Revisit Vegas.

Revisit Vegas (with college roomies)

Just over ten years ago, my roommates and I made an escape from the watch-eye of BYU and on a whim after dinner at the Cannon Center one Friday, decided to high-tail it to Vegas (and then LA) for the weekend. We had a reunion in LA last year and this year it was Vegas, Baby!

The baby part being quite literal. Brooke and Liz just had babies and this was their first trip away from them. Being as they are nursing, they had to pump every three hours of the trip. It certainly put a different feel to this Vegas trip than our last one. At a gas station in St George? Pumping. In the hotel room? Pumping. In the Mandalay Bay parking lot? The Ceasar's Palace parking garage? Oh yeah, pumping baby. Who knew electric pumps had car adapters? I kinda wish I didn't.

Somehow between all the pumping, we managed to lay out at the pool, go to the movies and see Baby Mama (I told you it was the theme to the weekend), see Mamma Mia! (more motherly themes), and shop H&M. And H&M Baby. My old women friends were not up the roller coasters I wanted to ride. boo! I did, however, take a belly dancing class while the old ladies had massages. (Nikki, you'd be proud). OH and we went and ate at Toby Keith's "I Love this Bar and Grill" at Harrah's and watched the Jazz whip on the Lakers.

The next night, while we were wildly cruising the strip (ok, driving to The Cheesecake Factory), Deana Carter's "Strawberry Wine" came on the radio straight from 1997 and we sang along at full-volume. We were feeling pretty nostalgic until when the song was over, the DJ came on and said, "Wow, it BLOWS MY MIND how OLD that song is!". Haaa. Perfect.

Oh yeah and Brooke put $5 in a slot machine and accidentally bet it all on like one pull. It was pretty funny.

Since I'm feeling nostalgic, here are some photos from both Vegas trips.

2008- I drank two full Mason Jars of Diet Pepsi at Toby Keith's restaurant. NO ONE in Vegas had coke products. A major, major flaw of that city. Oh and I loved Toby's awesome top model face in the poster behind us.

I loved it so much I copied it the next night in our photo shoot at Mamma Mia!

Liz wasn't quite tall enough to reach the cut-out. Haaaa.

The three of us posing with a poster? Not sure what we were thinking here. We stood there awkwardly for like ten minutes until we mustered the courage to ask someone to take this perfect photo-op for us. What a bunch of weidos.

OK, now for some throw-back pics.

1998-Luckily, Liz could comfortably reach this cut-out. (And the neon-colored background is from my awesomely-designed Freshman year scrapbook.)

Brooke and I with our collection of casino cups, which for some reason we thought was cool. (This was back when they had casino cups and not all these new-fangled electronic machines). And apparentally we thought wearing overalls and wrapping sweaters around our waist was cool too. Ah, the 90's.

I was one of the few BYU students NOT looking to get married off during my college years. Ironincally, I was the one married just over a year later.

So there you have it. Let's do it all again in ten years, girls.

Make more earth-friendly decisions.

Make more earth-friendly decisions.

The whole "save the earth" campaign has always kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

Well, I guess technically not always. In middle school I thought it was really cool to use recycled paper.

But, since then, I have proudly piled my cases of bottled water in my cart at the grocery store, carried everything else home in plastic bags, unabashadly used styrofoam at parties and cared only about the cost of the massive abouts of gas consumed by my massive SUV.

I have to admit that is changing. A bit. The whole earth week guilt-trip still got on my nerves, as does the fact it's now the "trendy" cause, but over the last couple of months I have nonetheless been making some small changes:

Since Chase decided he didn't need diapers (yay!), I haven't needed the plastic grocery bags to seal them in before taking them out to the trash. So, I bought some reusable grocery bags and use them instead at the grocery store. Unless I forget to bring them, which honestly, happens a lot. Then I use paper. Unless I forget to tell the bagger. And unless I'm buying lots of bottled water. Because I guess I would rather look like I don't care about the earth than like a hypocrite.

Which brings us to the issue of bottled water. Love it. A lot. I am a total water snob. And as a result, my kids have become such as well. But, I did make an effort here. I bought a water filter yesterday and I tried really hard to use it. But, after one day, I found I had drank cans of Diet Coke all day instead of metallic-tasting water and woke up this morning dehydrated. I did, however, convince my kids it tastes great and they are no longer drinking bottled water all day. That's something, right? p.s. Dasani, the best tasting water out there, is on sale at Smiths this week for $2.99 for 24. I bought six. And then didn't use my reusable bags.

Sorry, earth. I'm trying.