Hi Guys

Hi... well Abby lost the cord that allows us to put pictures on here, but we have had a lot of fun things happen none the less. Since our last post we went to Disneyland, started school, studied until our brains were completely fried, and, a bit more recent piece of excitement, discovered that the utensils at Rammono's Macaroni Grill in Provo are magnetized! We were eating there last night and I was able to suspend my fork in the air by the magnetic force that was emitted by the knife... it was awesome.
Well that is about all of the excitement that we can handle around here. Only about one more month and the little man should be here!

IT's A BOY!!!

Dallin and I are proud to announce that our baby boy is looking healthy and wonderful and only has a few more months to cook! Mitchell Judd Palmer will be born (according to todays appointment) on December 10th!!! We are ridiculously excited! We celebrated by eating "boy food" for lunch- big burritos and chimichangas! And then went and bought him a darling set of athletic onzies!!! And we found a gift card so we grabbed a few maternity shirts for me while we were at the mall! Yeah!

We are home!!!

Well we are home! We had a fabulous time in Tonga! We are now just trying to recover from the jet lag and some stomach issues we acquired in the last little bit of Tonga.. Here are some pictures we promised we'd post when we got home!

SO it has been a little while...

Sorry that we have been a little lazy about doing anything on the blog for about... well .... a month now.`

Our life has been so weird since coming to vava'u and living with a family and washing ourselves in a tiny bin with a curtian that leaves you exposed to the world when there is wind.... awkward, our toilet was a small tin outhouse, our bed was filled with bugs and we lived off of flour, sugar and water deep fried for most meals... but really. We have loved it but it did turn our world upside down!!!

The family that we lived with was so generous and cute. The little kids would come around every morning to wake us up and let us know that it was time to play! We feel like our eyes were really opened and that we have a new perspective about life and what is important. These people really don't have alot of the things that we would call basic needs, but they get along happily and well.

We are now living with another family that is closer to the book project we are working on with a group of people and our professor that set everything up for us! Also we will be coming home on the thirteenth of this month... one week! So we expect lots of flower gifts, cookie dough... haha just kidding but really about the delicious cookie dough I have been craving since we got here!

WE love you all and are so excited to be coming home. We have a new love for Tonga and for the incredible amount of generous and kind people we have met here, both Tongan and Chinese! We are so grateful for our experience here, it has been life changing for us.

See you soon.
Pictures will come when we are back!!!

What a life!

Well I showed dallin my journal entry about food and he thought we should share it with all of you! Here are the foods I miss/crave and will be making the minute I get home!!!1.

1. Chocolate chip cookie dough ( the Sibley Recipe of course)

2. Cheese, oh how I miss my daily dose of cheese

3. Mexican food, chips and salsa, nachos, quesidillas, beans, rice ect.

4. ground beef, chicken breast in anything!

5. Mcdonalds vanilla soft serve ice cream! So delicious and refreshing for hot sweaty humid days in Tonga!!!

6. CHOCOLATE!!!!

Foods I will miss when we leave

1. The Wheat bread with all its delicious grains

2. The whole loaf of white bread that can be torn off and eaten in minutes because it is so light and fluffy!

3. MACAROONs made in heaven by our favorite Tongan bakery!

4. The crisp New Zealand apples

5. Shopping at the fresh vege market

6. And of course the deep fried breadfruit that make the most incredible fries they would put mcdonalds out of business with how incredibly delicious they are!!!

THis week dallin and I attended a korean church that fed us delicious sam hawks dinner afterward which we devoured with pleasure! We also got to go to the temple on our weekly ward trip and we love the people here so much! Going to the temple with them is such a joy, comfort and blessing for us! We are sad to leave our friends on this island but are ready for a new scene and new adventure! I am really running out of places to paint!

Well here are some pictures for this week! One of them is dallin at the saturday market where they sell clothes and food, mostly remittances from America! The first time I went it was oreos and ritz crackers everywhere you looked and they cost about three times what they cost at home!!! THe next picture is for Camille, little buddy. We figured it wasn't worth buying them since you can't eat them but we thought it would be fun to at least send you a picture! ANd the last is a huge plate of tongan food we bought one day on our travels abby was getting low.... big surprise since we walk all day long here! Well we stopped in and bought chicken wings since that is how they sell it here. And it was topped with this crazy good/spicy gravy and came with half a huge plate of breadfruit!!! We loved it!!!

Just another week in paradise

The last picture is Dallin doing our wash! Our next door neighbor has a washing machine but Dal decided it would be more fun to try it himself!!! We also have a picture at the top of Dallin about to walk off a set of stairs with no destination! We found these hilarious so we took a bunch of pictures on them and the one in the middle... I can't remember what we chose.

Next we'll put up some of my paintings....

Dallin found this awesome octopus while digging around the ocean at low tide while I painted! It was so cool he found a shell that is was hiding in and when he set it down it came out all crazy and eightlegged! He also found a HUGE muscle which he took home and cooked up! It shrunk a lot when he cooked it, but even the lady at the market was impressed by how big it was!

Alright! Enough about me we are probably boring you all to death! Abby has been working really hard on some beautiful paintings. It is really neat because just about every time that we sit down somewhere to paint someone will come up and just watch her paint and ask her questions. There was a man just yesterday that was very impressed to see "the lady" do the painting. She has got some really neat ones that we will be putting up today.

(Oh. the middle picture is of my birthday dinner)

Abby has been handling the dirt and the bugs over here very well and has obtained a rare sense for spotting cockroaches! Just the other night she said to me "I think I just heard something fly from that wall to that wall" and lo and behold a two to three inch cock roach was crawling on the wall right next to our bed! So Abby jumped up, cut the cockroach in half with laser vision and cooked it up the next morning for breakfast.

Ya right! I scream run away and tell Dallin to be a man and kill it!!!

We love you all and hope this has been entertaining!

Love Abby and DAllin

Here are some other pictures from the Tongan Experience!