Fantastic Fourth

Our 4th of July was pretty crazy, but of course a lot of fun. This balloon is a great example of that, as it landed right in my parents neighborhood very unexpectedly.

Steve wanted to run bandit for the Freedom 10k run. For those who aren't familiar with the term "running bandit", it means running a race without registering for it. He wanted to be a real bandit, so of course he was. He did really well and kept going the whole way, but he was dead tired afterwards. I was pretty tired too, because we had to wake up super early.

Some of my siblings and cousins slept overnight on the street to save us a spot on the parade route. I met up with them in the morning and painted some of their faces. Here are the results below. It was my first attempt face painting, so taking that into consideration I think I did pretty good. Everyone wanted something patriotic except for Noah, who is at the bottom of the picture below. He wanted spiderman. But I couldn't do spiderman, so then he had me paint eyeballs on his face and on his eyelids like Jack Sparrow from the 2nd pirates movie. Funny boy :)

After the parade we had to go do a puppet performance with Curtis. We were already very worn out from the morning, but we managed to pull energy from nowhere and put on a pretty good show. Thanks Dez for taking the pictures.

We performed our Frog Prince show, and at the end we had some girls, who happened to be beauty pageant winners and wearing crowns, come and kiss the frog. They were more than eager, but alas, that frog was no prince.

For that evening Lafe headed up a fantastic bbq. Steve and I collapsed with exahaustion afterwards and slept. Then my cousins came and wanted to play. Noah gave Steve a walkie talkie to use and Steve sent Noah on secret missions throughout the house. Noah loved it.

For the evening, we made some scrumptious treats that I got from familyfun.com. Heather and Sage made these fabulous statue of liberty cupcake torches (though they were supposed to be green ice cream cones. I couldn't find any at the store)

I dipped some strawberries in white chocolate and pretty blue sprinkles for a fabulous looking red white and blue treat. I love Family Fun!

My parents live right across the street from the Stadium, so we had great seats to see the fireworks. We also had to put up with traffic though, but it was worth it. We got some little fireworks to play with, then we watched the real deal.

Not the most flattering picture for me, but I was pretty dead by this time. Steve was too, but you can't even tell in the picture. After that was over, we collapsed with exhaustion again and had to wait a long time for traffic to clear up so we could get home. It felt like 3 days jam packed in one, but that's how we enjoy holidays. Thanks mom and dad for taking most of these pictures.

Me & My Girl Friends

If I were Rapunzel

One of my favorite traditions is hanging out with my mom, sisters, and grandma for the annual quilt shop hop. We jump in a car together early in the morning and drive as far as Tooele and hit around 15 quilt shops all the way down to Springville. We were stamped at every store, so we got to enter for a sewing machine. I would love to win, but of course the chances are way too slim.

People always ask me why we go do this every year. When we describe it, it sounds really boring. I love going to the shops and getting ideas for crafts and quilts, and I usually indulge. The main reason we go is because we love hanging out with each other, even crammed in a car for a whole day. Mainly Sam, Heather, and I "annoy" each other in the back which makes us laugh like crazy women. We can usually get my mom and grandma laughing too, and when they get into a fit of giggles, it only makes us laugh even harder. I got quite a good ab workout this time.

This year we very unexpectedly ran out of gas. The gas meter didn't warn us very well and my mom was lucky to exit off the freeway right before it ran out. Sam and my pregnant self had to get out and push, which was probably very entertaining to the cars around us.

Sam and Mom saving the day.

This experience only made the trip more fun. It's cool to think that if I was ever in a big catastrophe with members of my family, we could all lift and cheer each other up.

My mom

Grandma Bonnie

The theme this year was fairy tales, so each shop made it's store follow a certain fairy tale. This one was Rapunzel, of course.

Heather

Sam

I never thought I would ever want to learn how to knit, but at one of the stores they had a very adorable display of knitted baby booties and I fell in love immediately. I am currently learning and it's very addicting, actually.



I love hanging out with the girls and I hope we will things like this for the rest of our lives. Family really is the best.

Puppets & Stories for Lunch

At the Provo City Library, I've been doing a show called Canopy Capers on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12-12:30. Miss Alicen and I perform puppet shows and storytelling for pretty decent sized crowds. It's totally free, so stop by sometime. Here are some highlights from one of my shows:

Miss Alicen is an amazing performer! She graduated from BYU in vocal performance, which is a very hard program to get into to begin with. I have a lot to learn from her.

It's been awesome performing at the library for about 2 years now, but at the end of July I am going to be done. Miss Alicen is going to resign as well, so any of you who would love to perform for toddlers weekday mornings in the fall, there will be 2 positions posted. They aren't posted yet, but I'll let you know as soon as they are up.

Zoo with Gashler clan

We went last Friday with Steve's parents, Deanna, Eric, Desire and her girls Jamie & Talie. We of course forgot our camera, so Desire let us take some pictures with hers until they had to leave. It was a fun experience because we actually got to see a good amount of the animals moving around instead of sleeping. A zoo keeper was feeding this tiger to get it to come close to the fence while a news station (I forget which) was doing a little live blurb about the zoo.

Good old uncle Steve let Jamie ride on his back. You can't see it, but Steve is wearing a hat that says #1 dad on it. He's practicing living up to that, as you can see here.

Jamie had a lot of fun. She was way into seeing the animals and has the child curiosity and interest that I envy and want to make sure I have myself.

Here are Deanna and Leonard (Steve's dad) in front of some turkeys. It was hard to get pictures with animals because the animals were hardly ever close enough. It's so great having family in town and spending time with them. Somehow I neglected to get a picture of Eric :S

Linda (Steve's mom) and our one and only nephew Paul. Linda is such a cute grandmother :) Paul wasn't so interested in animals, but maybe that was because he couldn't really see most of them and when we tried to point them out he didn't seem to notice. He was quite pleased with the bushes, however. He liked to pull on them.










Talie, on the other hand, was very interested in the animals and would point at them as she took notice of them. Here she is with Desire, though I can't remember which animal they were looking at. This picture is an attempt to catch her in the act of pointing.

We saw a really awesome bird show showing off eagles, parrots, chickens, and lots of other birds. It was extremely well done and very entertaining. I hear they have a lot of other great shows/exhibits to give more knowledge about their animals, so I highly recommed for anyone to check out the zoo sometime this summer. It's totally not just for kids as long as you remember to have the interest and curiosity of a child.

Performing, working, and family

This is us posing as if we were bored. We've realized that posing a believable bored face is pretty hard. It's true that our sociality has been suffering greatly, that being our own fault. We, however, are anything but bored.

On Friday June 6th we had a last minute Gashlaria performance at a city event in Nephi. Since it was super last minute (which all of our performances seem to be recently) we could only get Curtis to come along with us. We performed short puppet skits, Pythagorea and the Gnome once, and did some good old storytelling. Unfortunately, we left our camera home, so we could only take cell phone pictures, which we are still trying to figure out...

On Saturday we drove to St. George for a wedding job. It was the first Catholic wedding we've ever attended and we greatly enjoyed it. It was completely Christ centered and the father emphasized to the couple the need to let Christ in their marriage. Steve was doing videography for it and during the ceremony at times we both felt that videotaping was inappropriate because parts of it seem so special and sacred, but they wanted the whole thing taped so we did it.

Between the ceremony and reception, we stopped by the Brigham Young winter home. We were in a ridiculous hurry, so one of the ladies there was nice enough to take us through quickly. It was really awesome to see. Steve remarked that he must be an old grandpa man now because he actually enjoys and took the initiative to see a church historical site. When he was young, his family took some big cross-country car trips to see church sites and it got tiresome. Now he's an old grandpa man :) and insisted that we make at least a little rushed time to see some sites.

Us in front of Brigham Young's winter home.

The reception was a fun experience too. Both the bride and the groom are in the army, so the bride decided to choose different shades of green for her colors. It was actually cute! She even had camouflage ribbon on her cake. Doesn't sound cute, but it really was. We ended our time in St. George by walking around the temple for a bit and learning about how it was made. All I can say is that the Saints living down there were absolutely amazing and hard working.

Yesterday Steve's mom, dad, and sister Deanna made it from Gilbert, AZ to be here for Emily's wedding today. We ate at La Vigna in American Fork. I read reviews before going, and most of them were negative. We all had a great experience and highly enjoyed the food, so I recommend it to anyone! Our waiter was especially good to us as well, and even was willing to take this picture of us.

It's great for the family to be all together. We are missing Eric and Brain in this picture unfortunately. It's fun to chat and watch our darling nieces and nephew interact with the world.