The adventures of a BYU student...

Allie Jane (AJ) Crossley was born Sept 21, 2009. She weighed in at 10 lbs 3 oz and 23 inches long! Oh, how I love her!

So you may be wondering what I did to celebrate my 21st birthday...

Well, after I ate my teddy bear graham crackers, seriously contemplated the pros and cons of taking a nap, listened to the voicemail of my nephew singing Happy Birthday about 1 trillion times and made cupcakes, I did get plastered!.... with acrylic paint that is!

 I have been blessed with many things in my life, but one of the greatest of those blessings is my friends. They are just as weird as I am, and they even think I am funny, which makes for great times. Last year, my friends decided to have a paint war to celebrate my 2oth birthday, and proclaimed that such an event had to happen annually since we had a blast. (Now you may be wondering what is a paint war? Well, you take watered down paint and spray others with it. Weird, I know. But totally awesome.) We have actually been talking about the paint war for months now, so the excitement was built and it definitely wasn't a let down. So when Sept 11 rolled around, we were ready for the 2nd Annual Paint War Extravaganza! We didn't get much actions shots during the actual paint war since someone was an Eager Beaver and started the war early, but here are some of the after shots: 

It was a great day! I am so grateful for my amazing friends that truely made my Birthday Happy.  I don't know what I would do without you guys.  

....................Weird.

On Saturday, I went here:

For these super cool people: Brandon and Chantel were both able to go through the Draper temple on the same day to receive their endowments. It was amazing! It was great to be in the Celestial room with so many friends that I consider to be my second family. Brandon leaves on Sept 30 to the Ventura California (woot-woot!) Spanish speaking mission, and Chantel leaves on Nov 4 to the Domincan Republic Santo Domingo West Mission Spanish speaking, which means for a brief moment in the MTC, all three of us will be there together.

We are going to rock the world with the gospel! 

Me on the Pacific coast, and Chan in the Caribbean!

While Chan, Erin and I were pondering (more like trying to hide our laughter) in the Celestial room, Chan leaned over to me and happened to mention that the temple matron and her husband served as the mission president in San Jose. I thought that was pretty cool, but as we started to leave, I realized that I couldn't walk out the temple doors without talking to them. So I tracked down the temple matron, Sis. Fitzgerald. Her and her husband, Pres. Fitzgerald (the second counselor in the temple presidency), served in San Jose from 1999-2002. She then went on to tell me about how wonderful the mission is. She said that I will be fluent in the language because in the southern part of the mission, the majority of the people only speak Spanish and alot of them work in the strawberry fields. Sis. Fitzgerald also said that the weather is almost perfect all year round, the area is gorgeous and diverse, the people are fantastic, and how there is a little garden in the backyard of the misison home that they call "The Garden of Eden".  Needless to say, I am really excited to serve! 

10 reasons why I am the worlds Greatest Aunt:

1. I love chasing Jacks around the kitchen island for hours upon hours.

2. I search high and low for that incredibly small stupid toy just so I could hear Jack's squeal of excitement when I find it.

3. I love digging for worms with Jacks just to hear him say "Where are you, Mr. Wormie?" and "Oh, look at the cute little one!" Even if it means digging up Grandma's beets in the vegetable garden.

4. I am more than willing to help Jacks take a bath, brush his teeth, take care of the nasty diapers or now, when he has an "accident" in his underwear, and clean up after his up-chuck.

 All of which I have done.

5. I have driven the one way hour drive just to babysit him, on a Friday night, for a few hours so his parents can get out for a while. 

6.  I can play a mean game of tackle football, soccer and "The Green Latern vs. Spiderman". 

7.  I am not a typical girl. I don't mind getting dirty or sweaty. So when Jacks needs to be entertained for a good chunk of time,  I came to the rescue with this:

8. If he asks, "Where is my house?", "Where are my tools?" or "Where is my red train?", I know exactly what he is talking about, where it is at, and take Jacks to go find it.

9. I have no shame. So when Jacks wanted to play with my computer, we did this:

And I then told all of my friends how awesome my nephew is when I showed them this picture. 

10. Who else is willing to miss their classes right before finals, work (which they only get paid hourly), and hanging out with friends just to be with this kid:

As you can see, I am the worlds Greatest Aunt!

*Bonus Reason*: I have given the newest Crossley the nickname of Ladybug. She should be making her grand entrance into the world next week, and I couldn't be more excited! 

P.S. 32 more days until San Jose!

It all began last Friday at work when I got a call from Steve asking me if I wanted to go camping with a bunch of other people from the ward that night at Capitol Reef. Of course I said yes! How could I refuse? That night we headed down to the camp site, which was about a 4 hour drive total, but it was worth it. We had a great night looking up at the stars and throwing anything we could in the fire to make it bigger. The next morning we woke up, and headed straight to Burrow Wash Trail to do this:

We spent about 3 hours hiking into Slot Canyon. We came across so many obstacles that required climbing rocks to get around. One part in particular, you literally had to wedge yourself between the two walls of the canyon and shimmy your way across a large puddle of putrid water. However, I wore shoes that are literally older than my nephew and had no traction on the bottom, and it was impossible for me wedge myself. Steve, still wanting me to continue in our hiking journey, gave me directions to climb up and over the canyon to meet the group on the other side. He told me to back track a little bit and told me to take a right to climb some more rocks to meet him on the other side. I returned to the area he was talking about, but I took the wrong right. When I got about half way up, Steve caught up with me, and I had realized my mistake. As I was climbing back down, I started to slip (due to my shoes lack of traction) and as I leaned back to catch myself, my hand happened to make friends with this plant: 

Yep, you are right. That is a cactus (not the cactus, but the best image I could find using Google, because I forgot my camera). As I started to slip, I leaned backwards, hoping to find a rock to hold on to, but I found a a cactus with my hand instead. I had so many cactus spines in my hand that I spent about 5 minutes trying to pull them all out sitting on the rocks, but I wasn't able to get them all out. I still have some of them in my hand now, because they are so hard to get out. All in all, I had a great time and I really enjoyed getting to know more of the people in the ward.  

The next day, after church, I headed down with the Ficklin family to Lake Powell for the week. The week was full of: swimming, laying out in the sun, reading, eating, wake boarding, tubing, cliff diving, jet skiing, slip-n-sliding, boat riding, playing games, hiking, and sleeping. But at the same time, I didn't do anything, because nothing was required of me, and it was FANTASTIC! I did work on getting an awesome tan that I am proud of! Here are some of the memorable pictures from Lake Powell:

This is known as "Big Sand Hill". Yep, it is a giant hill of sand, and we hiked it to the very top.