June 21st to 23rd: At Sea and Ketchikan, Alaska

I'll skip writing about June 21st because that was just traveling from our house to Seattle.

June 22nd: At Sea 
It's interesting when we went on the cruise to Hawaii we were at sea for about 4 days before we arrived at any destination. With this cruise we only had two days fully at sea. Last time I also didn't not experience getting dizzy spells like I did on this ship. I'm thinking it may be due to new medications that I am taking....yay. I was grateful that our first day of the cruise was only at sea because I was not feeling up to doing much of anything. Brian was wonderful enough to watch Chloe and go out and explore the ship so I could rest. Not much happened this day except for the start of eating way too much food, but that's expected on a cruise, right?

June 23rd: Ketchikan, Alaska
Our first stop in Alaska. When we woke up that morning and opened the window I didn't realize quite how breathtaking the view would be. We were lucky enough to be on the side of the ship that faced the land. Ketchikan is such a cute little town. We signed up to take an excursion to Saxman Native Village and Totem Bight State Park. We left promptly at 10:30am and with a short ten minute drive through town we arrived at the village, gasping and oohing each time we caught a glimpse of an eagle flying in the sky or a totem pole. Our tour started with a video talking about the importance of totem poles and how they tell the history of the people. Our guide taught us a few phrases in the native tongue (I don't remember them unfortunately). Chloe did pretty good sitting through the video and listening. After the video presentation, we took a short walk through the woods to the clan house. We entered the clan house and were invited to watch them do their welcoming dance and others. At the end volunteers were invited to come up and take some of the garments the performers were wearing and do the last dance with them. Chloe was so excited to dance and Brian went up with her. There was actually a little girl who was Chloe's age who came up to her and offered Chloe her robe. Chloe wouldn't take it, but it was adorable. This little girl also did an amazing job following along with the others for the dance.

After that was complete we left the clan house and went to where all the totem poles were. Our tour guide told us the stories behind each of the totem poles and their meanings. Unfortunately Chloe was getting a little grumpy because she wanted to run and explore, not stand around a listen to stories. We took turns watching her so we could hear the stories.

Lastly we visited a master carvers workshop. We were able to watch him work on carving a totem pole. While he worked and Saxman village native told us a little more about the work that goes into carving totem poles, how long it takes to become a master carver, what tools were traditionally used, how paints were traditional made, and many more things. It was all so interesting to learn about.

When we came back from the tour we ate lunch quickly and put Chloe down for a nap with an intention of exploring the town right of the port where the ship was docked. Unfortunately we didn't realize the ship would be leaving port right as Chloe woke up from her nap, so we missed out on exploring Ketchikan a little more. It was still great fun.

Part of our view from the room we were staying in.

The cute little girl Chloe's age dancing in the center.

Chloe and Brian ready to join in the dancing.

The clan house.

Me trying to tell Chloe about the meaning of the totem pole.

Also because we had the whole afternoon on the ship after Ketchikan we went swimming. Chloe loves the water and would have swam longer if we didn't need to get cleaned up for dinner. The pool was awesome at this point because the water was heated. Later on in the cruise for some reason the pool stopped being heated, so we were glad that we decided to go swimming this one day.

Chloe didn't really want to stop swimming to take a picture.

Happy girl!

Trying to stay warm while dad grabbed her an ice cream cone.

Cheese!

Alaska Cruise: June 21st - 28th

A couple of weeks ago, June 21st-28th, our family was able to embark on quite the adventure. Brian's Grandma Riches coordinated and paid for a cruise for the entire Riches family to go on. (A few years ago, before Chloe was born, she also did this for the Hawaii cruise) We set sail on the Ruby Princess on Father's Day (what a great gift for Brian, right?) We were all so excited to see the whole family and see wonderful Alaska. In total we had 27 family members go, only two people were missing. It was such great fun to see family members around the cruise ship and hear about what adventures they had gone on during the day. Over the next few posts I will write about what our small family (Brian, Teresa, and Chloe) did on our excursions in Alaska. And of course what would be a vacation without pictures.....I apologize in advance if it's a bit of a picture overload. I went through over a thousand pictures and narrowed it down to 100 favorites, and I'll try not to post all of them in the blog. We are grateful for the generosity that made it possible for us to do this, and will cherish the memories for the rest of our lives. Here are a few random pictures to start us off. Enjoy!

We enjoyed playing miniature golf on board the ship a couple times. Chloe had fun swinging putters.

View from the back of the boat.

Grandpa Riches in his room, ours was right next to theirs. The one with the light on...

Chloe's favorite activity on the ship. Riding the "motorcycles."

Our pretty little girl. :)

Our Two Year Old

Chloe is most definitely a two year old. She is at a time where she is wanting to assert her independence at all times. I wouldn't say that she's a terrible two, but we do frequently see fits of rage when we don't understand what she wants, or we say no to what she wants. Despite the craziness we love her with all our hearts and would do anything for her.

Chloe has really enjoyed our times going to Disneyland since January. We have tried to go at least once a week since we got our passes and have only missed a handful of weeks. We are kind of sad that after this week we will be blocked of for the summer. Her favorite ride is the Ariel ride and the Finding Nemo Submarine ride. Chloe also loves to visit with the princesses. In fact I think visiting the princesses has inspired her desire to wear a dress every single day. We are grateful for the large bag of hand me down dresses we received from a ward member or else I would be needing to do laundry a couple times a week so Chloe can wear dresses every day. It's cute. She is a little princess.

The funny thing about the dresses is that it doesn't stop her from being extremely active. She loves to be outside whenever I let her. We live right next to our complexes park and so we often go out to play on that equipment. She is becoming such a good climber, it kind of makes me nervous that she's so much like Brian in that sense. Here is a video of Chloe climbing at our favorite local park. It was the first time she was doing it mostly on her own.




Chloe is talking more and more in complete sentences and is a cute little story teller. Our bedtime routine time has doubled because she keeps asking for us to tell her more stories. She likes to take her little pink toy phone and pretend that she is talking to grandma on the phone. She loves to sing her favorite lines from her favorite songs in movies too. And anytime she hears any music she will stop what she is doing to dance.

Chloe has entered a stage where she is a very picky eater. It's literally a game every meal to try and guess what foods she will actually eat. She's mostly just drinking liquids for the past couple weeks and so I had the clever idea to make her smoothies, that way I can get her to eat plenty of veggies and fruits. This crazy kid even says no to ice cream and pizza and hates leftovers. Feeding her on the cruise to Alaska in June will certainly be interesting....

Anyways here are a couple cute pictures of Chloe that we've taken recently and haven't shared on Facebook yet.

The line was short for Autopia and so we took Chloe on for the first time. She was so excited to drive!

At the mall, in a fire truck, in one of her princess dresses.

Graduation, Jobs, and Car Accidents

Life has been pretty busy since the last time that I wrote, and unfortunately that means that I can't possibly share everything that has been happening. So I'll just share the things that are most important...or actually more like the things that are standing out more in my mind right now. Brian has been working very hard over the past month to complete his master's thesis. Things were absolutely crazy with his deadline to complete this in addition to all his final papers and projects. I am happy to say that Brian was able to complete his master's thesis prior to the deadline and as of May 15, 2015 Brian has his Master's Degree!!! I am so proud of him and the dedication he has put into his work. It has been hard at times, but I love that I was and will continue to be able to support him through these years in graduate school.

Because he now has his master's degree on his way to the PhD he can now teach at most universities. He is lucky enough to have cohorts who work at Cal State Fullerton in their psych department and so when they told him about job openings he jumped at the opportunity to apply. Brian was contacted for an interview and spent many days stressing and prepping for it. I told him he would do remarkable because he tends to always leave a good impression. Brian's hard work and diligence has led to a job offer teaching at Cal State Fullerton this Fall. He will be teaching two sections of Research Methods. We are both beyond excited for this opportunity. It is such a blessing that he was able to find a job so quickly, especially in comparison to most of the job hunting we've experienced since coming to California.

On May 18th, while Chloe was taking her nap and Brian had already texted me to say he was coming home from setting up an intervention at a local high school, I was surprised see that I was getting a phone call from Brian. I rejected the call because I didn't want to wake up Chloe and texted him back to ask what was up.....If I had known what his text would be in response I would have answered the phone right away. His text read: "Someone hit me...pretty bad. I'm OK but I'll be awhile" My heart stopped, even though he said he was OK it's a terrifying thing to hear that someone you love has been in a car accident. I immediately called him back and he told me the car was in pretty bad shape. I asked Brian to write what happened, but he's still pretty upset about the situation especially because of how things are now going with the car... but I'll get into that later. Brian was coming home and as he had stopped as an intersection he looked behind him in the rearview mirror and saw a car speeding towards him. There was nothing he could do except wait for impact. The car slammed into the Maxima's rear end with such force that the Brian's car was pushed into the car in front of it, and that car then rear ended yet another car. Because of this lady's reckless driving 4 cars were involved in an accident, and our car unfortunately took the brunt of it and was the middle of the sandwich.

You could actually see the Honda symbol from the car imprinted into the bumper and the trunk would no longer close. :(

:(

Last Wednesday the insurance adjuster came and estimated about $4200 in damages and gave us a check and a name of a body shop we could take our car for repairs. He then told Brian that they could increase their coverage to about $5200 if needed. Unfortunately Brian let me know that if it did surpass that amount that would mean that the car would probably be totaled, that the insurance would not be fixing the car and would instead give us a check for what they feel our car is worth. Yesterday we called the repair shop to see how things are going, their estimate has now exceeded the maximum the insurance had allotted. Not the news that we were hoping for. While the insurance hasn't officially told us they will be totaling the car, we don't have much hope that they will pay for the amount the shop has quoted. We could take the money insurance gives us and repair the car, paying for the rest of the repairs out of pocket, however that would mean that the Maxima would have a salvage title. More than likely it looks like we will be trying to find a new car. Yay!....Not really.....

Brian and I really loved this car. It has a lot of memories in it and we put a lot of hard work into fixing any repairs ourselves so we could save money. It's frustrating that because of someone else's bad choices we are having deal with the worst of it. I'll try to do another post in a few days once we hear back from the insurance, maybe things will turn out more positively....and I'll focus on Chloe things, I love that crazy little girl of ours.

Brian & Teresa Happenings

As you may have noticed the last post was solely about Chloe. And that is how it should be. However there is so much happening in Brian and my life I figured it was only fair that I write a little update about us.

First off, since it's easier to write about other people, is Brian. Brian is currently in his last semester of coursework at Claremont Graduate University. What does that mean? He's super super busy. By the beginning of April he needs to have his master's thesis done. So he's working on that on top of everything else that is expected of him, his normal coursework, teaching online for BYU-Idaho, and playing with Chloe and I. After this semester is over he will have completed his master's while on his way to a Ph.D. This means that he will be able to start teaching at more local universities starting this Fall. (which he's needing to worry about applying to as well) In January we received great news that the grants for Brian's lab were approved, and now Brian will get paid for the work he does. Once the semester is over he will still be attending Claremont Graduate University to finish his Ph.D but will not have to attend classes on campus. He should be able to focus more on his dissertation, whatever teaching positions he may have, and continue working with the lab on campus.

I am feeling a lot more busy than I was a year ago. I am currently the first counselor in our Young Women's presidency and that has caused some great changes in my life, in addition to some added stresses. Every Wednesday we have mutual and I love getting to work together with the girls and getting to know each one of them better. The difficult part sometimes is that in order to give Brian some uninterrupted study time is that I bring Chloe with me. It is interesting to try to wrangle a hyper becoming increasingly tired two year old who doesn't like to sit still, or stay in the same room for longer than twenty minutes. Chloe does love the interactions with the girls though, especially the neighbor girl who has babysat her a few times. Currently we are trying to raise money for the girls to go to Girls Camp this summer. And so right now I am in the midst of planning a Fiesta Dinner and Silent Auction. It's going to be awesome, but there is a lot of work that goes into an event such as this. (much bigger than planning a toddler birthday party) It'll be May 2nd, just in time for Cinco de Mayo, so I'll try to remember to update everyone on the success or semi-success of it. Besides wrangling and teaching Chloe daily and Young Women stuff that's pretty much my life right now. I am still going to the doctors monthly to try to figure out this joint pain thing, but it's slow going. We've been thinking for years it's fibromyalgia, but from what we've read it takes awhile to actually be diagnosed, and the doctor has mentioned it as a possibility a few times. But it seems like she's still trying to rule out other things. She just ordered another round of bloodwork and x-rays. Yay! :/ So for now we keep trying different doses of different medicines, but it only ever really dulls it barely, not exactly the treatment I want for the rest of my life (since it seems to be here to stay). The physical therapy was kind of helpful in that it made me recommit to being physically active everyday because that seems to be the only thing that consistently keeps the pain at bay. An added bonus: it means I will continue to be in shape the rest of my life. So that's my life in a nutshell right now.

Anyways, because of  generous family we were able to buy Disneyland Passes in January. We are so excited for this. We have gone 6 or so times already. We can only go on weekdays, but since Brian has no classes on Tuesdays we have made those our Disney days. It's fun and Chloe is loving the Disney magic in her life. We've missed the past couple weeks because of stuff, but we look forward to going again this Tuesday.

Well...until next time enjoy life!

Chloe's 2nd Birthday

Chloe turned 2 on February 7th. (Yes, I know it's been almost 20 days, I've been a little busy. :P) Anyways, over the past months Chloe has shown a great love in the movie Finding Nemo. She would constantly request to watch it, and memorized lines from the movie. So when planning Chloe's birthday party I decided to do a Finding Nemo themed birthday party. I had a blast planning it, and I think Chloe and her guests really enjoyed it. Here are some pictures from the day:

Our Nemo Ocean Wall

I had Jellyfish around the room.

Yummy Food!

Nemo Coloring Pages

Playing with Playdough

Pin the "Lucky" Fin on Nemo

Fishing! The kids loved this and would have done this the whole time if they could.

We also played a game where the kids rolled a cube with different colors on each side, and with each color we would do a different action such as "Jump on the jellyfish" "Glide on Mr. Ray" or "Peak out of the anemone."

Chloe's cake that I made.

We didn't even practice blowing out candles and she did it first try!

She got a Squirt to go with her Nemo.

The Kids. (this is the best group shot we could get lol)

We had a great day and I'm grateful for those that were able to come.

So here's some more things about Chloe now that she is two:

• She has so much personality. She will stand in front of the mirror and make faces at her herself.
• She has become extremely talkative. (Except she's developed a shyness with strangers in the past weeks)
• She picks up new words almost instantly.
• She is a climber and explorer.
• When she does something she's proud of she'll turn to us and say "I did it!"
• She likes to pretend cook like "Ratatouille", she says it as "Touie", and likes to help mom cook.
• She has mental maps of places that we go frequently (mall, church, apartment complex)
• She's become quite the picky eater.
• She goes down for naps and to bed for the night extremely well.
• She stopped breastfeeding a month ago.
• She loves most anything Disney related (We probably let her watch too much...)
• Still likes Tinkerbell, but has recently become obsessed with Frozen and singing "Let it Go"
• Loves going on our walks to Barnes & Noble where we read many books, and she asks us "One more" when it's time to go.
• Pretends to read any book, even if it's dads textbooks.
• 25lbs (29th %) and 34inches (44th %)

Merry Christmas!

I know it's not really Christmas now, but I know if I wait I won't have time until after actual Christmas...Here is our little newsletter we included with our Christmas cards this year:

2014 has seemed to just fly by, but that happens when you are having fun and raising a toddler. Here are some of our highlights from the year:

Brian is still attending Claremont Graduate University for his PhD in Positive Developmental Psychology. Studying and working on massive research projects takes up most of his time. He has one more semester of coursework, which means we could move away from California while he works on his dissertation, but we will see what happens. He is still a professor online for BYU-Idaho teaching psychology.  He continues to enjoy teaching the 12 & 13 year olds in our ward as well.

Teresa continues to stay home and take care of Chloe. While it is a full-time job with no sick days, it continues to be quite rewarding. Teresa still loves to read whenever she can and Brian jokes with her that she is still reading more than him even with all his schoolwork. In the end of July, Teresa was released from her calling as Primary Secretary and was called to be the First Counselor in the Young Women’s presidency. It has kept her quite busy, but has allowed her to get her creative juices flowing and have more interaction with adults. 

Chloe continues to be the center of our busy lives. Every day we are amazed by her intelligence. She is quite a talker and picks up new words daily. Chloe is also very sweet, saying “Hi” and waving to everyone we meet outside of the house. She loves going on walks and asserting her independence. Chloe has made friends with the older kids in our neighborhood with her friendliness, they all know her name and even come knocking on our door to play with her. Chloe is in a constant state of motion, climbing and going everywhere her little body can take her.

As some of you may know both Brian and I like to play around in photography, and we've always figured we can take pictures close to the equal of most professional photographers. That being said, getting pictures with an active toddler this year really made me consider getting a professional over doing the pictures ourselves. We ended up having to get dressed up two days in a row because Chloe had a meltdown and would not cooperate for a family picture...I love the pictures we got and I want to share, so this is going to be a little picture overload. :)

This dress was a hand me down, and Chloe absolutely adores it.
Whenever she puts it on she will spin around in it. It's her "princess" dress.

She's not looking so much like a baby anymore....

Being silly.

I was joking with Brian that we look like we're doing engagements pictures. Lol.

Love my lil girl!

So stubborn, but adorable.

One of my favorites!

Tickling her to get her to smile!

I'm done Mom and Dad....

Nemo!

As she points to things she usually say "I see"

This year we'll be spending Christmas in California again. We're already working on getting Chloe to say "Merry Christmas" and she's really close. She loves the tree that we have up, even though she keeps taking the ornaments down. And she gets super excited when she sees all the Christmas lights as we go on our daily walks. Brian's brother and his wife will be spending Christmas with us, so it will be fun to share Chloe's excitement with them. I have a feeling it is going to be a great Christmas. Hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and are safe in your travels. Merry Christmas!