More House pics

I promised a few more pictures of the house. For Christmas we finished decorating the kid's rooms. This is Conner's trophy wall. They had already painted this wall red and white. Conner LOVES BYU, but Grantsville colors are red, white and black. We decided to embrace the red and add blue shelves. Conner keeps saying we should paint it blue, but that's not happening any time soon.
Here is his bed and night stand. He has BYU decorations everywhere. He has a BYU basketball poster that will hang above his bed, but we need to get a frame.
Here is Kaylea's room. She wanted bright colors, but not over the top. She was very happy with this choice. Kaylea has a bonus room right off her bedroom. She uses it to put on make up, and do homework. The decorations for this room are still in progress. Kaylea likes the black and white and the light pink, but really hates the bright pink and the rhinestones on the wall. I really don't have time to paint right now so she will have to deal with it for a while.


This is the bathroom on the main level. The walls are a light (bright) green, and the previous owners had it accented with bright pink. You can see the pink box above the toilet. We found a colorful, warm, shower curtain that went well with the walls, and muted the pink a bit. I think it made the room really nice.
This is Steve's office. He does most of his work from home. Our office before was twice as big, but this one works well for him.
He looks out the bay window into the front yard. It's a cozy space for him. We do need to put up curtains or blinds though. At night he's in a fish bowl if he is in his office.

On Christmas Day I didn't take any pictures at all. We had Jess and Chris come spend Friday and Saturday with us. We had a lazy day watching movies, and lounging around the house. I did miss Steve Jr. He's in the MTC right now, but besides that we had a really nice day.

Happy Birthday Jess

This beautiful young lady turned 21 yesterday! She is my oldest daughter, and just got married in February. She told me last week that I am going to be a grandma! Steve and I took Jess and Chris to Joe's Crab Shack for her birthday dinner. Yummy, yummy crab!!!

I couldn't get Steve to wear a special bib, but I was glad I wore one, I had butter dribbled all down my front! After dinner we went to see "True Grit". The movie didn't start until after 10:00pm, we didn't get home until almost 2:00am. Wow! we never stay up that late! We enjoyed spending time with Jess and Chris.

Steve's Mission

December 8, 2010 Steve was scheduled to enter the MTC. The night before his dad got to set him apart as a missionary. It was a really neat experience. Grandma and Grandpa Collings were home for a week from their mission in Washington D.C. and were able to be there along with my sister Erin.
I thought I did pretty well, I wasn't too emotional, until I actually had to drop him off curbside.
It's a tradition in the Collings family to go to the Brick Oven for dinner before going into the MTC. Grandma Collings, Adam, Cait, Zoe, and Jessica all met us there for some yummy pizza. I told Steve that the time was getting closer, and he said it was going to slow, he just wanted to get there.



Of course mom had to embarrass Steve with pictures, yet again. Then a quick hug and he was on his way. I basically cried all the way home, and off and on the next day.

He looked good, and was so excited to be there. I'm really proud of him. Now he just needs to learn the German language, and he will be spending 2 years in Frankfurt. :)

My new home

I have had some complaints that I haven't posted any pictures of my new house. I decided I'd try and show some of it. It's harder than I thought to get good pictures of this house. The room above is my family room. I'm looking from my kitchen to the family room, and on the left is the entryway and stairs to the basement.
This picture is looking from the family room into the kitchen, and below is the entryway with your Christmas card on the door if you sent me one! :)


The picture above is the master bedroom. It's really hard to get a good shot of. If you look below, there are steps going into this room, and steps up into the master bath. We learned very quickly....don't forget the steps into the room!!!! No broken bones, thank goodness, just some bruises.

This is a picture of the master bathroom. In our old master bathroom, you couldn't fit two people into it with out bumping into each other. I'm loving it!!! I will post pictures of the rest of the house later. Email me if you need our new address and phone number.

Family Pictures

I wanted to get a family picture before Steve went on his mission. The only problem was, we had couldn't find a day that everyone was available. On December 7th, Steve was going to be set apart as a missionary, so I asked the family to come early and get our pictures taken. Our photographer works in Salt Lake and would not be able to get home until it was dark so I asked my sweet sister Erin to snap a few pictures for us. She's really very good!!! Afterward we went out to dinner one last time as a family. It will be 2 years until we are all together again.
I love my family, I'm so blessed!!!

Thanksgiving

Yes, it's a day before Christmas, and I'm blogging about Thanksgiving. That's kind of how my life has been lately. We spent the day with Kenney and Sandi and their family. We really had a great time.
The meal was amazing, we visited with Sandi's parents, and played some fun games. I actually played Kinnex on the x-box for the first time. It was such a blast. But some of the family thinks I'm a little bit crazy on that game... not sure why.
We had a great day with family. It was very relaxing, which I needed.

New blog for my missionary!

I just started a new blog for my missionary. Check it out!
http://www.stevecollings.blogspot.com

I have catching up to do, hopefully tomorrow I will get to it.

Busy, Busy, Busy...

You can't imagine how CRAZY busy we are right now! The Collings family never does anything the easy way. I can honestly say life is never boring around here, I sometimes just need a little time to catch my breath.

So, we found a house that we really love, and decided we want to buy it. We will be closing on November 22nd, and moving on November 27-28th. We have spent the past two days packing and de-junking. We've lived in our house for 10 years, and I guess we accumulated a lot of things we don't need.

Steve Jr. is preparing for his mission. He has his mission farewell on November 21st, and will enter the MTC on December 8th. He will be going to Frankfurt Germany. We will have an open house after church onthe 21st (the day before we sign on our new house).

Steve Sr. has had a lot of success at work, they have had several sales presentations in other states, and have won the bid on several of them, which means he has to travel to these other states for start-ups. He basically will be gone one or two days a week for the rest of the year. He's the stake president in our area, so he is usually taking care of those responsibilities on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays each week, and sometimes on Tuesdays (if missionaries are leaving) and Saturdays.

I have a crazy school schedule. I'm in classes on Monday and Tuesday. I go to the hospital and "pre-load" on Wednesday. I spend Thursday in the hospital taking care of my patient, I'm gone 12 hours on Thursdays. Then Friday and Saturday is spent studying for tests and packing the house, and preparing my missionary, and studying my lesson for Sunday, and doing every other motherly thing I'm supposed to do.

Kaylea and Conner are the best! They are very patient with me when I'm working on my homework. They have helped so much with packing and cleaning, and are staying on top of their homework. Conner has started up basketball and has games every Tuesday and Thursday night. Wednesday is YM/YW for both of them, and Kaylea still runs, and dates, and works...

Now on top of each of our crazy schedules, we have Birthdays, Thanksgiving, Anniversary, and Christmas all coming up. I could be way stressed out.... or I could just go with the flow....I'm thinking I need to just go with the flow. Life won't always be this busy, and I appreciate everyone in my family for pulling their weight.

How to host a murder party

We decided a fun way to celebrate Halloween was to host a MURDER MYSTERY party. The party was set in the '70s... disco fever baby!!! Lee and Tricia

Erin and Brayden

Jared and Casi

Steve and Me. Kaylea says I need to keep my blonde Farrah Faucett hairdo. We had a lot of fun spending the evening together. The food was great, it was an entertaining evening, and I really enjoyed seeing Steve in an AFRO. Did everyone really dress this weird in the 1970's?

Flowboarding

After the Ragnar Relay, Jamie and her family came to visit us. Steve decided that a fun family night activity would be Flow Riding, which is a lot like surfing, but it's indoors. I think the kids had a great time. Uncle Adam came and hung out with us as well. It was very cool.

We had Lacey, Kaylea, Amber, Steve, Jo (a foreign exchange student from Belgium) and Conner. Kaylea struggled to stand on the board, Adam tried to help her, which was NOT successful. She's athletic in most sports... flowboarding is not one of them.

Body boarding was a little bit better for her, but it was still comical to watch her.

Steve goes a little more often than Kaylea, he spent most of his time trying to perfect some tricks on his board... which lead to this...

Conner could stay on a body board for 10 minutes or more, but it was fun to see him actually stand on a board for a short period of time. He's quite the athlete.

I think he enjoyed hanging out with his cousins.

Here's the after shot, they're a little bit water-logged, but it was well worth it.

Ragnar Las Vegas

My family got a team together to run the Ragnar Relay in Las Vegas. I was so proud of Jessica and Kaylea for running along with My brothers, sister, nephew, and cousins. They ran almost 200 miles through Las Vegas.

They ran in honor of my grandparents who just celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. This picture is a pretty good representation of them. Grandma used to call us "scrub" so their team name was "Dickson Scrubs". At the end of the race, everyone crosses the finish line together, they all wore hospital scrubs to cross the finish line.

The team consisted of Dallin, Gina, Susanne, David, Jamie (a great support person), Brent, and Shayla in van 1.

Jessica, Amber, Kaylea, Lee, Erin, Jamie (a great support person), and Ericka in van 2. It sounds like they had a VERY fun time, and many of the other 32 grandchildren and 103 great-grandchildren are talking about running it again next year.