A Thanksgiving Recap...A bit late

What a wonderful Thanksgiving we had. I'm so grateful for my all my family coming over and helping us celebrate such a special holiday. I think I can safely say, that everyone had a great time. It has been many years (at least 4 years) since we have been able to spend Thanksgiving with family. During that time we developed our own traditions and have been brain-storming how we could keep our traditions that have been established while still celebrating with our families that now live so close to us. Well, we did it! We did our own thing in the morning, my sister & fam came over in the afternoon, then my parents & brother came in the late afternoon for the feast that I had prepared.

Warning: I'm going to whine for just a moment. My camera & computer had a major conflict and most all of the pictures from the day (the carving of the turkey, the spread, everyone enjoying the feast, playing games, proof that my dad played games and HAD FUN...) all got deleted in the process...SUPER CRANKY!

Okay moving on, here are the few remaining pictures:

Playing Apples to ApplesWhich my mom rocked us all at!The kids watching movies on multiple TVs while the adults play games.
Plotting our Black Friday shopping (which BTW, I didn't get the only thing I set out to get, first time this has happened to me...cranky about that too! Stupid deceiving ads.)
Recording the many things we each have to be thankfully for on our Thankful Turkey, so fun to hear what things where important to each of them. Some really surprised me. For example, my Dad announced first thing he's thankful for his children with much emotion. He's not a touchy-feely kind of person and I think that's the first time I've heard him say how much his children meant to him vocally.
After stuffing our faces with Delicious food all day long, Randy makes this creation at 11 o'clock and devourers it! I don't know where it all goes?!
And just for the kicks of it, a cute niece.

A Huge THANKS goes to my family for being such wonderful company. You should come back over for another holiday. Maybe I'm make up a one just so we can do it again. :)

Our 4th of July Festivities

All in all we had a great holiday spend with our families. We hope you had a safe and fun day filled with delicious food and great company also!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!!!

Happy Easter

Here's a brief picture rundown from our day:

Our cute kids sporting new Easter clothes (thank you Grandma), ready for a special church day.
And a little egg hunting in the sunshine
We have had a wonderful day together filled with the love of our savior and each other. May your homes and hearts also be filled with the spirit of this very sacred holiday.

Our Egg experiments

Experiment #1 - What happens when we color on eggs with a white Crayon?

The daughter's hypothesis: The dye will cover up the crayon.

The result:


Experiment #2 - What happens when we mix all the dye together.

The daughter's hypothesis: It will look like a rainbow

The result:

A New Years Eve Celebration

This is the first year that we have included our daughter in the New Years festivities. She had no idea what the holiday was or what you do to celebrate it. How she has lived this long and not learned this I have no idea (can you say...mother of the year?), none the less this was a first for her and a first for us celebrating all by ourselves (we miss our college friends). So here's a run down of our night:
Enjoyed french toast casserole (breakfast foods are part of our holiday tradition)Played the Daughter's new games she got for ChristmasDevoured Fried Bread (another tradition)Getting our partiness onWatched movies together while drinking our Shirley templesHAPPY NEW YEAR at 10pm! We celebrated with the east coast so we could get her to bed...she didn't know any better!We hope you had a safe and enjoyable holiday.

Our Christmas Celebrations

Here's a run down of our Christmas week:
Traveling
Our holiday celebrations started off by deciding based on the weather that we would have to travel home Saturday morning (a few days early) or not go home at all do to the horrible weather. Of course this decision was not made until Thursday night, causing Friday to be a day filled with lots of crazy as we packed and finished making the gifts (be looking for a post about this years homemade gifts later).
Here are our good little travelers
We traveled on the only day that it stopped snowing in something like two weeks...crazy! The blue skies and the snow covered trees where beautiful. The roads on the other hand were not so much but we made it safe and it didn't take as much time as we had expected.

A birthday celebration
Happy birthday to a great father-in-law! The day included lots of snow, delicious cinnamon rolls, and curling up and watching movies together. It was a great relaxing day.

Christmas Eve with the Lee's

The magic of Christmas morning
After many days of staying up late, the kids slept in until 8:30. It gave us a chance to get showered and dressed without having to get up early. The kids were tickled pink with there gifts. Santa did a great job!


Spending Christmas day with the Long's
After the kids opened their gifts from Santa we headed over to my parents to spend the day together. We had a nice day spend playing games, talking, and being together.

Finally heading home
After being delayed for a few days due to the passes being closed we finally headed home on Sunday (that's right we were gone for over a week). The roads were great but the glare was horrible.It's a good thing I have so many pairs of sunglasses in the car.Christmas at home
We made it home to discover that Santa had left something for the kids at our house too! They were so surprised. We had a relaxing evening exchanging gifts for each other and playing.


We had a nice visit filled to the brim with fun. Like always we never have enough time to do everything we wanted or visit with everyone as much as we wanted to but I can truly say that it was a good trip.

House building fun

Forgive me as I attempt to get the blog caught up. The holidays caught me off guard this year and for the first time ever I was not ready for them.
We'll start with our traditional "gingerbread" house making event. Someday I would like to make a big one with real gingerbread but this was not the year. I was so excited that Randy really got into it this year. Here are a few picture of the fun:

A Thankful Turkey

Here's our finished project. It was a great way to be reminded of all the things that we are thankful for as we did things together yesterday.

(I totally stole this idea off someones blog but can't remember who's...sorry!)

Thanksgiving highlights

We have had a nice Thanksgiving holiday so far. Here are few photo highlights from our day. They're a bit lacking but at least the day is recorded!

Our little Pilgrim complete with bonnet from her school party

Preparing the feast

with a great helper

Carving the bird

Enjoying our feast

Good old olive play

Doing a thanksgiving activity together

Attempting to pluck the bird (he was more interested in tearing it off the wall!

In between things we enjoyed watching the parade on TV, searching for the paper (had to go to two grocery stores and three gas stations to find one!), searching the ads and plotting our Friday morning shopping. We had a nice day together and hope you are enjoying the holiday weekend!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We hope that each of you have a wonderful day filled with many things to be thankful for. We love each of you so much and are so thankful for you!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

(check back later for our thanksgiving highlights)

Halloween Festivities

We have been partying for days and having a blast doing it! Here are some of the things that we have been doing:

Partying with friends from our Wednesday playgroup.
Partying at school. They had a classroom party and then a school wide family night complete with trick-or-treating from classroom to classroom for school supplies (crayons, coloring books, pencils, etc.), pizza, and science experiments.
Awaiting her coach
On the way to the Ball...I mean party
Then trick-or-treating in our neighborhood. This was our first year not going home for the holiday (sigh) and the first year that we have actually gone house to house. We normally would do the Uptown and then the grandma's. The daughter didn't quite know what to do at first but was always very polite. She would say "trick-or-treat" as she knocked and them would just smile pretty when they answered.

We had a great time handing out candy and had an all time record number of trick-or-treaters ever! It could have something to do with the fact that Randy is normally the only one home in the years past (the kids & I would be in TC). I'm pretty much convinced that he would sit in the dark and pretend to not be home!

We hope you all had a safe and enjoyable Halloween!

4th of July Festivities

We had a wonderful day celebrating our nation's independence, enjoying great company, and beautiful weather. I love summer days! The weather is great & it stays light outside so late. If only there was a way to be able to enjoy summer weather all the time yet still be able to experience the four seasons.

Here's a photo recap of our patriotic day:

Getting our daughter's bike ready for a ride to the park for our ward/neighborhood picnic
The little man ready for a walk
The daughter playing games with her new BFF at the picnic
Although this picture is way out of focus (hard to shoot with a little helper. Note to self: must get better at that!), it captures the joy these two little girls were having tossing water balloons. They actually won the contest but tended to get closer & closer to each other instead of moving apart. It was too cute!
Having a blast watching the big kids play & eating pancakes (BTW, wagons work great as outdoor play pens : ) )
Randy looking so thrilled to be there (he really did have a good time...it's hard making new friends though)
After play all morning we came home for naps and Hawaiian chicken kabobs. I forgot to take a picture until there was only one left. Oops!
They were so yummy that I didn't even have any leftovers!
With everything going on, I forgot about a festive desert. No worries, we made s'mores.
They were so yummy too!
When it finally got dark (oh, 10:30!) we did the traditional fireworks. All of our neighbors were out and were were able to enjoy quite the show. I can't believe the amount of aerials that were going off around us! I thought for sure something was going to go wrong. I have a horrible fear of fire and spent most of the night praying that we (& no one else) will be harmed.


And for our finale...a creepy clown! after being first lit this is what it did...
It then progressed through different chambers that where pretty cool but that creepy clown face came back every once in awhile .
Overall we had a great day visiting, celebrating and even made some new friends. No one was hurt, no fires in our area (I am sure fires did happen somewhere in all the craziness but I am just not very informed), and things quieted down pretty fast around us. We are so thankful to be USA citizens and live in such a beautiful country! HAPPY 4th of JULY EVERYONE!!!


[To add to my day, I finished the first twilight book! I will admit that Bella irritated me at times (stupid girl!) but I still really enjoyed it & am already engrossed in the next book.]