I'm 32 now and a big announcement! (No, I'm not pregnant!)

It's the start of birthday season in our house! My birthday is in August, Abbie's in Sep, Jared's and Porter's in November, and Leah's in December. I turned 32 today and had a pretty good day, considering we just got back from a family reunion late last night and Porter has been sick with the croup. The girls found some old Christmas wrapping paper and went to town wrapping toys from around the house to "give" to me as presents. Jared brought home dinner from Panera Bread, my favorite, and a bumpy cake and we had fun just having a simple celebration and spending the evening together as a family since we've been apart a lot lately.

Abbie and Leah singing a song that they had practiced for my birthday

Just a cute one of all the kidsOne of the reasons we've been apart from the kids lately is because we also just got back from a trip to Utah where Jared was interviewing for a job! And he got it!!!!! That's right, folks, WE'RE MOVING TO SALT LAKE CITY!!!! In two weeks!!! Things have been pretty crazy around here lately, we only found out about the job a few weeks ago and then went and interviewed and looked at houses last weekend and now we're in the midst of renting a moving truck, canceling appts and rescheduling others, changing our address with about a million bills and online companies, collecting moving boxes, squeezing the kids in for last-minute checkups at the pediatrician, giving things away and collecting borrowed things from others, trying to get everything done that we've ever wanted to do here in MI, making calls and researching info about our new home and city, registering Abbie for school, figuring out travel arrangements, and packing! Aaaahh, packing!!! Last time we moved we only had one kid and were coming from a 2 bedroom apartment so we didn't have half the stuff we have now. It's going to be crazy trying to get everything ready but it will be awesome once we are in our new home! I have a lot of family in UT and we're going to be a lot closer to most of Jared's family so it's going to be so great to be able to see all the aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents more often and also to be there for all the big holidays and events like birthdays, blessings, and baptisms. We've been looking for a job out west for a couple years now so this is a long-awaited change. It's really short notice and seems crazy to try to get there before Abbie starts kindergarten but it will be so worth it once we're all settled in. So if I don't see you or call you back in the next few weeks, please forgive me! I'm packing!

P.S. Here's our new house! Isn't it adorable? I love it, it's perfect for what we need and is within a few miles of four of my sisters and their families! I'm so excited! Happy Birthday to me!

Estes Park

We just got back from Estes Park, CO for a Butler family reunion. It was beautiful and perfect weather while we were there and we had a lot of fun spending time together with all of Jared's siblings and their spouses. It was an adult-only reunion (except babies under 1 year) so we left Abbie and Leah at home with some friends and had a few days with just Porter. He was a great traveler, especially after we missed our flight coming home and had to spend a lot of unplanned time in the airport and on overbooked planes. It was a great vacation, otherwise, and I already miss that fresh, clean mountain air. Here we are on top of a mountain:

The beautiful view. We took a tram up and walked around the top for a while.

Jared swore that if you held a peanut up in the air, a bird would swoop down and take it right out of your hand. He stood like this for a couple minutes waiting for it to happen....pretty funny! I don't know if I'll believe it until I see it!

The chipmunks did eat the peanuts right out of your hand, though. Some of them had huge cheeks and were pretty chubby.

Porter hanging out with the men, waiting for the women to finish shopping in all the little touristy shops

I think someone was drinking a little too much tequila when they made this sign! We ate at this Mexican restaurant one night and it was pretty good (and no, we didn't drink any "tequela")!

Racing against a few family members on this huge slide at the fun park

And the winner is....ME!

We did lots of other fun things like hanging out in the hot tub at our cabin, staying up late singing songs to Grandpa's guitar, going to church together, eating out, shopping and chatting and driving around to see all the sights. We all had a great time without all our kids (we love them, really we do) but it was fun to spend time together without all the distractions and work that it takes to care for 22 kids under the age of 14. I say we do this every year!

When I'm not busy being a mommy, I craft

Here are some of the projects I've finally completed in the past few months. They are all done in little spurts of time, just a little here and there while kids are napping or playing or late into the wee hours of the morning. At any given time, I usually have a few unfinished projects laying around, just begging to be finished and displayed. I also have a list a mile long of more sewing, painting, scrapbooking projects that I want to do so I don't think I'll ever catch up or finish all the creative things rolling around in my head. It's good to know that I'll never be bored!

These are wood letters that I covered with scrapbook paper and then decorated with ribbon, flowers, buttons, and tags. So easy and cute!

It goes with the nesting shoe boxes and wood frame that I covered with the same paper and they are all displayed in Porter's room. I made the shoe boxes over a year ago and the frame a few weeks ago and I think they all look custom designed to go together.

After making Porter's rag quilt last November, I got the quilting bug and have made two more for gifts. This one was for my sister who had a baby boy about two months ago. I bought fabric to match the theme in her nursery and it turned out so perfect!

This one was made for a service project with some 8-11 year old girls in my ward. Each girl cut out 9 squares and made their own little mini-quilt and then I sewed them together to make a normal sized baby blanket. It turned out pretty cute too. The hard part was making sure the back squares lined up in the right pattern.

I made a family name board for a friend for her wedding a few months ago and loved it so much that I had to make one for us too. I bought the vinyl lettering online and then painted the wood a contrasting color and viola, easy peasy!

While I was buying the fabric for one of the rag quilts above, I couldn't help buying this fabric below. I didn't know what I was going to do with it all but I was sure I'd come up with something.

First some pillows for a new brown suede slipcover for our couch (it used to be green with white piping but got so stained and holey that I finally traded up for this beauty and had to change the pillows to match).

And a new boppy cover to cover this hideous pattern on the boppy I bought secondhand when I had Leah

Much better!

I saw a tutorial on Grosgrain and thought, I can do that! I just layed the boppy on top of the fabric, cut it out free hand, sewed the two sides together with white ric-rac in between, and sewed in a little zipper.

I haven't done a zipper in a while so I wasn't sure if I could remember how to do it well, especially working around the ric-rac, but it turned out great! My high school home-ec teacher would be so proud!