Updates from the Holidays coming soon!!!

Another Successful Science Fair

So evidently, 6th graders are required to take part in the Science Fair. And my understanding, at least at this school is that they are the only ones that can take part in it. I don't particularly like science projects. But Miguel picked a topic and put together a great presentation. His question was "Do you think you can pick up a piece of ice out of water without touching it with your hands?"



All of the younger kids were coming by his presentation and he did the experiement for them and they all thought it was the coolest thing ever.



Love to all

Pics from the party

Here are some better pictures of Miguels birthday party.

Here is the gang playing PS3
Here is the gang
We had two of these pizza's for the boys. They are from Papa Murphy's

This is the cake that I made for Miguel. It took me forever.

Pics to come soon.

I am having issues, so pics from the party will be coming soon. Stay tuned.

Love to all
Darci

Party, Party, Party!

Last Saturday we celebrated Miguels 12th birthday. I spent most of the morning doing the marvelous cake, if I do say so myself, and then around 5 that evening his friends came over. We had huge pizzas from Papa Murphy's, they played PS3, then decided to go outside and play football with a glow-in-the-dark football Miguel received from Chase. I know, it was really cold, but these are big strong tough boys we are talking about, right? They came in for a little while and then went back out to play 'Capture the Flag' or something like that. Basically they were all running around my neighborhood yelling and screaming. I was a little worried seeing as how we have 3 police officers in our subdivision and I was sure someone was going to call for excessive noise.

They had a great time and started leaving around 9pm. Here are some pics of the festivities. The post before this one was from when I was making the cake. Miguel and Antonio took the brown frosting and made themselves mustaches and go-t's. Miguel's was on for probably 3 hours :)

Look, Miguel hit puberty!

Caution, new teenager on his way!

Well, I am on my way to having two teenagers!!!!!! Wow, how time fly's. Miguel turned 12 today and he will be ordained a Deacon on Sunday. He is so excited. He wanted to study the sacrament route last Sunday during Sacrament Meeting. Miguel is an awesome son and I am very proud of him and the kind of person he has become and is continuing to strive to be.

We will be having his 'party' this weekend so I will post more then.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GELLY!!!!!!!

Love to all
Darci

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone

Hello to all.
In honor of Thanksgiving 2008, here are 2008 reasons for me to be thankful:

1. Life
2. Family
3. Friends
4. Just kidding, I won't go on.

I figured this was an easier way to wish everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving. We all have very different reasons for being thankful for this year. I have many things to be thankful for, a few of them being my family, first and foremost. I wouldn't trade them for anything. I am also thankful for friendships being re-kindled.

I will be trying to send Xmas cards out, so if you are one of my newly found friends, I need addresses.

So again, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT!

Love to all
Darci and Family

A look Back at 2008

So, I was kind of told that I am not a very good blogger. I blog about some mundane things, and then forget about the more important events in my life and the lives of those around me. So, I know it is kind of early, but I thought I would take the time to do a little review of the year and send 'Kudos' out to those events I didn't do at the time.

March 2008- Diego IV's 15th birthday. We took Diego and some of his friends out to eat, Goodwood (where else) and then we dropped them off at the movie theatres and let them loose at the movies.

June 2008- Antonio's 10th Birthday. Pretty low key, well, as low key as 4 or 5 9 and 10 year olds running around your house can be. We had some of Antonio's friends over to the house for a little fun time.

July 2008- Trip to St. Louis. We had a great time visiting family and friends, going to baseball games at the new stadium. We were there for two weeks.

November 2008- Diego III's 38th birthday. Diego and I went out to dinner by ourselves on Saturday and then on Sunday his mom cooked dinner so we spent the evening over there. I love her cooking.

December 2008 - Miguel's 12th birthday. This is going to be a big birthday for Miguel. He will be ordained a deacon and be a bonified 'young man'.

I love my family and I am proud of the men that my boys are becoming. I get comments from friends and people in general about how good my boys are. Yes, they can get on my nerves and each others nerves, but that is what kids/brothers do. I never have to worry when my boys are out in public or at others' homes about how they are behaving.

I love you all and I will try to be better at blogging. I really need to take more pictures and post them.

Love to all
Darci

My top EIGHT:

What are your favorite TV shows? (In no particular order)
1. The Office
2. Life on Mars
3. LOST
4. 30 Rock
5. Seinfeld
6. Army Wives
7. Ghost Whisperer
8. The Unit

What are your favorite restaurants?
1. Goodwood
2. Tucanos
3. Red Robin
4. Cafe Rio
5. Panda Express
6. Los Hermanos
7. Fuddruckers
8.

What are 8 things that happened yesterday?
1. Went to the dentist and had a tooth pulled
2. Changed the filters in my water purifier
3. Went to Target for 'soft foods'
4. Finished Jodi Picoult's 'Change of Heart'
5. Started Jodi Picoult's 'Mercy'
6. Taught 3 piano lessons
7. Went to my sons Parent/Teacher conference
8. It snowed

What are 8 things you are looking forward to?
1. Thanksgiving
2. Christmas
3. Going to Disneyland in April
4. Seeing my son get ordained a Deacon in December
5. The rest of my life with my husband and kids
6. Losing about alot of pounds : )
7. My oldest son making the Honor Roll this semester
8. Checking my blog tomorrow to see if anyone has left a comment

What are 8 things you love about fall?
1. Thanksgiving
2. Seeing the trees change colors
3. Christmas is coming soon
4. That the year is almost over and I get to try my resolutions again(I usually fail)
5. The small break between sports
6. Cuddling with my kids and/or my husband
7. Drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows
8. Halloween

If you are one of my awesome family members, I tag you!

Happy Halloween!!

Okay, so am I a totally bad mother for not having pics of my kids in their costumes???? We kind of went back and forth on a couple of different ideas for Miguel and Antonio.

At first, Miguel wanted to be Captain Underpants. Captain Underpants is evidently the principal of a school and in his spare time doubles as Captain Underpants. (You can google him for more info). He has a red cape and his 'outfit' is his whitey-tighty's, and he is bald. So, Miguel keeps his hair fairly short anyway, so he asked Diego if he could shave his head in preparation for this costume. So we did, but not totally bald, just a really short buzz cut. Then, we were trying to decide how we would do the costume since we didn't have any flesh colored sweats or anything, and we weren't sure how the school would feel about it. ( I really didn't care what the school thought, I am not happy with their festivities anyway this year). In the end, he and Diego decided that it would probably be better to go with a different costume, and being Thursday night, Miguel decided on Albert Pujols.

Antonio, on the other hand, had not come up with any ideas. Do in visiting with my brother Scott and Helen the Saturday before halloween, the topic of politics came up. The idea was thrown out for Antonio to be Barrack Obama for halloween. We all started laughing becuase he could totally pull it off. His skin tone is the same, his face is more oval and thin. The only thing we couldn't figure out was how to make people realize that is who he was. I was trying to come up with different slogans or something that I could make into a sticker or pin, but I couldn't come up with anything concrete. So, Thursday night came, and when I got home from work he had decided to be Batman, which we already had the costume for from Miguel the previous year.

They had a great time on Friday. As mentioned before, the festivities at the school were not anywhere near the usually holiday activities, other than a parade. So Diego picked them up early and took them to his office for Trick-or-Treating. They came home with so much candy. Then that night, we went over to some friends house and all of the kids went out again, while the adults stayed in.

All in all, a great evening. I think there might be pictures coming from someone that Diego works with, she takes pictures of all the kids, so if she did this year, when I get them I will post.

Love to all
Darci

And the winner is...

Kellie was right, it is a Liger, and it does have serious skills. So, Antonio has to write a 300 word report on an animal of his choice and he chose a Liger. They have to include a hand-drawn picture of the animal, (Miguel suggested he use the picture of the Liger from Napolean Dynamite:-)), ya know the one he draws for the weird girl???? Anyway, I just wanted to see if his drawing really showed any kind of difference in the face and the body.


Love to all
Darci

It's a bird, It's a plane, It's a ......................

This is a drawing that Antonio, my 10 yr. old did for a school project. Can you guess what the animal is?





Can't wait to hear what you think. He got help with the outlining from Miguel.

Love to all
Darci

Homemaker, Suzy Homemaker

So I made my first Pineapple Upside Down cake yesterday. Here is how it came out. Looks pretty good, not sure how it tastes yet.

2008 School Pictures

Pictures are back!! Here are updated photos of my very cute boys, oh wait, I guess handsome is a better word now that they are getting older. :-)




Antonio Rafael- 4th Grade
Miguel Tyler- 6th Grade
Diego IV- 10th Grade

Reach out and touch someone?

So, I am not sure if I missed some kind of memo or something about this being like 'National reach out and contact long lost friends week', but it was really wierd that two of my very good friends that I have unfortunately not kept in contact with got in contact with me.

Monday morning, after a week of vacation from work, I was reading through the 150 emails that I had missed at work. One of those emails was from Melanie, my sister-in-law saying that she had updated her facebook and it gave me the link to go see her profile. So I clicked on the link and logged in and I had like 3 new friend requests and a bunch of other stuff. I don't keep up my facebook stuff very often because, truth be known, I don't understand all of it so I just stick with blogger. So I am looking at the new friend requests and lo and behold, my good friend from High School found me. It was Annette. I haven't seen her since my wedding, 16 long years ago. Annette was one of the first people that befriended me at school when my life was totally uprooted. I had my friends at church, but at school it was just Jeremy and I (people actually thought we were dating becuase we were always together :-) ). I was glad to have a friend. I was so glad to hear from her. I am sad that I didn't think to look for her sooner, as we were just there in St. Louis in July and it would have been great to see her.

Then, Monday afternoon, I was checking my blog, (I know, I am way slackin') and I noticed that there was one more comment on the latest post than there was the last time I looked, and when I opened it the new comment was from another very good friend from St. Louis, Laura. She found my blog through Ben's blog, which she found through Kellie Fortner's blog, which she found through Cali Pope's blog. (I don't know Cali, but I know Kellie and she, too, is a good friend that I hope to get back in touch with). It hasn't been quite so long since I have seen Laura, but still, a long time. Laura was in our stake in St. Louis and again, it seemed like no time at all until we were friends. Every now and then I will see something, or hear something that brings back memories, but I never know how to get in touch with people.

I couldn't believe that in one day, I now have the opportunity to re-connect with people who mean a lot to me and who I will never forget.

I hope that maybe through these contacts, more might be found.

Love to all
Darci and Family

I was tagged.........
1. What is your husbands name? Diego Pena III
2. How long did you date before you got married? 7 months
3. How long have you been married? 16 years
4. Where did you meet? At the Glenwood apartments. We both lived there.
5. What is your favorite feature of his? His laugh
6. What is your favorite quality of his? He always makes sure we,as a family, are taken care of
7. Does he have a nickname for you? Darbila (dar-bee-la)
8. What is his favorite color? St. Louis Cardinal colors
9. What is his favorite food? Pretty much any Puerto Rican dish his mom makes.
10. What is his favorite sport? Baseball
11. When and where was your first kiss? Maybe a couple of weeks after we met, up in Provo canyon looking at Bridal Veil Falls
12. What is your favorite thing to do as a couple? Watch our kids excel in life (I know, its cheesy:)
13. Do you have any children? 3 Boys
14. Does he have a hidden talent? If he does, he has kept it hidden :)
15. How old is he? Almost 38
16. Who said "I love you" first? He did.
17. What is his favorite type of music? Latin music
18. Name something odd about him? He HAS to have a fan blowing on him 365 days a year, and the millisecond that the power goes out the fan goes off he wakes up.
19. Do you think he will read this? Yes

I now tag: Everyone who reads this!!!!!!!!!

Books, Books, and more Books

Hey Everyone,

My sister-in-law, Helen, is having a book party, so I thought I would help her out and extend the online invite to all of you. You can go to www.ubah.com/f2478 and go to the window on the right that says Active eShows and click on Helen Fuhriman. There are alot of fun kids activity books as well as reading books.

Thanks
Darci

GO BIG GREEN

Provo High School football!

Gotta love it. Diego is #13. He is a sophomore at PHS and plays D-End (I haven't figured out what that is yet:) )

"You're gonna do what??????"

On Wednesday, Miguel had his first tackle football game of the season. He is playing on the 6th grade team in the UVFL league that is done by Park Sportsmans. He has been playing in this league since 3rd grade.

He came home from the game on Wednesday and looked a bit different than usual.





Evidently, on one of the plays, someones skinny little elbow came barreling through the opening on Miguel's helmet and landed right on his nose. When he took his helmet off, his nose was crooked.
Now, most of you are probably getting ready for a big long emergency room story, well, I don't have one for you. Diego gave Miguel something to bite on, told Antonio to hold Miguel's hands down, and proceeded to 'straighten' his nose out. Popped it back into place, TWICE. Evidently Miguel was not enjoying it, but the story goes that he was a trooper and withstood the pain quite well. Whether or not his nose is actually broken, we don't know, but we are pretty sure it isn't. It evidently didn't bleed profusely on impact, and the bruising really isn't that bad. Needless to say, Diego went out and bought him a guard to put on his helmet.

As my Mom and Dad always said to us growing up: "It'll heal before your married."


Love to all
Darci and Family

Well, it's that time again. School is back in session. My kids are actually really excited this year for a few reasons:

1. Brand new school. Lakeview, the new elementary school in Provo, is about 3 blocks from our house. When they were trying to decide whether or not they were going to build it, my kids' most exciting thought about it was that there would be clean bathrooms. Go Figure.

2. They get to walk to school now instead of the bus. (They didn't like the bus driver).

3. They each have at least one of their 'best' friends in their class. I am not sure as of yet how this will go. I guess only time will tell.

Miguel's teacher, Miss Birkinshaw, was actually in our ward before it was split, so we know her pretty well as a person, and as a teacher she seems like she is going to be fun for the kids. She is upbeat and energetic. Of course, it seems to me that that should be a prerequisite for someone wanting to teach sixth graders. Good Luck Miss B.

Antonio has team teachers, Miss Hafen and Miss Terry. We met them and they, too, seem like they are going to be great. The room decorations are not your typical classroom ABC's and 123's. If their imagination in teaching is as good as the room decor, we are in good hands. I think they will be great.

With the school split, the kids are going to miss their friends who will be staying at Westridge, but they look forward to meeting new friends that are coming in from Grandview and Amelia Earhart.


Love to all
Darci and Family

Here are most of the pictures from St. Louis, Enjoy!

Remember when........

This sounded like a lot of fun!!

This should be fun hopefully everyone will play along, I am excited to see what memories everyone has of me......ENJOY

Here are the directions:

1. As a comment on my blog, leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn't matter if you knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember!

2. Next, re-post these instructions on your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you. It's actually pretty funny to see the responses. If you leave a memory about me, I'll assume you're playing the game and I'll come to your blog and leave one about you. If you don't want to play on your blog, or if you don't have a blog, I'll leave my memory of you in my comments.

Pics of the boys up close and personal. This is the game on the 4th of July when we got to go out on the field for batting practice. We got some great pictures of the players. More to come.
Izturis
Yadier Molina

Rick Ankiel and Jim Edmonds

These first three are pics of Albert Pujols.


This is Yadier Molina catching for the starting pitcher before the game. We were standing right above him watching, and everyone was yelling his name, " Yadi, Yadi, Molina, etc." Diego told Miguel to call out 'Boriqua' and said that any time you call a Puerto Rican 'Boriqua' they will know that you know where they come from. (Before Puerto Rico was Puerto Rico, is was called Boriquen (?)). So they stopped for the National Anthem and Yadi went under the overhang. When the National Anthem was over, he came back out and got into position to start catching again. Right then Miguel yelled out "Boriqua", and Yadier immediately looked straight up at us and had a huge grin on his face, you could see it through his facemask. But unfortunately, Diego didn't have the camera ready to snap the picture. It was pretty cool.

The public is allowed into the stadium two hours before the game. Almost everyone goes right down to the rail and waits for the players to come sign autographs after batting practice. No one came the two times we were there, but we got some awesome close up pictures.

????

I put descriptions in, but they didn't come through. They are pretty self explanatory. :)

Pics

This is what you see coming into St. Louis from the west.
What an awesome scene
The new Busch stadium
Our first game at the new stadium

...the saga continues

So where were we, oh yeah, Sunday. So my brother Jeremy works for Channel 5 in St. Louis and can usually get pretty good deals to most places in St. Louey. So after dinner Sunday night we were all talking and he asked us what are plans were for the rest of the week. We only had a few things set in stone: I was taking my Mom to her treatment on Monday, Cardinals game on Tuesday that we had purchased tickets for and then another game on the 4th of July against the Cubs that Jeremy had tickets for. Other than that we didn't have any set plans. So Jeremy mentions that he has 4 tickets to Monday nights game that a client had asked about, but he hadn't responded to them. He asked Diego and the boys if they would like to go, UH, HELLO, NEED YOU ASK!!!!!! So Monday morning my Mom and I headed off for the hospital and Diego and the boys went to run a track down the street. Later that afternoon Diego calls me and says that he is at Jeremy's office, (they got downtown a little early and stopped in to say hi). Diego said that they met Jeremy's boss and he was really cool. Jeremy introduces Diego and the boys and then procedes to ask Diego if he and the boys would press passes to go down on the field during batting practice. DO COWS GO MOO!!! He said Jeremy needed to be with them, but had meetings that night, so they were going to use them on the 4th. My children were ecstatic. When they got into the stadium, their first time in the new stadium, they said it was awesome, and the seats that Jeremy had were about 8 rows behind the dugout. WOW! They got some really good pictures. The next night we went to another game, but these seats sucked in comparison. They were out in center field in the bleachers and it was really hot and the sun was right in our face for the first few innings. It was still a great experience, but the seats just didn't compare.

Wednesday was fairly uneventful. My Mom couldn't really go anywhere because she had to wait for a nurse to come and take her IV out from the treatment, so we decided to go see the movie Hancock. It was a pretty good movie.
Thursday we went out to the new St. Louis Mills mall with my Mom and the boys spent the better part of the day in the Nascar mini park. They have all kinds of different activities: indoor and outdoor go-karts, rock climbing wall, miniature golf, arcade games, laser tag and a nascar simulator. We bought all day passes that allowed them to do everything except the simulator as many times as they wanted while Diego, me and my Mom walked around the mall. My Dad, who has been in Idaho until this point, was supposed to fly in that night but his flight got canceled due to the weather in STL, however, being in STL, there were no weather problems that we could see, so he had to spend the night in the Denver airport, because since the cancellation was weather related they weren't giving hotel vouchers or anything. For more on that story, and for those of you who enjoy hearing my fathers saga's, contact him. :)

Friday morning, Ralston and Mark drove in from Tulsa we all spent the day, wait, I spent the day preparing the meat, making potato salad and so on, while we waited to see what was going to be happening with my dad's flight. He was getting in at 1:00 that day so my Mom and I went to pick him up while everyone else stayed home cooking the meat so that it was ready to eat when we got back. Friday night was the Cubs game. Diego, me, our kids, Jeremy, Ben and his wife Stephanie were all going to the game. The only downside was that I didn't have a press pass to go with my family down on the field, or did I?

.....to be continued

Darci and Fam

Vacation

So we just got back from our family vacation to St. Louis. It was a blast. Pics will come later.
We got there on Thursday the 26th, pretty late due to delayed flights :(. First stop the next morning, TED DREWES FROZAN CUSTARD. For those of you who aren't familiar with Ted Drewes, it is awesome. There are only two locations in the world and they are both in St. Louis, and my parents were kind enough to buy a house (20years ago) a block away from one of the locations, and the other one is maybe 10 miles away. We visited it alot. They make great concretes as well as banana-splits and a variation of other frozen custard desserts.
My dad was actually in Idaho/Utah for the first week we were there and my mom is going through chemo right now for colon cancer so she is tired alot and didn't feel like she could do a whole lot, so Friday we went to see the new Indiana Jones movie and then just hung out the rest of the evening. Saturday we went out to this great new mall called St. Louis Mills. It has all kinds of outlet stores, Nascar racing entertainment center, an ice rink and an 18 screen theater. It was huge! It took most of the day. During our visit to the Mills, we had picked out some shirts and other Cardinal souvenirs and when we went to pay our Visa was declined. We just figured that it was probably due to the fact that we don't use it alot and so it was flagged to make sure we were the ones using it and because it was a Saturday I couldn't call about it. So we used the only cash we had taken and then had to just use our debit cards.
Sunday was pretty uneventful, we went to church and then both of my brothers, Jeremy and Ben, and Ben's family came to my mom's for dinner. It was great to see them again and get to know Ben's boys again, it always takes so long for them to warm up to us.

.....to be continued.

Darci and family

Anything else??????

Okay, so this week was really not the best in the WWT (Wonderful World of Technology).

A week ago Sunday, while watching our marvelous technological device that allows us to pause live TV, didn't allow us to pause live TV. Our DVR wouldn't rewind so we decided that instead of calling Direct TV and having them tell us to reset the machine, we would just reset it ourselves. It stuck on the same 'Step 1 of 2, this may take a few minutes' for the entire week until Friday when the technician came out to replace the box. He didn't have a replacement box, so he returned on Sunday with the replacement and finally got everything to work.

In the meantime, Diego calls me at work on Friday and said the he turned on the computer and it wasn't doing what it was supposed to be doing. The only thing that would let him get anywhere was to push F10. Now, for those of you who pay attention when your computer is booting up, you know that F10 is the system recovery. IT ERASES EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!! So he calls me back a little later and says that we have a "brand new computer". Everything was gone. All of our pictures, iTunes stuff, files, programs. It reset to factory settings. :(

As wonderful as technology is, it really sucks.


So, hindsight being 20/20 and all, BACK UP YOUR PHOTOS AND FILES to be on the safe side.

Love to all
Darci

Antonio getting some final instruction from Coach Dad.

Take me out to another ballgame.....

Here are some pics of Antonio:


Catcher
Thinking about stealing 3rd
At bat
At bat
Catch
Catch
Getting ready