When the Baby's Away, the Parents will Play

Well, before the playing, we got a little work done. Or maybe a lot of work! I made a list of things to do around the house while Carrie wasn't here. It ended up being a very long list! Tuesday, the morning after we got back, I made a trip to Lowes for supplies, came home and painted the living room. The ceilings in this room are double tall. The upstairs hallway has a railing looking over into the room. Therefore, I did NOT want to paint the whole walls. Too much time and effort! We opted for: paint the bottom 3 feet and put up chair rail! It turned out beautifully!

My dad was awesome enough to come down from Mesa with his air compressor, saw and nail gun to help put up the chair rail (more like he totally did it himself and I helped hold something occasionally).

This picture also shows off the new window valances I made on Friday. Once the room was painted, we decided the windows needed a little color too. We think they look great!

Another project completed was the downstairs bathroom. I'm so glad it turned out even better than it looked in my head!

And a final hoorah, a new kitchen curtain (that matches the new dining room curtain).
On top of all these projects, I did laundry, cleaned all the bathrooms, swept, mopped, trimmed trees and bushes in the front yard, and Justin vacuumed....

ALL WHILE THE AIR CONDITIONER WAS BROKEN!!!

When we got home from New Mexico we discovered that it was pretty warm in our house. Our downstairs unit wasn't working. Luckily we have two units so at least the whole house wasn't burning up. Also, luckily the weather was "mild" last week and only got to the high 90s. This meant it only ever got as high as 86 in the house... Yuck....

Anyways, we got a home warranty when we moved in and A/C is covered so by Thursday someone came out and repaired it for really cheap. Hallelujah!

Now, obviously the painting stuff was on my to-do list while Carrie was gone just because it would be easier. All the cleaning, however, was done because we hosted this:

GIRL'S NIGHT BRING-A-DATE BBQ EXTRAORDINAIRE!

Every month some girls in the ward/neighborhood get together and have a fun girls night. Lately we've been talking about how our husbands don't really know each other and came up with the plan to have a girls night where we bring our husbands.

It was sooooo much fun!!! We had everyone bring their own meat and sign up for something else to bring (fruit, drinks, dessert etc). All the guys ended up out on the patio hovering around the grill talking about work, layoffs, the economy, and sports. All the girls (almost half of which are pregnant) ended up in the house on the couch talking about pregnancy, babies and kids! One of the guys came inside for something and made a comment like "Wow, what a change of conversation!"

After eating, we played "The Feet Game". I don't think it really has a name, but it was fun anyways. We sent all the boys upstairs while all the girls picked a seat on the couch and held blankets covering us from the ankles up (holding them over our heads too). So when we called the boys back down, all they could see was our feet.

The point was for the husbands to secretly pick which pair of feet were their wife's (we had numbers). They were trying to remember what color nail polish their own wife had on etc... They also tried (without success) to find the pregnant bellies to narrow down options. We were smarter than that though and a few of us had put pillows on our laps to mess up that giveaway. We were trying so hard not to laugh out loud (we didn't want our voices to give us away either). There were quite of few of us who were silently laughing so hard we had tears running down our faces! Only one husband picked wrong. We were so proud of them!

Then we switched and had the boys "hide". They took forever to get ready! We were sitting in the other room wondering what was going on! Well, here's what they were doing.


They were trying to figure out a way to make the game more interesting. What they finally came up with... Showing us the BOTTOMS of their feet! It was soooo much harder! Come on! Who knows what the bottom of their husband's feet look like?!? (There is one pair of hands in there too, but he switched wedding rings with another guy to confuse us). Even though it was much harder, we still ended up with only one girl guessing wrong, so all in all the game was a success!

Next, we played the "Newlywed Game", or at least something close to it. We all had pieces of paper where we wrote answers to questions and got a point when husband and wife matched. I think Justin and I ended up matching on about 1/2 of our questions.

A few examples of questions: What's "your song"? When she was 13 what did your wife want to be when she grew up? What one material thing of your husbands you would want to get rid of? What's the one thing that went wrong on your wedding day? Finish the sentence- my husband is a natural born ______"

They were all really funny but this last one was hilarious. One of the guys said, "I couldn't think of anything my wife would say so I just wrote 'my husband is a natural born hunk!' " It was awesome!! By the end of the night we all had cramps in our sides from laughing so much!

All the guys


All the girls

The whole party! Left to right: back row: Hale, Crockett, Moss, Graves, Tenney, Chipman, Payne. front row: Rodgers, Greer, Andes
Smooches!!