Grandpa Cody

Dan's Grandpa William Cody passed away on Sunday afternoon after a battle with cancer. He was a great man. He was adventurous (going on rollercoasters when he was well into his eighties), and kind, he always talked to our girls and asked us questions. We loved visiting with him and Belle on our trips to California. I loved listening to his prayers and playing zilch with him. We are so glad our girls got to meet him. I will update this blog and let dan say a few things when he gets home from work but I felt compelled to write something right now.
Grandpa Cody: we will miss you!
We are driving down to Long Beach this weekend to attend the funeral services.

Music

Sorry I haven't changed the music on my blog for a long time, but I couldn't remember the password for the website and they didn't return any of my emails to get a new one. Also, I haven't wanted to start all over with a new site and all new downloads so thanks for bearing with me.
It is finally updated yea!

Also, I just watched a show on abc.com called "Notes from the Underbelly" and it is so hilarious. Anyone who has had babies or is pregnant will like this show.

I'll post pics later of my weekend in SanFrancisco.

Juno

I saw this movie last weekend with my sister Kristen and friend Melissa (thanks for letting me come along).

I loved this movie, it was so witty and surprisingly real. I heard that it was funny so I was excited to see it and then I ended up crying through the last half of it. But I still loved it. Jennifer Garner did such a good job, she was very convincing. And I loved Juno.

For those of you who haven't seen it, give me a call because I would love to see it again. Go see it!

What happens in Vegas.. gets blogged about

I just developed a disposable camera which has been in the bottom of my closet for over two years. I was so happy to be reminded of our trip to Vegas with Kristy and Loni.

Kristy planned a whole surprise birthday trip for Loni. We did a lot of fun stuff: visited a lot of casinos, watched Cirque du solei, ate at the new (then) Wynn buffet, saw the Mazarati and Ferrari showcase, went to a variety show which was so cool. Too bad these are the only pics that turned out. But they are funny anyway.


Kristy and I (look how young we look. I had just had Ashton) G-unit

wassup g-loc Lon in our hotel room!


I miss blonde hair.

Hope you enjoyed our little walk down memory lane. Maybe I should develop the other random cameras i've found around the house, maybe I will find more treasures like these.

Feeding Adrienne

So we decided to put Ashton to work and give her some responsibility finally. Her new task is to feed the baby. She loves it and here is some proof:

There's not really anything in the container. lol.

Give me more food!

Friends Christmas Party

Ohhhh, I know this is soooo late. But I figure, there is still snow on the ground here so posting a party in the same season isn't as bad as posting something from say summer?

Anyway, several months ago my friend Ashlee and I decided to have a small Christmas get together with our some friends from high school. We hosted it at my mom's house in Orem so that everyone didn't have to drive up to Logan or Roy.

Well, I still haven't decided if that was good or not because there was a huge snowstorm on that day and Ashlee & Family drove for 2 1/2 hours and my familia took 4 hours to drive a normally 2 hour drive! It was crazy, but we were determined to hang out with friends we hadn't seen in over a year.

Due to the snow it ended up being Lara & Eric, Ashlee & Greg, and Dan & I. We ate a lot of yummy food: sandwiches, bean dip and chips, chocolate fondue, and so much more (this was one of the highlights for me since I love eating). And we had a lot of funny conversation, which I cannot include here because most of it needed to be sensored. But we laughed a lot.

And then there was THE white elephant exchange. Dan and I got some socks that made us ask "what were the manufacturers thinking!" Yes those are mice, or cats or something on them,which were acutally really comfy:

Ashlee got a very classy and regifted sunflower frame : (I can't find that pic right now. Sorry I'll post later.)

and the ringdinger:

A thong, KY Jelly, and mormon champagne for the "newlyweds"! They are thrilled about it as you can see from the pic. Lara, you still need to let us know how that turned out...j/k.

It was so fun to see you ladies and to get to know your husbands. I loved it. Time to start our traditional girls night out in February-EVERYONE is invited.

Best Life Challenge

I am not going to call this a New Year's resolution post, because I usually associate resolution with short lived, trite statements ... at least for me. So this year I am doing Oprah and Bob Greene's Best Life Challenge .

http://www.thebestlife.com/ms/mvchallenge/index.html

I don't like the word "diet" either because I think it is a lot like the word "resolution" where I am just setting myself up for failure.

I like this program because I feel it encourages a well rounded improvement in your whole life and not just in weight or eating. The below link talks about emotional eating which I totally do. I love this "Circle of Life" article because it talks about that, but I believe the article can be applied to help any aspect of your life and not just eating. http://www.thebestlife.com/ms/mvchallenge/art_circle_of_life.html

I did the exercise of writing down the things that I can improve on, I made a cool wheel chart in excel (the formatting wouldn't transfer to blogger) and the text consisted of this:

• CALLING/SPIRITUALITY -


• FAMILY +


• WORK -


• ORGANIZATION -


• FRIENDSHIP +


• FINANCE -


• HEALTH +


• EATING -

The Goal is to write down the areas of your life and then rate how each of them are going with either a positive sign or a negative sign. Then write down one thing you can do each day to improve. These are very small, quantifiable things that are easy to measure. I assigned each area a day of the week and will work on my goal from that category every day. I am not going to divulge all of the specifics on this post-partly because I don't want to bore you to death and also because I don't want this post to be 10 pages long. But I decided to write about it so that I would be accountable for my goals and so I can track my progress. I am going to lose 12 lbs total, exercise on a consistent basis, cut down on emotional eating, improve my organizational skills, and not give up.

Taking a quote from the website: "if you're patient and take small steps everyday, the results can be amazing. If you can consistently do at least one thing daily to change a negative into a positive, I promise that powerful change will occur in your life after one year. If you can do three things daily, you won't recognize your former life."

This will be my mantra for the year. Although, I will take Dan's advice and have an expiration date on each goal, so that each goal stays fresh and I can keep pushing myself.

John Candland is my inspiration(check out his blog-this is Dan's friend from Seattle). If he can lose the weight he did and keep it off, I believe I can lose weight too. I've always blamed my weight for my insecurities and blamed my insecurities for not achieving my goals-or setting any for that matter-so I hope that this life plan will aid me on my journey to becoming the person I've always wanted to be. I know it will be a long process and that no "diet" can change me immediately or quickly. I do believe that it will give me a good kick start though.

The contract is signed http://www.thebestlife.com/ms/mvchallenge/contract.asp and I will keep you updated.

Love, Kyla

Ringing in the New Year in Ogden and the awesome Salomon Center

I know I haven't posted any pictures of the friends party or christmas yet, but I will soon. There was a debacule over our new digital camera and I haven't developed my film pics yet. Anyway..
New Years Eve we drove down to Ogden to exchange the digital camera I got for Christmas at Circuit City -since we don't have one in Logan. We went on a slightly frustrating search for an affordable camera with a fast shutter speed (which is very important when I have two little girls who are very fast and I want to get pictures of them actually looking at the camera). We left circuit city empty handed. Next we drove to McDonalds to let Ashton play at the playplace. She thought it was sooo fun and played for an hour!




This is not the real picture or Ashton in them. All of the pics in this post will be random images from the internet until I get a new camera.
Next, Dan decided we should take the 89 home instead of the freeway. On our way we saw the downtown area still lit with Christmas lights. We slowed way down so ash could look at them and say "green light, red light, sana (santa), hear bell!!" When we got to the end of the block we saw a huge rock wall, flashing lights, and a megaplex theater. Our curiosity was peaked on what this new area was. We parked the car and found out it was the Salomon Center. Compliments of Larry Miller (refer to Cassi's blog about everything Larry Miller).



This place has a huge rock climbing wall. A Flowrider, which is an indoor pool that simulates surfing and boogie boarding. We took the kids inside and watched people attempt to surf. The water was sooo powerful that people could only stay up for a little while before they ate it and went flying to the back of the pool. It looked really fun and it made me laugh really hard! Here is a link to a video of someone surfing (I hope it works I've never tried linking before, if not I bet you can just copy and paste):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FP3ey91F8s

Loni- Dan said he wishes we would have known about this when you were here because you would like it. I guess its time to plan another trip!
When we had enough California surfing flashbacks we walked over to Fat Cats bowling and arcade. Ash and I ran around pretending to race cars, motorcycles, play dance dance revolution, while Dan watched some football game. It was also funny to keep Ashton away from stealing people's skeeballs in the middle of their games! When the football game was over, we went to Ifly, a skydiving simulation. Here is another video of it. Last night, three employee's were in there doing tricks for us. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfyPIgy5WDY

I left very impressed with the new development in Ogden. It is supposed to bring in 2.8 million dollars in revenue by 2010 for Ogden city- because they own part of the land.
Although everything was kind of pricey, it seems like those "lets do it at least once, because I don't know when I'll have another chance" type of activities. If I could convince Dan to spend the money on that I would totally do all of these things.
We finished out the old year and were ringing in the new year with a very anticlimatic tv marathon of Dick Clark's and Carson Daly's New Years Eve specials, back in Logan. After we saw everyone partying in NYC, Dan and I vowed to spend New Years Eve in New York next year


instead of going to Seattle's space needle like the past three years. Who wants to come?








Happy New Years Everyone!!! Good luck with those resolutions!