The Ogden's: May Catch Up

Yet again, here is another catch up post that is "only" 6 months behind. :)

(Warning: Picture Overload)

We finally got our fence in! Seriously one of the best days ever, especially since having Makadie. She loves to run around and is super curious so she gets into everything. Having a fence meant some kind of containment when going out into our backyard. Of course, it also meant that it would be easier to have family and friends over so they weren't having to worry about their kids being in other people's yards.

Covey and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary! It is crazy to know that we've been married that long. Since we hadn't done anything very big since our 1 year anniversary (a cruise), we decided to do an overnight weekend trip to Salt Lake. For having lived in Utah my whole life, I've never really spent much time there, so it actually is kind of like a vacation to go there.

Covey took Friday off and we dropped Makadie off at my mom's house. I'll admit, I was a little anxious since that was the first night I had ever spent away from her and I wasn't totally sure how she was going to do. Turns out she did great so I had nothing to worry about. We left a little later than we had originally planned because I wasn't feeling well that morning. Covey and Makadie had just gotten over a cold and I was the last one to get it. Lucky me. We were tempted to cancel the trip to Salt Lake and just stay around home, but we had already paid for the room and some other activities and so we went ahead with our plans.

First thing we did was drive up to Sandy and eat lunch at TGI Friday's. This is one of our favorite restaurants and since the closest one is in Sandy, we don't get to go very often. We have kind of a history with TGI Friday's because there used to be one next to the Provo Marriott and that is where we spent our first night married and had breakfast there the next morning. Then, we went there again in San Diego on our honeymoon. They also had one in Buffalo, NY, where Covey was selling security systems that summer and we went there a lot with the sales team. You'd think we'd get tired of it, but we don't. :)

After lunch, we went to the Living Planet Aquarium, which was fun since neither of us had been there. We wandered around looking at the different exhibits for about an hour and a half and then headed up to Salt Lake to check into our room.

We decided to stay at the Grand America Hotel and we got a great deal. The rooms there are so nice and big! And the hotel itself is just awesome. Since we were both still recovering from being sick, we took a nice nap on the comfy beds in our room.

Feeling refreshed, we took Trax to City Creek, wandered the stores a little and ate dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. Yum, yum. We were so full from dinner that we ordered our cheesecake to go so we could enjoy it later. Then, we went back to our hotel and relaxed for the rest of the night. They had a nice band in the lounge that played relaxing music, which we listened to for about an hour and tried not to fall asleep.

A couple of monks we saw taking pictures on their phones. It made me smile.

The next day, we ate breakfast in their cafe, gathered our stuff together and wandered around the hotel until it was time to check out. At one point, Covey thought it would be fun to see if there was a way to get up to the roof of the hotel. I told him we probably couldn't, but he was on a mission to find out. We went up to the highest floor we could, then Covey found a hallway that led to a stairwell. Long story short, we checked that the door to the hallway would open back up to the floor, but failed to check the door from the hallway to the stairwell. Yeah, we got locked in and had to walk down 25+ flights of stairs to the basement level and back around to the front of the hotel and then back up the elevator to our room. A slight detour, but a fun story. :)

Squinty smiles. It was bright outside!

We found this in the fridge in our room. Only in Utah...

We checked out of our room and put our luggage in the car, then hopped on Trax again back to City Creek to eat lunch and explore the stores more. I couldn't believe how big City Creek was. Neither of us had been there before, but we were kind of deterred from going into a lot of the stores because they were so dang expensive! Originally, we had planned on eating at Famous Dave's before heading back home, but we'd had so much restaurant food that weekend that we nixed that and went to my mom's house and picked up our baby girl and went home. All in all, it was a good weekend!

The next weekend was Mother's Day. My dad and step-mom invited us to go out to Cedar Fort for a day of four wheeling. It took us a little bit to get there and thankfully, Makadie fell asleep for most of the ride. By the time we got there, she was ready to get out of the car and go explore the dirt and sagebrush. :) We went on one ride, then went back and ate lunch. There was a family there that is friends with my dad and step-mom who had rented a 4-seater off-road machine. We took Makadie on it down the road and besides not being able to open her eyes, I think she liked it. :) We drove out to my dad's house in Herriman and put Makadie down for a nap, then we went to a dirt bike race that my cousin was racing in. Makadie was tired by the end of the day and so were we.

Mother's Day was really nice. The weather was perfect. Covey went home with Makadie to put her down for her nap so I could attend all of church. I can't even remember how long it had been since I attended an entire block of church, so it was nice to go.

As the weather started warming up, I thought it would be fun to get a little blow up pool to put in our backyard for Makadie to play in. In addition to a new pool, I also got her a few swimsuits. Like, 4 new swimsuits. I couldn't help myself! They were just so darn cute. We got to enjoy the new pool and swimsuits soon after I bought them and Makadie LOVED it. It made me so happy to see her joy and the sweet smiles on her face!

Covey was accepted to the MBA program at UVU! He had studied like crazy and taken the GMAT a couple months earlier and was nervous that he wasn't going to get in. But he totally did! It is a new program and they only admit about 40 students each year. It is a 2 year, year-round program. So in 2015, Covey will have an MBA.

My younger sister, Dani, was due with a baby boy in July and so I threw her a friend baby shower. I decided to do a theme of "Ready to Pop". It was pretty fun to think of food to go along with the theme. I felt pretty creative if I do say so myself.

Poppin' Cupcakes (I put pop rocks on top.)

Blue Raspberry Lemonade

Kool-Aid Flavored Popcorn (flavors from left to right) S"lime"y Green Frog, "Red"y to Come Out, Little Boy Blue

During the month, we also invited some friends over for a BBQ. Daniel and Covey were roommates at one point and Daniel, his wife Ann, and Covey all worked at the same place for a while. So I've known them almost as long as I've known Covey. It had been a while since we had gotten together and so we invited them and their two girls over. The weather was awesome and their girls and Makadie all played in the sprinklers while we made the food and chatted.

Another thing I did this month was that I decided to start making a jean quilt. My mom had got a bunch of jeans from someone and had asked if I wanted them. So I took them and decided to make one of those big, heavy jean quilts that (hopefully) last a really long time. I'll just say that I was a little ambitious in my vision of this quilt. More on that later.

Lastly, a couple of things that I forgot to mention from the month of April. First, we got a new car! After driving to St. George in March and barely making it there and back in our little Hyundai Sonata, we started to consider selling it and getting a new car. After looking around, we decided an SUV would be a good option. We found a used 2003 Lexus RX300 at a dealership in Draper that looked perfect. Although we were kind of set on it, we decided to take an afternoon and look at some other cars at some other dealerships. We didn't find anything we even wanted to test drive. Our last stop was this place with the Lexus. We took it on a test drive and decided we wanted it. It sounds kind of impulsive the way I'm saying it, but it really was an informed decision. The place said they would take trade-ins so we had them look at our car. We had though that we could get $800-$1000 on it, but sadly, it was only worth about $300. Kind of a disappointment. But if that was all we could get, then we would take it and put it towards our "new" car. Driving home in that Lexus was so much fun! The car is in awesome condition and had only had one owner previously who took great care of it.

We had only had our car for a little over a month when we had a totally crazy experience. One morning Covey found some animal poop in our garage and figured that it was our neighbor's cat. We couldn't see that the cat was still in the garage so we didn't worry about it. When Covey came home for lunch, he found more poop and some random insulation on the ground around the car, but still no cat. Later that afternoon, I went out into the garage to throw out some trash and saw an animal scurry behind a long piece of wood we had laying up against the wall (about 10 feet long and 15 inches high). I guessed it must have been the cat we hadn't been able to find. I walked over and called for the cat to come out but heard nothing. So I lifted the board away from the wall and there were two huge eyes staring at me with a big nose and long whiskers. But this was no cat. I squealed and dropped the board back into place. Then I barricaded the ends so whatever it was couldn't get out.

I texted Covey when I got back in the house: "Hey you know that cat that we thought was in the garage? Yeah, it's not a cat. But I don't know what it is." He called me about a minute later and I explained what had happened. I told him that it looked like a huge rodent of some sort, kind of like a beaver but without the tail. After getting off the phone with him, I started to do some research on large rodents in Utah. The only thing I could come up with was that it was a marmot. Otherwise known as a groundhog. Yeah. A groundhog. Did you even know they had those in Utah?! I texted Covey back: "I think it's a groundhog." He said: "I'll be home soon."

When he came home, he peeked behind the board and came to the same conclusion I had after looking at the picture I had pulled up on the computer. We weren't really sure what to do with the thing and Covey was going home teaching soon. He told his companion about what we'd found and he said he had a shotgun. (I won't go into details but hindsight is 20/20 and we probably should have just called animal control.) Once the groundhog was no longer a problem, Covey went home teaching. We thought that was the end of it. Guess again.

The next day, Covey was out in the garage where he found more insulation on the ground. He was going crazy trying to figure out where it had come from since we couldn't find any holes in our sheetrock in the garage and we didn't have any insulation lying around. Then Covey called me into the garage: "Shani, you need to come see this." Based on the way he said it, I didn't really want to come see whatever it was. But I walked into the garage to see the hood of our new car popped. Care to take a guess where that insulation was coming from? Yeah. The car. That freaking groundhog was trying to build a nest inside the hood of our new car! Our Lexus! I about died. Covey checked his hood too and there was a bunch of insulation from his car that had been pulled out, along with some chewed wires. If I was feeling bad about the demise of the groundhog, I wasn't feeling bad anymore, that is for darn sure. Stupid groundhog...

One thing that I've been working on since last summer is learning how to use my DSLR camera. I love taking pictures and really wanted to be able to take some good ones of my family and friends. Covey has been trying to learn a little bit here and there too. A couple times during the month we took some pictures in our backyard and I edited a few.

And now some talk about Makadie's developments during the month of May. In May, Makadie was 16 months old. I had started to write down all the words/phrases she knew how to say and said on a regular basis. I came up with over 50 words and phrases and I know I missed some! Now, I know she is not some child prodigy or anything, but that is pretty darn good as far as I'm concerned. People were always surprised at how much she talked and how clearly she spoke (they still are). She is a smarty pants.

Makadie also started to really get into everything she could possibly reach. She is so curious about the world around her and wants to explore everything she can. Her little personality is coming out more and more everyday. She is crazy and busy, but she definitely keeps life interesting (and me on my toes!).