6 A.M.

Ughhh, that's how I feel about waking up early. I love that my babies are good sleepers and I usually get up around 9, but I find that I have no time to read scriptures, work out, and have a lil mommy time if i'm not up earlier. So I'm waking up at 6 am now. Sooooo early. My hubs decided to do it with me, and we worked out together this morning. We both started weight watchers and after we hit our goal weights we're going to do P90X. I think we're crazy, but I'm commited and so is he, so wish us luck. We should have awesome beach bods by next summer! Maybe we'll go on a romantic get away,... Back to being mommy for now.

Food Fixes

I grew up with a diabetic mom, and a dad that has heart problems, so food was and is a big thing in our family. I think because I didn't grow up on junk food, I look at other people and think, "what in the heck are they feeding their family?!" I have to pull back and remember that most people didn't grow up like me where if you didn't eat right then you got sick. So with that said I'm very thankful for a mom that taught me simple things that I can do to help keep my family healthy.


One of the easiest things my mom taught me was juice is bad!!! Empty calories, what little nutrients you do get from it, would be much better received from the actual fruit. Parents will say that their kids won't eat fruit, but I saw my mom raise four very different boys and two also very different girls and we all love fruit and veggies. Why? Because that is what was in our house to eat. We are human, we must eat, and we will eat what is provided for us. We never had juice, and I never buy it now because it is not an essential part of my diet.


Stay away from fried!!! You can satisfy most every craving for something fried with something baked. Chicken nuggets with breaded baked chicken, french fries with potato wedges, and so on. I occasionally will indulge in potato chips but when I do I always feel sluggish and sloppy. No bueno my friends.


Refined whites are evil. No really, just pure evil, and this is what I struggle with the most! Yummy cakes and muffins, pancake breakfasts, breaded everything, it's hard to resist, I know. What my mom always did was she gave us whole grain or corn-mill everything for day to day, and then gave us a yummy desert every Sunday dinner. I love the way whole grain tastes! White bread is like fluff, and is kinda gross to me.  Pasta is best when it's hardy and whole grain. I'm not talking wheat or whole wheat, I mean whole grain. It's harder for your body to digest, so you burn more calories, therefore you gain less weight. They say the greener the better with veggies, I say the browner the better with pasta, bread, rice and tortillas!


Always rinse your hamburger meat! Even if it says not to, do it!!! It rinses off a lot of the fat that turned into grease while cooking. Use half a seasoning packet instead of the whole thing. Cuts the sodium intake in half and will taste the same. The same thing can be done with the amount of hamburger meat in most recipes. Not only will it save you some calories, but it will save you some money.


We never had meat at every meal. The scriptures say eat meat sparingly, and I think it's wise council. We would have a veggie brown rice casserole, a salad with black beans, or soup and a whole grain roll. We never even noticed that meat wasn't apart of the meal. It's an important part of our diets, but most people eat way to much. 


It's not about being skinny(I'm not by any means) but for me it's about being as healthy as possible for my kids and husband, and making them the healthiest they can be. I used to feel deprived because we never ate fast food, we always had carrots and grapes instead of cookies and chips for lunches, and my mom made EVERYTHING from scratch.(she even grinds her own wheat) I'm now sooooo grateful for the way we ate, because I'm already showing signs of heart disease and diabetes and I know how to eat to live longer. I've totally given up fast food and soda, and I have so much more energy, and I'm a better mom. My daughter tells people that she won't eat certain things because it's not healthy, although she truly believes that chocolate is the healthiest thing you can put in your mouth.( I think the same thing, my momma taught me right! ) I'm proud that my daughter is learning things from me that I learned from my mom.

I won the Gold for being the worst blogger EVER!

So in the land of Rexburg blogs are everything,...to most moms,...but not this one. I don't know how any mother of two finds time to do this! Sienna isn't here right now and that's how I found a couple of min to update, but Mags is still pretty demanding.

That's right I had miss Maggie, actually a while ago. I meant to do a blog about it, but I chose to sleep instead. A good choice I think. So I think I will give a quick run down of our life starting with her birth.

She was born on May 9TH, MOTHER'S DAY! Everyone that hears this is always like, what a wonderful mother's day gift!, and I'm like yay I will have to give up my day for years to come for my child's birthday! I had consistent contractions the whole week before she came and I was miserable! No sleep, no patience, no fun. Then around 2am on Sunday morning I felt a lil pop and a lil trickle of water. Not the huge gush that you hear about or see in the movies, a lil trickle. I got up, went to the rest room and wondered if that was my water breaking. I put a towel down on the mattress and went back to sleep. The next morning we woke up and got ready for church. I was having bad contractions, but I knew that they were giving the mother's day gift(chocolate) in sacrament meeting that day, and I was so not going to miss that. I stayed for all of the meeting, and then after much convincing from Grant he got me to call the doc. I told him what was going on and he told me to get up to the hospital. They confirmed my water broke and 4 hours after getting there I had my beautiful baby. Her official birth certificate name is Marjorie Hope (Maggie Mae) Daniel. She was 7 lbs 7 oz and 19 inches long. She has my eyes and Grants coloring and smile. She always has a look of concern that she might be dropped at any moment, which we realized was justified after Sienna dropped her,...twice. We absolutely adore her!

They look so much alike in these pics!

Sienna is a wonderful big sister, droppings and all! She helps me get diapers or anything else I need, and usually is the first to comfort her when crying. She does get a lil jealous, but for the most part she's been awesome! She is still hilarious and keeps us laughing all day. I can't believe that she's four! She's so smart, pretty, and adventurous. We have thoroughly enjoyed the summer, and we have spent most of our time at the splash park, getting snow cones and riding the carousal. She's a ball of energy! Always on the move. Earlier this week she got a hold of the button for the downstairs doorbell(my bro and his wife life in our basement) and hid. She started ringing it every five seconds so my brother came upstairs and started looking for the culprit. It took all of us, three grown adults,(Grant was at work) 45 min to find her. I started getting scared! She was in Mags closet under my wedding dress. Sneaky lil devil. We are hoping that she will start preschool in the fall, we're just playing the waiting game to find out if she was accepted.

Grant has been out of school since the winter semester ended in April and we have so enjoyed it. He has been working for Melaluka and is doing really well there. He just placed second in the whole company for credit card transfers and won a Nook. He also earned a surround sound system for our living room, so as you might have guessed this is his favorite job yet. He had another 4.0 semester, and he's gearing up for the fall. I'm truly blessed to have such a hard working husband. He loves Mags and is wonderful with her. Although he started walking with her to get her to calm down when crying and now she thinks if daddy holds her he has to be walking. It's really cute. He's been fabulous with helping Sienna get the attention she needs and everyday he comes home and plays with her before he does anything else. Both girls really adore their daddy!

We all got a lil vaca in July, and went home for a lil bit. We blessed Mags and ate at all the restaurants that we've been missing. I gained a fair amount of weight while there, but Rosa's caso is always worth every lb. My mom ended up coming back with us and we had a splendid week with her here in Rexburg. She had a lot of fun with us I think, and she even made us our traditional Christmas dinner, Navajo tacos! Sooooo yummy! We loved every minute of her being here.

I will try to be a better blogger,... maybe. It's just not really on my priority list right now. When the winter comes and we're stuck in the house, you might hear from us a lil more often, but I want to spend these last glorious weeks of summer outside. :)

It's a GIRL!!!

We found out yesterday that we are having another girl and we couldn't be happier!!! The sad part is that we gave all our baby clothes away because it took so long to get pregnant that we just stopped hoping, we found out 2 weeks later that we're expecting. I guess that's just the way it goes.:) We are going to name her after Grant's paternal Grandmother, Marjorie Hope Daniel. We're going to call her Maggie for short. We had a couple of other names that we liked but we made the mistake of saying Maggie in front of Sienna and she has called the baby Maggie ever since so we really don't have a choice at this point. We called Grant's grandmother yesterday to tell her and she informed us that her birthday is right around the due date, so we're just calling this one divine providence. Anyway, as most of you know, I wanted a girl so I'm thrilled and we're feeling pretty blessed. Oh yeah my due date has been moved up a little, maybe around the 10th or 11th,... we'll see.

Adventures with morning sickness

So I have been sooooooooo sick with this pregnancy! I know everyone tells me that sick mommas make healthy babies, but this has seriously been the worst. Poor Grant has been doing almost everything. Just call him mister mom. I have to apologize to anyone that has called, texted, emailed, or tried to contact me in any way, I'm just so tired I rarely respond. If you need to get a hold of us call Grant for right now.
Okay, enough complaining! On a good note I'm out of my first trimester and we find out what the baby is on Dec. 17th, right before we go home for Christmas. The heartbeat was so strong at the last appt, so our worries of miscarriage are almost gone, although I will always worry a little. Sienna is convinced that it's going to be a girl, but I'm almost positive it's a boy. I would love to be wrong though, I love lil girl clothes and bows! We have picked out some names, girl names come so much easier than the boy names do, which I think it's more proof of a boy. Any name suggestions are welcome!
Grant is doing well in school, he's working towards another perfect straight A semester. I'm really proud of how well he's done handling everything. I def got a winner. He's enjoying all of his classes, his favorite would probably be history and philosophy so he's going to do a cluster in history. The man is a studying machine!!! I have seriously never seen anyone work so hard. It is really paying off.
Sienna is still our perfectly funny lil girl. She seems so much older, I don't want her to get any bigger! She was in her first primary presentation, although she's still in nursery, and memorized her whole line and said it without any help. She still is telling everyone that the baby is mean because it makes mommy sick, but she is really excited about the baby none the less. She told me on the way to the doctor that I was really big now, and I was a lil offended, but at the doc appt, we found out that I had lost weight so now that comment is just cute to me. She kisses my belly before she goes anywhere and tells the baby that she loves it, and that just warms my heart. She's going to be the best big sister!
We can't wait for Christmas, and to to see our family and all y'all back home. We plan on being there the 19th and staying for 2 or 3 weeks. I know Grant is ready for the break and so am I! I most of all can't wait for the tamales and caso at Grant's mom's and Navajo tacos at mine! I can just taste it now, which isn't so great for morning sickness, but hopefully I'll feel better then and be able to enjoy it all. See you all soon!

Idaho!!!

So we've been in Idaho for about a month now and we love it! Our townhome is the perfect size, love the neighbors, and love having the church across the street! Everything is so close, we honestly have not been using the car that much, which is great for our pocketbooks!!! Grant is really enjoying school and is doing well in all of his classes thus far. He's getting on the fast track so that we can finish up his BA a year faster, and we'll be in law school that much quicker! He's become mister mom and taken care of the house and been doing all of the cooking, cleaning, and playing with Sienna because I've been out of commission for the past 4 weeks, why you might ask, this pesky little condition called morning sickness!!!!!!!! Yes we are preggers, we found out the week we got here, I'm about 10 weeks along and we are so excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!After a long road of getting here this one looks like it's going to stick, the doctor says with sickness the risk of miscarriage is significantly lower and I've definately had a lot of sickness, so we're feeling good about it. I want a girl and Grant want's a boy so we'll see, but either way we feel so blessed. We joke that the Merrifields fertility must have lingered around here and rubbed off on us (we rent the townhome from them), but we really know that the Lord has anwered our prayers. Anyway, we'll post pics of the place and sonogram soon, my mom and mommy in law have been on me to do this, but I've been sort of lazy of late so I hope they'll forgive me! So all in all Idaho is awesome.

We're back in Texas!

Well a lot has happened since the last post, mainly we decided to come home early! It all happened really quick, one Saturday night Grant was talking about his sales goal and if he would hit it and what we would do if we didn't and all of our options and I thought of a few different things, one of which was going home two weeks early. At first we both sort of were like, no we won't go home, we're so close to the goal, and we moved on with the conversation and talked for about an hour and came back to going home. I really did not want to give up, pride I think, so I was really against it and I think Grant felt the same, but we both couldn't get the thought out of our heads. We decided that we should call Grant's manager and talk to him about it, so we did and we talked it over with him and we left deciding to stay and feeling like we had found a solution to all of our worries. We went home and prayed and told the lord our decision, and I went to bed content that we were staying.
The next morning Grant got up and said I think we need to call our parents and talk to them, I still feel like we need to go home. I was shocked but when I thought about it I got the same impression, but I told him that of course our parents would encourage us to go home because they missed the Nena girl so I didn't think they would be much help, but Grant called my dad and his mom and they both went over the pros and cons of staying and leaving and were really helpful. It all seemed to be leaning toward staying, but we both could not get the impression that we should leave to go away, so we decided that no matter what we had to do what we felt the Lord was telling us to do, so feeling defeated we started packing so we could go home that night. Grant was ten away from meeting his goal, and we felt like failures, but we had to trust that we were doing the right thing. The really sad part is that most of our friends were in New York and we were leaving without saying goodbye, so I was not in a good mood.
As we were loading up the car and about to leave one of the sales reps mentioned to Grant that he could sell at home, and instantly it was like a light bulb went off and it all sort of clicked. On the long drive home we came up with a new plan, that Grant would continue selling at home, I could work, and we could get everything with school situated and spend time with both our families before we moved away for who knows how long. It all felt right and the best part was I got to see my Grandpa, who isn't in the best of health, because he was visiting my parents. Grant has sold 5 since we've been back, three have been installed and two are getting installed while I type, and he has several promising meetings set up for the rest of this week, so we are faithful that he will meet his goal. It was a really big lesson I think especially to me because I really did not want to give up and come home. It just goes to show me that the Lord's way is always better than mine because he can see things that I can't and I have definitely learned to trust in him a little more.