Yay!! Visitors!!!

We had so much fun last week having people come visit us here in Texas. My mom came from California for a long weekend, and she wasn't here nearly long enough, but we were glad to have her for as long as she could come. It was even extra great, because Devin and I got to go out on a real date for Valentines Day, without worrying about Julia. We went to a movie and had dinner and dessert. I'm already laughing at myself because I am about to blog about food, but can I just say that I discovered heaven on a plate on Valentine's Day. I had the lobster ravioli, and it is hands down the most amazing food that has ever graced my tastebuds. They were little pasta pockets of heaven. Anyone who ever goes to Macaroni Grill ever, has to try it. It will make you die of happiness, and it will inspire you to blog about food, in true fat kid form!! That dinner followed by a piece of Chocolate Coconut Cream Cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory, and I can just die and go to heaven!! :) Well so far I have written more about food than about my mom (oops..) so let me fix that!!

We went to the Fort Worth Stockyards on Saturday and enjoyed a good 'ole day in Texas. We saw the longhorns, and horses, we watched a cattle auction (which was remarkably high-tech) and we shopped for little Texas souveneirs. Grandma even bought Julia little stuffed farm animals, which we discovered (during Sacrament Meeting, of course) make noise!! We also had buffalo burgers for lunch (which were really good, and apparently better for you than beef... who knew?) It would have been a perfect Texas day, if it hadn't been freezing (ok, more like 50 degrees.) Here are some pics:

Julia practicing to be a Rodeo Queen!! ;)

She was fascinated by the animals

And apparently they were fascinated by her!


We had a really great time. I loved seeing my mom!!!!


Not only did my mom come, but Amy came through on her road trip from Orlando back to Utah! Thanks Amy for taking the long way to come see us!! It was so fun to see her and she finally got to meet Julia. We went to the JFK Museum and tooled around Downtown (which I navigated without having to call Devin to ask for directions, thank you very much!) We also visited with our friend Forrest who lives nearby, and we discovered You Tube videos of Adam Lambert. If you haven't yet had this pleasure, do yourself a favor and watch him sing "As long as You're Mine." He's rull good. :)

Catching up with friends is probably the best thing in the world, and I can't wait to see Amy and everyone who lives in Utah in just 3 1/2 weeks!! Yay!!

So about this picture... there have definitely been better pictures of me, but there has never been a better picture of Julia, so here it is...

Greatest face ever!! :) Love that little girl!!

Not a lot has been going on this week, but I will share the few highlights. First of all, and probably most importantly, Devin forgave me for signing up to feed the missionaries during the Super Bowl. (Unintentionally, I promise! But yes, yes, I'm the worst wife ever!) We had them over and ate Super Bowl food, and then we watched the game after they left, (thank goodness for DVR's). But my wifely blunder has been forgiven, and next time I'll do my best not to sign up to feed the missionaries during the one NFL game we actually plan to watch! :)

Julia is busy crawling everywhere, showing me all of the things she'd rather play with than her toys, such as my shoes, the contents of the diaper bag, the cheerio I missed underneath the high chair, etc... Good thing she's cute! On Sunday we picked her up after she was crawling around in her dress rather than pants like usual, and we saw that she had raw little knees from so much crawling! Poor thing! I guess that's the price we pay for progress! (And by the way, I'm not a terrible mother for having my child bare-legged in February... it was 70 degrees here this weekend! Yay!!!)Julia's other new thing is that she has learned to sit still and pay attention while we read her books. She loves looking at the pictures and holding my finger and helping me follow along under the words. She's on her way to becoming the nerdy little bookworm that we're hoping for!! :)
Other than that I am spending all of my time playing with my new digital scrapbooking software. I am in love!! It is so much fun, and it is a solution to my inability to do real scrapbooking. I can mess up over and over again and just fix things with a click of the mouse! Plus, the $20 I spent on it (thank you ebay!) is all I ever have to pay! There is TONS of free stuff online, plus the stuff that came with the software. I'm a big fan. If any of you are scrapbooking challenged like me (iPhoto was my scrapbook up until a couple of weeks ago) I would totally recommend it. There, that's my plug for Memory Mixer. Maybe I'll post a couple of the pages I have made. And, the new header on the blog (to answer Libby's question) is something that I made in the program. It took probably 20 minutes. I'm telling you... it's the solution to all of my scrapbooking and boredom problems!! :)