Emily's Party Invitation!

Make a Smilebox greeting

I'm gonna be on TV!!!

Well, sort of... On July 28th I auditioned for American Idol in Salt Lake City. Now instead of hearing "So when are YOU going to try out for American Idol?" I can say, " I did! Last week! "

For those interested in the process, here is the story: The day before auditions you go and get a bracelet and a ticket for the venue the next day. This happened to be at the ESA (Energy Solutions Arena, or the Old Delta Center, if you will..) The next day you show up at 5:00 am (ack!) and stand in line for about 3 hours. Then they herd everybody into the ESA and you find the seat that is on your ticket. For me, this was in section G about 6 rows from the floor. Not bad, except that they started at S and worked there way back to F. Which, if you are following along, means that I was in the second to last section and therefore approximately number 5,500 to auditions out of about 6,000.

When your turn finally comes, which for me was at about 5:30 pm, you and three other people are brought to a table of one judge. In my case, it was the guy who had been in charge all day telling us what to do. His name was Patrick. I sang "Summertime" from Porgy and Bess and jazzed it up a bit. He let me sing for about 20 seconds and then that was it. Unfortunately the outcome was not in my favor. Then Patrick called us all forward and said, "There are varying degrees of talent here, but unfortuantely you are not what we are looking for." I knew it! There are SO many blonde haired blue eyed girls in Utah and therefore a ton of them at this audition. They had reached their quota for my "type." After it was over, the rush of adrenaline and emotions and the fact that I had only been running on about 4 hours of sleep caught up with me and I crashed into a well needed nap at my Grandma's house for an hour before driving home. It was a "good experience" (such an overused phrase...) but something that I can say that I did once. Thank you to all of the people who pulled extra weight in watching Emmy for me so I could go and have this experience. (namely my sis-in-law and brother, Ashlee and Bret, my good friend Mary Fox, and of course my hubby Scott who is always encouraging me to keep singing. Thank you all!)

BUT, as to lighten the mood a little, here are some pictures! Ryan Seacrest showed up to do his little "Welcome to Salt Lake City" spiel:

I met some really neat people in the "herd" outside while we waited to go inside. I even met Katie Lewis who I found out is best friends with my friend Suzanne Wood and she even lives in Cedar City. CRAZY, right? (She's the one on the far right...)

And this is me waiting in my seat for my turn. :)

Would I do it again? Maybe. Give it a year and then I'll think about it. BUT, make sure you watch the Salt Lake City auditions of American Idol and look for me "yelling" when they do the crowd shots. I'm wearing a pink shirt and a white headband and standing next to a tall blonde dude. :) For what it's worth, I tried. Maybe next year...

Kristin

July Recap...finally!

***Caution: This will be sort of a long post due to the fact that nothing has been blogged since the beginning of the month. However, if you keep reading, I promise it will be worth your while. Thank you for flying Mabb Airlines and have a nice day. Sorry no complimentary peanuts.***

WOW! July fleeeeeeeeeeew by, didn't it? Scott blogged about our pioneer trek and then BAM it was the end of July! So, going in chronological order, I will attempt to recap July for the masses of people reading this blog. (Masses, okay maybe not, but for those of you who do read it, here goes...)

HAPPY FORFA JULY!! Scotty and I planned to have some friends over the the 4th. We had dinner and then we were waiting for them to come over, but they were late, so we texted them to see what was up. They texted back a picture of a "Mommy" and "Daddy" shirt they were wearing and told us they would be there soon. We were super excited to hear that our friends were expecting a baby! However, due to that fact, the future "Mommy" was not feeling well and therefore they did not stay long enough to enjoy the fireworks and dessert. But, Scott and I had a blast doing the fireworks by ourselves regardless. Here's a couple shots of the fireworks:

Before Emmy went to bed, we did some sparklers on the back patio. (See our garden over on the left? It's like 10x that big now...seriously... The other picture is me being scared of the sparkler because it was SPARKING...who knew, eh? Let's pretend I'm not such a sissy when it comes to being burned, okay? We did fireworks right in front of our house on the street. (No burn ban here...wahhoo!) It was really fun. Then after we lit off all of our fireworks (Emily slept through the whole thing upstairs in her comfy bed) we climbed on top of our roof and watched the fireworks that were shooting off over at the Cedar City Airport. It was fun and romantic and well, here's a picture of us on the roof. My husband is so photogenic, don't you agree?

Then to top it all off, we climbed back into the house and I made some SCRUMPTIOUS 4th of July Sundaes complete with Ice Cream (white), Blueberries (blue..duh) and Raspberries (Red). Oh yeah, and whip cream on top. Here is Scott being "excited" about them. Hooray! That about sums up the fourth of July. Emily enjoyed the sparkler, but next year maybe we'll let her stay up past her bedtime for the rest of the fireworks.

Moving on to the rest of July...

My family came to visit us in Utah since they will be moving to Japan mid-August. It was really nice to spend some time with them and also see my sister who lives in Kansas City and her two adorable children. We celebrated my nephew Jace's 2nd birthday on July 10th. Here are a couple pictures:

Jace's party was a swimming party. Here he is blowing out his AWESOME cake that his mom made. It had 2 horses on top and was even a fondant cake! Nice job, Ashlee! Also, here is a picture of me and my Daddy. Isn't he handsome? I'm wearing a necklace that he bought us girls in Kuwait. It's supposedly made of Camel bones...ooOOOoo!

Of course no visit from the cousins is complete without the obligatory bathtub cousin picture. Don't worry, the bubbles were very strategically placed. Like my awesome tourquoise tub straight out of the 1950's? I love it.

This other picture is of my sister Kara reading a book to her daughter Corrinne and our little Emily. They were twinners that day thanks to Great Grandma Campbell!

While my family was here, my mom celebrated her 50th birthday on July 18th. Here are two pictures of her. One enjoying holding her sweet granddaughters (the only ones!) Corrinne and Emily. They are twinners in this pictures too. They are only 5 weeks apart. The second picture is her birthday cake. It's actually a Texas sheet cake, but hey! we had a lot of mouths to feed!!

She doesn't look even close to 50, does she? (love you mom..) Overall, hanging out with the family was a ton of fun. Here is a picture of my sisters Kourtney (the youngest) and Kara (4 years older than myself) being "cool" at PacSun in the St. George Mall. Can you tell who is who?

Oh, and here's one more picture from Jace's swimming party. Emily looks like she's about to hurl, but it's a good picture of Scott. :) She loves here Daddy, really she does!

Okay, last but CERTAINLY not least, Scott and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary on July 26th. To celebrate the occasion, my brother and sister-in-law watched Emily while Scott and I celebrated in VEGAS...don't worry, no slots. We stayed at the Caesar's Palace and had an amazing room thanks to Scott's "Samsung Rewards Points" from his job at T-Mobile. It ended up costing us $40, but was at least a $450/night room. Fun to be spoiled when it's free, right?

The room was amazing. This other picture was the view from our window. It's the Bellagio fountain pool, so we got to see the fountain show from our window on the 44th floor. VERY cool!
We went to dinner at the same resteraunt wear we ate on our honeymoon, the Samba Grill--a Rodizio style Brazilian BBQ...Soooo tasty! The waiter brought us a dessert because it was our anniversary (Scott had called ahead and made special reservations) and so it was extra special.

So, of course I had the waiter take our picture. :) THEN, we went and saw Phantom of the Opera at the Venetian which was AMAZING! However, in walking from our hotel to the Mirage for dinner, then to the Venitian for the show, my stillettos were killing my feet. So after the show (which did I mention was really REALLY great!) we walked around till I found a shop where I bought some uber-comfy sandals from the Walking Shop. I heard angels the moment I saw the sign. (I had been walking around the hotel without my shoes on it was so painful...) So then we went to BrookStone and I sat in that crazy looking contraption you see above. No it's not a dentist chair straight from the Jetson's, it's called the Coccoon and it is a massage chair with "soothing lights." It was really funny so I had Scott take a picture. He was in the chair right next to mine getting his own massage. :)

The next day we went and walked around Vegas. Scott bought me some "designer" sunglasses "For only five dolla!" and we window shopped in the Miracle Mile at Planet Hollywood. Pretty fun! It was recommended to us to go see the lions at the MGM, which we did. We happened to arrive right before "feeding time" so we stuck around to see it. It was SO cool. We are standing in this glass walkway and the lion and lioness are walking on top of the walkway and licking the glass and basically it was really really cool. Here's some pictures:

They were getting fed a huge hunk of ground hamburger...raw of course. It was pretty interesting. But THEN, my camera died. No, not even saying Pretty Please would get it to turn back on. So that was the end of the pictures for that day. We went home that day too, so it was okay. We drove back to Cedar City that evening to pick up our little angel from Bret and Ashlee's. She was happy to see us and I was happy to hold my baby again. She is the sweetest baby in the world.
It was really nice to get away for a couple days though and spend time with my best friend, Scott--just the two of us. (Make you think of a song??) It reminded me why we got married in the first place. We just fit. We had alot of fun and I look forward to spending the rest of eternity married to him. :) Thank you Scotty for a great anniversary trip! I love you.

Well, take a breath, you made it through July. Hopefully I can update a little more often now that things are not so crazy around here. July was good though. August is peeking around the corner waiting to surprise me with the craziness of Scott's birthday, Emily's 1st birthday (yes, really..), another visit from family right before they take off for Japan, the start of Scott's last year of undergrad (HOORAY!), starting up teaching lessons again, the list goes on...

Till next time,
Kristin :)