Happy Easter!

Today was extremely tiring for me! I spent most of the day yesterday cooking and getting ready for the Easter dinner today. I wanted to have a huge spread of food and invite Leo's family over for dinner because they had just gotten home from Washington yesterday and I was sure they wouldn't want to cook. And it's also traditional in my family to have a big Easter dinner, every excuse we have to eat, we use!

SO! Yesterday I made:

• Carrot cake (and it turned out!!!! I had to kind of guestimate the adaptions to the recipe for high altitute, we're over 7500 feet here...) The first time I tried to make carrot cake here, I didn't know the tricks to make my oven work, or how to adjust recipes for high altitudes or adjust cooking times/temps and the result was a burned mass on the outside, and barely cooked enough on the inside...blech! But it still tasted good...hahaha
• My aunt's Refrigerator rolls (didn't turn out, it was too cold and the rolls didn't rise enough so they came out kind of dense), my aunt is still the undisputed queen of these rolls!
• Since I can't find the canned French's Fried Onions, I had to make my own fried onions so I started by marinating the onion rings in ranch dressing.
• Pineapple sauce for the ham - since I couldn't find crushed pineapple, I had to have Leo crush it for me.

Today I made the:

• Potatoes and Onions with the Lipton's Onion soup mix. These are SO easy and SO yummy!
• Mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallow fluff mixed in - this reminded me of the candied yams my grandma used to make and she'd put in miniature marshmallows. I had a jar of marshmallow fluff that somebody had given me that was set to expire so I thought "What the heck?!" Sooooo yummy!
• The ham - Costco makes it easy! One minute to make the glaze, heat up the ham, put the glaze on and voila!
• The green bean casserole. Since I could not find canned green beans, I had to buy the green beans, steam them and then make the casserole. Even yummier than my mom's (sorry Mom!)
• The fried onion rings for the green bean casserole topping - since they had to marinate overnight, I fried them today in a bran/flour breading.

When writing down the dinner menu, it doesn't seem like that much work, and I knew it would be a lot of work because I do this every Thanksgiving and Easter, it was fun and I'm glad almost everything turned out!

SO! Dinner was a hit, my in-laws gave me permission to marry Leo (a family joke every time I cook something that turns out really yummy)

So that was happy...I was tired and took a much-needed nap after dinner.

Tiago ate green beans for the first time today! He's getting much more coordinated than before, he's reaching for toys now and he can pass toys from one hand to the other and back again. It's exciting to see him grow and progress, I just can't get enough of him!

Leo left tonight for Spain. He's got 13 hour flight (or something like that) straight to Paris, then he has a two hour layover in Paris, and then a two hour flight to Barcelona, Spain. He'll be back next Sunday... :(

He really did not want to go, I think I was more excited for him to go to Barcelona than he was! I did some research and gave him a list of some places that he had to go try and visit this week! It's our goal to move to Barcelona sometime in the next 5 years as General Manager of the office there, once Leo gets his MBA. Becoming a GM or a VP is the next step up for Leo from where he is now.

Well, this has been a long post, so long for now!

Tiago's first time in the pool!

Today we took Tiago down to the pool for his first time swimming! He looked soooo cute in his little bathing suit and he had lots of fun splashing around in the water! Here are some pictures of his first time swimming! And we realized today just HOW much water a diaper could hold! Sheesh!
















"What do you mean I can't mix florals and stripes?"

















"I'm looking good! See, I've even got the underwear-showing-underneath-my-baggy-pants-look rocking!"

















"Do you think the ladies will go for the Buddha look when I'm older?"




"Daddy, THIS is how you play in the pool! You splash and get water in your face!"

Leo comes home today!

Leo is coming home today from Colombia! This is the first time he has been gone for so long since the birth of Tiago...10 days! We didn't get to talk much while he was down there because international rates from hotel phones are notoriously expensive! And he stinks at writing emails!

He called me for 10 minutes from Cali, Colombia where he was on Friday to Sunday, and he checked his hotel bill and saw that that phone call had cost the company $90 DOLLARS! So needless to say, we didn't talk much.

Vonage has a worldwide plan that we will probably get that includes free calls to 60 countries for free (well, $40 a month but that beats $90 for 10 minutes!)

I'm excited to see him again and I can't wait to go pick him up from the airport!

March Madness

Well, I'm sitting here posting stuff to craigslist.com in Mexico City for sale. We're trying to sell most of our big stuff to either repurchase in the US or buy something else that we like better. We don't want to have to deal with the risks of things breaking or getting damaged, and we don't like waiting for forever to get our stuff, either! So the less we have, the better it will be!

Anyhow, so I was looking at the news and I saw headlines about the annual college basketball event called March Madness.

Many offices, friends, networks, wards, whatever...participate and gamble in filling out brackets that list each of the beginning games, then it is your job to guess who is going to win each, who will be paired up for the next game, who will win that one and so forth until you pick the national champion. You are only given the pairings of the first game, it is up to you to determine which teams lose and which teams move on from there on out.

Lots of skill, thought, technique and knowledge goes into picking the winner of each bracket. It helps to be on top of sports news and know the coachs' styles and each team's strengths and weaknesses. If you are the person that wins the bracket, many times you win a prize. If you've gambled on it, you could win lots of money.

About 7 years ago while I was at BYU (yikes! Has it been that long?!?!?!), my home teacher was a guy named Chris Seifert who wrote for the BYU newspaper's sports section. He was truly a humble guy, but he proud of his Nebraska heritage. He said that in Nebraska, there's nothing to do except farm corn or play sports (and I would rather play sports than farm corn!), so you can't help but get into sports if you're a Nebraskan.

Anyhow, Chris and his roommates decided to organize a March Madness bracket selection for the BYU 149th ward. There was no charge to enter, this was purely for fun.

Each person who wanted to participate was given a sheet with the intial games and then we were to fill out the rest according to how we thought the playoffs would go. Many guys I knew spent hours filling out that sheet, analyzing the facts and weighing their opinions.

I on the other hand, picked my teams according to the limited knowledge I had. I also knew that sometimes the underdog is determined to be the top dog, so sometimes the lower seeds would beat the higher seeds. I also picked some teams because I liked their names. I didn't pick the winner, though so my technique must not have worked so well. I think I spent maybe an hour on it and I handed my sheet in to Chris and forgot about it.

Chris and his roommates kept track of everybody's results and at the end of March Madness, when the National College Basketball Champion was crowned, they tallied up the results. I'm not sure how the tallying worked but they had it down.

One night a few days after the end of March Madness, I got a knock on my door. Sports-writer Chris Seifert was standing at my door with a sheepish look on his face and a super-jumbo sized box of Whoppers in his hand.

I had won! Unbelievably, I with my almost random manner of picking my teams had bested all of the sports "experts" in my ward! Chris was a wonderful sport and he said that the prize was a box of whoppers for the person who committed the whopping feat of winning (yeah, corny but so what?)

So it just goes to show...you can't always trust the experts in stuff as volatile as the stock market, or March madness!

Grandma Belcher's Funeral

Grandma Belcher's funeral was the first event of the new year, unfortunately. But she was ready to go and we are all glad that she's where she's been wanting to go for many years. It was on the 3rd of January and we had the services at the Heil Building in Huntington Beach. This was my first funeral and it wasn't as sad as I thought it would be.


I had had a difficult time making it to California for the funeral. For several days I was trying to find a way to get a notorized letter giving Leo's permission for me to travel alone with Tiago, but we found out on Saturday the 29th of December, there was no way I could get a letter on Saturday, Sunday, Monday or Tuesday (because Monday and Tuesday were New Year's Eve and New Year's Day and nobody would be in the office), and then I had to leave on Wednesday. So I had to leave Tiago with Leo and have Leo, Denhi and his family help take care of him.


I was to leave on Wednesday morning around 8:30 and arrive in the early afternoon, in time to meet with all the other grandchildren at Grandma's house to pick out stuff that we wanted to keep. However, after waiting in line for what seemed like forever, I got up to the ticket counter and the agent pointed out that I didn't have my passport with me, I had grabbed Tiago's. My blood went cold as I realized I wouldn't make the flight. I called Leo and had him rush down to the airport (I had taken a taxi b/c we didn't want to wake Tiago up at 5:30 in the morning). But he didn't make it in time and I had to fly on standby to Atlanta and then fly standby from Atlanta to LA, thank goodness I made it onto the first flight from each place, but I still didn't get into California until around 11:00 at night.


The funeral itself was nice, I got to see some family that I hadn't gotten to see at Thanksgiving, like Staci, Jason and the kids, and they could all see that I was recovering from the depression I had gone through in November. I also got to see Lisi and Jake again which was nice because now that Lisi's married, I'm not going to see them as often!

Dad, Mom, Me, Lisi and Jake

My cousin Staci and Jason Kling with their kids Aubri, Avah, Grant and Lexi

I had always wanted to play the piano for my grandma's funeral, because it was on her piano that I learned how to play the hymns. I would pass hours playing most of the hymns in the hymnbook in order, never realizing that I was building up a skill that would come in handy for me. So for the viewing, I sat at the piano and played comforting hymns.


Grandma looked beautiful in the casket. She looked peaceful and happier than she'd been in years. She was no longer in pain and she was finally reunited with her husband, a day she'd been waiting for for 35 years. She had been a widow longer than she had been married.


As I was playing the piano, Lexi (Staci's daughter) asked my mom to go up with her to look at Grandma. She's about 4 years old at this time and when they got to the front and saw Grandma's torso in the half-open casket, she asked my mom in her loud, cartoonish voice "What happened to Grandma's legs?" So that made my mom laugh, and of course I did too when she told me the story.


After the viewing, we went in for the funeral and I played the piano for the services. Lisi sang "I Believe" by Kory Kunz and I played a piano arrangement of "Families Can Be Together Forever." Because we can. It was Grandma who I remember most teaching me about the Plan of Salvation, showing me the diagram and explaining what happens to us. She would do this and tell me that she would be with Grandpa Belcher again in the next life. I wanted to play that song as a testimony and also as a thank-you to Grandma. In a way, I also wanted to remind my inactive cousins that there is a plan, that the Church is true and why won't they come back?


After the services were over, we drove to Westminster Memorial to hold the graveside service for Grandma. Dad dedicated the grave and then we were free to mingle and share memories of Grandma. Lisi couldn't stop crying, she was very affected by Grandma's death. I on the other hand, had prepared myself for a while that this was going to happen. I am going to miss her, but I am also happy for her because I know that she wasn't living a full happy life the way she was for the past couple of years after her stroke. I'm so glad she is finally with her husband again, and I can't wait to see her again.


We went back to the Heil building where my cousin Lindsay's boyfriend, JJ had catered lunch for us. He is the owner of El Azteca restaurant on Main Street in Garden Grove, with all of its Elvis memorabilia. So it was after lunch when we took advantage of the majority of the family being together to take pictures. Todd was the only grandchild that couldn't make it down, he is a manager at Best Buy in Fort Collins, Colorado, and of course New Year's is one of their busiest times so he couldn't make it. It was also during this lunch while we were pigging out on Joy Cook's delicious carrot cake (she says she used Grandma's recipe, Grandma was famous for her carrot cake, but it wasn't Grandma's recipe...oh well!) and cheesecake, that I found out about the challenge that Aunt Sheila, Meghan, Staci, Amanda and a couple of Aunt Sheila's friends had set up. Each person contributed $50 to a pot and whoever loses the largest percentage of body weight by June 1st will get all the money. I intend to win. So I didn't have the cheesecake at the funeral. :)


So are some more pictures we took.

My cousin Meghan, Dave and Diego Bautista. Diego is about 17 months here.

Uh, this is everybody! Family and extended family

Aunt Sheila and my Mom

New Beginnings

Well, here I am at the beginning of a new project. I learned through a friend, Janelle Nutter who had in turn learned from a friend of hers, that online blogs can be published into a book. So this friend of hers decided to publish one book every year and use the blogs from that year as a sort of family history.



I thought this sounded like a great idea, keeping family history while keeping family and friends informed of our lives at the same time! I know that many aren't going to follow our lives through the blog, it is more for us and posterity than it is for anybody else! This is my second attempt at blogging, the first time, I tried to set up a blog on myspace.com but it didn't work out too well because not all my family and friends had a myspace account, so it didn't get out to as many people as I had hoped, besides I became disenchanted with the whole myspace experience, too many viruses and hackers made it extremely inconvenient to say the least.

I decided to call it Monkey business because that was a nickname that Leo had come up with for me, "Monkey" and then I really liked the Paul Frank Julius monkey clothes, and it just sort of morphed into a symbol for the family. Also, at every Family Home Evening, after the opening prayer, we conduct "Monkey Business," coordinating our weeks and discussing what's going on in our lives. So it seemed an appropriate title.


At the time of this writing, Tiago will be turning 6 months in 3 days, Leo is in Colombia for work and I am at home, writing this! I am currently doing a cleanse to help jump start a healthier lifestyle for myself and my family! We are in Mexico City, and we are moving back to Utah next month because of Leo's promotion to Field Development International Director of 4Life Research.

As part of this post, I decided to include pictures that I took of Tiago on Friday the 7th of March. I decided to strip Tiago down to his diaper and put a towel to cover his car seat (we don't have a high chair yet!). I was feeding him chayote (a squash) and rice cereal, but he decided he'd rather explore his feet and blow bubbles in his food than eat it.