Aubrey and Britton Howell!

Aubrey got married to Britton Howell her highschool (sort of) sweetheart on April 27. Here are a few pictures that I have for anyone who wanted to see how beautiful she was on her wedding day.

Braedon's Birthday Safari!

Okay, I have so many pictures to post! So I will just start by saying for Braedon's birthday we had a safari and Derek and I went to the extreme to make this the best party ever! So...I will post the pictures that show what we did and hopefully most of them will explain themselves...if not I will try to stick an explanation with the picture. Just know that we (meaning Derek and I) had soooo much fun!!!


We had a safari swimming pool set up in our backyard for the kids to play with. Braedon is being a good boy and playing next to it.

This picture is the gator hole we had in our backyard! Derek went on his mission to Florida and brought back a gator head so he made this as part of our safari decor!

This is a picture of Drew and Brynlee standing by the hut that Derek made.


This is the last picture I will post. This is Braedon when he was all done with his cake...and no, we did not have chocolate, we had party chip!

Braedon's first birthday!

For Braedon's first birthday Derek had spring break so we decided that we would take him to the Hogle Zoo! He loved it! It was a lot of fun. We were able to go with Grandma and Grandpa Reynolds and 3 out of 6 aunts and 6 out of 10 cousins! Here is a picture of Braedon, Mom (me), and Brynlee standing in front of the zoo's sign.

Here is a picture of Braedon, me, and Derek sitting on a butterfly(?) maybe. I'm not really sure exactly what it is we are sitting on but it sure is a cute picture!

Braedon's Birthday Invitation!!!

This is the invitation that I made for Braedon's 1st Birthday party! I am very proud of myself so I thought I would show it off!!!

Braedon's Cupboard!

Here are some pictures of Braedon playing in his cupboard. He loves to play with everything while I am cooking dinner!

Broken for 9 months!!!

Okay, so here is how the story goes. Last May, I think around my birthday, I went in for my after baby six week check up. As I was walking in I slipped on the wet floor. I landed on my wrist but I just blew it off as nothing. Well, two weeks later my wrist was hurting me pretty badly but I decided that I had a weak wrist and carrying around a baby all the time was just making my tendons sore. Well, it hurt for a really long time...until about December...and then I decided that my wrist must be getting stronger because it wasn't hurting as bad. Well, a couple of weeks ago in nursery I was helping a 35-40 lb autistic boy get out of the toy bin and I hurt my wrist again. So, Derek finally told me that I was being very stubborn and that I needed to go into the doc's. So, I went yesterday. It so happens that I broke the top of my radius and my scaphoid bone (my arm and my wrist). Although they have been in the process of healing there is so much inflamtion going on the they are healing wrong. So, I am currently in this dumb cast/splint thing that makes it so I can't move my wrist or my thumb and I should be finding out soon if I need surgery or not.

Mission Call!

For all of you who know my younger brother Blake you will be excited to know that he got his mission call yesterday! He is going to the Brussels Belgium/Netherlands mission. He leaves on May 9 to go to the Provo MTC. This is an exciting call for our family since my Grandma Bowles come to America from the Netherlands when she was sixteen. She started breaking out her Dutch last night when she found out that he would be speaking her language! We all decided that for our monthly VanderStek family night we are going to learn Dutch so we can all go and pick him up from his mission!!! (wishful thinking!) It is also cool because people are going to think that Blake is a native with his last name! They will soon learn differently when they hear him speak!