went to see the movie, Valentines Day! How appropriate was that? It was super cheesy, but we loved it! Hope everyone had a great Valentines Day!!!

Fun Girls Trip!

I just came home from the funnest girls tip with my mom and sisters! We went to Las Vegas to see the Donny & Marie Show! We stayed at Caesars Palace, ate amazing food {My favorite were the crab legs & crepes} and did a lot of shopping! Believe it or not, we actually had a missionary experience as well {The blurry picture is of my sister Ashley talking to this guy who was totally talking about Utah like it was this horrible state-don't worry, the McKell girls set him straight!} Amongst the smoke, and evil things all around the strip, we actually had an amazing Sunday morning where we each shared a story out of the church magazines and had a great spiritual uplifting! We even felt like movie stars when we got our pictures taken at a makeup runway show! Our hotel had these wax people that looked so real, so of course we had a picture with them! We had a wonderful time and I cannot wait for our next Girls Trip! Regan was awesome to be the Mr. Mom for a weekend! He actually admitted that it was hard to manage the kids, keep the house clean and not have Riley just play the wii all day!!! Thank you very much!

The Bellagio

We went to the beautiful Bellagio Hotel and got some pictures of the beautiful flower gardens. We also LOVED watching the water shows outside of the Bellagio! I liked this hotel because it was the least smokey of all of the strip hotels!

Donny & Marie

On the 2nd night in Las Vegas, we all went to the cleanest show on the strip...
The Donny & Marie Show! It was so good and as my sister said, surprisingly entertaining! We were the youngest ones in the show by far, and it was so much fun to see these 2 Utah Performers put on a wonderful show! Donny sweats so much and Marie was wearing some outfits she probably shouldn't have worn, but other than those, I would recommend it to anyone!

Beauty & Shopping

What does every Girls trip need? A beauty night and a lot of shopping! We did both very well on this trip! the first night we got settled into our awesome hotel room at Caesars Palace. I brought my foot bath and did pedicures and massages on everyone. We all put mud masks on! The mud dried so hard that we couldn't even move our faces! The next 2 days were full of shopping! I found my new Favorite store {and I am safe to say Favorite because we don't have it in Utah so I cannot be tempted!} H&M is the coolest store ever! I can say that for certainty because we went back 5 times!!! I got some cute outfits and had so much fun shopping with all of the girls {and no kids!!}
As we were shopping, we were looking at this booth that said, "Eyebrow Threading!" This lady from India comes out and tells us that we have to try it! What is it you ask? I guess it is very popular in India-it is where they take Thread and pluck your eyebrows with it! So wierd, I know! So what better people to try it out than my 2 little sisters! They were brave and tried this wierd Eyebrow Threading Trend and surprisingly, it looked SO good on them!