Chillin' With My Peeps

This last weekend we were able to spend time with a lot of friends and family we don't see very much. We went to lunch with our friends Karen and Ben at the Purple Turtle in Pleasant Grove. We have been wanting to go there for a while so we were pretty excited to finally make it. Sorry about the picture we forgot the camera and tried to take a picture from the car as we drove by later.

Then we went to visit Cassidy's cousin in the hospital for a few hours before heading to Salt Lake to meet Randi's cousins from Idaho Falls that were down for the weekend. We went to dinner with Wes, Ashurity, Piper, and Kendall and LaWayne before heading to their hotel to swim. Piper is three and was pretty excited to have so many people around to play with. Thanks for inviting us to hang out with you on your vacation we had a good time with everyone.

Nice pose LaWayne!

The whole gang trying to get a picture of Piper with her new bear from Build a Bear, can you tell who the center of attention was :)

HURRAY!!!!

From these pictures can you tell what the exciting news is? This is us in the car at the bank drive thru paying off my car! My mom and dad were lucky enough to be with us which was pretty exciting because it was just two years ago when my dad took me to "look" at cars and we both drove away with a new one :)

Here we are with the titles to both of our cars. In the last 10 months since we got married we have paid off both or our cars. We had to wait a week to post this though because we didn't have the title to my car until today because the credit union had to make sure the check cleared and then mail us the title.

Here our pictures of our two most expensive possessions. And the best part no debt!

February

So February flew by as a pretty quiet month with nothing to really do an entire blog post about so we saved all of the pictures from the month to do one big post (it really isn't that big because like I said it was a quiet month). Some activities not pictured include: we had dinner with different friends once a week this month which was nice to hang out with more couples, Randi had a sunbeam class Valentine's Day party, we celebrated Cassidy's brothers' birthdays with his family, and Cassidy volunteered in a special needs classroom at the junior high as well as attending school full time and working full time. There was a point where between work and school we only saw each other four hours in three days. I will be so glad when we are done with school.
Anyway on to the exciting things! At the beginning of February my brother told us he sent us a package from Hong Kong. He then had fun for a week making up things that it could be and driving me crazy because I can't stand not knowing what presents are. Well, the box finally came and it became official that BJ is the best big brother in the ENTIRE WORLD! He sent us an Apple TV! We had been talking about getting one in August for our birthdays (August is in the middle) because we had other things we wanted to spend our money on right now. But BJ saved us the long wait and pretty much gave us a little piece of heaven. It is so easy to watch movies that are on the computer now! Here are a couple pictures of our new favorite toy.

We also got to babysit for our first time as a married couple. Our friends Mike and Angela have a 1 year old named Cooper that we got to watch for a Saturday afternoon. It was pretty fun to have a trial run as parents and I had a blast watching Cassidy and Cooper play.

Then at the end of the month my parents came to Utah for a couple of doctor's appointments. While they were here I spent Friday shopping with them while Cassidy was in class and then Saturday morning we all drove up to Ogden to go to the temple. Cassidy and I are still working on attending all of the temples in Utah and we needed to go to Ogden before April when it closes for a couple of years to remodel. We are pretty close we have been to 9 out of 13 temples in Utah. It was a dreary day, but we had fun going with my parents.

We also did one other important thing with my parents, but that will get it's own blog post probably next week. Be excited :)

Babies Babies Babies

Randi grew up in Elko, NV where she lived by the Johnson family for pretty much the entire time. The Norton's and the Johnson's did almost everything growing up together swimming lessons, tennis lessons, sewing lessons, carpooling, birthdays, random trip to Dairy Queen, everything. Well since we have all grown up and moved different ways we don't get to see each that often these days and all three of the Johnson girls had babies in 2011. They all finally came to Utah and Randi was so excited to go meet all of the new babies (nieces and nephews until her own siblings start having kids). Even though we saw them a while ago we are still excited to post pictures of our visit now.

This is Kristine the youngest Johnson (now McDaniel) with her daughter Kya. She is so cute. She was asleep when Randi started holding her and when she woke up even though she had never seen Randi before she started smiling and playing.

The next daughter is Angela and this is her son Cooper. They live about 15 miles away from us so we get to see him a lot which makes him the favorite.

And finally, Lacey had Hailey this last summer. She looks kind of startled in the picture, but really did have a fun time with Randi.

These are Lacey's other two kids, Andrew and Brandon. They were busy doing other things and did not want to play with us much. Oh well we still love them.

Thanks Johnson Family for letting us crash your family time to meet all of the new babies. They are all so different and adorable at the same time. You guys have been amazing friends throughout the years and I hope you don't forget us now that you have families of your own.

A Cold Weather Time Out

For about the past 6 years the Norton siblings have made it a tradition to go to Yuma, AZ over Martin Luther King Day weekend. We have an aunt and uncle that live there who always have fun things for us to do and I love being able to pull out my shorts and flip flops and escape the high of 33 degrees for a few days. This year we had some excitement on our drive down. While on our way to Las Vegas to pick up the rest of the crew we had a deer run out in front of us. Cassidy had already slowed down because there was car off to the side of road and it's a good thing he did. The deer ran in front of us hit the car on our other side then the deer and all kinds of glass flew in to our lane where we heard two loud thumps as we ran over top of the deer. My car is little so we were worried about the damage and pulled over to see what happened. This is all the damage to the car a little bit of deer fur stuck in the bottom of the grill. We are so lucky because the small SUV in front of us that hit the deer had a broken headlight, screwed up front fender and the driver side door couldn't even be opened anymore. With no actual damage to our car we continued on our way much more alert than we had been :)

The drive from Las Vegas to Yuma was pretty squishy with 5 adults in the little Pontiac Vibe, but we did it and enjoyed this beautiful sunset on the way there.

Once in Yuma the fun began. Every year we go to the same orchard and pick oranges. We love having fresh oranges and juice.

Before picking with our empty buckets.

Yumm!

BJ the expert picker. The best oranges are always at the top.

We also took a trip down to Mexico. We went to the small border town of Algodones which just for your trivia file has more doctors, pharmacies, opticians, and dentists in a four block radius than anywhere else in the world. We weren't looking for any of those things though, we went down to find good deals on vanilla. And we sure did. This is Cassidy holding a gallon of vanilla that we got for his aunt for only $7.99

After Mexcico and orange picking it was back to the house to juice some of the oranges we picked. We have been doing this for a few years so we have an assembly line worked out that makes things go pretty fast. Here is a photo tutorial of how to make orange juice.

Sunday morning most of us got up to go hiking. This is hike is special because after 9/11 my uncle Dave started putting a flag on the peak every year and now the BLM has changed their signs to mark the end of the trail with a flag on the peak. We were pretty excited to find out Dave is famous!

View from the top. These are the Foothills just outside of Yuma where Dave and Raedene actually live.

The old flag on top.

Putting the new one on the stick.

A good picture of Rudy this one is for you Jamie :)

Mission accomplished!

After hiking and showering we went to this place named graffit hill. It is in California and is just little rolling hills of white dirt where people have spelled out their names in the red rocks you can find scattered around. We put the name Norton on the hill a few years ago, but this year we had two more names to add. This is us in the back of the truck on our way there.

The finished product. I wish we had a shorter last name (and think so does everyone else that helped haul rocks)

We had a great time with our family and enjoyed the 80 degree weather. We also continued the tradition of lunch at Lutes, Casino and went to this great little grocery store where produce was so cheap and they make their own tortillas.

Happy New Year

New Year's eve was a quiet event at the Peterson household. After a fabulous dinner with Cassidy's parents we continued the tradition of Randi's family to do a puzzle on New Year's Eve while counting down to midnight. Here is the puzzle we chose for our first New Years.

Then to really celebrate the new year right we took Randi's aunt LaWayne to the Jazz game on Saturday night. They played the Memphis Grizzlies and even though it was a close game the Jazz came out on top.

Here is a good picture of our favorite player Deron Williams!

We all had a good time at the game and hope you enjoyed your Christmas presents LaWayne.