boys and a girl

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Let it SNOW!!!

Only in Utah would you see something like this! Notice his shorts!! Even Gregg who wears shorts probably 300 days of the 365 days a year wore pants and a coat to blow the huge snow storm we had this past weekend! But our neighbor is hilarious! We enjoyed getting a shot of this.

But aside from the snow blowing we had a blast playing in the snow. Our other neighbor got out his 4 wheeler and took the boys sledding around the streets (that didn't get plowed for 2 days!). They looked like they were having so much fun and I just couldn't help myself. I joined in. I did that with my very good friend Cameron growing up all winter. They had 3 wheelers and 4 wheelers and pulled us around on tubes all winter. (Such good memories! I miss my good friend!)

Hopefully the boys can have as good of memories as I did. They braved the cold and snow with me!

On a side note. The boys were just fine. They didn't get hurt. I am sure this is probably not legal and I know it can be pretty unsafe, but they still had fun and Jon our neighbor was really easy on them. Me on the other hand I guess I am not as young as I want to be! I was bruised from head to toe! I had a hard time sleeping that night because my ribs were so bruised. My shins and hips are pretty banged up too, but man! I will still do it again if he gets it out this weekend with the new storm! WOOHOO!

Christmas Morning from Santa

Santa was good to us this year! Man, I thought my boys deserved some coal! But I guess I was wrong. The boys had a ball!

Some of their favorites were Jaxon's trade federation battle tank and clone wars game for the wii.
Kaden's favorites were the clone wars game for the leapster and his digital camera!
Zeke was really easy to please with Thomas stuff and a race track!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Yes indeed this has been the most wonderful time of the year! I love getting together with family and just hanging out! This year we were lucky enough to host Gregg's side of the family on Christmas Eve and my side of the family on Christmas day!

It was so much fun! I am so lucky to have Gregg to help out so much. He really did. If it weren't for him I think I would have been a basket case! He really helped. I made 15 dozen rolls, a turkey and 2 hams! Along with the plethora of before mentioned candies and goodies!

But my family are such health nuts they hardly ate any of the chocolate fountain and candy. Gregg's family ate as much as I thought should have been eaten (and some of the candy walked off the plates at the end!--which was so much appreciated!).

All in all, it was such a good time to just relax and enjoy each others company. I really do love to just catch up with each other and keep in touch. Thanks so much for coming over and hanging out and spending your Christmas with us! We love you all!

Stop the insanity!!! PLEASE!

Oh my goodness this year was crazy. I baked and cooked and baked and cooked straight for about 2 weeks! I love another one of my traditions I have had since I was little of making Christmas Candy. This tradition has been to make English toffee, peanut clusters, and butterscotch pretzels.

As a kid one of my good friends Diana Francis' mom always made home made caramels. They would give us a cup of them every Christmas. I would usually sneak the cup away and devour the whole cup before anyone else got any. I later added that to my yearly tradition.

And another one has been to make Rocky Road Popcorn. This delicious popcorn goody consists of a twist on caramel popcorn mixed with white chocolate, peanuts and marshmallows drizzled with milk and dark chocolate (could there be anything else better?).

How could I forget my last tackle? This year I finally found a fudge recipe that was to die for!! Gregg is quite the fudge fan. In fact every year he would get his own special pan of it from one of his friends mom. So I had quite a lot to live up to. I have tried to make fudge about 5 times to no avail! This year my sister Leslie gave me one of her in-law family recipes and it won!! Oh my gosh it was so so good. It was so good in fact we all ate 3 lbs of fudge in about 3 days!!! I made another batch with nuts for Gregg!

So that was my stint on candy this year and boy was it STUPID! Why do that to yourself? I have no idea. I also made the mistake of not letting anyone snack on the candy before Christmas and now on the 28th of December I still have a TON left! Oh it so has to be gone by next weekend!!!

Christmas Eve

On Christmas eve every year we have a fun tradition. We always put our family Gingerbread house together. For the first couple of years Gregg was a little bit of a grump about it. But after he realized how much fun the kids had with it he totally took over and had fun with us. He likes to take command and be our family contractor!
This year we took a change to the roof. We added the boys favorite cereal...Cinnamon toast crunch.
Kaden and Zeke both had a ball....
the end result was so cute....I love our house that love builds!

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Temple Square

Last weekend we were lucky enough to spend the afternoon with my birth-son Tyson. He is such a great kid. He is now 14 (almost 15!). He is part of a great family. My boys love to hang out with him and miss the short time we have while we are together. He is a great basketball player and we are planning on going to watch him play. We went to see the lights at Temple Square. We went a 'little' early. We had quite an agenda we had to attend to. So as you can see the lights were not even on for the first 15 minutes we were there. But that ended up okay. We got a few great shots with the beautiful sunset. It was only in the teens that night and we were a bit frozen, so after the lights came on we headed out.

We finished off the evening devouring yummy Mtn. Mike's Pizza and went bowling. I won't embarrass Tyson and reveal his score (which only ended up 2 less than mine!), but Kaden won all of us!! He thinks he is quite the little Bowler and wants to play professional?! It is really comical to watch I don't know how he ended up with the strikes and spares he got because he just chucks the ball off the railing and the ball bounces from rail to rail the whole way down! In Tyson's defense I don't think he had been bowling for a long, long time. We came back to our house and played a mean game of arcade basketball (one of which he needed to reedeem himself on as well) and toasted Gregg's record. He got 102 points in 1 minute. Gregg had previously held the record at 99 (although no one was around to verify this!).