More Birthdays!

This month we also celebrated my adorable nephew Brycen's birthday!

And who wouldn't want a pinata at their party?

Especially when its filled with tons of candy...

And especially when no ones stops you from eating all you want!

I don't think he moved from this spot nor made a sound for minutes! He only looked up long enough to hand someone a piece of candy to take the wrapper off for him.

Love you Brycen!

Well we tried....

In honor of the Suns, I made these fun little "cakelets". I promise, they were actually purple and orange though they are bordering on BSU colors!

Adam got me this fun cake pan for my bday, and I just had to try it out!

I guess it didn't really help the Suns win, but they were sure fun to eat!

More Surprises...

A few days after I got my dad's surprise b-day package in the mail, I got another package in the mail! So fun!

I got even more excited when I saw the return label
Oh what could it be!
Ha! Giant cupcake pan from Williams Sonoma! YEAH! I am so excited for this baby!

Mom also got me a dough scraper after watching me try to pick up donuts off the counter. Good one!
Thanks mom for some super presents!

Africa, Lion King, Oliver, Wicked, Wizard and Les Mis!

You may have noticed a serious lack of posts earlier this year, well it was because I had a third job... Ok, not really but it felt like it! Between my 2nd job teaching for Scottsdale Community College and my real job, don't ask me how I ever thought I had time to be in a musical! But since its something I love I just had to do it! Our stake has wonderful cultural arts programs and the musical was no exception! Imagine my excitement when I found out I could not only be part of 1 musical but of 4! And not only that, I would be able to sing, dance, act and even play my saxophone! Here are a bunch of pictures of our production; some are taken from dress rehearsals so the lighting isn't the best, but you will get the idea!

We had a pit orchestra/band for the performances that includes 3 keyboards, a clarinet, trumpet, guitar, bass guitar, drums and yours truly on Sax! It was sooo fun! It definitely took a lot of work though as I had to transpose all my music from the original scores as we didn't have full band parts. I spend MANY hours pulling out the parts I should play and the transposing them into the right key.

For a church production, this thing was intense! We had a full sound board, overhead microphones and 12 wireless microphones!

We had all the special lights on stage and a couple spotlights. Our director even got permission from Salt Lake to paint the walls on the stage black. They looked so good but she had to promise to paint them back white.

Serious sound equipment!

Our opening number was an acapello version of Africa (originally performed by the group Toto). It was sooo cool! We started out by making a thunderstorm that actually sounded like rain!

There you can see my up close in our sweet Calftans!

Don't we look good!

From Africa we went into Lion King. The basic idea of our production was to do a musical review of several musicals. We performed the songs from the songs with very little to no speaking parts. Lion King, Oliver and Wizard of Oz were each about 15 mintues long.

This is where I was, in the pit, during Lion King, as well as most of Oliver.

We had costume changes for every musical and they looked so good! I don't know how the seamstresses were able to come up with all the costumes we had. Our cast was around 80 people and almost all the adults where in every musical with lots of the kids in 2 or 3 of them. Thats a lot of costumes!

I did come up on stage for about 15 seconds of Oliver to do a little tap number. So fun!

For Wicked, we had 3 people perform a highlight of songs from the Musical while the rest of the cast changed clothes. Notice anything familiar from this picture? Yep, thats my wedding dress that Glinda is wearing! I was glad I was able to find at least one more use for it!

The main characters of Wizard of Oz, sweet costumes!

Wizard of Oz had lots of glittery green!

Our Final number was Les Mis. This one was amazing. We stretched Les Mis out to about 35 minutes worth of music with lots of movement between the soloist and cast.

Thats me on the end again!

Here I am a "serving wench". I think I am telling someone sorry I am out of drinks!

The picture below is of the full cast of all the musicals. It was so amazing the talent that was in our stake. As we got closer and closer to performances I was just amazed by the quality of the sound from the Soloist and the Choir.

The musical was tons of fun, but I was definitely ready for a break when it was over! Luckily, I think they only do them every 2 years....and I'll probably be crazy enough to participate again!

Cast Party cake

For our Cast Party, we made a huge, crazy cake! There were at least three of us working on this bad boy and it turned out pretty fun! This was the top.. The only credit I can take for this one is I baked the cupcakes!

Obviously the top layer represented Lion King. On the next layer, you can see the red and blue striped. The opposite side of the cake had white, grey, black stripes and this was the Les Mis layer.

This was my favorite part! The bottom layer was Oliver and, well we didn't know what to do so we represented the sellers on the corner with the Knife Grinder, Rose Seller, Milk Maid and Strawberry seller. Aren't those strawberry's so Cute! Yeah I made those!.... But my absolute favorite was Wizard of OZ! Aren't those cupcakes sooo cute! And did you notice the Wicked Witch of the East legs popping out of the cake with Ruby Slipper?! HEHE!