Ashtons of Colorado: January 2013

So, yeah...January. Already 2013 has been BUSY and I guess that's good, better than bored I suppose!

Celebrating the new year with our annual sparkling apple juice, only this time in AZ.

As mentioned in the previous post, we celebrated the new year in Arizona this year. After Roxy and Paul got sealed we enjoyed a few more days before heading back to Colorado.

I got a cool new carpet cleaner for Christmas and once we got back Joel helped try it out for me, cleaning the entire downstairs floor! Yay!

Almost immediately we started in on the busy remainder of the school year. Brynna not only had her regular Senior homework and the like but was involved in Continental League-an orchestra she had to audition for that were High School kids from our area. And she had to practice like a crazy person because she had 5 auditions rapidly approaching.

The boys watching Brynna at her Continental League performance at Boettcher Concert hall.

To relieve a little stress, she and I would go walking. I love to walk, and at this point was expecting I could very well be called to go to Trek so even in January we would walk if possible.

Here we walked up to an overlook of Chatfield Reservoir on a beautiful day.

Joel and Josh were lucky enough to get invited by friends to head up to Copper Mountain to go skiing. This is Joel keeping warm.

And then it began! The auditions! WHOO! If I had known how crazy stressful this would be I'm not sure if we'd do it again but it was a good experience for Brynna and me as a mom. And we did have fun in our way!

First stop was Arizona State University in mid January. She is trying for piano performance and this is no small task. She was accepted on academics and given scholarships for 3 out of the 5 schools on academics alone, but she WANTED to be in piano performance so she decided that even though the competition is fierce she wanted to try for it. And if she could get in at a music college, that would help decide because all 5 we were auditioning were very good places to attend.

Warming up at Arizona State University.

We had a beautiful day for auditions at Arizona State, the audition went very well, especially being that it was her first one and she was pretty nervous. She also was impressed as the campus is HUGE and the program very organized, the facilities top of the line. (and it was fun for me, as I graduated from ASU and we got to wander campus a little)

Then the very next weekend we had to head to Provo, Utah for tryouts at BYU. She really had favored the campus from a previous visit and really liked the environment there but we knew going in that auditions at BYU are notoriously vicious and rough. And this proved to be true. Not only did we fly in on the day after a really crazy ice storm, we had fog the entire time, it was freezing cold and the audition day was absolutely as stressful as almost anywhere I'd ever been.

I know BYU is a good place, and I know many people who go there, and have been...but I'm telling you right now, they are messed up in the music department. The tension was so incredibly thick the moment we walked in the building I could physically feel it. There was a ton of this weird "I know the professor" and other bragging about brown nose connections in such a blatant way I was surprised. Her audition was probably the worst out of her five and she was a wreck afterwards. I know some of this may be mama bear, but I thought the whole audition was handled very badly.

BYU is a church subsidized school, they have very high standards of morality and honesty, they pride themselves on being academic, but also on emphasizing church and gospel knowledge. These are great things, but there is no denying the nastiness of competition in the music department. By the time we left she leaned over and said, "I'm not sure I WANT to go here!" Sorry BYU, you are missing out on an amazing girl. Definitely your loss.

We still had a good time- visited with one of Brynna's best friends, Kaitlyn who was her Trek sister and happened to have a birthday the day we were there. So we took her to Cafe Rio. Somewhere I'd never been before-but is apparently a Utah staple. I know we Mormons like food but um...the portion sizes are massive! Yummy, but massive!