Simple Sundays

I was excited to purchase a pre-made Chinese chicken salad at Costco last night. We got home from church today looking forward to an easy but yummy meal.

Our chinese chicken salad dreams were dashed when I read the fine print -just add lettuce. How could I miss that there was no lettuce included?!

Here's to pb&j sandwiches.

Spring has sprung?

The weather has been amazing this week. Just about 70 degrees every day. This isn't normal and I think it's tricked my paperwhites into thinking it's spring:

I just love these flowers. Every time I look on my deck they make me happy. Someday I will have a garden overflowing with tulips, hyacinths, and lemon and orange trees, just to name a few.

My plan to get the land to have this garden is to win this home in Sonoma. I've already entered today and plan on doing so every day until February 19th. You can try to win too, but if you win and I don't, well, you have to promise me a two week stay every year, AT LEAST!

http://www.hgtv.com/dream-home/index.html

I can already picture myself living in Sonoma...

Dallin's Shiner

This one was taken day one when it was still fresh:

We had a trip to urgent care last night. It was a hard fall. Dallin tripped and hit his nose on a metal stair at the park. Many tears were shed but I think I'm going to be okay. Alright, Dallin was the one who got hurt, but guess who cried more?? We'll know this Tuesday if it's broken, but here's the black eyes to prove his manhood. This picture doesn't do the swelling justice. It's quite noticeable. I feel I owe an explanation as soon as people look at him.

Holidays

Rather than wait all the way to Christmas to put all the year-end holidays into one post, I thought I'd stick in Halloween and Thanksgiving.

First, thanks to Grandma Marquardson for sewing this adorable clown costume. True to the male gender, it was not enough for Dallin to just be a clown. Check out what's in his left hand. Boys!!

We ended up sticking around home for Thanksgiving. Our friends the Stovalls threw a great Turkey Trot the morning of Thanksgiving. Nothing like running 3 miles before the feast! Our kind friends the Bennetts invited us over for turkey. Thank you Camille!

Hey, we're just going running and it's early...I borrowed Dallin's turkey hat. Isn't it sooo cute? $1 at Target! They sold out before Halloween. Consider yourself warned: you've got to jump on the dollar bin bargains when you see them!

Dallin with his best buddy.Dallin just looks too cute here.

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!!