One Thing that is Green

I have been thinking for some time about the overuse of those pesky plastic shopping bags that you get at Walmart etc. It annoys me that baggers feel they need to put each item in it's own bag practically. At any given time you can find a huge ball of them under my sink. And although I recycle them now, and try to reuse them whenever possible, it is still a problem. Did you know that the average american uses between 300-700 of them per year? That's like 14 million trees per year, not to mention the oil that it takes to produce them. The other day I was buying some little thing (I don't remember what) and I told the bagger that a bag was not neccessary. She either didn't hear or didn't believe me, I don't know which, and she bagged it anyway. I went as far as to give her the bag back and asked her to please reuse it. I mean, I could totally carry this one item in my hand, it was not going to fall and break into a million pieces. Well I may have offended her because she looked at me with such a bewildered look.
I learned on the plane on Tuesday that Wild Oats is banning the use of plastic bags altogether and that IKEA is next. San Francisco banned them 1 year ago in the whole city.

I read this on the Chico bag site:

"Plastic bags don't biodegrade, they photo-degrade--breaking down into small toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food-chain when mistaken for zooplankton or jellyfish." I didn't know that.


Jetblue's Earth day promotion (with the givaway bags) is called "One Thing that's Green". The premise is that each person can surely do one more thing to help preserve our wonderful earth. I remember thinking as a teen, how lame it looked to carry a reusable shopping bag into the store, but now that will be me. I am going to make a committment to try to use reusable bags as much as possible. The nice thing is that they compact down so little and they have a clip to hang on to your belt loop. So I am just going to keep a few in my car so that I am ready to go.
And that will be my one green thing. What's yours?

A day in California

We went to California on Tuesday, just for the day. We woke up at like 4:30am and got back at about 11 pm that same night.

Here are some pictures from our trip.

We rode the bus everywhere, which the kids loved. It was super easy and quick too.

The ocean was freezing but I guess someone didn't care.

Eating Pinkberry ice cream-wow

Since it just so happened to be Earth Day, Jetblue was giving away these Earth Bags. They were Chico reusable shopping bags with tons of cool samples inside. The kids were so excited to each get their own, and they loved all the little goodies. More about the bags later...

The Magic of Ordinary Days

I don't know how I am doing on my other goals, okay, not so hot, but at least I am reading right?

I guess going from 200 channels to like 4 does that to me.

This book was recommended to me by Leah and I really liked it. It was cool because it is a fictional story but it has so many historical facts in it, that it is like reading part of a history book. But much more engaging. It goes through the story of this girl who gets pregnant out of wedlock in the 1940's right in the middle of WW2 and what's cool and unexpected is that it goes into detail about the Japanese Internment Camps at that time. Pretty interested and not at all what I expected.

And this one has a good ending. hee hee

Awesome Date

This was the best date we have been in a long time. Jonas picked me up in a humongous Ken Garth Truck and we headed down to the Energy Solutions Arena where we drove right up the pavement and parked literaly on the property!

The rest of the pictures are bad because I only had my camara phone with me.

Then I got in my uniform (a blaze t-shirt), we ate dinner, and then we started working at the inflatables. My job was to give out the prizes to the kids (and grown ups) who got the football in the targets, and to stamp hands. It was fun because being at the center of it all, everyone is so excited and it is so high energy there.

The other thing that was cool is I got to see Jonas in action. He is so talented when working with kids. It was so great to see him interact with them, coaching them in throwing the football, he was totally in his element. I loved watching that.

Then a little after half time we started taking down the inflatables and we left. We drove trax down to Temple Square and just sat by the reflection pool and stared at this:

So beautiful. We just sat and talked and cuddled. It was a beautiful night and not very cold at all.

Then we walked down Main Street and saw the amazing construction pit, wow. SLC downtown is going to look fabulous when it is done! Then we were walking past Channel 2 news right at 10 so we stood outside and watched them do the news. I tried reading the prompter. That was funny.

After that we walked to our little car and drove to Leatherbys. We sat down and realized we had to pick up the kids in 15 min so we scarfed down our Tracy's PB cup, which was surprisingly easy to do between the 2 of us, and left.

Every bit of that night was perfect, it was so fun for us to be together, working and playing and doing something totally different than the normal dinner and rented movie. And it was the first Friday in a long time that I was still wide awake at 11! :)

Random Good Things

Jasmine sleeping cute--funny how every now and then they revert to the baby mode of sleeping.

Jasmine sleeping with dad.

Wrestling on the trampoline.

I took the kids to the SL marathon finish line. I thought it would be this cool thing to teach them about perseverance and goal setting. No, they were bored from second one.

Happy Birthday Joy School Kids

Last week we celebrated all 5 of the kids' birthdays at once, instead of doing a small celebration for each of them. Each mom got to do a different holiday throughout the year and this was my turn. It also happened to be the last time I will be teaching these kids. It has been a fun year to watch all of them grow to be good little friends, and learn a couple of things along the way. I am so glad that I didn't have to pay for preschool this year! We really lucked out and had a great bunch of kids. The celebration went pretty well, they were all so excited!

Here is the "un-birthday" cake that my friend Susan made. She is the same Susan that made Jen's wedding cake. It was awesome. It had all 5 names around it!

It was so cute I didn't want to cut into it.

The highlight was of course opening presents.

It was really a fun day. I am glad that the year is coming to a close but I am also so grateful that I found a group to do this with. For a while I didn't think I would find enough people and I am so glad that it worked out.

The Namesake

I finally finished reading the book that I had started before I got so engrossed in the Twilight series. I had heard raves about it and my friend said that she loved the movie, but I have to say it wasn't my favorite. I loved learning more about the Indian culture and the author did an excellent job of describing the process of assimilation into a new culture, the ups and downs, but overall it was such a sad story. I guess I just wanted a happy ending.

l

My little veggie Eater

Jasmine is all about the greens (veggies, not money) and I love it! We recently discovered that she loves broccoli, I guess we hadn't offered it as much before. Now we have it all the time. So the other day I was cooking and I cut up a bunch of broccoli and then set aside a big stalk. Well I told her that we were only eating the cut up chunks but when I turned around for a minute, she had the big stalk in her hand and was eating it like an apple! I didn't take a picture of that since I didn't want to condone the fact that she didn't listen to me, but it was pretty funny.Then while I was cooking, she was busily setting aside some scraps into an empty pasta bag, some parsley, some broccoli, etc. "I'm cooking mommy!"

A while later I found her happily sitting at the table just eating her creation!

~Blogger finally let me publish my post about Jen's wedding! So if you want to see pictures of that go to "older posts"~

April Fools 2008

The only person I really got this year was Shayden. I froze a bunch of water in a cereal bowl the night before and then filled the top with cereal in the morning and fed it to him. It was so funny because he kept poking with his spoon at the ice with a puzzled look on his face. But he didn't say anything. Then finally when the ice moved he picked up the big chunk with his spoon and looked at me and said "Mom. I big chunk of ice?" and I happily said "April Fools!". He thought it was pretty funny.I tried to get Jonas and I kind of did because I put a post it on the bottom of the mouse so that it wouldn't move. All he had to do was turn over the mouse and he would have read the paper that said "April Fools" but he didn't, he just thought there was a virus on the computer and restarted it and ran the spyware protection stuff!!! Silly guy.

And I guess Jonas is wising up because he called me on the phone from work and gave me a good prank himself. I have to hand it to him, he totally got me. And he is not even a very good liar. Rats!

The Utah Blaze

Last Saturday my work had an bowling activity and the kids had a great time.



Then later we got to go see the Blaze play and it was awesome! It was a much bigger deal than I expected, just like a Jazz game. It is arena football so at least we weren't out in the cold like all of my memories of watching football games. The kids did pretty good too, there were lot's of things to keep them intertained though like bounce houses and

tattoos.



Jonas knows people (of course), so we even got to have dinner with the VIP's before the game! It was very cool. I always wondered what went on in there.

I should have taken a picture of Shayden shakin' his stuff all over the place trying to get on the big screen! It was awesome, this kid has some moves! Too bad they didn't pick him. We had really close seats, it was the closest I had ever been in that arena.

The only bad thing was that we lost the game. Oh well, maybe next time!

Last day of Spring Break

The last day of Spring Break was Monday March 24th and I was determined to make it a great day. We got up and kind of had a slow morning, playing and doing some clean up and then we went and saw Enchanted at the dollar theater! It was so good just as we suspected from the raves everyone gave it, and the box office surprised me when they said it only cost $.50 per person that day! What a deal, it was a nice theater too. Then we hung out around that part of town since we were meeting my sister's family later that day. We went to get something to eat and then went to the dollar store and they each picked a toy (I'm a big spender). When we finally met their cousins they were so excited and we went to Chuck E Cheese together!

We got tokens for report cards which is like the best thing ever. We used to do that all the time as a kid. Then we used a coupon to get a bunch more tokens so needless to say we had a lot.

Shayden made me laugh so hard, this is so like him, we were all wondering how come he wasn't running out of tokens like everyone else. Turns out he was playing this game over and over with this buddy that he found that was more than willing to pay for him too! Shay later said that he told the kid "sorry you have to pay for me so much" but the boy (who was like 11 or 12) said "oh, that's okay". I wonder what his parents would have thought. It is funny, his is just like his dad, always getting stuff for free.

My brother in law made a homemade du-rag for my cute little niece, so funny.

Jasmine normally is attached to this pony ride the entire time we are there, so she surprised me this time when she only rode it like 5 times :)

It was a fun time!