all dressed up and nowhere to go

my bands are fun

Here's a link to see and hear all the bands I play in, if anyone's interested. . .
http://www.robbennion.com/bands.html

Copa Cabana

We went to the cabin last weekend, it was loads of fun. We had yakiniku too.

Nicolle painted a bunch of our apartment before we left for the cabin, and we made a trip to Ikea, so we have quite the nice little apartment now. Our drive to buy a house is somewhat weakened by finding out what it actually entails. For now it seems we're content at our place, but if the perfect magic house/situation appears we'll be open to that too.

I'm trying to learn how to balance my obsessive behavior and work and family, anybody who knows me knows how obsessed I get about things and how much trouble I have balancing. I'm very excited about the opportunities I have with music, but need to learn to balance better. Thanks to my practicing in the mornings at 7am at the school before starting work, I feel really great about my progress and it's a great solution to the practice/wake up the kids /make Nicolle miserable problem.

We've fallen in love with the RedBox dvd rental machines all over town. For $1 you can rent a dvd for one night, and so we've seen some interesting movies lately. Yesterday I watched "Letters From Iwo Jima". It was cool to see some of the Japanese actors I recognized from movies in Japan. I'm sure everyone's already seen it or heard about it, it was told from the point of view of the Japanese soldiers. Brutality and kindness are shown on both sides during the conflict, and some soldiers (both american and japanese) came to see that the enemy isn't so different from them. It's by no means a warm fuzzy movie however, there's needless killing, boredom, insanity, etc. It made me think of friends I have fighting in wars. Kendall from Hawaii wrote me on Thanksgiving from Afghanistan. He said that after a morning of drills etc the commanding officer told them to get lost, and they were allowed the rest of the day off. They later had pizza for the soldiers, but Kendall said he was more excited just to not have to work. He didn't remember it was Thanksgiving until the officer let them go for the day. My life is so different from his life and many people's around the world, people I have contact with every day at my job who are desperate to get out of their present situation. I feel incredibly blessed and am amazed at my situation, I'm very lucky.
We also watched "Disturbia" a fun thriller rear-window-esque. The kids were actullay both asleep for a rare moment so we watched it together and Nicolle held me while I jumped at every scary part, as usual. I'm kind of a chicken with horror movies.

The cabin II

Col of the Wild

boys already?

guitar hero

Sorry guys, it's already sold out . . .

Look at the section "VIP dinner and dancing".

http://www.balletwest.org/Support/gala.html

Maybe next year you can get tickets if you're lucky. Heh heh.

Silly Interview in Salt Lake

Hi guys,

I did an interview in Salt Lake for a local website, here's the link:

http://labelfreeartists.com/view_video.php?id=83

Watch for Colette running around in the background! :)

Nigongo wa?! 祝福 . . .

I feel very blessed right now. I'm listening to general conference in Japanese early Sunday morning and thinking of everything I have to be grateful for.
My beautiful wife is so amazing. She's been very active lately. Besides taking care of our two kids, which is like 3 full time jobs (never a day off, 24/7 work all the time), she's playing volleyball twice a week (I've seen her play: she's usually the only girl playing with giant polynesian men that could squash me like a bug, but she holds her own!), she's gotten two face painting gigs recently where she uses her artistic talents, and she's started hula lessons.
Colette is learning how to talk so well now. She's making sentences, much of it isn't understandable, but she surprises me all the time with clear words and phrases. She always gives people hugs when she says hi, and she's cheerful.
Johnathan is nothing less than pure joy in my life. He's such a happy baby, always smiling at everyone and he really loves people's company. He doesn't demand much from people, just their smiles.

I've have big dreams with my music, and have been experiencing greater success than ever before. I play with great musicians, and have many projects in the works, from my own band to brazilian, latin, and hip-hop projects (played in park city friday with a rapper, it's a ton of fun to back him up and I'm going to have him start rapping with my jazz/funk trio, it's going to be so fun!). I'm very excited and hope to travel a bit abroad with these groups, taking nicolle to Europe and other parts of the world. I've been blessed to play at many high-end functions and events lately, I'm finally getting my name out there and get new calls for gigs every other day.
At my job I feel so lucky to be able to use Spanish and Portuguese all day. I'm having a lot of success lately, many students are coming in the next few months which I helped with their paperwork. I'm making many international connections and love the work I do.
we've been looking at houses around provo, thinking maybe we'll stay here for the long haul, travelling here and there like Mom and Dad. We both like it here and with the kids needing stability and routine, we're dreaming about having our own place. We walked around with Amy all day yesterday looking at houses and found one we absolutely adored, it was fun to dream about what we'd do with it.

Today we are going to visit the Esplin farm, so when we get back I will post some pictures. I also wanted to apologize for not being able to figure out how to set up the widget thing for the blog. Here's my sisters blog, she has been posting some fun pictures lately so if you have time you should check it out.
http://mackenziefotos.blogspot.com/

Happy Halloween!

I love Halloween. Or rather, I love dressing my kids up, so cute! Johnathan was Peter Pan, Colette was Tinkerbell and I was Tigerlily. Rob was supposed to dress up as a pirate but he didn't get a chance. First we walked downtown where most of the stores welcomed trick or treaters. Colette initially didn't understand the concept of asking for candy, she just wanted to run around with her arms behind her shouting "Im fiying!" She had bells on her shoes so she was really noisy. Johnathan was so sweet, he didn't pull his hat off or cry or anything. Colette needed a nap by the time we were half way through so she got pretty bad. But I guess she did ok considering we walked about a mile. Grandma Karla picked us up at the Library and took us to her house where we had "blood soup with bones" (tomato soup with bread sticks) it was awesome. Grandma also had pumpkin shaped sugar cookies. Colette dutifully licked off the icing and put them back on the plate. Then we went to Grandma and Grandpa's ward trunk or treat, but we were pretty late and Colette still hadn't had a nap. In fact she didn't sleep at all the whole day until after 10 pm! I really really hope it doesn't mean she has stopped taking naps. Anyway, it was a great day regardless of all of the walking and the cranky fairy. I hope you enjoy the pictures!