While moms away

I headed to Newark, New Jersey and Manhattan, NY last week for a brief business trip. I got to meet up with my in-laws who are serving a mission in Manhattan. They're doing great. The trip was a whirlwind but I did manage to finish the third book in the Twilight series on the way home! I was attending a conference on continuous auditing. We can talk about continuous auditing sometime if you're really interested:) Check out the beautiful fall leaves new the Gilstraps home.

We headed to dessert at a hip place in Greenwich Village-yummy!

I arrived home to a pretty grumpy toddler. He's been fairly difficult this week. It didn't dawn on me until my friend Lina said this is typical for kids when their moms leave. ah-hah! I'd forgotten. Last time I left for a few days Dallin sure made me pay for it! Has anyone else experienced that?? Maybe it's a function of him being the numbers of fingers he's holding up?

Wednesday afternoon I decided to do something fun. Dallin is always wanting to take a train ride so we went to the nearest light rail station and headed to downtown San Jose. We packed a picnic and took the train to park downtown. After eating outside we headed into the Childrens Museum. This place has got to be one of the coolest places for kids: art projects, water station, face painting, fire trucks, pizza creations, etc. We had a great time and here's the pictures to prove it. I may have almost made up for being gone for 3.5 days!!

I followed instructions and let Dallin paint his own face:

My little pizza maker:

Prop 8 Results

It's late on the night of November 4th and the prop 8 results are still coming in. As of midnight, it's 53% yes, 47% no. Let's hope this continues through the night.

I held up signs for a couple of hours today. Tonight I held a sign outside of my polling place. There were four no on prop 8 people handing out fliers just outside the door of the polling place. I had several people stop to thank me for what I was doing and commented on how courageous I was. It felt great...maybe this is the beginning of my political career? I doubt it, but I do believe strongly on this topic so involvement is easy.

Halloween pics to come...

Vote YES on Prop 8

On Saturday Dallin and I stood in the rain to hold a "Yes on Prop 8" sign at a very busy intersection that connects two freeways here. For the most part I didn't get too many middle fingers or thumbs down and got several honks and thumbs up.

What I didn't expect was the reaction I got when I told some people at church what I did. "That was really smart of you to bring Dallin along so you didn't get attacked." or "You shouldn't do that at an intersection because people will get out and hurt you."

Seriously it didn't dawn on me that people would physically hurt me!! Well, lucky me that Evan was taking a nap so I didn't have a choice to bring my little guardian with me.

Vote yes on 8!!