Incredible Pizza

So there's this new place here called Incredible Pizza, and oh my gosh it's freakin' incredible.....just amazing!!  We didn't have any specific plans one day so my older sister and I with our kids and Gramma & Grampa Makai went there just to check it out.... I honestly don't know who had more fun, the kids or the adults!  Haha.... Being the penny pincher that I am, I went online before we headed out there and signed up to receive their special offers and coupons and I got a text message that got me a FREE $7 game card.... Sa-weet!!  :)  We of course started out with the buffet, where they have every kind of food you can think of.... anything from pizza to wings, to a salad bar, a pasta bar, hamburgers, hot dogs, a whole dessert bar....a wide variety of things to choose from and tons and tons of food.  What's awesome about this place is that it's unlimited, so we ate until we were full, went and played games and ate some more.... hahaha!  The games were awesome too....they had your typical chuck-e-cheese games, but they also had miniature golf, bumper cars, laser tag, go carts....and fun fun fun for all ages!  We had a totaly blast there and it was awesome for my kids to be able to spend the whole day with their cousins and grandparents!!  I don't know what else to say to describe how awesome this place was....all I can say is you need to try it!  :)  Just look at the pictures, they speak for themselves!!

At the entrance, excited to be there!

Gettin' our grub on...

 Gramma & Grampa Makai

Lautala super excited to be there too!!  Hahaha

Game time!

Miniature Golf...

Just for fun...

What an incredible place!!  :)

Makai-Fatai Reunion

So my Dad comes from 5 kids, he's the oldest.  2 of his brothers live here in Utah, the other brother and his only sister still live in Tonga.  His brother Tevita that lives in Tonga came for the summer and we decided to all get together....for what would be the 1st annual Makai-Fatai Family Reunion!  Funny that we call it that, cause it's probably the shortest reunion in the history of family reunions, lasting less than 24 hours....but how long it was doesn't really matter because we all got to spend time together and we all had so much fun!  I think the reason it was so short was because it was sort-of decided and thrown together at the very last minute.  We all met up on Friday night at the Spanish Fork Reservoir to camp, and oh my goodness.....that place was amazing!!  It's honestly the perfect place to camp...it's clean, beautiful views, no bugs, it has a pavilion, it's own man-made reservoir, a playground for the kids and beautiful green grassed areas where you can pitch your tents.  Seriously, it was breathtakingly beautiful up there. 

I was so surprised that we were camping in September and it was so warm....all throughout the night!  So warm that we slept with the tent door open and no blankets.  It was windy, but it was warm wind and it felt so nice!  I dressed Lautala in a thermal onesie and she threw a fit in the middle of the night cause she was hot so I took it off her and she slept in her diaper...haha!  I told Ova, this is so going to be our camping spot from now on!!  :) 
We all potlucked and met up under the pavilion for dinner.  They went all out with puaka tunu and all.  We sat there talking and playing cards, listening to music and laughing until like one in the morning.  Just enjoying everyone's company.  Slowly as everyone got tired, they headed to their tents to sleep.  Nothing huge planned for the next morning, just a big breakfast with everyone together and then swimming in the reservoir.  The breakfast was delicious, everything you can think of was there....from pancakes to biscuits and gravy to bacon and eggs, to dougnuts and muffins.  It was delicious!  After breakfast we all went and took our tents down and got ready to go swimming.  The reservoir was within walking distance and it's pretty good sized.  They brought in sand and had a big beach on one side of it and on the opposite side of the reservoir were the fishers posted all day catching fish!  I didn't get to swim because the water was WAY too cold for Lautala, but I got some good pictures of everyone else in the water!!

After spending all day in the water, everyone was cold, tired and hungry!  We dried off and walked back up to the fire pit to roast some hot dogs on a stick along with some chips for lunch.  There were only a few of us left at that point, most everyone else had already gone home.  It was a very very short family reunion, but I'm glad it's something we started....now we gotta take it and run next year!  Next year will be longer, and even better!  Love my family!

Lagoon with the Dannon Folk....

Can I just say that I LOVE my husband's job! Dannon is such an awesome company to work for and I just seem to get more and more amazed as the time goes on at how well they treat their employees and their employees families. I could go on and on about all the perks and benefits they offer their employees, but I'll just focus on the latest and greatest!!

Dannon Lagoon Day!! Usually they have a specific day set aside where they close their plant and the whole company goes to Lagoon for the day....all expenses paid, including 3 meals and snacks....and to top it off, the GET PAID while they're at Lagoon, CRAZY, I know, but this year they did it a little differently. Not too long ago they took a bunch of their employees to Orlando for a soccor tournament and Disneyworld, so they didn't go all out with the Lagoon day, but still it was a blast!! :) They gave us all tickets to get into Lagoon for free and they paid for our parking...there are quite a lot of Poly's that work there now, and they're all either related or really good friends, so we have our own little Dannon family going on...hahaha! Well, we all decided on a day to head out and we met up there bright and early when it opened! The kids had a blast and since the majority of Dannon wives are prego right now (except me and Talia..haha) they couldn't ride the rides so we focused totally on the kids. It was so much fun!

We still had a couple extra tickets and they're good for the entire 2010 season, so I think Ova and I will go back for a date night at Frightmares.....that's another blog post coming!  haha

Gettin' caught up....

Ok, so life has been going so fast...so many things happening, so many things to do.... I'm not complaining because with this comes a lot of change, but I haven't had any quality time to myself to sit down and blog. And I do miss it because it's sort of my release, my step out of the world and into my own. My time to journal my life. I sat down a couple weeks ago and read through some of my old blog posts. Can I just say I LOVE my blog! There were some random things I'd written about that I totally forgot about. In the craziness of these past couple months I've got TONS and TONS of things to blog about.... and I refuse to NOT blog about them, so stay tuned and hopefully over the next couple days I'll be able to get all caught up! Here's a list mainly to help me remember what I need to blog about (in no special order)....hahaha!

-Hopekids 5K for Baby Tevita
-Incredible Pizza - Mone's 4th Birthday
-Lagoon with the Dannon Folk
-Temple Portrait Class
-Makai/Fatai Family Reunion
-My special Makai
I'm sure there are a couple other things I want on my list, but these are the ones that come to my mind right now....

9-11-2001 and now 9-11-2010

I can't believe its been 9 years since that dreadful day....I remember very vividly what I was doing, where I was at, and even how I felt when I heard about the tragedy of the twin towers. I was a missionary in South America, in Chile....it was early in the morning and we had just finished our morning district meeting. My companion and I were walking out of the church parking lot on our way to get to work on the new goals our district leader had just set for us. In Chile, all the houses and churches are fenced off....I guess to keep intruders or burglars from getting in, well the church we met at that morning was no different. As we were walking out there was a janitor guy cleaning the leaves off the fence. We walked by him and said hi and he said "se dejaron la escoba en los estados unidos" Which translates into English as 'someone dropped the broom in the United States' meaning someone dropped the ball.....my companion and I just shrugged it off cause people always made smirk comments about the USA. We went to our first investigator of the day and they were watching it on tv. I thought it was an action movie or something cause it just kept showing the buildings crashing into the towers over and over. The investigator told us that it was live coverage from the United States.....my heart sank. I cried and cried and cried....we couldn't even teach. We apologized to the investigator and asked if we could just reschedule....he understood. It was a good thing too because as soon as we got back to our house we had tons of messages on our machine from our zone leaders and the mission President wanting us to stay in the house until further notice. Sept 11th is the day of rioting in Chile, and we didn't know if it was connected or if what happened in the US was going to cause riots. One of our neighbors brought over their little tv and we watched for the next two days straight as our beloved America was being attacked. I can't even explain how I felt watching the planes crash into the towers over and over....and to hear about the plane that hit the pentagon....and the one that crashed into the field. My heart was heavy and I felt the same pain that the entire country of America felt that day. One of the sister missionaries in my zone was from New York.....and her Dad worked in an office building not to far from the world trade center. She wasn't able to get a hold of anyone during that time....she was a wreck not knowing if her Dad was okay. A few days after it happened, our mission President called a conference and all the missionaries got together. He basically told is that its a tragedy that happened, and a sign that Satan is real and the destruction of the last days are upon us. He gave a very powerful and emotional and spiritual talk about the importance of the work we were doing and told us to go out and continue. I will never forget that week.

As a testimony that God is real and he has his hand in our lives....I want to share the letter that that sister missionary shared with us a few weeks after the attacks. The letter was from her Dad. He told her he loved her and not to worry about him. Then he told of his experience that morning. He said he was supposed to be at work at 9am, but for some reason his alarm clock didn't go off. He woke up late all frustrated and rushed to get ready so he wouldnt be late for work. He told her that all these obstacles kept coming up and he was getting really irritated. On his way to work he hit a bit of traffic. As he was sitting in the traffic jam, he witnessed the planes crash into the tower....the first one and the second one. He was just far enough that the rubble of the buildings didn't reach him. He didn't go to work that day, but was there to help pull some people out of the rubble. His letter to his daughter was very powerful and detailed....so much so that when she shared it with us we could feel and see what he went through. At the end of the letter he said how glad he was that his alarm didn't go off or that he ran into all those obstacles. If God didn't have a hand in his life that morning....things would have turned out a whole lot differently.

It's actually crazy how many of these kinds of stories I've heard or read about. Other people that had these same types of things happen that made them late enough to not be a victim. God is real and he does work in mysterious ways!

9 years ago was when it happened, but all those lives that were lost that day will never be forgotten. All those people that were directly affected, and all the rest of us who were emotionally affected by it will always remember where we were, and how we felt that dreadful day. God Bless America!

Ova: "Mone what do you want to be when you grow up?"

Mone: "I want to be a cop"

Ova: "Why a cop?"

Mone: "So I can take all the people that like BYU to jail.......but not Grampa Makai cause I love him"

Hahahahaha Ova and I were dying laughing....cause he said it straight faced and all.....

What can we say, our boys have picked up on our LOVE for the Utes! Haha

For Jesus...

So a couple months ago in primary, Filimone's teacher taught a lesson that everything we do, we do for Jesus. She was teaching that when we say our prayers we are doing it for Jesus, when we go to church we are doing it for Jesus, when we are nice to others we are doing it for Jesus.... the point that she was trying to get across to that group of 3 year olds was to choose the right in everything they do. Well, Mone took the lesson and applied it to the most extreme....everything he does, or anyone does is for Jesus....it's so funny! When I ask him to clean his room, he tells me he'll do it for Jesus. When he is being nice and sharing his toys with others, it's for Jesus.....he even interpreted in his own little mind that anything that he, or anyone else does that is bad is not for Jesus and it will make him sad. When Makai is mean to him he says "Oohhhh, you're being mean to Jesus." Just this past Sunday we were walking to church and they were fighting over who was going to push Lautala in the stroller. Mone had her first, then Makai grabbed the stroller from him and they fought back and forth for a little while...I told Makai that Mone had it first so he had to give her back to him and ask nicely, that he couldn't just grab her away. Just like any other siblings there is that sibling rivalry that exists. Makai listened to me and gave the stroller back to Mone, but then Mone gave Makai this evil little hahaha "I win" look which makes Makai mad and he grabbed the stroller away from Mone so hard and fast that he made Mone fall down and made Lautala cry cause she got scared. Normally, I would have been really upset and yelled at Makai, but I couldn't because before I had the chance to, Mone stood up and screamed "Your being mean to Jesus...." he was crying, frustrated and so angry.

It's been a good 3 or 4 months since that primary lesson, and everything is still for Jesus....hahaha..... I'm really glad that Mone listens to his primary teachers and applies the lesson to his life, even if he sometimes takes it a little overboard! haha I guess it's a good thing for him to learn while he's young that everything we do, we SHOULD do for Jesus!