50 thoughts about December...

Our Cute Cute kids in their Christmas Outfits!

Our little Family

1. Beautiful
2. Fun
3. Crazy
4. Jesus Christ
5. Love
6. Shop Shop Shop
7. Christmas Eve PJs
8. Busy (is that the same as Crazy)
9. I love Christmas Sacraments
10. Christmas Clothes
11. Love Christmas morning excitement
12. Christmas Evening = Love
13. Fresh fallen snow
14. Spending only cash
15. Food
16. Smells
17. Lights
18. Temple Grounds (with the lights & nativities)
19. Nativities in our House
20. Baby Jesus
21. Mary
22. Music
23. Dance & Voice Recitals
24. The Book of Luke in the Bible
25. Fondue
26. Work & Ward Parties
27. Receiving Christmas Cards every day in the mail
28. Service
29. Sub for Santa's
30. Love
31. Friends
32. Family
33. Cooking
34. Treats
35. Weight Gain... oh just kidding just checking to see if you are still reading
36. Exercising
37. Christmas Concerts
38. A Christmas Carol at Hale Theater
39. Spending time with just the six of us!
40. Quiet evenings home by the fire with the tree lights on
41. Reminiscing about Christmases past
42. Christmas Outfits and Colors on the Sunday before Christmas
43. The smell of Cinnamon
44. The day after Christmas
45. The Birth of our Savior Jesus Christ
46. The song "Mary did you Know" and hearing Alyssa singing it!
47. Peter's Gift (a play the Shawn & Alyssa were in)
48. Homemade Christmas Candy
49. Loving Husband
50. Great Kids

Our crazy performing week...

Introducing the cast of "Peters Gift"

Shawn & Alyssa were two of the four main parts... yay! Good Job cute kids.

Shawn was hilarious! I am so proud of him... he is so natural up on stage. He absolutely loves it. He had a few solos in this play.

Alyssa was darling up there... I actually got teary eyed watching my little girl be up there. She opened up the play with a solo... the room dark and the spot light just on her. Cute!

Here is two cute boys that have been friends since they were in their Mommy's bellys. They are all grown up and going skiing with the fourth grade.

He looks like he should be on "The Christmas Story".

Dance performances...

Isn't she cute... SASSY as all get up - BUT cute!

...and finally more dance performances.

In the middle of all the performances, we have had soccer games, our ward Christmas party, Steve's work Christmas party, shopping, My work Christmas party, Young Mens and Young Womens, dance practices, dress rehearsals, scouts... anything else that I am missing?

As you can see we have been having a quiet month sitting home by the fire... reading Christmas stories, drinking hot chocolate, and cuddling... oh wait that was a relaxing dream that I had. We've been busy but I LOVE it! It is fun to watch our kids in all that they do. We have some pretty great kids.

PS - We had our annual fondue family fondue night last night... I will post pictures soon!

An almost perfect Sunday...

Church was so great.

The testimonies that were shared were great. I love to hear My teenager give his testimony, Shawn is sweet. I love to have Alyssa say "do you think that I can sneak up there before the Bishop closes the meeting?", I love Mogie DeMann's spiritual side. I loved all the testimonies and was glad that I could grow from them.

I went to young women's and Julie gave an AMAZING lesson on Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ's Gifts to us and what we can give back to them.

Then YW testimony meeting... the girls weren't shy yesterday and shared their testimonies and then Jenny Baldwin got up and made us all cry with hers.

We came home and cleaned up the living room a bit and decorated for Christmas. It was fun to hear the kids excitement. Steve and I fell asleep around 6:00pm cuddled up together on the couch with the Christmas Tree light on. I love this season.

We then made crepes and waffles for dinner.

We finished off the night sitting in the hot tub talking about the upcoming crazy week.

It was an almost perfect Sunday!

I am feeling...

a little overwhelmed.

That is it!

Not a whole lot more to post about... well actually a lot more to post about but I am spent!

Good Night... I miss you all!

Oh and one more thing...

It was our 14th Anniversary this month too. Steve I love you! You work so hard for our family to make our life better. I am glad that I married you. You were my right decision. It is fun to have my best best friend live in my house with me. For our anniversary this year we went to dinner at our favorite place - FLEMMINGS! and then we went to see "CURTAINS" at Hale Theatre. We love going to plays there. We have season tickets. Our day was pretty low key. We went to Rich's Bagels for breakfast and hung out together the whole day... I even got to go to work with him for a while. We had a great time just talking about our future.

Steve - I LOVE YOU!

Happy many more years to come.

Love - Me

This one is for you Jelissa...

Where to start? Well at the most recent I guess! So elementary kids all three entered the reflections contest this year for the first year ever. The theme was "Beauty is..."! Cameron took a picture of of whale tail in San Diego this summer and then zoomed in on it and blew it up. Ashley drew a picture of a rainbow, mountains, trees and a butterfly. It was so dang cute. I loved it. Alyssa took a picture of the San Diego Temple Moroni from sitting on the ground looking up to the spires and the Moroni... seeing it through flowers. It really was beautiful.

SHE WON! Can you see the cute excitement!

Ashley and Cameron were a little sad but they both did good and they were glad that Alyssa won.

So about Alyssa again... about a month ago she decided to run for the Grant Elementary Student Council. You had to write an essay of why you would like to do this job and then specify what position to run for. She picked Secretary/Treasurer. Then if you made the first cuts then you go on to making some posters and campaigning to the 4th, 5th and 6th grades. They campaigned for a week and SHE WON! This was a great self esteem boost which she need so I am glad.

CONGRATULATIONS!

Nikolah K. - President
Brooklyn M. - Vice President
Whitney R. - Secretary
Alyssa M. - Treasurer

Cameron's Soccer ended for about a week until indoor soccer started. He was super happy to start playing indoor. It is different but he likes it even when their team lost 13-zip!

Dance, Dance, Dance! My other three are in Guyz n Dollz. They are loving it. All three of them love the kids in their classes. What a fun uplifting group!

We are now car salesmen. It is pretty cool but it also meant that by selling two cars that I was going to have to ride the UTA. AWESOME!!!! Luckily my amazing sister let me borrow he cute little for escape for the month! Thanks Jelissa, I really really appreciate it! We sold the 03 Expedition and the 04 Mini Cooper. We just got an 07 Expedition! I love it. It is really nice to have a car big enough for our family.

We had Halloween in there too but that is a whole other story in it self. Jelissa - My life is pretty boring. I am sorry - no great pictures of some AMAZING place that I have traveled to. I love you Jelissa - I will see you in a couple of days!

Grant Elementary's 50th Birthday Party!!!

Happy Birthday GRANT!

Grant Elementary Built 1959!

All current and former students (and their parents), teachers, administrators, and staff are invited to attend the celebration!

50 Rockin' Years

Open House and Sock Hop
(with Steve as the DJ)

November 12th 2009

6:00 PM to 8:30 PM

@ Grant Elementary

Please come to celebrate with us!

My Young Women Craftyness (is that a word)

So in Young Womens I am the second counselor. I get to welcome in the cute new beehives. I wanted to give them a little something when they come in. I give them a little sack with all of the "stuff" that they need in young womens but it didn't seem like enough.

• personal progress book
• personal progress journal
• parents guide to young womens
• for the strength of youth booklet
• their favorite candy bar

All of this just didn't seem like enough. I started to think (and search the Internet) for some ideas. I came up with these little blocks that were a conglomeration (again is that a word) of ideas that I had seen online. Our 2009 youth theme is "Be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity"(1 Timothy 4:12). In these blocks I just simply wrote "BE" and then on the little tag it says "thou and example 1 Tim 4:12". I painted the block and mod podged it. They are between 5" and 7" square. I think that they turn out pretty cute. The new little girls seemed to love them.

Harley Dog...

So last week (on Friday) my brakes went out. On Saturday Steve was changing them at our house. He went to the back to get our car jack from under Shawn's car and when he moved it there was some anti-freeze that he didn't notice dripped out. Sometime in the day Harley went out back to potty and licked some up (we didn't see him do it - we found out later). Apparently anti-freeze is sweet and pets like to like it. A few hours later Harley started to get a belly ache and started to have diarrhea and throw up. We just assumed that he was sick (we still didn't know about the anti-freeze). Steve walked around to the house to see if he could see anything that he got into and that is when he saw the fluid. We just thought he would get it out with diarrhea and throw up. Be Sunday Night he was doing worse. He wouldn't even get his head off of the pillow. He was so lethargic. It was super sad. Sunday Evening Steve and I decided to take him to the Pet ER. We got him up to Cottonwood Animal ER around 9:30pm. The Doctors did some tests on him. They came up with that he did in fact have anti freeze in his system. This is when we found out how bad it is for pets. We found out that a HUGE percentage of animals that eat anti-freeze actually die. The Doctor suggested that because Harley was SO dehydrated he should keep him over night for a couple of days. He said he was in kidney failure and then it would go to his liver. This is when I asked how much this was going to cost. I really love my dog (I thought that I would NEVER say that about an animal), but I can't afford thousands of dollars. He said it was going to be about $500 - $600 a day with tests and everything else. It might go down in price after the first couple of days. UUUMmmmm I am not sure about you guys but I can't afford that much money for my dog... my kids yes but not a pet. We asked what our alternatives were and he suggested that we take him home (basically to die) and to keep him hydrated he would show us how to inject his body with fluid. Basically keep him comfortable and love him for the rest of his short life. We were pretty devastated.

We decided to come home and get some rest (it was 1:30am by the time we left) and then the next day Steve and I would spend the day with him and tell the kids as soon as they got home from school. We during the day he got worse and worse and worse. We just hoped that he would make it for our kids. I think that Steve and I cried pretty much all day. It was really hard to know that we were going to have to tell the kids as soon as they got home.

When the kids got home Steve and I were sitting on the couch waiting for them. They walked in and knew that something was wrong. Except for Shawn, they didn't even know that we had taken him to the Vet. When Steve told them what was going on they all four immediately started to cry... uncontrollably. Which really made it harder to explain everything. We told them that the Doctor didn't give a very great chance of living. We told them that the Doctor told us that we should decide if we would want the Doctor to put him to sleep and take care of his body or if we should let him just die at our house with us around him and then we would decide as a family where to bury him. They picked that he die at our house and we would pick where we bury him. They thought maybe (if we promised to live here forever) we could bury him here at the house so they could go out to visit him every day. That was so sad to think about.

We decided to take a whole bunch of pictures with him. We were all sobbing. I could hardly even see through the lense to take the picture. I had no idea I loved him so much.

The kids were so cute they just took turns holding him. It really was tender. Our family is lucky and hasn't had to deal with death yet with anyone even Great Grandparents. We didn't really know how to deal with this.

Well with a whole lot of prayers and a whole lot of luck Harley slowly started to do better. By about Wednesday or Thursday he was on the mend. I think that now he is back (almost) to himself. He is still a little tired but that is understandable. I hope that he stays in our family for a long long while. We are happy that the kids decided to have hope that the doctors would be wrong and he would live. We all really love him.

WELCOME BACK HARLEY ~ WE LOVE YOU... STAY AWHILE!

My new favorite hobby...

So after hearing years and years of 5th Sunday Lessons on being prepared, I finally got myself a cool new hobby... I love buying food storage supplies. I am not kidding. I am getting the biggest highs from it.

I actually have a 3 month (almost) supply now. It is amazing... I love to go down to my storage room and look at it. These are just a few pictures of it.

I figure I don't really look all that great in all the new clothes that I buy anyway and food ALWAYS fits me. I am now buying that. I shop all the ads and go in and by the stuff that we use if it is on sale and then I buy at least 12 of what ever it is. It is such a great feeling to know that our family would be pretty prepared in case of an emergency. There are so many emergencies that we could encounter here in Salt Lake... financial included. I am going to keep going... it feels great. I still need to save up our stashed cash and a few other things but we are well on our way. I love my family and I want to be as prepared as possible for them.

I challenge you next time that you go to the grocery to pick up 12 of something that is on sale and stick it in your food storage.

Happy (NO) Labor Day!

Happy Labor Day!
I am pretty sure that I have the strongest husband... He didn't drop me in the river on accident or on purpose... AMAZING!

So this year for labor day we decided to leave Sunday right after Shawn & Steve did fast offerings. We decided to take the kids up to Mirror Lake area and find a spot to camp.

Sometime during the trip I found Ashley and Cameron laying on our bed just looking out the window and having a cute little conversation. I really love the sibling bonding that you get on a family trip.

I am not sure what my eyes are doing. Weird! Maybe they are still glued shut from the long time that I slept in or maybe from the 2 hour nap that I took. Either way they look funny!

What a fun quick, unplanned camping trip. I love to spend time with my little family! We actually camped up in this same area about 7 years ago when Ashley was a brand new little baby! We took a family picture on a log just like this. We were even in the same order, only Ashley was in a baby car seat. It is weird to see what has happened in 7 years. Our kids are so old and big now. It really happens so fast. I love them. I love their ages right now. I wish time would slow down.

Happy (no) Labor Day! I hope yours was as fun as ours!

The Best Summer Vacation...

The BEST

"In choosing how we spend time as a family, we should be careful not to exhaust our available time on things that are merely good and leave little time for that which is better or best. A friend took his young family on a series of summer vacation trips, including visits to memorable historic sites. At the end of the summer he asked his teenage son which of these good summer activities he enjoyed most. The father learned from the reply, and so did those he told of it. 'The thing I liked best this summer,' the boy replied, 'was the night you and I laid on the lawn and looked at the stars and talked.'"

Elder Dallin H. Oaks

This was one of my favorite quotes from Conference. I love to listen to Elder Dallin H. Oaks. He is such a great speaker. I thought I would put this on my blog to help me remember what the most important things are in life. We had such a great summer with the kids. We did do a couple of vacations this summer but most of all we hung out and had a great time with each other. Sometimes I forget about those little important things in life.

Back to School!!!

Miss Ashley has a little mind of her own... I know shocker! Nobody knew that right? Well this year I won't be picking out any of her clothes... she is in second grade... and you know having Mom pick out your clothes is for littler kids... At least she has pretty good taste. She is a little sassy pants but funny and sweet too. She loves to show me that second graders ALWAYS brush their teeth, floss, make their beds and clean their rooms everyday with out being asked. I won't tell her any different.

She has Mrs. Hyer/Mrs. Snyder split for 2nd grade. I am really excited about that. They are both just amazing teachers. We have a really great class, the kids are fun and so are the Mom's (I like that).

Cameron is my little stud. He really could care what he wears as long as someone else picks it out. I tell him all the time "Bud you look handsome" he says back "Mom you are pretty". I like him he is my self esteem booster. He has Ms. Brakke for 4th grade. I think that she will be a great teacher... He loves her. He has Callin L, Colby W, and a few other friends in there. I am pretty sure that if Lisa... er I mean Callin Jr wasn't in there we would want to change classes.

Alyssa is just beautiful and sweet. She just wants to please me. She tells me every night that she is glad that we are best friends. I love her age. She was so fun to shop with this year. She has her own little style. She has Mrs. Laidlaw for 6th grade. We had her with Shawn too and I just love her. Alyssa has a lot of great friends (and great Mom's) in there.

Shawn is my big eighth grader. I love his age. He is just so dang fun. I love to be friends with him. He loves to be different than everyone, he just has his own little style. I like that confidence. He is a great friend to all and really likes the ladies. He has some pretty great teachers. I hope that we have a great academic year with him. He really wants to get good grades. I love that he is in Jr. High.

I LOVE when the kids go back to school. I love the schedule (oh and the break). I love that we get to have OCD and be organized. My kids love to see their friends everyday. Happy Mother's Day... I mean back to school day!

Pioneer Trek 2009

So we were invited to be a Ma & Pa for our Stake Pioneer Trek. Four years ago when our Stake went we were invited, we had to say no because of Steve's work. So this year when it came around I was pretty much begging to go. I started to get nervous because I had such high expectations that I thought maybe it would be as great as I imagined. I loved it much more than I ever thought that I would.

First of all... everyone kept saying that they had the best family... but in reality, we REALLY did. I loved each and every one of them.

We had Matt, Maya, Jael, Anastasia, Josh, Corina, Rayce & Nick. They were all in between the ages of 14-18. They were all so great. We had one that we hard but only because she wouldn't stay up with the group and she would fall behind and get lost from us. I am pretty sure if she were a real pioneer, she would have gotten lost or died on the trail. I know that is terrible to say but really true.

Steve grew his beard pretty thick for the trek. Then the second day into it he shaved it to look like "Brother Brigham". It was sweet - Well okay it was actually really gross. But our trek kids loved it.

This picture is right when we met the kids. They were all so different from each other. When we all first met I wasn't sure that they would all become friends. By the time we left they were so great together. They were all friends.

This was one of the most spiritual times that I have ever had. As we would walk more and more I would just think about all that the pioneers went through for us. One of the nights we had a huge "company" party. We all square danced together. We were laughing, sweating, thirsty, our legs were giving out from so much walking and all of the sudden we heard gun shots. We heard "bad guys" screaming at us to get out of town move on. Even though I knew that it was pretend I was so panicked. It took me a minute to find all eight kids. I started to think and realize how the pioneers felt. I was getting worried about my 8 kids. Were they safe? Were they looking for me? I really that this was just a drill but I guess being a real Mom it just hit me what they went through.

There were times that Steve and I would just hold hands and talk while our trek kids would pull or push the cart. We would talk about what it must have really been like. They were brave and strong. The trials that they went through were so different from ours. I can't even imagine what it was like. Steve decided that we could have been great pioneers. We would have just jumped in and done it. It was such a different time then. They didn't have the stresses that we have now. Their kids didn't deal with what our kids and teenagers deal with. Our Trek Theme was "Fortify our Faith - Step by Step" they talked a lot about how we are modern day pioneers. They read a quote at one of our stops:

by Elder M. Russell Ballard... It reads "The Lord isn't asking us to load up a handcart; He's asking us to fortify our faith. He isn't asking us to walk across a continent; He is asking us to walk across the street to visit our neighbor. He isn't asking us to give all of our worldly possessions to build a temple; He is asking us to give of our means and time despite the pressures of modern living and then attend regularly the temples already built. He isn't asking us to die a martyr's death; He's asking us to live a disciples life. "

I love this quote. It is so true. We are both pioneers in our own way. We both have different trials. We need to help our neighbors around us.

On the last night we were there we had our little trek family together getting ready for nightly family prayers. Steve was talking to our trek company boss (his name was Jeff Bryan and also happened to have his son in our family). They looked like they were having a pretty serious discussion. All of the sudden Steve comes over to me and our kids and says "Ma - get the kids together. I need to talk to you about something serious. One of our brothers has died. We are going to have to bury him here tomorrow. " I kept saying "what? how? who? why?" I was assuming he was kidding but I guess you never know... He went on for a bit (even saying lets pray for Ma because tomorrow will be a sad day for her leaving one of our kids here). Finally he told us that he had to go to base ball back home, their team got to the finals. It was a weird feeling. I had a little bit of the sick feeling that a Mother or Father got when they had to leave them buried and then move along the trail.

The next morning when we got up as we were walking along the trail we saw on the side of the trail two shallow graves with a couple knelling to mourn the loss of their son. The other one was for our trek son. It was a sobering experience.

I loved going as a MA because I really felt like I could do the real thing, I learned a lot about the pioneers. I can't wait to read some books about them. They fascinate me.

I am so thankful that I was able to go in the pioneer trek. I just hope that they call me to something next time again. I loved it that much.

It you have read until now you are a saint. I mainly posted so that I could remember it. This was a long post... I am sorry!