Owen is Six!

Happy Birthday Owen! Where has the time gone? Our baby is six and ready to head off to school. Some of my favorite things about Owen:

his cute blonde hair
his songs that he writes and performs (he was part of a band, but has recently gone solo - our favorite song is titled "Owen C. K. is the one I want")
he is always willing to hug and kiss me anytime I want him to (all the time!)
he likes Target as much as I do
he misses me when I'm gone
he is passionate about his interests (when he was in his Chicken Little phase he wore green paper glasses everywhere for about 6 months and made me pin a tail feather made out of construction paper to the back of his pants)
he says the funniest things (like when I was dropping him off at preschool and he saw the cute girl in his class and told me "make yourself scarce, I'm gonna make my move!")
he is sensitive (he cries at the sad parts in movies)
and oh so sweet.

We love you Owen!

Where do I begin?

Wow, it's been 2 months since my last post. How time flies! It's been a busy couple of months so I will do a quick recap!

Recently on stage: Our beautiful ballet dancer Shelby starred in a dance recital in May.

Swimming success! Owen went from holding me in the death grip in the pool to running and jumping in while yelling "Cowabunga!". All within one week! Thanks to his wonderful swim teacher Marni who learned that flattery really works - Marni to Owen: "Owen, you are so strong!" Owen: "Yeah I work out." Pause, "Well, not every day." Pause, "Actually, just once." Great job Owen!




So You Think You Can Dance Part Two: I finally got called up for tickets to the taping of one of our favorite shows! Jen, Amberly, Stacy and I all went to celebrate Stacy's birthday. We had such a fun day! We were inches from the stage and where all the dancers came in and out. You can see Amberly's blonde hair through half of the show! The rest of us faded into the background *blurg* Jen gave Cat Deeley one of her bracelets from her new business venture CoDo Jewelry Designs. She was very sweet and said she would wear it on the show. We ran into Kherington at Cheesecake factory and she agreed to take a picture with us even though she still had bed head from the bed dance. We are very angry that she got voted off! It was a great day.


Girls Camp times Four! It was my fourth year as the Redhawk Ward camp director! I don't know how that ever happened in the first place- as I have not ever been involved in or enjoyed camping before this. But this is not real camping - so I guess I am qualified. In fact, Chris looked at the big pile of camping "gear" that I had assembled and thought I was insane. It included a blue mailbox, a fake fire, blue paper lanterns made to look like blueberries, nail polish, pajama pants, notecards and pens, streamers, things tied with ribbons, and maybe a flashlight thrown in just in case. Like I said, not real camping! But, it was a fun year. Our ward YW are outstanding. Finally, Lindsay was old enough to go this year! I loved having her there!


From Camping to more camping: We came home from Girls camp on Friday - ourselves and our belongings covered in a layer of dirt. Had enough time to clean it all and pack it right back up. On Sunday morning we headed for a family camping trip at Minaret Falls in Mammoth. We met up with the Greenes, Gilberts and Carpenters at the most beautiful camping spot right on the stream. It was so much fun and so much work. Cooking for 24 in the outdoors takes a bit of effort. But those were some delicious meals thanks to our combined efforts and a little secret ingredient. We fished and floated on the river and hiked to Rainbow Falls, sat by the fire, survived a rainstorm, were attacked by swarms of mosquitos, showered in the natural hot springs and then decided to pack it up a day early and head for Lake Tahoe.



The Big Blue: Swimming in Lake Tahoe is like swimming in a giant pool of Aquafina. It is so clean and clear and blue. And the sky ... it is all so beautiful. We spent the rest of our trip at the Greene's family cabin - sleeping in beds and showering in real showers. We spent two days on the beach at Sand Harbor where we kayaked and boated and played on the rocks. It was heaven. One day we rented rafts and floated down the Truckee River, where we were attacked by a band of super soaker toting hooligans. They attacked us, soaked us all and then followed us the rest of the way down the river until Scott got out of the boat and assaulted them with their own weapons. The kids had so much fun, they begged us not to leave. But we had to come home! And now on to the endless pile of laundry!

Mother's Day Slideshow

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Family: let me know if you want me to email this to you!

Lindsay turns 12 and more

Lindsay had a big birthday last week - she's 12! On Sunday she sang with the Primary in Sacrament Meeting for Mother's Day - even though she said she wasn't technically in Primary anymore - just one last time for me on Mother's Day!

You can tell she's growing up because she requested to go to sushi for her birthay dinner. I guess Richie's Dinner doesn't cut it anymore (well it never has but that's beside the point.) And she decided to adopt the Sorenson tradition of birthday creme brulee. Once we figured out Stacy's industrial sized blow torch, it was beautiful!
Also this week, she participated in a band concert with Gardner Middle School and the high school bands. She and Ashley are in the flute section. It's amazing how much they have learned in a few months. Here's a cute picture of them at the concert.
She'll have her party next week- I'm sure there will be more to come on that.

Among all the other things in my crazy week, a friend put together a cupcake exchange. What is a cupcake exchange many have asked? Well, the point is to find the recipe for and make an amazing cupcake that you share with everyone else. That is much more easily said than done. There were delicious cupcakes, but it was funny to hear how many different recipes people had to try, about the failed experiments, and how much everyone was despising cupcakes by the time it was over. I wish I had a picture of our beautiful cupcake display - but this was my submission.

and this is what my kitchen looked like when I was done making them. I probably won't do that again!

Cupcakes and Magic in the OC

Two words: Girls' Weekend. It has to be done at least once a year. This time we headed up to the OC and stayed in the lovely Dana Point. The weather was outstanding and just added to the blissful perfection of the girls weekend! Chris really doesn't understand exactly what you DO on a girls weekend - so this list is for him.

We relaxed at the pool sipping on our pina colada smoothies, hit just about every mall around, saw 2 movies, shopped in 90 degree heat at the Santa Monica flea market, searched Montana Ave. for "macarones", played papparazzi at the Ivy, chatted with Magic Johnson and Cookie while waiting in line for popcorn at the movies, taste tested Crumbs cupcakes vs. Sprinkles cupcakes (Sprinkles won, BTW), stopped to get a Diet Coke probably more than once, were awakened at 3 AM by the evil hotel fire alarm, visited Roger's Gardens, shopped with Billy Baldwin and Hope from "Thirty Something", and gave a shoutout to someone called Ruffio from Hook, we ate gelato, crepes, amazing salads, sweet corn tamale cakes, cupcakes and more until we were sick, shopped at Anthropologie for almost an hour after they had closed (no one bothered to tell us they were closed they just gave us dirty looks), took a walk on the beach, read trashy celebrity gossip magazines, drove in lots of traffic and laughed the whole time! Girls, please let me know if I left anything out! Thanks to our wonderful husbands for making it happen!

Maui Highlights!

Stranded on an Island

Actually, it's not such a bad predicament to be trapped in Maui! And we might not actually be trapped, but for a while there we weren't sure if we'd be able to get home. We still aren't sure! We didn't find out until we were actually on the plane that we were on the last San Diego to Maui flight that Aloha Airlines would fly! We heard some rumblings that Aloha was closing - we just didn't know that we were on the last flight and that they had no intention of getting us home. We were just happy to be on our way, feeling lucky that they didn't cancel our flight and hoping that the soon to be unemployed pilot wasn't too depressed about his situation - and take us all down with him. It was a memorable flight, the attendant on the intercom cried through her announcements and the entire flight applauded when we arrived in Maui to lots of people on the tarmack taking pictures of our flight landing. The airport was a ghost town with no one at all in the terminal where we landed. We waited for 2 hours at the airport to see if United would fly us home - as you can imagine there were lots of angry people there who arrived at the airport for their flight home only to be told "sorry airline closed"! They weren't much help to us either. We do have reservations with Hawaiian for a flight next week. We're still not sure if we'll get on it - but until then, we're having a great time stranded in paradise!