Memorial Day Weekend!

Wow, this is the first time in a couple of years that I get to celebrate Memorial Day weekend. First off, thank you to all the troops who are serving our country. My grandfather was a WWII Air Force pilot, so we used to go visit his grave every Memorial Day to pay our respects. He died in 1973 in a car accident, so I never got to know him, but from the stories I have heard, I have a great legacy to live up to.

Leo, Tiago and I are going to Chehalis, Washington tonight for Memorial Day weekend. Chehalis is about 1/2 way between Portland, Oregon and Seattle, about 20 minutes from Olympia and it's a beautiful place. My sister-in-law, Lili lives there with her husband, Mike and their son Christian who is 5 months younger than Tiago.

I'm excited to go meet Christian!!! He was born February 20 of 2008, which puts him at 5 months and 3 days younger than Tiago. The pictures I have seen of him are adorable, and I can't wait for him and Tiago to start being able to play together, and fight together (just like my cousin Meghan and I did when we were little), go on their missions together, go to college together...etc.

Happy Memorial Day to all of you, and be safe! It's a time for vacation, true, but lets not forget (hence the name Memorial) our veterans and troops!

More pictures of Tiago!!!

Leo Tiago Espinosa 7.5 months old

Here are more pictures of my adorable, sweet baby! He's finally learning the tricks so that he can start crawling. He's proficient at rolling around on the floor to get where he wants, and pushing himself backwards from room to room...but he hasn't quite gotten the hang of moving forward.


These pictures were taken for Mother's day presents for my mom and mother-in-law. I thought that taking the pictures on Wednesday, I'd get and mail them on Thursday...nooooooo...it takes about 2 weeks to get pictures. I did not know that. Oh well, so I sent some picture frames to my mother-in-law for the pictures that will be coming later. The actual pictures I am sending to my mom and MIL are not posted on here, so if they see this blog, the surprise will not be ruined!

This is one of my favorite pictures, it fills me with such joy looking at this little face.

Tiago's photogenic, which I suppose comes from Leo and I...we've both been told that we're extremely photogenic. Too bad I don't look like my pictures in real life.

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!"

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.