Girly Girl!

I had lots of errands to run this morning while Luke was at Preschool. Tess was such a good girl that I told her when we got to the last store she could pick a treat. In my mind I was imaging swedish fish or some fun Easter treat. Not what Tess had in mind. At the end of an isle she spotted the nail polish and right then it was all over, she knew what she wanted...hot pink nail polish with glitter. I tried to offer her a giant chocolate bunny instead but she was having none of it, she knew what she wanted! So we came home and now Tess has bright pink glittery finger nails and she couldn't be happier!

The Wind, Laman and Lemuel

A few nights ago, during our family scripture reading, we read about when Laman and Lemuel tied up Nephi on the boat on their way to the Promised Land and how the Lord caused there to be a great tempest. Tonight Barrett picked Luke up from my brothers house and it was really windy, as they got in the car Luke said "Dad I think I know why it is windy...maybe because Nephi's brothers Laman and Lemuel tied him up."

Love that kid.

Night Ice Fishing

Last weekend Barrett and I went with his dad night ice fishing up (sounds awful, doesn't it?) at Strawberry. I didn't absolutely love it, but didn't hate it either. It actually wasn't as bad as I thought it would be! Barrett and I each caught one and Ike (got lucky) caught four!

St. George

A few weeks ago we able to take a long weekend and go and visit Barrett's grandparents in St. George. We had a great weekend, great weather and fun just being together and relaxing. Barrett was able to go golfing with his grandpa and they had a great time! We went fishing, we visited the La Verkin cracks (they were very cool), went to the park, and hung out with Nana and Pops. Thank you to Nana and Pops for letting us come down!

Love, love, love these pictures of Tess and Pops

Me and the kids in the La Verkin cracks

The kids with their great grandma and grandpa

Christmas 2011

This year for our Seljaas family Christmas Party we went to EA Zone (an elite athlete training center that my brother owns) and had lots of fun!

The cousins waiting to exchange gifts

Our awesome tradition of making the in laws sing a Christmas carol

Barrett and my niece were having a head stand contest and Tess wanted in on the action!

The Clan

Me and my siblings

Christmas Morning!

Love this girl

Our Norwegian Family Christmas Party

We had a great Christmas and lots of other parties that we sadly forgot to take our camera to.

28 years ago today...

I can't believe that today marks 28 years since my mom passed away, that makes me feel old. Since then, November 28th has always been a weird day for me. It's almost as if it were a holiday or birthday in the sense that every year I feel the anticipation of that day coming, yet when the day arrives I'm not really sure what to do. I usually think about my mom a lot on this date and depending on the weather, sometimes I head down to the cemetery. So this year I decided to mark this day with a tribute to my mom.

(I'm a fairly private person and when it comes to this blog I usually just post the happenings of our family and leave my feelings for my private journal. Since this is my family journal that I hope to pass to my kids as they get older, I want to include a post about their Grandma Nancy so that they will know what an amazing person she was. So if you are reading this, know that this is for my kids.)

My mom was a really amazing woman. I was only six when she died, but I remember, I remember what a fun, happy, caring and special person she was. She had a great talent to make every person, no matter what their age, feel like they were special and important. Everyone felt like my mom was their best friend. She was sassy and loved to joke around and tease. She was very generous with her time and talents and she was very loyal and dedicated to her family and friends. Family was very important to her and she went out of her way to make sure that family relations were in tact. I remember many family parties held at our house with both her and my dads families all together, the more the merrier! She had a strong testimony of the gospel and it showed in the way that she lived her life and interacted with others. She was the perfect example of the woman that I would like to be. She left a great legacy, and I am so very thankful for that. Love you mom!

New York, New York!

We just got back from a fantastic trip to New York! Our friends, Rob and Meggan Gonzalez, called us a couple of weeks ago and asked if we were interested in a last minute trip to the big city and well, of course we were! Everything fell into place perfectly and off we went. Rob lived in New York during an internship, so we had our own tour guide!

We arrived late Wednesday night and took the subway to our hotel in the financial district, right near the south seaport. On that subway ride I had a very interesting conversation with a really wacked out New Yorker. In fact, he went five stops past his stop to continue our conversation! The highlights were that he was the top computer scientist in the nation, that he was sure the Jews were going to kill us all, and that I, as a Mormon, need to be more aggressive in propagating the technique (that would be our technique of living.)

This is at the South Seaport about five minutes from our hotel with the Brooklyn Bridge behind us. Barrett loved looking at the wooden ships docked here.

Barrett, Megg and Rob with a cool church behind them.

Here is the "occupy movement" in New York. It was actually quite small and unimpressive, basically a bunch of hippies and weirdos hanging out.

At the 9/11 memorial they had this really cool mural on the wall. This was only a portion of it, but it was actually really touching.

We went out and saw Lady Liberty. This was the second time I have seen the Statue of Liberty and it seemed much smaller than I remembered, but still very impressive.

We were all lucky enough to get tickets to see the Late Show with David Letterman.We were in line waiting to get in when one of the Pages pulled us out of line and told us he was going to sit us on one of the first two rows (thank goodness I was with good looking people:)), so he walked us in past hundreds of people waiting in line to an inner foyer and then we went in and sat right on the second row. It was awesome! The guests were Mark Harmon and the guy who does Beavis and Butthead. It was really cool see the taping of the show and if you pause it at just the right moment you can see us in the audience, but if you blink you will miss us!

We spent lots of time in Time Square

Barrett's cute cousin Kristi works at Madison Square Garden, so we went to visit her there and she took us on a tour of the whole building. It was really cool. They were setting up for a concert that night, so it was dark with all the spot lights and stuff. They just remodeled the lower bowl this year so she showed us all of the new amazing box suites that are courtside and all of the other cool stuff. It was great to see her and so nice of her to take time out of her busy day to show us around.

We went to the top of the Empire State Building right before the sunset, so were able to see the view in the daylight and at night. It was beautiful to see the sunset over the city.

Here we are at Grand Central Station

Here we are at Rockefeller Center. We could have sat there for hours watching the people try to ice skate, it was very entertaining.

Other highlights of trip were going to see Wicked (it was amazing), going to the Met, the Museum of Natural History, shopping on Canal Street, lots of yummy food, Central Park and seeing the New York Marathoners. It really was a fantastic trip, we had great weather, good company, and lots of fantastic memories! Thanks Gonzalez's for a fantastic time!