Jaiden's First Halloween

For this Halloween, Jaiden dressed up as a cute little monkey. First, we drove to Bountiful (which ended up taking 90 minutes due to the absolutely awful traffic from Salt Lake to Bountiful) and went to Jaiden's Great-Grandma's place.

Then we drove to Grandma Ownby's house (it is still weird calling my mom that since to me, Grandma Ownby is my own grandmother). Grandma didn't know that we were coming, so we rang the doorbell as if we were trick-or-treaters.

Jaiden Laughing Uncontrollably

I just pulled these precious video clips off the camera. I love making Jaiden laugh!

Noah's yellow party hats!

Melissa, Tatiana, Asher, Jaiden and I traveled to Boise for Noah's 1st Birthday! We had it on September 29th at the Cabin. The theme was John Deere tractors. Maren made a really cute cake with a tractor on a crushed oreo road. Noah looked so grown up. He got real close to walking on his own. We had a wonderful barbecued pork-chop dinner and then yummy cake. He got some cool presents.We had fun. We sure love little Noah!

Snow in October!

It snowed last night. Imagine our surprise to see the snow last night when last year, there was no snow on the ground even during Thanksgiving time. I do remember that one year, it snowed really badly in early October and they canceled school for the day as a result. I loved getting out of school. Perhaps this and other experiences have lead me to love fresh, white snow, because I do. I love seeing all the lawns and rooftops covered in white. I don't even mind driving on fresh snow. What I hate is driving on snow that's melted and refrozen as ice.

Favorite Conference Quotes

Yesterday (and the day before) was General Conference and Heather and I watched almost all of it. I think that my favorite quotes came from Dallin H. Oaks who spoke Sunday Afternoon. His talk was about how we have many more good choices in life than we can possibly choose. In other words, we should choose the best choices and be most efficient with our time. Here are some of my favorites:

"Even though a particular choice is more costly, its far greater value may make it the best choice of all."

"It is not enough that [a choice] is good."

"Not every [goal that is good] is worth the portion of our lives that we pay to get it." Ugh, this really made me think about some of the things I've spent a lot of time on that just didn't seem worth it in retrospect.

"What your children really want for dinner is you." He talked about how good eating together as a family is.

Cell Phone Woes

Heather and I are trying to save money by consolidating our phone usage. We currently have Qwest with unlimited long distance ($60 per month) and Verizon ($60 per month +$15 taxes, for 400 measly minutes shared across two phones). We want to switch to Cricket ($45 before taxes, probably would end up being $55 after taxes) for our primary phone with unlimited long distance (it would also be Heather's phone during the day). And I would get a prepaid wireless phone that I would only use sparingly (the only person I really talk to at all is Heather, and if I'm at work I could just talk to her on the work phone).

So we decided to try to save some money and buy a used phone that we thought would work with Cricket. Heather paid a lady $115 for a Motorola RAZR V3C phone , but also wasted a lot of time driving around because the lady lived far away. The next day (Saturday, two days ago), we took the phone to the Cricket office. The place was absolutely packed. I couldn't believe how many people were hanging out at Cricket. We took a number and after a 15-20 minute wait, we talked to a sales representative who told us that we needed to go to Customer Service if we wanted to use a used phone. So we had to wait another probably 30-45 minutes, and Jaiden was starting to get really squirmy. Finally, we got up to the counter and the lady told us that our phone wasn't getting any signal so it was probably damaged and it wouldn't work for us. During this time, Jaiden was slapping me in the face with his little hands which was making me rather frustrated.

We left Cricket and were both pretty angry and vowed to do all we could to recover our $115 from the lady and return the phone to her. Heather called her and "jousted" with her on the phone for probably 10 minutes before the lady agreed to at least look at the phone to make sure we hadn't damaged it further since we'd purchased it. We drove down to Pleasant Grove again and got lost due to Mapquest's directions being wrong; we finally located her place and she wasn't home. I was feeling pretty discouraged by this time. Heather called her and she came home. She looked at the phone and then gave us our money back. Once we got in the car (and inconspicuously counted the cash) we got the heck out of there. On the way home, we were feeling really relieved. We vowed that next time we weren't going to get ourselves into a situation where we'd buy something that didn't work.

So now we are still on the hunt for a used (or new) phone to use with Cricket. We're learning a lot about phones that we never knew before which is making the search take longer. Hopefully it will all be worth it in the end.

New Jaiden Pictures

Heather, Jaiden, and I went to the family cabin near Boise, Idaho recently and we got a lot of pictures. I've uploaded some of them for you to view right here.