Ashtons of Colorado: February 2013

February! February! The shortest month that has so much crammed into it you want to just crawl into a nice warm bed and hide!

First of all, unbelievably-somehow my baby daughter has grown from a darling little baby to an 18 year old young lady! I can't seem to figure out where the time went but it's been a wonderful 18 years. Many people will tell young mommies to "just enjoy it" and not to worry about cleaning up and all the little stuff. I can say I took this to heart and just really enjoyed it but it didn't make it go any slower! (except those nights when everyone had the flu- those were really slow!)

Brynna and me on her 18th birthday!

And a week later Josh celebrated his 13th! So...this means I officially have three teenagers, two are hungry boys, so it's kind of wild and I wish the price of cereal and milk were not as high!

Josh turning 13! Teenager alert!!

Every winter we have to run up to the cabin for winter maintenance. Because we're 'off grid', we have to run engines and we usually do some snow plowing to clear things out. This winter was not really bad up to February, but we still had a decent amount of snow up there.

Curtis snow blowing. I think we ended up taking the snowplow back to Denver for repairs. Which was a good thing because we did get a bit more snow in the late Spring!

And we're back to auditions!

Brynna had her first audition in February on the first weekend in February at Colorado State University. If BYU was a cold, damp and awful affair, CSU could not have shown off any better. I'm not kidding when I say it was absolutely a stunningly beautiful Colorado winter day. Bright blue skies, snow on the peaks, and the audition experience was night and day different. The staff was organized, the professors warm and welcoming, happy to see her and her audition went well. It was a huge relief after the previous one. We even sat next to a guy who was auditioning that had also auditioned at BYU and he agreed...this one was a lot calmer experience!

Warming up at CSU, very nice practice facilities.

The very next weekend we had to go up to University of Denver, where she currently is taking lessons from a Master's student there. As expected, we were quite comfortable in the environment because she's been there so often but DU is an incredibly beautiful campus (also incredibly expensive and exclusive) and again, Colorado was showing off a beautiful day in mid February. We knew this one was a long shot because they let 3 or 4 people in and she seriously would need a scholarship to handle the tuition there, but it was a fun audition and she did well.

Warming up at DU. The staff handled auditions there very well, super organized!

And then a couple weeks later we had to fly back to Salt Lake to have her audition at Utah State in Logan, Utah. The nice thing about Logan is that it is a beautiful area, smallish town with very pretty mountains surrounding it. The bad thing is that it is in Northern Utah-where it snows and is cold.

But another really huge perk was that one of my best friends, Teena Palfryman, and her family live there. They were absolutely so gracious to host us twice as we checked out Logan and Utah State. We loved the campus, loved visiting with some of our friends there that are attending and had a great time staying at the Palfryman's home. The Palfryman's lived down the street when we first moved to Denver and Teena and I did a lot together. Her cute kiddos were 5, 4 and 3 when Brynna was born and it was super fun to visit with Emilie when we were there. What a great family! We miss them in Denver but it was so nice to see them in Logan! They also have a very nice piano, which was really great for Brynna to practice on.

Beautiful girl, beautiful piano, beautiful home! Thanks Palfryman family! We love you guys!

Only problem was that we woke up to snow. And I mean serious snowstorm snow! I had this little teeny rental and by the time we got to the campus from North Logan where we were staying...I was not sure we'd be able to get there! We had to tromp through a foot of snow to get to the music building, and once there a confused staff member didn't even know where piano students were auditioning. Thankfully we figured it out in time and she was able to make it on time for the audition. It was more casual, but still kind of unorganized but she thought she did all right there.

The rental car outside Teena's house! And this was earlier in the morning. By the time we left it had about 8 inches on it-and by the time we got to the campus, we were in 12 inches. It was crazy. Kind of a miracle we made it at all!

So...with the audition over, we had to drive back to Salt Lake in this storm to get to our flight. Talk about an adventure! Teena called and texted us with updates from the airline-which went from delayed 1 hour to 2 hours...to not sure, to 3 hours. So we drove slow, knowing that not only did we leave with plenty of time now we had MORE time!

Driving to Salt Lake in a snowstorm and praying we would make it alive!

Once we got to check in, the flight had been delayed about 5 hours. And I have to give credit where it's due. Frontier Airlines gave us vouchers for $100 to use on a future flight because ours was so delayed (like it was their fault or something!?) and they gave us $30 in food vouchers and $20 in snack vouchers for the airport. So we had dinner (at ridiculous Cafe Rio of course), bought chocolate at Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory-YUM, and sat around and relaxed at the airport using their free wi-fi and generally sighing a HUGE sigh of relief that the auditions were OVER!!!!!!!