Easter in San Diego / Birthday Celebration

  Caitlin had Friday and Monday off of work, so we went to San Diego for Easter.  It was a lot of fun!  Caitlin got ahead in her lesson planning so that she wouldn't have to worry about it on the trip too which was nice. We packed up Thursday night and left on Friday morning really early. We arrived at Caitlin's house at about 9:30am. The house was empty except for Pennie. She didn't even know that we came in. Her hearing is not so great anymore :(

  Caitlin went for a run and I didn't. Her mom took a half day at work and then she and Caitlin went shopping. I stayed home for that too. I kept busy though and scheduled a windshield replacement, scheduled interviews for a business school I'm applying to and some other minor to-do list type things. Jayce came home first and we were hanging out and started playing Super Smash Brothers after we had shot the bow and arrow in the backyard for a while. Eventually everyone came back home and we had delicious hamburgers then watched the movie Gravity.
  Saturday was awesome! Caitlin went for another run in the morning, and I read a book. Jayce is really into Gary Paulsen books, so he gave me a bunch to read. I read, "The River". It was pretty short, but pretty good! After we got ready for the day, we went to Costco which is always fun to do with Caitlin's mom. Then picked up birthday cake for Caitlin and also a couple small cakes just for fun, then we went to a hot dog place for lunch.

  Saturday evening we went to Jayce's baseball game.  It was pretty fun watching the game and goofing around with Caitlin and Cody.  Jayce pitched at the end of the game and did great!  Then we brought some Rubio's back to the house and had dinner.
  Easter Sunday was great!  The music at church and the talks were great.  After church we had Easter dinner with Grandma and Grandpa Sutherland, Colin Mackie, and the Hansen's who live a couple houses away from Caitlin's house.  The dinner was super good and I stuffed myself with tons of ham and potatoes. Cody had a pretty good sized ham pile on his plate too.  Colin works at Home Depot and was naming all the appliances in the house and how much they cost at Home Depot. It was pretty fun.  There was an Easter egg hunt with probably over 150 eggs.  The Hansen kids and Jayce scored with Easter candy.  It was really fun to see Grandma and Grandpa too and we had some good laughs.  Here's a quick photo session we had after the hunt.  Caitlin just laughs and laughs when she looks at these -

Caitlin thought that it looked like Cody was wearing a skirt when he sat cross-legged.

  After the Hansens left, we had a little family birthday celebration for Caitlin.  We sang Happy Birthday, ate a delicious cake from Nothing Bunt Cakes, and Caitlin opened some presents.

Pennie was excited about the presents and wanted to help unwrap.

I got Caitlin M&M Minis because every time we see them at Costco, she mentions that they are her favorite candy.

Caitlin got a nice Fossil necklace from her mom.

Pennie was all over the place during the excitement.

I captured a moment on this one! Caitlin was happy to get the swimsuit she wanted from Anthropologie.

Our bags for our weekend trip. My bag is the black one closest to the door...

  Monday was pretty fun too, well, in the morning we had fun.  We woke up and said goodbye to everyone when they were leaving for school and work, and we worked in a run.  While Caitlin was getting ready for the day, I picked up some donuts from PQ Donuts where I was endorsing the Nokia Lumia to the interested donut shop worker (you're welcome Mark).  The donuts were delicious.  We had chocolate bars and some donut wholes. Yep, I call them donut wholes because they are a whole donut, without a hole.  That's what I thought they were really called and Caitlin explained to me how they are called donut holes because that part is the hole of the donut.  She laughed really hard, for like 5 days straight after that all went down.  Anyway, back to the trip - once we got all packed up and ready to go, we went to the Irvine Mission to look at a car they were selling, then we drove to the Redlands Mission to look at two cars they were selling. We didn't end up buying any of them and it added too many hours to our trip back to Arizona.  I thought it was a fun road trip though, but kind of long.

I'll end with one last picture of Cody being funny.

This is what he was doing when he was trying to decide which shirt to wear to the church dance.

Thanks for an awesome Easter Sutherlands!

Spring Break!

  So our Spring Break started with our trip to Sedona. We came back from Sedona on Monday because I had to be back at work on Tuesday.  So on Tuesday Caitlin went out to lunch and went shopping with her good friend Caitlin. Yep, they have the same name and spell it the same way. They even look exactly the same! Just kidding, they look very different from each other. They met at Scottsdale Fashion Square and this is what I was imagining my Caitlin to look like -

 I don't think she bought anything though, or maybe she just bought a couple things... I don't remember. But I remember her talking about some clothes she wanted to get, like maybe a pair of jeans or a dress or something. I don't remember exactly, but I do remember the clothes she wanted were from Anthropologie so I know that they are $$$$$$. Caitlin had a lot of fun though.
  Maybe the next day we went to see the movie, Non-Stop, featuring the talents of Liam Neeson. It was better than I expected and Caitlin really liked it. She loves terrorists :) Just kidding, she likes to see Liam Neeson take down bad guys. He did look really creepy though at the end when he was smiling and flirting with Julianne Moore.
  Other activities we did were looking at model homes, visiting the Phoenix Aquarium, grading lots of papers, and Caitlin organized a ton of school stuff.  The homes we liked were really close to my parent's house called Blandford Homes. We aren't going to move there, but we really liked the house! Here are a couple pictures.

We really liked the layout and Caitlin loved they way they had decorated the house. The aquarium was pretty cool too, but we learned it is designed more for little kids. It was still fun to see the ocean animals. My favorite were the seahorses. *Side note by Caitlin--Sorry for my hair in these pictures.  I was trying a new product.  It did not work as well as I'd hoped.*

Caitlin touched a star fish.

Jaws!

Turtle!

That's me popping up in the aquarium!

It was a good spring break!

Sedona!

  Caitlin had a break from school so we did a quick trip up to Sedona.  It was so much fun! We headed up on Sunday, March 9th and left the next day, so it really was a quick trip, but we packed a lot into it.  When we got there on Sunday, we drove to our bed and breakfast/hotel called El Portal Hotel. I'm not sure if it is a hotel or a bed and breakfast... They accepted our bed and breakfast gift card. Anyway, we arrived there, unpacked our stuff, grabbed a quick bite to eat for lunch at Senor Bob's Hot Dogs and did the Devil's Bridge hike.  Here are some pictures.

Driving in to Sedona

 Here are some pictures of the room we stayed in.

Caitlin in the courtyard

At Senor Bob's Hot Dogs the person who dished up our food looked like he was about 20. He told us it was his store then Caitlin said, "Oh my gosh! You're Senor Bob?!" He kind of laughed and said that wasn't his name. He was pretty helpful though, he gave us a trail map of all the hikes in the area and gave us some good recommendations.

The view from where we were eating our hot dogs

Caitlin with Senor Bob. Just kidding, that's a cartoon hot dog.

Devil's Bridge was pretty cool.  It's the largest natural sandstone arch in the Sedona area.  The hike was pretty easy.  It wasn't long or steep.  The arch is about 50 feet above the ground at it's base.  It was kind of trippy watching people walk out onto the arch - it seemed very narrow and dangerous.  I really wanted the picture though, so I got in line to go on the arch and Caitlin hung back because she was a bit nervous. Right before I was about to walk out there, Caitlin yelled for me to wait, asked someone to take our picture and handed them the camera, then jogged out to the arch.  It was pretty funny and I'm glad she did it!  Here are some pictures at Devil's Bridge.

First we took a trail that went below the arch, so there it is above us.

Cait striking a hottie pose on the trail.

Awesome view during the hike.

On top of Devil's Bridge!

We were a little jealous when this helicopter flew by doing a tour for people. Maybe we'll do that next time we go.

  We drove back to our room and changed and went to dinner at a little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place called Tortas de Fuego.  I kept thinking it translated to 'Fire Turtle' which I thought was awesome, then Caitlin reminded me that turtle is 'tortuga' in Spanish. Thankfully she's seen Pirates of the Caribbean a ton and learned that word so I wouldn't go the rest of my life thinking we ate at a place called Fire Turtle!  We have one picture of me eating my food there and it's awesome.

 

  After dinner, we went back to our room, exhausted from hiking, put a fire in the fire place, pigged out on candy (especially Nerds Jelly Beans - Cait's new favorite) and watched two movies!  It was super fun!

  Monday morning we went to the lobby area of our hotel/bed and breakfast and ordered breakfast.  We did have to pay for it which was disappointing, but it was pretty good.  Then we left to hike Cathedral Rock.  It was a pretty good hike.  It was more strenuous than Devil's Bridge the day before, and much steeper.  It has some awesome views on the way to the top and at the top there was a rock ledge you could venture out on.  It was pretty awesome.  I'll kick off the Cathedral Rock pictures with this awesome panorama -

On the trail to the top

  Here are the pictures from the top.

That rock ledge on the right side of the photo is where we are in the next series of pictures.

We had to get some jumping pictures on the way down.

The girl that took this picture for us had us take pictures of her with her phone doing an awesome hand stand that she held for like 30 seconds while doing the splits and straightening her legs and stuff. It was pretty impressive.  Cait gave it a try and totally succeeded after we got far enough away from that girl.

  After the hike, we drove up to the main street and walked around and looked at the shops.  We didn't buy anything besides some fudge because everything was pretty expensive, especially the stuff Caitlin really liked - like a really cool horse made form wire.  It was like $800,000,000.  After we finished on the main street, we drove back home.  It was a really fun trip!

Here are some jumping outtakes -

And I'll wrap up this post with a nice Sedona selfie.