Mother's Day Surprise!

Emerson has been working a lot lately, so I was really excited when he told me on Thursday that he was going to try to leave work early. He got home at about 3:30, just about the same time as my dad called me to ask me if I'd gotten the Mother's Day present they'd sent me. I said I hadn't and he said that he'd sent it UPS and that he had confirmation that it had been delivered. I asked Emerson if he had seen anything on our front porch when he drove in and he said that he had seen something out there. So, while I was still on the phone with dad, I went to check the door. When I opened it, to my surprise, there stood my mom and dad! I couldn't believe my eyes! What a Surprise!! My mom had just been told that morning about our mother's day surprise and had been given a few hours to pack and no method of communication (so that she wouldn't slip the surprise to me :)). Dad has been planning this since February and, apparently, Emerson, Lizsett, and Sherrie have all been in on it. It's been so much fun having them here. Ana Elisa is in heaven and has been laughing and playing with them from the minute she saw them.

Here are some pictures we took together when we got home from church today.

Emerson is making us a Mother's Day feast. He is making Brazilian food--rotisserie sirloin steak, rice, beans, grilled veggies, salad...need I say more?!) I have the best husband in the world!



The weekend has been fun. We bought Ana Elisa a little pool and a sprinkler to play in outside, and we've been out there playing with her, and watching her play when we wear out (she seems to be able to outplay the whole bunch of us!)





Mom and Dad bought Ana Elisa a pair of sunglasses since she keeps trying to wear theirs. She was so excited because they let her pick them out herself. I'm so blessed to have such a wonderful daughter. She is my biggest mother's day gift ever!



Last night, we went to Emerson's soccer game and Ana Elisa went on an hour walk with Gampa. She was in heaven. They went to see the pond and the ducks. When they got back from their walk, Ana Elisa really got into Emerson's game. She yelled and screamed to Emerson from the sidelines and would yell at anyone who would get near him.

After the game, mom and dad took us out for ice cream.



Emerson says that Ana Elisa has found a new best friend in gampa. She plays hide and seek with him, shows him which walls he should bump his head on, and insists he go everywhere she does. If he disappears, she goes on a frantic hunt for him. I'll be surprised if gampa gets any time to rest while he's here because Ana Elisa just won't let him sit down, unless, of course, she can sit on his lap...

It's been a great Mother's Day. I am so blessed to have such a wonderful mother who has sacrificed so much for me and my sisters. She is so unselfish and has always put us before herself. I can only hope that I can be the kind of mother she has always been. Thank you for everything!! I am so happy that they were able to come visit us.

To Emerson's mom, Cida, and my sisters, Lizsett and Sherrie, thank you so much for being such great examples to me of what true motherhood is. You are all so generous, hardworking, and selfless. You are raising (and have raised) such wonderful children. I wish you could all be here to celebrate with us.

(Cida, me, Emerson)


(Matthew, Josh, Lizsett, Sherrie, Ana Elisa)
-Sorry, these pictures are almost a year old!-

Happy Mother's Day!!

Weekend in Las Vegas

Last weekend we went to Las Vegas to meet with the Brazilian Consulate. Ana Elisa got her Brazilian passport and citizenship. The best part of the trip, though, was that grandma and grandpa met us there. Dad just happened to have a business convention to go to in Vegas that same weekend, so it worked out great. It was so good to spend time with them, and Ana Elisa was so excited to see her grandparents. I always show her pictures of them, so she recognized them right away. She calls both of them "gampa", it was so fun to see her with them. We spent a lot of our free time swimming at the hotel pool. Here are some pictures that we took at the pool.

We came home and had a pretty normal week until today. I decided to take Ana Elisa out for a walk to try to get her to fall asleep. I walked about 10 feet from the house when I realized I'd forgotten the house key and that I'd locked the door as I walked out. So, it was 2pm and we had about 4 hours to kill before Emerson would come home from work. So, I had two options, spend the rest of the afternoon in the back yard or try to find someone who would take us in. Luckily, I called some friends just as they were about to walk out the door and they said we could go over to their house. It was about 90 degrees outside, so it was nice not to have to sit out there for so long. Ana Elisa never took a nap, so by the time we got home (after going to the park for a bit), Ana Elisa was wiped out. We gave her a popsicle to cool her down and she fell asleep eating it.

Passport Pictures

We are going to Las Vegas to visit the Brasilian Consulate so that we can get dual citizenship for Ana Elisa. We decided to go the cheap route and take our own passport pictures here at home. I had to go to mutual, so Emerson took the pictures. I couldn't stop laughing when I saw them. Emerson said she didn't want to sit still for the pictures, so he had to bribe her with jelly beans. She goes through a lot of emotions before Emerson finally gets a picture of her smiling at the camera...

Just Plain Mad!

This is boring!

Fine, I'll just sit here and suck on this jelly bean, then!


Where are you hiding the rest of those Jelly Beans?!

The perfect shot!

I may just have to frame her passport :)

Happy Easter!

Growing up, we always went to my grandma's house for Easter. She was big on holidays and always put a lot of time and effort into making each one memorable. I was sad when we moved because I didn't want to miss those holiday get togethers at grandma's house. I was sad that Ana Elisa wouldn't be able to go to the parties at her house and that she wouldn't get to make those memories that I always cherished. Now that grandma has passed away, I have thought about it more and more. Lizsett told me something very true the other day. She said that Ana Elisa can have her own wonderful memories, and they don't have to be the same as mine were. It's up to us to make her childhood memories sweet and enjoyable.

I thought about that as we prepared for Easter. We had a wonderful weekend, different than the ones I always cherished from the past, but wonderful because we are making our own new memories.

Emerson had Friday off, which was so nice. We got to spend three full days together. On Saturday, our ward had an Easter egg hunt. I was really excited to take Ana Elisa because this is the first year that she can participate in the fun. I couldn't believe it when we woke up, it was raining! It's been two months since it rained, and of course it chose to rain on the day of the ward party. We went anyway and braved the rain.

There were so many eggs! I wouldn't be surprised if there were around
1,000 candy filled eggs out there!



Emerson took Ana Elisa out to get the eggs while I wimped out and stood under the canopy to take pictures :) Here they are getting ready to charge...



Ana Elisa had a blast running around picking up eggs off the ground. The rain didn't seem to bother her at all.





Later that evening, we went over to some friends house for a little Easter party. They had another little hunt for the kids. Ana Elisa's favorite part of that evening was the little puppy that they had there! Here she is trying to feed the puppy through the glass door!



Today, Easter Sunday, we tried to dedicate to thinking about our Savior. This morning we had an Italian Colomba for breakfast (the Colomba is very traditional in Italy, when I saw it at the store, it brought back so many great memories from my mission, that I bought it so that I could share a little part of my wonderful Easter memories with my family).



After church, we had some friends over for dinner and watched the movie "Finding Faith in Christ". It was a great Easter filled with wonderful NEW memories.

Some of Ana Elisa's favorite things...

It's fun to watch Ana Elisa as she develops her likes and interests. One of the things we discovered she really enjoys is music (we actually discovered this really early on). On our way to church on Sunday we put some classical music on in the car. She started swinging her arms around with her pointer fingers pointed like she was directing the music. It was so cute! Here are some pics of her demonstrating her love for music:

Here she is with her very first drum set (aka our cheap version of a drum set!)

Some ladies in our ward get together every Tuesday for a Music & Me class. Ana Elisa loves to go and especially loves when she gets to get up with her instrument and march...
(Sorry, the picture is a bit blurry, too much movement!)



On Thursdays they have a kids show called "Dewper" at the mall where they sing and dance and perform for the kids. Ana Elisa loves it. I had a hard time getting pictures of her boogieing, but here's sample of what it's all about...





Another thing she has really grown to love are the Sesame Street characters, specifically Elmo and Cookie Monster. She gets so excited when she sees them. So, on Saturday we took her to a Credit Union who was featuring Elmo live to meet the children. She was in heaven. They had popcorn and drinks for the kids and Ana Elisa kept trying to go over and offer Elmo some--which I'm sure he'd have loved since he was out in the heat! Ana Elisa is so thoughtful :)



She also got to see the woof woof...


|

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Yesterday we went to Walmart and saw a lady leaving the store with a bunch of shamrock balloons. I asked Ana Elisa if she wanted one and she yelped for joy. We ran to the area where they have all the holiday things and found the last balloon there.


Ana Elisa has been so happy with her balloon. When we got home from the store she went running to the kitchen and opened a drawer and grabbed two long plastic spatula type spoons. She used the spoons to wack her balloon around the room. She did that for a long time. Now she carries the balloon around everywhere with her.

New Car

Our poor Mazda has been really struggling. It's no wonder, it's almost ten years old and it suffered a fender bender almost four years ago that never left it quite the same. We've been trying to run it for as long as possible. We even decided to keep it when we saw that the car won't run when it's raining (poor Emerson had to figure that out the hard way at about 10:00pm when he had to pull off to the side of the road on his way home from Phoenix). We figured that it doesn't rain that often here, so we held off on replacing it. But we finally broke down (no pun intended) and decided it was time to get a new car when the breaks started acting up (again, poor Emerson found this out the hard way when someone cut him off in the middle of an intersection and he couldn't get the car to stop--luckily he's great at maneuvering cars and was able to jerk out of the way just in time).
I wish I would have taken a picture so you could see the pathetic state that poor car was in. The hood paint was almost all gone, and until recently it didn't have any hubcaps. Inside, though, we kept it really nice. I'm sure the new owners will appreciate that!! :) Poor Emerson called me a few months ago in a panic because one of the Directors of Honeywell wanted to go to lunch with him and wanted Emerson to drive. He was so worried about what the director would say or think when he saw our car. Hahaha...I told Emerson to think of it as a good thing--maybe the director would feel bad for him and decide that he needed to give Emerson a raise!! It didn't work, but at least the director didn't seem to mind!
Anyway, after several weeks of searching, we finally bought a new car (and got a great deal on our trade in!). Here are some pictures of our trusty new Hyundai Sonata.

The seats even move up so that I can see over the wheel! hehe...



I don't know if it was the way this picture was taken, or if it's just a reality check,
but Ana Elisa looks so big and grown up!

Now that we have the car buying out of the way, we decided to make Saturday a clean up the yard day.

Emerson worked out there for about three hours and is still paying for it--his allergies were so bad yesterday and today that he's just miserable. Hopefully, (now that we have a new car I can say this), hopefully it'll rain so that Emerson's allergies can clear up.

Ana Elisa helped Daddy with the yard work and enjoyed an ice cream cone as her reward for being such a great helper!



For those of you who know Ana Elisa well, you know that she is really full of energy. Very little can get her down. She had the croup last week and wasn't feeling well. You'd think she'd want to stay inside and rest (yeah right!), here is what she did as we stayed home so that she wouldn't get any other kids sick...



That's our girl!

Girl Scout Cookies and a Trip to the Park

Family Home Evening last night consisted of two things: Girl Scout Cookies and a Trip to the Park.
Someone at Emerson's work gave him a box of Samoa Cookies. Emerson was really excited to come home and share his cookies with Ana Elisa. She has a sweet tooth, just like her daddy. At first she just laid back to relax with her favorite blankie and the box of cookies on her lap.
[A noite familiar de ontem a noite teve duas coisas: Girl Scout Cookies (bolachas) e uma visita ao parque. Uma pessoa que trabalha com o Emerson mandou uma caixa de bolachas para nos. O Emerson estava animado para chegar em casa e compartilhar as bolachas com a Ana. A Ana gosta de um doce--assim como o pai. A principio ela estava toda relaxada deitada com a caixa de bolacha e o cobertor favorito.]

It only took one bite for her to pop up. The cookies were too yummy to just have them there on her lap!
[Mas ai a Ana deu uma mordida na bolacha hummm...as bolachas estavam muito boas so para deixa-las no colo.]

Are there any more in there??
[Tem mais ai?]

After they ate cookies, we went to the park by our house. Ana Elisa gets so excited when we go. She points at it and starts to giggle. She wants to be like the big kids and climb everything!
[Depois de comer as bolachas, fomos ao parque proximo de nossa casa. Ana Elisa mal pode se conter quando ela ve os brinquedos de longe. Ela quer ser como a criancas mais grandes...quer subir em tudo.]







We stayed until it got dark.
[Ficamos ate ficar de noite]



It was what my niece, Brittney, used to call a great Happy Home Evening!