Miller Family

Miller Family

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Gruene, TX and More

We spent a few hours strolling down the streets and through the stores of this cute little town. Gruene Hall is the oldest dance hall in Texas and is where George Strait got his start. Somehow I ended up not getting a picture of the actual hall, but we got a picture of us standing just to the side of it.


This is how my ten-month-old niece, Elena, "hangs out" in her stroller:


She is a little shy and likes to pull her headband down over her eyes so she can see out a little, but so no one can see her. Several people we passed kept stopping to let us know her headband had "fallen" over her eyes. So cute!

One of my favorite things about Gruene---a charming old mansion that has been converted into a B&B:

Men and babies:

After being out in the humid heat for a few hours, we decided it was time to spend some time in the air-conditioned shopping outlets. My brother-in-law, Lee, discovered this grotesque spider in the bushes nearby:


This is a Texas Yellow Garden Spider. An article on the internet states, "There is hardly a yard in South Texas in summer that does not possess one or several garden spiders, often called the "black-and-yellow garden spider." I don't think we'll be moving there. Sorry, Suzanne!

I need to end this post with a cute picture. Here are two little cousins loving to be together:

Monday, October 20, 2008

Baby's First Flight

Waiting for take off....at 6:00 am

McKay and Daddy checking out the plane and the busy people below during our layover in Denver.

Just trying to take it all in.

McKay did really well on all of our flights. I was pretty anxious and worried about how he would handle it. Again, all my worry was for naught. He was a great passenger and was even given his first set of wings by a flight attendant.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Toothless No More

McKay's first tooth finally made it's appearance last week, the day before we left for Texas. It's been fun to watch more and more of it appear. I wonder when the second one will show!?!?

Texas

A cute welcome sign my sister and nieces made.

We returned home late last night from a fabulous trip to San Antonio to visit my sister, Suzanne, and her family. They were gracious enough to let us and my parents stay for 9 days/8 nights. The time went by way too fast! We had a great time and were kept very busy visiting the nearby attractions. The first night there we ate yummy food at a down home Texas BBQ restaurant, Rudy's. The next day we took a stroll through the quaint German town, Gruene. On Sunday, we took a drive to the Gulf of Mexico and toured a decommissioned aircraft carrier, the USS Lexington, in Corpus Christi. Parts of the movie Pearl Harbor were filmed there. On Monday, we went to the San Antonio zoo, toured the Alamo and took our first walk along the Riverwalk. (I will add more comments about these places when I post the pictures.) We shopped and worked on a few projects during the week and returned to the Riverwalk on Thursday night for a riverboat cruise. On Friday, we went to Sea World. While I like Sea World in San Diego, I have to say that it is better in San Antonio. (Isn't everything bigger and better in Texas?) We rode a few roller coasters there. They had "Jack's Frightmare Forest," which was pretty good as far as "spook alleys" go with a frightening chainsaw ending. There were spooky clowns, werewolves and zombies walking around Sea World that totally creeped me out.

I've considered making a slideshow out of the 900+ pictures we have (between our camera, my parents' and my sister's), but I don't have the patience to even load 1/10th of them and I'm not sure anyone has the patience to view them. So each day, for the next few days, I'll be posting a few of the best ones.

My sisters who live in Las Vegas made the trip so much easier for us by dropping us off and picking us up from the airport. They rock! (All my sisters do.) THANK YOU, THANK YOU and THANK YOU!!!

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

7 Things

I've been tagged by Suzanne!
Here's how to play:
1. Link your tagger and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

I'm usually pretty reserved and usually don't share much personal information. I prefer being mysterious, so this puts me in an uncomfortable situation---but I'll try to get over it. ;)

1. I have a few obsessive/compulsive tendencies. I'll only mention the ones that I seem to be over. ;) When I was little and couldn't tie my own shoes, my older siblings would fight over who had to tie them for me. If the loops didn't match, I would untie them, cry and demand them to be retied until they matched (sorry!). When I was eight or nine, I was a "lip licker" and licked so much that there was a red chapped ring around my lips. Sooo funny, now.

2. I LOVE making and decorating cakes and want to be better at it than I am. I was always my sister Holly's assistant when she made wedding cakes. Several years ago, I volunteered to make a friend's wedding cake having never done one by myself. It turned out pretty good, and I have now branched out into other themes. I'm so excited to have someone (McKay) to make fun cakes for...Nathan always chooses pumpkin pie over cake for his birthday.

3. I only have one adrenal gland and am a cancer survivor! I had a malignant fist-sized tumor on my right adrenal gland. The tumor was discovered when I was six and was surgically removed along with the adrenal gland when I was seven (I have a 12 inch scar across my midsection).

4. Due to the cancer and adrenal gland removal, my growth was abnormal and my bone age was five years ahead of my actual age. Throughout grade school I was much taller than all the other kids in my grade. On picture day, I was always called "Daddy Longlegs" by the photographer (he had cuter names for the other girls like "Angel Eyes" and "Princess"). I haven't grown any taller since the sixth grade, and I'm now the shortest in my family at 5 feet 5 inches.

5. I (like my cousin Melanie) have a strong aversion to needles. I still remember the first time I had to have my blood drawn---I was four and going to have my tonsils out. I didn't pass out, but had to lay with my head in my mom's lap in the waiting room for quite a while after. Since then, I have felt like passing out many times and have actually passed out three times. On one of those occasions, I just had my blood drawn at Primary Children's for a checkup. I was walking out of the lab when I felt that fainting feeling come on. I fainted, and in the process of falling to the floor, I hit my head on the steel door frame. My sister-in-law, who is a nurse, ran back into the lab for help and in the meantime, happened to notice the lab had mislabeled my blood. They had mixed up my blood with someone else's who was having a brain tumor removed later that week. Yikes! In that case, my fainting was a good thing...I think. Because of my cancer ordeal and having to get poked so much, I truly believe I have developed a sixth sense and can discern whether or not the person doing the poking is good at it or not before they even try. (Those are stories for another post.) Okay, I'll share the last one. When I was getting my IV during my labor with McKay, I knew the nurse wasn't experienced and would have a tough time. It was in the middle of the night and they were short on nurses so I didn't ask for someone else. After the third try, I did ask for someone else. They got someone from the lab and I knew right when she walked in that she could do it. I was right, and it only took her one try. (I really do have many more similar stories!)

6. My fourth toe is taller than the third toe on each foot. Nobody else in my immediate family has the same issue. However, when a distant cousin was visiting from Sweden, we noticed our toes matched...EXACTLY!

7. Four pages of my music disappeared while I was accompanying the Institute choir in front of President Hinckley and a packed arena of college students. The song was an arrangement of "Praise to the Man" and there were a total of eleven pages. We had rehearsed right before the meeting started and I left my copy of the music sitting on the piano. During the performance, when I got to the third page, I saw that the middle portion of the music (four pages) was missing. I had a girl turning my pages and I told her of my dilemma. She started looking around the piano and got up and ran over to our seats to check for the music but couldn't find it. I could remember enough of the music to help the choir through a key change, but I actually stopped and left the choir to sing a cappella. I even got up from the piano to check for the music...all while the choir was singing. The choir was high up on the stage and I could see the choir director looking in my direction with a surprised/worried/anxious expression. I couldn't find the missing music and went back to the piano to pick up where the music started again. It happened to be right where the key changed again and I had a little solo. It turns out that no one really noticed except for the choir and President Hinckley's bodyguards. I never found the missing pages of my music. The choir director still tells this story when he speaks at firesides and has the choir sing it the same way it was sung that day for President Hinckley.

Whew...that was hard! I'm tagging everyone who reads this and hasn't been tagged yet. If you choose not to participate, I understand.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Fun Family Fall Foliage Photos

We went up to Cedar City on Saturday to spend Conference Weekend with our families. One of my goals was to make it up Cedar Canyon to check out the Autumn scenery. We did make it up the canyon, and we were also able to talk Nathan's sister, Misty, into coming along to take pictures of us with her great camera. Misty did a fabulous job and we are so grateful for these pictures:




I'm not sharing my favorite family one, yet. It is to be revealed at a later date...perhaps in a Thanksgiving blog header, or on our Christmas card. (I'm actually going to send them this year!)

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Cat Rant

I actually don't have enough time at the moment to list every reason I STRONGLY dislike cats, but today's incident has urged me to write a post for therapy's sake.

When I went out to check the mail today, I was greeted by a gory mess on my welcome mat. This isn't the first time this has happened---more like the tenth. Not only were there the remains of a dead bird (several little pools of blood, inner organs, etc.---sorry for the graphic description), but we were left a bonus present by the perpetrator (that's how I know it was a cat). I could feel my own blood start to boil and my blood pressure rise at the thought of having to clean up something so yucky---again. I'm 99.9% sure of the specific cat, but there really isn't anything I can do about it. I'm also embarrassed because I didn't see the "present" until my visiting teachers had come and gone---with their kids.

Arrrgh!!!!

I feel a little better, now.