The Travelers Have Returned

Well, Brian and I are finally home from our adventures. After spending a week in Las Vegas helping my sister out with her new twins, I flew home. Then the very next day Brian and I took off for a Wilde family vacation to Grand Tetons National Park. We spent five days there, camping, hiking, cooking, and making s'mores. It was a blast. We saw some amazing waterfalls, several lakes and rivers, geysers, hot springs, and a bear! I got bit by a spider and half of my arm swelled up, making it very difficult to move my wrist or fingers for a few days. And Brian and I came home with over 30 mosquito bites between the two of us! But other than that, it was a great trip. I think my favorite site was the Yellowstone Waterfall. It was huge and amazing, and the trail to get there was pretty trippy- straight down on metal stairs that you could see through, so it gave you the illusion that you were falling down the mountain! Grand Teton and Yellowstone sure are beautiful places.

New Nephews!

I went down to Las Vegas this week to be with my sister Andrea because she had twins! They arrived last night at 10:34 and 10:37 pm. The first one to come was Michael Frank Dawson. He is very healthy and weighs 7 lbs. 5 oz. The second one to come was Jared Frank Dawson. He is also very healthy and weighs 7 lbs. 14 oz. That means Andrea was carrying over 15 lbs. of baby around with her! The doctor said it was a new record for him, and he's been doing this for 14 years. The twins came at 36 weeks and they were still both bigger than Andrea's daughter Brooke was when she was born! The delivery went very well and Andrea didn't have to have a C-section, which we were all very glad about. It was really fun to be in the waiting room at the hospital with my parents and my sister Karli, speculating about names and hair colors. This is a long video (more than 8 minutes), but it's fun to see the boys and get a feel for how it was last night in the hospital. Congratulations Andrea and Adam!

Cupcake lollipops

On the Bakerella blog there is an amazing looking recipe for some really cute cupcake lollipops, and I've been dying to make them, so I got brave and tried it out! My friend Maria was visiting from St. Louis, so she helped me start the project.


It was so much fun to have her here! We don't see each other very often since she lives about 20 hours away, so our short week together was wonderful. She left on Friday, and the cupcakes were only about halfway done, so I recruited my other wonderful friend Nancy to help me finish them. We had a blast dipping the little cupcakes in chocolate and decorating them with sprinkles. Here's the finished product.


If you want to see what the real professional cupcakes look like, check out the Bakerella page, but I think ours turned out pretty well. There are a lot of steps involved, but they actually aren't that hard to make. We added sticks to some of them and left some without sticks, just as little bite-sized cupcakes. It's fun to be out of school and to actually have time for things like baking again!

The DAT is Destroyed!

Brian took the DAT on Saturday and rocked it! He got the score he was hoping for, which means that he has a pretty good chance of getting into dental school somewhere. We're hoping to stay in the west (California, Nevada, or Arizona), but we'll have to see where he gets accepted. The good news for now is that Brian doesn't have to re-take the test in September, so he can quit studying and we can have a life again! We're very excited to start hiking and camping and doing all those fun summer things that we couldn't do while Brian was studying. Hurray and congratulations to Brian!