Evacuate the Dance Floor

We love weekends.

Here's a glimpse into the night life in Laie, Hawaii.

Bowling and Dance Central. . . twas a good time.

An afternoon with Tommy and The Joz.

Sunday Funday

We Love Sundays . . .

Darla

Dan and Sharla came to visit us last week. It was fun, relaxing, and gluttonous. They lived here with us the summer Rod and I met, so it was just a big, sandy walk down memory lane. They showed us a great time and even cooked us gourmet meals (it should have been the other way around). We love you guys. Mahalo plenty!

Friends.

Monday was a wonderful holiday. The waves at Waimea were giant and the sun was glorious.

Dan and Shar made it here from the mainland and it's been a blast so far. Beach, eating out, and gourmet meals made for us by our guests.

Love this crew. Can we make up a team name please?

Loves my Shar Shar.

After some crazy rain, flash flood warnings, and temps in the high 50's last week (burrrrr!) It was so nice to spend the weekend in the sun. I remember why we live in Hawaii.

Health Class

Welcome to Health Class.

My name is. . .

Student teaching is busy, but I LOVE it. The kids crack me up every single day.

I have an incredible mentor teacher. . . she is seriously brilliant.
I am learning so much, there is hardly enough time to soak it all in.

The view from my classroom. What more could I ask for?

Please bless I can get through these next few months.

I can't wait to be a real teacher.

A New Year

On New Year's Eve we came home to a gift from our house sitters Zack and Julie.
When we went to sleep Stevie was a tiny cocoon and when we woke up on New Year's Day he was a beautiful butterfly! We set him free and celebrated his birth along with the new year.

We spent New Year's Eve in Waikiki

We ate at Duke's and Jozie did some profesh photography. If you have access to their blog watch the video Tommy made, it's excellent.

We ended up at Times Square and watched the ball drop from the top of a hotel.

We ate a yummy frozen yogurt before we started our 2011 diet.

And we watched fireworks over the ocean - a first for us. It was beautiful.

Happy New Year, it's going to be a great one.

2010 In Review

Happy New Year!

I know everyone does these posts, but we want to remember this crazy year, so here are the most memorable moments of 2010:

• Getting stranded overnight in Park City with friends at a huge cabin (oh shucks)
  
• A cancer free trip to the dermatologist
• Sticking out my very last semester (hopefully ever!) at BYU
• Tanya taking the Praxis exam
  
• Tanya going blonde (if only for just a weekend)
  
• Saying goodbye to Grandma Rasmussen, Grandpa Tapp, and Great Grandma Freeman (within a two month period)
• Upgrading to our waterproof camera (which has paid for itself by now)
• Tanya getting into every school she applied to in Hawaii
  
• A weekend at East Canyon with friends and junk food
  
• Learning to appreciate - and then become infatuated with - Vampire Weekend
• Easter in St. George with both families
  
• Back-to-back college graduations
• Endless amounts of planning and preparing to move to Hawaii
• Selling Rodney's car
• Two perfect weeks traveling around Costa Rica with our best friends
  
• Rodney taking the GMAT
• Tanya saying goodbye to the Breast Care Center at Intermountain Medical
  
• Two weeks at Lake Powell with family (Bullfrog and Antelope Point)
• Driving to San Francisco and spending a week with The Peronas
  
• Putting Tanya's car on a barge and sending it overseas
• Seeing Wicked on Broadway
• Putting all of our nice things into storage
• Packing our lives into 4 suitcases and boarding a plane to an island where we didn't know anyone and didn't know how we were going to pay for it
  
• Turning a crap shack into a beach shack into a home
• Rodney getting his first big boy job, complete with full benefits and real money
• Tanya fulfilling a lifelong dream of going to school without working
• Discovering new hikes, new beaches, new restaurants, and new parts of the island
• Making new friends
  
• Becoming proud owners of the essentials - surfboards, beach cruisers, boogie boards, and beach chairs
• Hosting our visiting friends and family in our new home
• Hosting Thanksgiving with friends
• Flying home for Christmas to be with both of our families

2010 has been good to us and we have a really good feeling about 2011. We know where we want to be and what we want to be doing this time next year, and it's exciting!

Christmas 2010

We were so lucky to be able to fly home and spend Christmas with both of our families in Utah.

Here are some of the highlights of our holiday:

Seeing our bed and spending many comfortable nights between our two houses. Some elves even decorated our room for Christmas before we got there.

Decorating sugar cookies

Dinner with our besties at our favorite haunt (Italian Village)

Thanksgiving (again) with Madison and the gang

Watching the little nuggets get excited about Santa, presents, and Christmas in general.

It was actually pretty obscene how many gifts these little boys had to open (this is only half of it - but to be fair, these are gifts for all 13 people in my family)

Enjoying so much diet coke before we go off of soda for the New Year

I mean REALLY enjoying it . . .

Playing lots of games with both families and Curtash

Being there for baby Chloe's blessing

Parties literally almost every night of the week, and when there wasn't a party, there was a gourmet meal being prepared or a favorite restaurant being visited.

Going snowboarding twice

Going swimming with the babies

Being reunited with Alex, who recently got home from her mission

Eating this pizza that was big enough to swaddle baby Chloe in

Throwing a surprise 60th Birthday party for my mom Cheryl. She is always the one throwing parties for everyone else, and it was time she enjoyed being the center of attention for once! She was totally surprised and we spent the night roasting her and basking in her coolness. Doesn't she look great for 60?

Although we didn't get a White Christmas, we woke up to this a few days later

The only real bummer of our holiday season was our car accident. We were driving by Fashion Place Mall going to get Tanya's wedding ring cleaned when a minivan pulled right in front of us. We didn't even have time to react before we t-boned them. The airbags went off and it was pretty shocking. We walked away with only some cuts and bruises and whiplash. The girls in the other car seemed completely unharmed, even though their car was pretty banged up. We were driving in Tanya's mom's beetle and we feel so bad. She loved that car. It was the other car's fault and they got a ticket.

I took some pics with my phone. Our car . . .

And theirs . . .

Overall we had a great Christmas and are lucky to have two awesome families.
Last night we got back to Hawaii and it feels good to be "home"