California sun...

We spent a few weeks with Linda before the three of us headed up the coast.

 We hiked to the Hollywood sign on Saturday morning.

After our hike we visited Page Muesum at La Brea Tar Pitts. Tons of animals have been excavated including wolves, saber tooth cats, coyotes, bears, horses, sloths, camels, and mamoths. And by tons I mean over one million!

 We stopped at a funky little store after lunch and they had a lovely little art exhibit inside as well. Look at this picture closely, do you notice the squirrel stabbing the deer? Yes that just happened.

 Stephanie had a baby shower while we were there. I tried out some new cupcake frosting recipes and they were a hit. German chocolate and lemon with fresh raspberry icing. Linda made chicken salad sandwiches. The two ladies that put the shower together did an awesome job. It looked like a pinterest baby shower board exploded in the lady's house. It was lots of fun and Stephanie got tons of baby girl clothes which was just what she needed for baby Emery.

 We celebrated Linda's birthday early at the Carr's. We had burrellenos and a raspberry layered ice cream cake.

 We got to see this guy and Stephanie a lot. He has some pretty sweet dancing moves.

We went to the tide pools and beach one day after kayaking.

Patrick taking out the dead tree in the backyard. He also fixed a toilet, made a budget excel file for Linda, and then updated our budget file.

 

It was a pretty relaxing trip and nice to spend so much time with family and with each other. It was also nice that we got to eat insane amounts of Mexican food  :)

I ♥ Patrick...

Our 4th Anniversary celebration was a day full of awesome! We spent most of the afternoon at the aquarium.

This little lorikeet attacked Patrick as we entered into the exhibit. It landed on his hand first and was drinking the nectar like crazy!

We were able to touch rays and sharks in three pools. Patrick loved it and it made me a little nervous.

 They replaced part of shark egg case with plastic allowing us to see the baby shark as it was developing. So cool!

 I really liked all the jellyfish. We even got to touch moon jellies.

 We got to touch these guys too. The sea cucumber was really squishy even though it looks spiky.

 Patrick's favorite was this crab. We thought it looked like an anime creature.

 We were looking at the fish and a lady came over and asked to borrow our camera to take a picture of us since she thought we looked cute. Thanks random lady!

We also saw tons of other fish, frogs, penguins, seals, otters :)

For dinner I found a Peruvian restaurant through yelp and was a little nervous since we don't really eat that type of food. But turns out it was a lot like food from Ecuador so Patrick recognized many things on the menu from his mission. Everything was tasty and we were happy we tried it.

To end our celebration we shared s'more fondue. It was a great way to end the day!

Moving...

I should make sure that I say that Patrick was the one who wanted to drive to OR on Saturday. We had originally planned on driving Sunday so we could take it easy Friday, pack the truck Saturday, and take it easy that evening before the big drive. But after some talking we realized it might be a little hard to each drive to OR, unpack our stuff into a storage unit the next day, and then drive together down to CA the day after that. So we left on Saturday morning instead. We went to Home Depot to get the car dolly attached and get the car ready. It started raining as Patrick was getting everything set.

We each had a bag of snacks for the drive and an audio book ready to go. Patrick drove the truck pulling the Focus and I drove the Sonata. At the start of the drive I wondered how I would keep myself awake and alert enough to safely make this drive.  As I was thinking about this I thought that it already seemed like we had been driving for a good while, I looked at the clock and we had only been driving 17 minutes! Thankfully the drive went pretty smoothly. There was a lot of rain in Utah and we even got some snow in Idaho. It took longer than we had planned on to get gas because the truck took diesel and was just so long. As soon as we crossed the border into Oregon we were greeted by more rain. I was feeling great until the last hour of the drive. I was ready to be there. Overall it took us 15 hours! When we got there Devin and Bridget were still awake and had the bed all ready for us.

Sunday we were able to rest, go to church, and take it easy with Devin and his family.

Monday Patrick ate lunch with his team at work and I had a job interview in the afternoon. Then we moved all of our stuff into storage. I was a little nervous that it might not all fit. Thankfully it did :) We got a little Taco Bell for dinner. Chalupas never tasted so great! Then we watched part of Ryan's baseball game.

Tuesday we headed back on the road for Linda's!

Graduation...

 Patrick graduated MBA school the end of April! We are so excited!

 His section from his first semester got together before convocation.

Patrick with his good friend Todd.

Patrick and Carlos. They won an award for the "Best Bromance"

This day was busy! Patrick played soccer in the morning with a group of MBAs. I picked him up and we headed to The Home Depot to get our moving truck and car dolly. Over an hour later we left with just the truck since the dolly needed a repair. With the help of Todd, Patrick, got the big furniture packed in the truck and then we finished loading it up. We had enough time to shower and grab a hamburger before heading to the Tanner building for a few pictures before convocation. After convocation we returned Patrick's graduation gown and ate a delicious Thai dinner!

General Conference Weekend...

My parents got us tickets to the Saturday afternoon session! We went up early and stopped at Patrick's favorite sandwich spot for lunch. Oh the prosciutto sandwich was delicious. We enjoyed the session even though we were a little sleepy. Saturday morning we slept in and I made breakfast. We had tickets to this session too but decided it might be nice to share them with someone. We had french toast in the waffle iron, hash browns, eggs, and sausage. It was delicious. We decided that we are going to make that a tradition and always have a big breakfast for the Sunday morning session. Conference was wonderful and I like that we got burst of energy to help us try a little harder to be better people and live the gospel.

One last trip to St. George..

The other weekend I had off in March we spent visiting Danielle and Chad. We realized this would be our last visit to see them while living in Utah. We had a more relaxing weekend than normal for when we get together. This worked out great because Patrick had a crazy busy week and Danielle's back was angry. Even though it was more low key it was one of our favorite visits with them.

We walked around a nearby park and enjoyed the ducks and the peacock!

They took us repelling on Saturday.

 It made me worry for my life on a whole other level but we did it. 

 Clearly Chad was not worried.

Danielle was the official photographer since she was injured.

 We also ate delicious nachos, watched Frozen twice, went to the amazing Chinese food buffet, ate cake, and played munchkins! 

I think Danielle and I are pretty lucky that our husbands get along so well. We are really going to miss being so close.

Hopefully we will get to spend a little time together soon in California!

Camp trip...

This past weekend we headed down to Arches with some friends, Todd and Roo. We spent a few days there and had a blast!

 We spent two nights camping. When we woke up Friday morning we had breakfast then it started to rain and hail! We hung out inside at the visitors center until it passed.

 Todd is in the MBA program with Patrick and they're in our ward too.

 Balanced rock.

 Eating a sandwich as we start our hike.

 Landscape Arch is Patrick's favorite. It's the length of a football field.

 The views were amazing!

 Double O Arch.

 In the bottom arch.

 Saturday we hiked to Delicate Arch. This is the most photographed arch in the park.

 Patrick with the petroglyphs.

 Walking around my favorite, Double Arch.

 It's pretty big.

We had such a fun time! We ate tin foil dinners, s'mores, and enjoyed sleeping in our big tent for the first time outside.