Merry Christmas!

Every year we make a GIANT batch of sugar cookies for Christmas. I love the cookies and so does the whole family and although it is a tradition we will never give up... I am now realizing I enjoyed this a lot more when I was a child and had less responsibility in it.

Ok, this is something we have done since I was a kid. We all would wait down stairs in the basement where we slept and wait for my parents upstairs to call for us to come up to see if Santa came or not. We would all wait so patiently(as patient as kids can be) until we got the go ahead.

Well now the kids bedrooms are on the same floor as ours and so they have to run from their rooms to ours with out sneaking a peak down stairs until we go down stairs to see if Santa came. Here are the kids after we called them down, trying to see if it is so...

And here they are after they see that Santa really did come. So cute. We didn't have a plentiful Christmas this year, but to see the look on the kids faces is always worth a million bucks. I love these silly kids!! So I hope everyone had a good Christmas, and a Happy New Year to ya.!

Snow Days

Carson loves to shovel the snow, yesterday I think he went out 7 times to shovel. I guess having it snow all day long for 2 days worked out pretty good for the little guy!! He is a good helper, even though there are some days he makes me want to punch him, he is really a good little boy deep down inside.

Mack wants to help too, but his way of helping is chasing the shovel till it hits him in the face and then he runs after it again. It really slows down the process.

Lincoln wanted to clean off the trampoline, he did a pretty good job. When I looked out to see how it was going, I saw he was scooping the snow up and dumping it on his head. Huh, that was fun I guess.

Maycee and Lincoln stayed out a little longer and they made this very cool "snow fort". It looks a little like a casket, but they were so proud of it. They wanted to have me take lots of pictures of it for them.

They even put the big blue sled in front of it because it kept them warm in there, they are practicing to be on survivor man or something.

Maycee is very photogenic. If she wants you to, she will sit there for beautiful photos. She is a good girl. Oh, and those are the new glasses she got for the school year. She loves them even though they are not the ones I liked the best.:)

That's Better!

BEFORE......

AFTER!!

Maycee got the cutest hair cut a little while ago. Her hair was getting so long and the whole time it was growing out she wanted it cut. So I finally gave in, I just wanted to see what it looked like when it was long. It does look so much cuter short, it looks so healthy and shiny. So Thank You to Grandma Campbell who took on this task with a smile and made Maycee look so cute!!!

Let it snow...

The kids went outside to play the other day when we got some snow, and one of the boys came in and said, "hey come look what we did on the tramp" and I expected them to have taken their little red shovel and gotten all of the snow off. No, I was wrong, they rolled up all the snow and made it into this GIANT snowball, in about 2 minutes...

They rolled it off and made it into a great big snowman that was about 10 feet tall, I thought I had a picture of it but I guess not. It was awesome. They had lots of fun putting it together and then the next day they had more fun knocking it down.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I love, love, love Thanksgiving. I think it may be my favorite holiday. This year it was with my side of the family at my house. This is a picture of the bathroom door. The good news is that we have 3 bathrooms, the bad news is we don't have a plunger...ok we do now cuz we had to go buy one to un-plug the toilet. Anyway we had about 20 people here and the kids slightly out numbered the adults, so we taped off the bathroom so no one would accidently use it. Funny funny!

Here is part of the crew. We were getting ready to watch UP. It is the cutest movie ever. I don't think we have ever watched a movie on Thanksgiving before but it was really cute and we had so much fun that day. I have the greatest family ever:)

Oh my, this is the last of the trip to Cleveland... Here is Jenny and her lovely husband Josh...he made up a game called Lets stick grapes in our lips and look like silly pants. It made us all laugh so hard that our bellies hurt.

On Jenny's birthday we went for a day of shopping, just the girls and we managed to find a restaurant, Applebees and we had a girls lunch. It was so much fun and a big thanks to Josh for taking the day off work and letting the ladies do our thing.

Look how cute the Birthday girl is...yes there are candles in the ice cream and for some reason that really didn't seem that odd until right now. hmmm

It is hard to tell in this photo with my junky camera, but this is the house from the Christmas story, the real house. The leg lamp is just inside the window behind us. Who knew that movie was filmed in Cleaveland? Not me, till I was there.

OOOOh, the city. Turns out this is probably the most windy and cold day the city has ever seen. Ok, maybe not but it was freezing. We are standing outside the Browns football stadium, ya can't see it, it's to the right but believe me it's there. Shortly after this we drove into the hood, the gheto, the slums and it was quite frightning. I wanted to go see it so bad and I feel very lucky to have made it out of there with out getting a cap busted in my head. It was scary, they even had bullet proof glass in the gas station... I don't even like guns!!

I had the best time ever and I am so happy to have gotten to go an this amazing adventure:) Thanks to Jenny and Josh for letting us stay in their house, especially to Jenny because she didn't even know we were coming....and especially to Josh because he did know and kept an amazing secret for two months. UNFORGETABLE!!!

Kirtland day in Ohio...

I always knew that Kirtland was in Ohio, but as it is well known I am not very good with geography and I had no idea that my sisters house was, was only a half hour or so from it. We decided to go see it and it was so very cool. A lot of the little town is not the original buildings but they did their best at recreating it.

This store however is the original, the original floor boards and walls, and the door that we were standing in front of is the very door that has always been there. The couple missionaries that gave us the tour reminded us that it was the original door and that it is the same one that Joseph Smith walked through personally. The picture above is the store from the inside, very modest but useful, not WalMart by any means but very cool. They had guns and buttons, fabric, thread and grains etc. Maybe it was WalMart.

The main level of the store is the store and store room of course and then some modest living space. The upper level is all "house". Up there was awesome, they showed us the room where Joseph and all his men would meet and where Emma did typical wife things, like make them food. Also it was the home of the room that housed the first School of The Prophets. There are 2 prophets that I have been very impressed with, in a way that I feel like we could be buddies or family, President Hinkley and Joseph Smith. Not to underestimate the power of the others, but there is something about them that keeps them both very close to my heart. There is no doubt in my mind that anything either one of them has ever said is anything but the truth, so to be in a room where Joseph Smith recieved revelations was VERY surreal.

This is just a photo of the "town" how cute huh. Even though these are not the actual structures that have always been there, they have tried to re-create it to be as close to what it would have looked like as they could.

This is a picture of the Whitman's "summer kitchen" it actually had a door on each side so they could be left open and let the breeze come through, wow. I for sure would have never cooked.

This is a logging place, they cut the wood that was used to build the temple right here. Notice little Jack is having fun on one of the logs on the bottom.

I forgot what this building was called, but they did stuff with ashes and stuff to make another kind of substance. It was cool, they kind of created a place to help guys have a job etc.

And here we were in front of the Kirtland temple, we couldn't go inside, it was closed when we were there, but it was still very cool to see. It is amazing they could build something like this so long ago. We had a great time and the kids were so good, they totally trooped around on a "grown up" day. We did go to a yummy, yummy place for lunch called Penn Station, Jenny's favorite. It was a good ending to a very good day!!