Free Range Family

BIG things going on for me in 2015, big and exciting things! :D I had a wonderful weekend with some friends who were town, who are very well known choreographers in the dance world. And I had two super cool things happen to me at work as well. Yes! I am so happy and cannot wait for this year! After all the hard work and the rough year we had in 2013 and 2014, I know that wonderful things were bound to happen this year! I just hope that a new house for our family is ALSO in the cards this year. I will keep praying and keep spreading that good karma! So we will begin with the work news: I was offered to join the YMCA's annual campaign this year. Our annual campaign raises money to provide more memberships, scholarships and healthy lifestyle programs for our community. All of our annual campaign donations help with either our preschool or afterschool programs, our scholarships to families and senior members, our Livestrong program, our Get Started program, our aquatics...

Happy Holidays!  I am so excited that I can finally say that! I love December and the holiday season! I have been waiting for this all year! We have been applying for houses like crazy too, in hopes that we will have a place by Christmas. Wouldn't that be perfect? Its honestly all that I want for Christmas this year.   Pray for us to get lucky! :) I hope that everyone is having a great Christmas season, I know that we are! We went to the Festival of Trees last night with Grandma Melanie and Grandpa Kevin. Aunt April was performing with her dance studio. She did so awesome, as usual! They even did their new dances, like their Spice Girl song choreographed by Ade! Oh my goodness, it was all so awesome! Great job April! I could go on and on about how wonderful their performance was! Seriously! She even inspired one of my own dance students who was their with family! :D Aunt April and her crew after their performance <via>   After Diversity was done with the...

We ended up getting the car! Its perfect and I love it! It is a silver 1996 Mercedes-Benz with a sun roof. Oh I love it so much! The best part about the whole thing? I bought it 100% by myself. Yep! Paid $3000 in cash and felt like a BOSS! Whoop, whoop! It is so awesome being an adult sometimes. :D I know, its not an apartment… But we are taking baby steps to a better life for our family. First comes a new car, then more hours and more money, then a place to live. Lon and I have a plan made, it will just take some time. Which does suck on the hard days. But on days like today, days when all my hard work has finally paid off, days like today rock! I have yet to really settle into the car, I haven't even cleaned it up or taken a decent photo of it! I had Lon snap a quick one for me this morning (we have to wait until after work before we can get it registered) but I think that it doesn't even do it justice. It just looks so fancy and so nice! How did we get so lucky? Isn...

My summer classes are officially over! Yay! It was a wonderful summer, I loved all of my classes and my camps. But it is nice to have this upcoming week off of dance and gymnastics, so that I can prepare Alan for his last year of Preschool and get in some fun family time before he off and leaves us three days a week. He starts school September 3, so we have the whole week off next week to get in some summer fun! I plan on taking Alan and Anna to go swimming, to the library, to as many parks as we can fit in and somewhere else fun too, maybe the zoo or the art museum? Not sure yet! Saturday was my last showcase for the summer, it was my lovely hip hoppers performance! We performed three dances: a breakdancing dance to one of my favorite Incubus songs, a "follow the lyrics" type dance called Born to Move, and of course the YMCA for our finale dance. It was a wonderful performance, we had a decent turnout and all of my kids danced really well! Alan came along to watch his ...

Its been crazy week for us here at the Andersen clan! I have a lot going on with my hip hop and gymnastics classes this week, plus we are leaving tonight for Aunt Natalie and Uncle Jake's wedding weekend family vacation! Yay! This is the first time we will be going on a family vacation since before Anna was born. We are not going to Canyon Ferry like we traditionally do for our vacations, but we are headed up to Flathead Lake, some 10-12 hours away from here. Due to my class scheduling, we will be doing the trip in two sections: tonight we will drive from here to the Helena area, before grabbing a hotel for the night. Then tomorrow, we will drive the last few hours to Flathead Lake. The wedding is on Saturday but Friday evening will be spent decorating and setting up the reception area and with Miss Natalie's Bacherlorette party! Sunday will be a family vacation day for us. We do not have anything specific planned, just fun touristy stuff. I want to go to the lake at some poi...

I have quite a few book reviews to catch up on, this summer I have been reading about two books a week. Its been crazy, but I love that I can get back into the old things I used to love doing. I have always enjoyed getting lost in a book, so happy I can do that again now! Truth be told, it has been driving my hubby and family crazy though. Every chance I get, my nose is in a book lol! It has been a great source of stress relief for me, which is good. But here is my first of many  book reviews for this month lol. Enjoy! Life in Motion by Misty Copeland Life in Motion is a non-fictional autobiography by Misty Copeland, the first African-American female to perform as a American Ballet Company soloist in twenty years. She didn't come from a typical upbringing that a ballet dancer would have either, she and her siblings lived in a poverty stricken area with their mother. They experienced hunger, gang violence, domestic abuse, and homelessness as children. Misty also has anxie...

This weekend was also full of dance recitals and birthday parties lol. Its funny how the month of May is usually always like that. :P But this time around it was Aunt April's Diversity Dance Studio recital and Alan's school friend Dominic's third birthday party. It was a lot of work for this mama lol, but a good Saturday for us overall! Dominic's party was actually at the YMCA. Dom's mom works with me there as well. I think I may be having Alan's party this year at the Y as well, but I haven't fully made up my mind yet. The party was a blast though! It was one of my tumble parties, the kids had a great time! Alan loved running all over with Dominic and his older brother. He always has so much energy lol. :) Anna tried to keep up with them, but after a bit she just started doing her own thing. Silly girl! Anna about to shoot a hoop Alan as the King of the World lol Alan and Anna went on the zipline maybe a billion times. Dang my monkey kids love ...

I had my spring showcase this past weekend. It was the YMCA's second annual showcase, this time the ballet classes joined up with us! We had 5 classes, 31 kids and eight dances total. It was quite the little recital! One of our dance teachers was retiring, so I had all of her students sign a card and we gave her flowers. I am very proud of all of my kids for doing their best and making this recital amazing! We had a weekend full of practice, team building and performances! We started out the weekend with four hours of dress rehearsal. I helped for the whole rehearsal, but each class only came for 45 minutes. Each class rehearsed the finale with the other class for 15 minutes then worked on their own dances for the other half hour. I loved helping at the rehearsal, I know most of the girls in the dance program, through subbing and them being in other programs with me. I love them all so much! Its great to get to work with all the students, not just my own kids. Plus they were ...

Are you having a bad day? Feeling a little glum? Well I have the thing for you! :D A bunch of GOOD NEWS to make you smile and brighten your day! Plus, some cute kiddos too. :P Okay I am just being silly now but seriously, how long has it been since I have had something GOOD to tell you about this family's home situation? Quite some time, if I do say so myself. Well, I am tired of the negative so I found a different solution to our problem! Yay! We have been waiting for the okay on this before we shared it with my blog readers, I didn't want to count our chickens before they hatch so to speak lol. But honestly because I love you guys lol, I have been so impatiently waiting to tell you! I am just so excited! We are applied for the First Time HomeBuyers Program and will hopefully be buying our OWN HOME SOON!!! This is the best news I have had for a while, I am so tired of renting and after being turned down by 7 different places recently, I am just done with landlords and ren...

My hip hop students performed Thriller last night. This was my fifth Thriller performance with the YMCA and the biggest performance thus far. We didn't end having every kid in class there, but we did have ELEVEN students that performed! They did so darn well, I am so proud of them! Only a few were nervous this time around but every single one of them did there best. They sure had one spooky show! I didn't get a video of the performance this time, the dance dad I asked to film for me somehow only filmed me talking at the beginning lol. Blahblah, you guys don't want to see THAT lol!! He did however, get a ton of really cool action shots for me! Thanks Dance Dad! You did great! :) Here are some of the photos from the performance. I did post some of my Instagram photos too (like I always do) because I really like how the filters looked with my monsters! Very cool indeed! Enjoy! The spooooooky beginning pose I did perform with them, as I usually do. I dressed in my ori...