Happy are we, happy are we.

I can never fully explain to anyone how happy Rick and I are. We love each other, we love Levi, we work hard, we keep the commandments, we honor our promises to our Father in Heaven, and we try to serve as much as we can. I often tell people how happy and wonderful our life is and the same reply comes, "Better be careful, you might jinx yourself. Now something terrible is going to happen." Why??? Why do we say that or think that? I just think that is so silly. Our Father in Heaven doesn't listen to us and the second we say to someone that our life is wonderful he automatically pulls out his lightning bolt and throws it down at us. I know that God loves us. The more we try and follow what he would have us do, the more we become free.
I know it is tempting to look to self help books and programs to fix things in our lives that are broken or negative. Although these ways can help us understand what we can do to be better.... they are not our solution. Our solution is to LIVE the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In primary if you are ever called on to answer a question, even if you didn't hear the question, the right answers are almost always, "Pray. Read your scriptures. Go to church. Serve someone." These are the most basic but profound solutions in our lives.
I know that the Book of Mormon has healing powers and is a true account of a people that existed long ago. Together with the Bible we can fully understand who our God is. He is perfect and merciful. He knows me and my strengths and weaknesses. He understands my fears and gently helps me through them. He is not a scary, fearing, angry man. He is kind, true, merciful, just, gentle, loving, and trustworthy. Those words aren't even enough to fully explain him. But don't forget we also have the Savior! He LIVES. He is the essential key in this entire plan of our earth life and the eternity. I'm so grateful for what he did for us. He died and suffered for our sins. God is merciful but he is also just. That is why all of this is so perfect. God must have laws and justice to treat everyone equal, but he gave us the Savior to show us mercy. I know all of this to be true.
It is also important to remember that there is RIGHT and WRONG. There is GOOD and BAD. There is JESUS CHRIST and SATAN. This is the perfect plan God has set out for us to learn here on earth and be happy.
Sometimes I feel like Peter that denied the Christ three times and didn't even really know he was doing it until after the third time. I sit back and don't speak up for fear that I might hurt someones feelings or get into a debate that I can't argue through. Really I am just scared to state simply what I know to be true from the mouths of the prophets and even the Savior himself. I can't be scared. I just need to state what I believe and let the Spirit touch them or not touch them. But I don't want to sit idly by. This is a small way I can speak up and let those of you that are closest to me know how I feel and what I think of life and our choices here.
I pray that if you are not in agreement with what I am saying that you respect my freedom of speech and not rebuttal me. Just take it for what it's worth to you.
I love all of you. We count ourselves lucky to have such wonderful people that love and support us. We are constantly surrounded with happy, loving, selfless people. It is so important to have people like this in our lives. You know the saying, "You are what you eat"?? Well you are who you hang out with. :)
~Alexis Brunson

Levi's First Babysitters

Rick and I had a date night and a work party over the weekend so we had our official first babysitters. Quinn is a sweet girl in our ward that comes from a wonderful family and has a good head on her shoulders. I knew I could trust her so I called her up and asked her to come watch Levi. She was excited because Levi is sooo stinkin' cute! I told her she could bring a friend so another YW in our ward came, Nicole. They were very responsible and great with Levi. I was so glad to have them in our home taking care of our most precious possession! Thanks girls for being so wonderful! (Nicole on the left, Quinn on the right) This is what we found when we came home. He loved playing with them. He couldn't have been happier. He didn't even want to go to sleep, he just wanted to be where they were!
On another note. Rick was playing with Levi the other day. It was all fun and games until Levi go a hold of the remote and began banging in on Rick's face. Rick was laughing AND hurting and that made Levi giggle even more! It sure was funny to watch.

They are so cute together!

Our little stud!

Okay, prepare to die from the "Awwww" factor!! Rick and I love dressing Levi up in his white shirts and ties! We call him our little missionary! So adorable. I couldn't pick my favorite so here are a few for your feasting pleasure! SO CUTE!! We love you our sweet future Elder Brunson.

Date Night

We went on a double date with some friends of ours. Zac and Carla Whitworth. Rick served with them in his mission. We are so glad they came from Orem to hang out with us. We went to dinner at Z'tejas at the Gateway. SUPER YUMMY! We had fun talking and catching up and then we headed out to temple square for some lights and some fun! Look how gorgeous
Rick and I love getting a picture in this same spot every year.

Aren't they cute!?

We decided we wanted to have some fun tonight so we put together a scavenger hunt around temple square. It was girls against guys. We had 15 minutes to get pictures with as many things as we could on this list I made up. Some of the things were: A carriage (being the in carriage in the picture was double points), a square within a square, animal, fire hydrant, someone with food, an old woman blowing a kiss, an untied shoe, UofU and BYU clothing, and coming up with your most creative picture. Here are just a few of the pictures. (I don't have any of the boys pictures)

We may have asked this girl to untie her shoe. ;) This was our most creative picture. We asked a bunch of strangers to do the stacking heads around a corner thing. I thought it turned out pretty good. The bottom guy was practically laying on the ground. ha ha. And um... check out that guy in the background. We raced back to the gathering place and counted up all our scores. We had a random stranger choose our most creative picture. The guys took a picture of a construction worker skateboarding on Temple Square. After much deliberation.... the GIRLS WON! By one point. Thanks guys! We had a blast.

Cold bum bum...

First off! Look how adorable Levi is when he falls asleep in his car seat. Awww!!
We got Levi a new food accessory! He loved it. It is a mesh bag on a handle. You put food inside that babies can't normally chew well such as oranges. He just bites into it and sucks all the juice out! Yummy! Nasty to clean up, but he loves it.
I've been working on "letting go" a little more. People have complimented me and also told me how annoying it is that I am such a clean freak! Well to prove that I can let go and relax I let my kitchen get messy! Look!! I'm so proud. I left bread sticks on the pans for at least an hour! There are dishes on my counter and I even left a drawer open. You can't see it but there are crumbs all over the floor too. It was monumental. I left it that way for a while until Rick came home. I wanted him to see how good I was at "letting go." ha ha. Well once he walked in and gave us both kisses and hugs he looked around. With a quizzical look on his face he said, "Um... did you know there are crumbs on the floor?" To which I replied with my explanation on my desire to be more laid back. He just smiled and said okay. Then I cleaned up and laughed when it was all clean again!

A small adventure we had this last weekend was exploring a new hot chocolate. Rick loves Stephens and I love Swiss Miss. We don't usually drink anything else. Well Rick got this free from work so we decided to try it. It has all these little milk chocolate shavings. Sounds delicious right? You are supposed to heat up milk and melt the chocolate shavings in it. Yum!???.... No!

It was terrible! As you can see by Rick's face. So we went back to our standard!

Can't beat Swiss Miss!

YUM!!

Levi can now pull himself up and often goes into the bathroom to "play." Well the other morning he found daddy when trying to get into the tub!! ha ha. I quickly undressed him and Rick pulled him into the shower to play for a few minutes! He is so much fun! He even plays peekaboo with me. He will hide behind something then poke his head out and laugh until I look! So adorable!

So after all that if you are still wondering why I titled this post as I did... well... I love winter, but no matter how high I turn up our heat or how much I move around and get my blood pumping... my bum always seems to be a bit chill! ha ha. I hate cold bum, its almost as bad as cold hands and feet!