Happy Summer!

I just thought we'd wish you a happy rest of your summer.  Tomorrow I go back to teaching school and Ellie will go to a sitter.  Thankfully I'm only teaching half days now and she will only be there in the afternoons.  I'm a little worried about my first day and I'm sure I'll bawl my eyes out when I leave Ellie.  That's going to make a great first impression when I show up to school with bright red eyes.  Wish me luck.  I'll try to let you know how it goes.

Say Cheese!

Ellie loves to smile. Here are a few pictures of her smile.

Best Burger in Town

Last friday, I regained my faith in hamburgers. I went to the new Five Guys Burgers and Fries in the Fort Union area (currently the only one in Utah) and had the best burger ever. Yes I did say ever. For those of you who don't know their concept, they do everything fresh. They use the bags of potatoes for their french fries to form the crowd control for ordering food. Their hamburger is never frozen and their regular size hamburger is a double quarter pounder. They do have "little hamburgers" that are just a quarter pounder. The best part is I can get a burger with whatever toppings that I want and it doesn't change the price and there are a lot to choose from. And their french fries are awesome. Word of warning, don't think that you can eat both the regular hamburger and the regular size fries by yourself. They fill up a twelve ounce cup with fries and put it in your bag, then they put in your burger and top of the bag with twice as many fries that are in that twelve ounce bag. You could probably share the fries between three people and still be satisfied. The one thing that Five Guys needs is fry sauce. They do have mayo and ketchup out, whether its to make your own fry sauce or not, it works. I was looking forward to going to St. George in October so I could eat at the Inn-N-Out burger. Let's just say I found something that I like even better.

I hate insurance companies!

I don't want our blog to become a place where we rant about everything bad in our lives, but I have to get this out somewhere and offer advice to anyone else going through this.  To anyone who will be having a baby and needing to add them on to the insurance:  ADD THE BABY THE VERY DAY AFTER YOU HAVE HIM/HER!  Apparently even though there is a 30-60 day window for qualifying events through insurance, they don't really care.  Maybe it's the doctor's office and hospital billing offices I should hate, but they sent all these claims to my insurance and we hadn't added Ellie yet.  I keep getting bills and notices saying she does not have insurance and we will have to cover the bill.  We added her on June 26th.  I had 60 days to add her and I added her within 30.  I thought I was doing a great thing.  You would think that the insurance companies would hold on to the claims for babies until the information comes through or at least until the 30-60 day window is over.  I did what I was supposed to and now I have to keep making all these calls and having the hospital and doctors office send the claims again to the insurance company.  I got three more bills today saying we have to pay.  To make matters worse, my insurance company turned over their administration to another company who will handle all the claims from July 1, 2008 and on.  Since Ellie was born at the end of May, I saw no problem.  Yeah right!  Anyway, I could go on and on.  Just a word of advice:  Even though you don't feel like seeing the outside world for a month, go add the baby to the insurance before the bills start coming.  

Ellie's Photo Shoot

We took quite a few pictures on Saturday for Ellie’s Birth Announcement. We could not decide which pictures to use, so we went with 5 and are going to put pictures in the announcement randomly. Here are some of our favorites.

Happy 4th of July!!! (I hate parades!)

It may sound un-american of me, but I absolutely hate parades. Particularly when they keep me from leaving my neighborhood or returning home. Two years in a row the 4th of July parade in Magna has blocked us from travel. The way that our neighborhood is set up has the fatal flaw of blocking the only two exits from the neighborhood when Magna decides to have a parade. Last year, I had planned to go see the Transformers movie on the 4th and I wanted to go to a earlier show to save a few bucks. We got in the car and headed for the exit. There was a minivan blocking the exit and people in lawn/camping chairs from one corner to the other an HOUR before the parade started and our sub-division is close to the end of the parade! If you haven't look at my list of transformers(it needs some updating),then you don't understand why I was so mad. The lady in the minivan told me sorry and to check the other exit. Same story. I had to wait until Saturday to go see the movie I had been waiting months to go see.

This year I thought that it wouldn't be a problem because we planned on going to IKEA and beating the parade. We left at 9:15 and went to IKEA. We had breakfast there because we arrived before the furniture store was open. Then we went back to the car to fed Ellie and strap her into the Baby Bjorn carrier. Last time(my first time) we went to IKEA it took three hours so I thought we would miss the parade entirely. Well, we were looking for specific things and found what we needed plus a little extra and headed home. We got home at 12:45. Fifteen minutes after the parade started. So we went to get some lunch and ate at a park. We were done with lunch at 1:15 and started back to see if the parade was over. Nope. So we drove to the Smith's fuel center to use one of our fuel rewards and save $1.50 on gas. We headed home again at 1:45 and as we were approaching "Magna Main Street"(2700 South for you who are not Magna-ites) we saw that the parade-goers where returning to their cars. There was a line of cars waiting at the road closed sign. We got home at 2:00 with a screaming hungry child. I HATE parades!

Other than that we had a pretty nice 4th. IKEA was fun and their food is good. We went to my Grandma Reynolds for a party that night and had a great time. Happy 4th!