The El Conquistador

We spent this past weekend in Tucson with Ben's family for a little summer resort time! Someday, when I hopefully have more money, I want to really live it up at a bunch of resorts. Currently when we go, we don't usually enjoy the luxurious spa services or golfing because it's so darn expensive. But I think I NEED a massage when I go to a resort and I'm sure Ben NEEDS to golf on a fancy course. Don't you think? ;) I say this in jest, of course. We really had an awesome time - we stayed at the Hilton El Conquistador and it's the best - we spent many hours at the great pool area, enjoyed the awesome breakfast buffet a couple times, ate out at a yummy bbq place, and afterwards the kids had fun with the "old west" themed games, played card games, watched movies, and enjoyed each other's company. I really enjoy spending time with Ben's family. They are just FUN. :)

Dr. Dangerfield

I can't believe the day finally came! My cutie Ben is officially a doctor! I'm so proud of him. I actually teared up a bit as they read his name and he walked across the stage. It's been a great 4 years. It's been hard in some ways, but honestly, I really enjoyed our time in medical school (I feel like I went to med school too). We've had amazing friends and an incredible ward. Our little family has grown too - we've gone from a family of 3 to a family of 5 in the past few years and it's been awesome! Congratulations Ben - you've somehow pulled off becoming a doctor while still being an incredible daddy and hubby too. What an accomplishment!

At the commencement banquet the night before graduation

Us with our great friends Craig, Aubree, Taya, and Ryan



Our cute family :)

Ben with his mom and dad

Ben with his sister and nephew

Emma and her friend Addy

Angie, Craig, Ben, and Ryan

A last minute vacation

As I mentioned earlier, we took a rather spontaneous trip up to Utah a couple weeks ago. We were bored the morning of Memorial Day and were trying to decide on something fun to do. We bounced around many ideas and in the end we decided to travel up to Utah to see my family. So, a few hours later we were packed and in the car - we stopped over in Vegas to split up the drive, mostly because we had a late start getting out of the house. We did Hotwire for a good hotel deal - we saw that we could get a 4 star hotel just off the strip for 65 dollars - that sounded great! So, we booked it and it ended up being the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. Well, the Hard Rock is known for being... well.. not so family friendly - it's more targeted towards young single adults who like to party. We felt quite out of place bringing our 3 kids through this place. But, the room was nice and the pool was awesome! So, we enjoyed ourselves, even though we stuck out a like a sore thumb. We drove the rest of the way to my family's house the next day and stayed till the end of the week. It was a great visit! We saw lots of my fun brother (who's living in Provo), and spent a lovely afternoon with my grandparents in Salt Lake. I love my family! Thanks for having us so last minute - we love to spend time with you! :)

I haven't posted any videos in forever! Below are a couple of fun ones from our trip. The first is of Emma on the rope swing at Great Grandma's house. The second is of Emma and Ben rolling down the huge hill at the Thanksgiving Point gardens and proof that Ben is a really fun daddy. :)

We have keys!!

Well, the moving process is in full swing! We successfully closed on our new house on Tuesday, got the keys that evening and immediately headed over to move in our first van-load of stuff. :) We're a little excited, yes. The girls ran around the house and backyard... and stairs, of course. I'm probably going to go crazy with the stairs, so some ground rules will soon have to be set - like no hanging/climbing on the banisters. And when Jacob starts crawling and climbing himself, the baby gates will be making a quick appearance. We really couldn't be happier with the house - it's way nicer than anything I thought we'd be able to find for our price range. Ben will have to drive 30 minutes to get to work everyday - so we actually moved further away from the hospital than we were in our rental home... but in the end, we couldn't pass up getting a nicer home a little further away, and with lovely Arizona mountains and cactus surrounding the community. It's lovely. For anyone looking to buy a home, now is the time - there's all sorts of good stuff up for grabs! We feel very blessed. We're taking loads of boxes over to the house each day and by Saturday we should only have the furniture left to take over in the moving truck.




First time entering the house with our own set of keys! It was rather exciting!




You can see that the kitchen is in need of a stove and fridge. We've successfully purchased a fridge off craiglist, which is now in our garage (We also bought a washer and dryer off craigslist, which we'll need to install in the laundry room upstairs).. still looking for a stove. We better hurry - there's only a couple days left till we're living in the house, and I don't want to microwave everything. :)


Family room


The stairs that the kids love to play on... ugh


The living room, with a little dining area and bay window just to the front of the photo, which you can't really see


I think we better get some window coverings on that window, or our neighbors will have quite the show to watch!




The loft area at the top of the stairs

I'm trying to get caught up with blogging before we have to pack up the computer. I still need to post about our rather spontaneous trip to Utah. And, oh yeah, Ben graduates tomorrow morning! So, lots of posts soon to come, if I can do it amidst packing. :/

It's Summer Time!

This post will be a little all over the place, which seems to be the standard lately with me - but seeing as I've fallen into an every 2 week schedule of blogging, I guess that's to be expected.

It's recently gotten hot lately with temps in the 100's (up until that last couple days, where some rain seems to have cooled us down a bit). So, we've spent a bit more time in the water lately - swimming and squirt parks. Becca has found that another effective way to keep cool is to strip down to her diaper and eat some ice cream. I wish I could get away with that. ;)



Another good way to keep cool is stay inside with some good AC - like, instead of a picnic at the park, just go ahead and eat out at Chili's instead (courtesy of a gift card from Craig and Aubree - even better... thanks guys!). I'm not sure why I took pictures of us all at the restaurant.. other than I was just so excited to be eating out! :) (isn't Jacob so cute?.. he gets at least 100 kisses a day)







Emma had preschool graduation this week! Ben has been making fun of me for being so excited about it. He thinks that 'celebrating mediocrity' is not something to get super excited about... I mean, you would hope that everyone would graduate from preschool and hopefully then move on to get some more education right? But I look at it as a fun excuse to celebrate just another milestone in my cute Emma's life. I'm all about celebrating... it's what keeps life fun, right? I guess, though, Emma still has another year of preschool before starting Kindergarten, so maybe that's another point for Ben. Anyway, it was really cute - the kids all recited things they've learned this year - like their phonics sounds, counting in spanish, shapes, etc. And then they went through and announced each "graduate" and stated what they want to be when they grow up. Emma apparently wants to be "a singer who sings twinkle little star and I am a child of God". How sweet. And Emma's teachers, Miss Lorene and Miss Carolyn have been amazing! They do such a great job.







And speaking of graduating - we've got less then 2 weeks left till Ben's med school graduation. In fact, just this week Ben had his official last day of medical school. Before he took off for his last rotation day, I took a picture of him. Look how excited he is! He's already started getting stuff in the mail addressed to Dr. Ben Dangerfield. Ha! That's awesome! I'm so proud of you honey. :) His residency orientation starts on June 22nd, so he's got a month off till then, with graduation and moving to keep us busy in the meantime.



Since Ben is home now and we are in the home buying process, we are once again getting excited about the prospect of buying a bit of new furniture to fill the space. I use the word 'new' loosely I guess, because we do have an affinity towards antique furniture. We haven't really bought any antiques since we lived in Provo 4 years ago - it was then that we accumulated most of the furniture that we have now. We may not be able to get as much antique stuff as we'd like - seeing as Ben won't be having much time to refinish like we used to back in the BYU days. But it was really fun to browse around downtown Glendale through a lot of the fun antique shops they have. We did buy a little old park bench for the kids to put outside in the backyard - the girls love it! Below is a pic of us (minus Ben) taking a little snack break outside the antique shops.



So, Ben went to a Flight of the Conchords concert this week with his friend Mike. He was so excited to go and it seems like it was a great show. If you don't know who they are, here's a clip of one of their songs - I think a lot of you have seen this before, among my friends anyway. But, to me, it gets funnier every time I watch it. :)



And, on an unrelated note - is anyone else as excited as I am that So You Think You Can Dance has started up again?!! :)

Lots of pampering...

We've had a pretty nasty cold bug going through our house the past couple weeks, but despite that, we've had a lot of fun stuff happening. Last week we had girls weekend! Woohoo! Most of us will be moving soon, so we took it as the perfect excuse to leave the kids with our hubbies and stay at a resort in town. Awesome! We seriously should have done this before, because it was such a good time. I felt like I was in college again hanging out and being silly with my girlfriends. Since I have a nursing infant in tow, I didn't spend the night, but joined in on most the rest of the activities. One of my favorite parts of the weekend was getting a group picture taken at the nearby Albertsons. So fitting to have all us moms getting our picture taken in a grocery store... considering how much time I spend grocery shopping. Anyway- don't we look so cute and sassy? ;)



We also had a great dinner at California Pizza Kitchen and spent a lot of time at the pool, spa, lazy river, and waterslide. LOVE resorts and LOVE awesome friends! To see more pics of our weekend, go to Heather's blog.





This past Friday I attended Emma's preschool for Mother's Day Tea. It was so cute! Emma "shaved" my legs, painted my toes, and pampered me with treats and a crown and necklace to wear. What a sweetie she is!





I felt extremely spoiled for Mother's Day this year. My sweet hubby spent all day Saturday cleaning our house from top to bottom (and he did it all while having a cold!) - he did everything from vacuuming, dusting, cleaning bathrooms, sweeping floors, spraying off our back porch, etc, etc... he even took our van to get it washed, waxed, and vacuumed. What a guy!! Then on Sunday, with the girls help, he made me my favorite breakfast of eggs benedict. Mmmmm. On Saturday he had taken the girls shopping with him and they picked out some pretty pink flowers and some new fun clothes to give to me on Mother's Day. I heart Mother's Day. :)







So, in the last post I mentioned that we put an offer on a house. Well, we ended up getting outbid on that house - but just the next week we found an even better house for less money than the first. So, yay! This time our offer was accepted - hooray!! So far, we've had the home inspection - next up is the appraisal and then we wait for financing to get sorted out for closing. Our current closing date is May 27th - our lender thinks it may take a week longer, though, to actually be ready to close... so anyway, hopefully we'll be moved into our new house by the end of this month or first week of June. I'm soooo anxious, because I LOVE this new house! In any other housing market, we'd never be able to come close to affording a place like this, but it seems things have worked in our favor. But I'm a bit of a pessimist, it seems, and until we've actually signed our closing papers and have keys in hand, I have a hard time believing we're actually about to buy a house. So, I'll hold off on posting pics of the house till we're actually moving in. :)

To tie up this post, let me end with some random stuff. First, Becca's quite the personality lately, so I thought I'd put up some pics of her silliness.





Also, Emma's been getting rather creative at bedtime. She has these wood boards under her mattress to hold it on the bedframe and we've never actually secured them together. Well, she apparently took one of them out and created a unique sleeping situation for herself. She was asleep like this when we checked on her later... very weird, yes..



And lastly, you must check out this video - Ben's brother and his wife are currently living in Japan and will be for the next year while they teach English classes out there. Apparently, they are having quite the cultural experience... click here for their latest discovery at the grocery store.