Well I hope you all had a very merry Christmas. Our morning was filled with lots of excited smiles (but with awesome gifts like Ninja Cookie Cutters, how can it not?), but would you believe we didn’t get any pictures? Just too busy enjoying the day I guess. And the fact that we got to go to church Christmas day was just a nice bonus.

For New Years we were back in Vegas, and we welcomed the New Year in very casually. We sent the kids to bed early and sat down with a big bowl of popcorn and a good movie. But, after reading some of my friend’s New Year traditions, I’m inspired for next year. While we wait, we’ll enjoy creating a time capsule with pictures and letters (we helped the kids fill out a 20 question get-to-know-you form for FHE last night); we’ll play games and enjoy a huge ice cream banana split extravaganza, and then when the clock strikes we’ll pop our balloons filled with surprises and noise makers, and see who can get a grape in their mouth for every one of the 12 strikes of midnight. (Whew. Catch that all?) Of course, I may or may not set the clock ahead to celebrate the New Year with a different time zone.

Last year we kind of read Christmas type stories before Christmas. It was a lot of fun. The only problem was that we had a limited variety of stories that were even remotely related to Christmas, Winter, or Holidays.

Looking back it was kind of funny that we never thought of trying to get a few more from the library. I guess you live and you learn.

This year we have been reading a brand new Christmas story each night before we head to bed. The kids have really enjoyed it! We have a lot of stories all in a bag (tied up so there is no peeking ahead of course) and each night the kids in turn get to pick out a new story.

It has been a lot of fun. We have even had the kids try and sneak a peak a few days ahead to see what else was coming!

Tonight we read a story about Santa Duck, by David Milgrim. It was a good story about a duck who tries to find Santa to give his list to but ends up helping out a lot of other people in the process and helps out Santa. He learns a bit more about what Christmas is all about! The favorite line from the story is “Jingle Quack, jingle quack. Jingle all the quack!”

We also made our Christmas tree shaped pancakes with M&M ornaments. I was dubbed the best mom in the world for that one! Of course, later that day I was dubbed the worst mom in the world because I make my kids pick up their toys every day. How mean can you get?

Later this week I hope to cut snowflakes out of tortillas. I can see that being something my kids really enjoy, especially if we brush them with butter and sugar and toast them in the oven. Mmmmm!

What Christmas traditions do you have?

The last couple days have a been a whirlwind! I’d like to share some of the highlights:

• The Elder’s Quorum Family Party. Chris is the Elder’s Quorum President, and a Christmas party was in order, so he set a date and we made up a bunch of yummy food (bread, grilled chicken, pomegranate salad, and a pumpkin trifle that was so delicious it got me a marriage proposal). The party was a huge success (or so I heard from several sources; I actually had to stay home with a sick kid). Lots of friends who just relaxed and chatted while the kids ran amok on the other side of the gym.
• A Night on the Town. Chris’s parents came to Vegas so we showed them the sights! We visited the cactus gardens all decorated with Christmas lights (now there’s a job I don’t envy-wrapping cacti with lights!) We toured the chocolate factory and watched the chocolate assembly line (it was fun watching them pour gallons of chocolate into the machine). We enjoyed a Smash Burger and then went to the last bit of our ward Christmas party, just in time to see Santa and help clean up. After that we went to the Bellagio fountains and botanical garden. The holiday display is my absolute favorite of all the Bellagio seasons! Christmas trees, poinsettias, penguins; They even have enormous polar bears made out of carnations (18,000 carnations!).
• Sunday. Chris was sustained to his new calling. 1st councilor in the Bishopric.  Wish us luck on our new adventure. Anyone have good tips for keeping four kids reverent during sacrament meeting?
• Spontaneous Library Time. Today the kids and I visited the library and checked out armloads of books. Then we came home and had a pizza party and a read-a-thon. Is there anything better than three snuggly kids and a stack of new books to read? I love hearing my kids laugh at the silly stories! Zach’s favorite today was The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. No surprise there! What little boy doesn’t love pure mess and chaos unleashed through the house?

Happy December all! I hope you all had a chance to enjoy the Christmas devotional.

The weather’s gotten a little colder here, and unfortunately some evil ice nymphs broke our heater. But we’re keeping warm with some space heaters. It’s actually kind of nice having different temperatures for different rooms. Now I know my kids are nice and warm.

Warm heaters don’t solve all the problems of getting out of bed in the morning. The other day I was getting Zach up and he rolled over and smiled like he’d had a nice dream and announced with a happy smile that “I think I’ll just stay in bed and snuggle with my warm blankie instead of going to school today.” Such politeness! Wouldn’t it be great if the world worked like this? Cold mornings everyone gets an extra hour for warm-blanket snuggles!

In other news Katie walks! Okay, she has for awhile, but it has solidified in her mind that she is a big person, just like all the other kids running around here. The other day we were laughing at this Draw a Stickman website and she came laughing up behind us with a loud “Ha HA HA!” I swear she was thinking “I don’t know what’s so funny, but it sure is fun to be doing what everyone else is doing!”

Speaking of laughing, we rented Cars 2 for Zach’s birthday and Wow! I’ve never heard that kid laugh so lard!

Other side note: We’ve been trying to do better at family home evening. Usually we start with the lessons, because that’s the most important part, right? …along with some weeping, and wailing and nashing of teeth….Anyway, inspired by some talks from conference we decided to restructure. We start with games and treats (you know, hoping to get our kids excited and BEGGING to have FHE), and then shift into song and prayer and lesson. This way, if we don’t get past the games and treats, at least we connected as a family and made some memories! The last two weeks have gone well. Chutes and ladders one week and then yesterday we took homemade bread around to several families (one of our favorite Christmas traditions…). I have to say, there was considerably less screaming from everyone involved.

Anyway, I know there’s all sorts of great websites out there with FHE ideas, but I was wondering, what are some of your favorite family home evening memories?

When we moved to Las Vegas, we started celebrating my birthday at Zion’s National Park so I could enjoy the beautiful fall colors. Isn’t my husband awesome?

We found some wild turkeys (just weeks before Thanksgiving…)

and some more crazy turkeys…I mean, my kids….

We spent some time playing by the river. One place we built some awesome rock cairns, and in this picture, this is moments before Zach fell in the water. He says it was very cold.

We also enjoyed some nice hikes! Look at the gorgeous fall leaves.

Can you see the emerald pools behind the red leaves?

Katie says lets go play! and food is yummy!

Josh says, I’m cute, and I’m glad that I didn’t fall and crack my head open this trip. (Me too, Josh. Me too.) Overall, my kids are just happier outside.

Here we are in a cozy little nook we discovered just off the beaten track.

Nice little romantic spot with waterfalls.

More leisurely walks through the colorful canopies.

My kids are checking out the water skeeters. They were quite amazed at the bugs ability to walk on water.

Happy kids! Happy trip! Can’t wait to go again!

And what is a birthday without a cake? This was Zach’s cake. He asked for a blue castle (he was more than a little jealous of Andi’s pink castle for her birthday), so we gave him a blue castle, with a little something extra! Dragon!! Zach’s really in to dragons right now, as you could probably tell by his Halloween costume. He got a toy dragon and we also watched How to Train Your Dragon (and Cars 2).

The cake was thoroughly devoured.

Happy Halloween!

I used to think that this holiday was so silly, but now I have kids and it’s so much more fun. Let’s look at the costumes, shall we?

Here we have Andrea in her beautiful Sleeping Beauty dress (the hat would never stand up for us). We borrowed it from a friend and Andrea wore it every minute that she could. She actually sobbed when I made her take it off for bed.

Isn’t she adorable?

And here is our very scary dragon Zach! for the entire month he told me how he was going to be a scary dragon and “scare the pants off of dad.” We were going to make a dragon costume, but at the last minute our friend (who has boxes of Halloween costumes) brought this over for us. He actually won an award for his costume at our ward trunk or treat. The funniest costume of all; he made the bishop fall over laughing. Zach was quite pleased with himself, to say the least.

Katie our little Piglet. The cutest little piglet I’ve ever seen! But I don’t think she particularly cared for her costume, or maybe it was the fact that her brothers and sister kept chasing her around and pulling her tail. She is taking some steps in this picture! She’s getting braver and braver with the walking!

But she still loves to crawl!

Josh wore a costume too, for about 30 seconds. So a group shot will have to show you our Prince Charming.

Whoops. Too slow, he’s already ditched his hat. But then again, why would Prince Charming wear a helmet when he had such beautiful golden curls?

And here’s a group shot just before the we took a treat over to our neighbor. You can’t really tell, but Zach is wearing my Sunday shoes in this picture. I guess that technically this is a girl dragon… But no wonder after 10 minutes of trick or treating he was ready to go home (or maybe it was the distance we had to walk between houses ….not many houses on our street give out treats on Halloween.)

Earlier during the day I made them our usual green smoothies, but today it was called Witches’ Swamp Slime; created with gross ingredients like werewolf saliva (orange juice concentrate), dragon tears (water), swamp weed (baby spinach), and witches’ warts (frozen blue berries).Way to mess with my picky eaters! (Bwhahhaha!) I finished off by reciting magic incantations and waving my magic wand (my mixing spoon) and magically turning on the blender.  I think they were secretly delighted, buy my timing was bad. Zach was mad about something from earlier (Andi stealing his toy and time outs or something) and so he would say “No it isn’t! Call it by it’s real name! I’m not drinking that!” But by the time I used magic to turn on the blender he was asking where I found my witches warts.

Later we made spiderweb snacks. Zach, still kind of miffed from earlier whispered in my ear, “Tell me what they really are and then we can pretend they’re spiderwebs.”  “Pretzels, white chocolate chips, and raisins,” I whispered back. The raisins were supposed to be the spiders (I was too lazy to pipe them out of regular chocolate chips), but by the end, my kids were having so much fun with our gross monster food that they were pretending the raisins were the flies stuck in the spider webs. And you know what, raisins do kind of look like gross little dead flies. Ugh. Our spiderweb snacks ended up looking like this.

By the time dinner rolled around Zach was only too happy to pretend our tacos were bat wings. “And I hid in the dark and when they flew by I cut off their wings with my knife,” as he told his dad. And that’s where you get bat wings. We also had spider deviled eggs. My kids had too much fun pulling off the legs to eat them.

After dinner we carved our pumpkins

Zach drew the face for the pumpkin on the right. Do you like the warts on the end of its nose?

Me and Andrea carved the one on the left. It also says Boo on the back!

I have to say that Zach and Chris did a great job with this pumpkin!

Unfortunately, someone smashed it when we walked around the corner to our friend’s house. Seriously? We were only gone 20 minutes. Why couldn’t you have smashed mine?

(Side note: Dear Jerk, I wish you could have seen the tears and sad cries of my broken hearted 5-year-old because of your thoughtless actions. Don’t worry. We cheered him up by telling him how your pants caught on fire and you had to go to the doctor’s to get LOTS of shots, and then you lost all your Halloween candy).

Dear Everyone else, we also had a mini lesson on forgiveness and letting go of mad feelings.

Oh, we also celebrated Halloween by having a pizza party and watching Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit.

Whew. Holidays are so much more fun to celebrate with kids!

October is one of my favorite months! We kicked off the month with home made donuts and hot apple cider. Welcome fall! We also enjoyed the primary program (which was awesome with my singing kids!) and had a ward service project where we assembled 205 humanitarian kits (and because we had so many people show up it only took us 13 minutes to assemble all the kits). Later we were going to have a pumpkin potluck, but made a quick trip to Provo instead to celebrate my dad and my Grandpa’s birthday! One night we went up the canyon for a picnic, a bonfire, and the absolutely stunning leaves. Oh wait! I think I have some pictures of those!

Josh enjoy the chips and cookies. And when he finished with those he entertained himself by using the hot dog roasting stick to stab all the dry leaves and then burn them in the fire…

Katie learned the joy of chips and dip..

Zach got some good quality time with the uncle Rob

And then we got lots of yummy produce from the Williams’ garden.

We finished the month with the ward trunk or treat and then Halloween! Oh and Chris put in our sprinkler system and planted grass for us! Go Chris!!

All month we’ve been enjoying our Halloween books (nothing to scary because I don’t want to wake up with nightmares!) I thought I’d create a list for next year (These are all picture books, just so you know).

Top Three (I think we read these every single day):

• Room on a Broom, by Julia Donaldson
• Big Pumpkin, by Erica Silverman (Andrea can actually recite this entire book)
• Too Many Pumpkins, by Linda White

Others We Read and Enjoyed:

• Berenstain’s The Berenstain Bears Trick or Treat
• Sally M. Walker’s Druscilla’s Halloween
• Nancy Shaw’s Sheep Trick or Treat
• Margery Cuyler’s The Bumpy Little Pumpkin (Zach really liked this one too)
• Margery Cuyler’s Skeleton Hiccups
• McNamara’s How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin
• Helen Cooper’s Pumpkin Soup
• Kevin Somer’s Meaner Than Meanest
• Emily Homer’s Excuse me, Are you a Witch?
• Cambria Evans’ Bone Soup
• Lisa Brown’s  Vampire Boy’s Good Night
• Arden Druce’s Halloween Night (Beautiful pictures!)
• Elizabeth Hatch’s Halloween Night
• Judith Moffatt’s The Pumpkin Man (beginning reader book)
• Tom Brenner’s And then Comes Halloween

Last, but not least, my favorite Autumn book is Numeroff’s If You Give a Moose a Muffin.

What books did you read this month?

In August, Chris’ brother got married in Colorado. And since we were
headed in that direction anyway…well, we just decided to explore the
local National Park. It’s a pretty one!

Most mornings we slept in, but on the last day we were up early to see the sun rise. I think we changed our of our pajamas around noon.

At one point we came around the corner, and an entire herd of elk were sitting in the road.

Our little hikers made it all the way to the waterfall! Hooray for no more kid backpacks.

Oh yeah. We did make it to the wedding on time too!

Such a pretty temple, and such a beautiful wedding! Thanks for joining our family Jen!

On the way home, we took the scenic route, stopping in Black Canyon of the Gunnison for some incredible views! “No other canyon in North America combines the narrow opening, sheer
walls, and startling depths offered by the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.” (quote from gunnison-co.com). Yeah. the kids stayed in the car for most of this quick visit. Maybe next time…when they’ve learned a healthy fear of heights.

It was here that we learned to make popcorn on our camp stove. Wow. That was pretty awesome too!

And continuing on our journey we found a nice little park in a neat little town.

The slides were enormous!! I didn’t know that safety regulations allowed such fun things to be in the playground anymore!

It also had this huge rock climbing thing. Chris was in love.

All in all, a great trip! Trips like this make me excited to plan our next adventure!

One thing we’ve been meaning to do for the last few years, is to take our kids camping on the beach. We finally did it and WOW! WHAT an AMAZING trip!! Weeks later my kids still talk about it, asking WHEN can we GO AGAIN! and just the other day Andi was drawing a picture and said these are my two favorite places: grandma’s house and the beach. It’s nice to know what matters most to these kids!

Zach couldn’t get enough of playing in the water. This supports my theory that he’s part fish. We had to keep a close eye on him to make sure he didn’t get washed away! (although I’m almost certain he’d feel right at home in a merman’s castle).

We got there kind of late the first night, just before sunset and so we told the kids only to go in up to their knees. Silly me! Of course, three of my kids were soaked in the next five minutes. Andrea got tumbled by a wave and only entered the water if she could hold tight to Chris’ or my hand. She loved standing in the surf and feeling the sand being sucked away around her feet.

Josh fell in love with the sand. I think the entire trip he was intent on digging and dumping the sand into huge piles.

Katie, for the most part was content to lie in her crib and watch the people next to us try to catch seagulls (and they actually succeeded once or twice!). Apparently seagull catching can be pretty boring, so she spent a fair amount of time dozing too.

So much fun! I felt like a little girl playing out there. These pictures make me so happy thinking about the fun time we had out there! (even if I am in a swimsuit. Blah).

Ah, here we are lounging on the beach, and Josh busily trying to construct a shelter so we could stay there forever.

Hair in the eyes and feet in the sand. We’re definitely happy and tired!

So glad there were no tsunamis on our trip.

And here’s our handsome photographer! Chris enjoyed jogging on the beach, and I got to go for a couple of walks.

Yes, we literally played there till sunset one night…

Zach waiting impatiently for us to say that he’s “warmed up” enough so that he can rush back out to the water…poor kid was shivering so much he couldn’t talk straight. But he was still ready to go back and play in the ocean!

What a beautiful trip! Can’t wait till next time. And there will definitely be a next time.