The Past Couple of Months...

Ok, well I guess we can start with October - since trying to catch up with an entire year seems a bit crazy to me when it's December. So, bloom where you are planted and here I am.

OCTOBER:

Ryan turned 6 on October 7th and for a variety of reasons his birthday party was pushed out til almost Halloween. I am typically an over the top birthday planner, but I really tried to keep that in check this year. Instead of 20 kids we had about 10 and we decorated pumpkins for his birthday - so those were the treats for the kids to take home. They all loved it.

On his actual birthday, I made his favorite dinner Swamp Stew. G-ma came over for dinner, cake & ice cream. We also went to the Ritz Theatre here in Tooele to see Beverly Hills Chihuahua. It was a cute movie and we all enjoyed it.

So we started decorating for Halloween sort of early. Everything but our bride was on the porch waiting for little trick or treaters. I wanted to wait to put her out for a variety of reasons - one of which is that I was worried she would blow away. So Dan & I put everything up on 10/30 and it of course all blew over by the morning of the 31st. It didn't stop me though where there's a will there's a way.

I actually ended up weighing everything down with landscaping bricks but it was just really spooky. I had a couple of little kids who didn't even want to come upon the porch. I went down into the yard to hand out candy to them. I just love Halloween. It's kind of sad, the neighbors asked me if we would have as many decorations up for Christmas as we do for Halloween. I told them yes, but the available decorating weekends just got away from us. So, the truth is nope not as many out.

NOVEMBER:

Well as far as November goes. Let's see, we celebrated Dan's birthday. We had some friends over for Sunday dinner to celebrate. It was kind of crazy for me, I have never cooked for that many people. We had our family of 5, Brad Linnell's family of 5, and Darin. That was a lot, but it all turned out ok.

The next weekend we went to Texas for my nephew, Daniel and his wife Linda's wedding and reception. It was a very wonderful experience for all of us on many different levels. While we were there we also went to Fossil Rim Wildlife Refuge and I've included some of the amazing photos from there as well.

Amy & Rebecca at the Dallas Temple waiting for the bride and groom to come out for pictures.





Rebecca was able to feed the giraffe
at Fossil Rim when it stuck its head

through the window of the car.

Dan & David



My mom at the reception

Ryan and his special crown
the garter he caught at the
reception.

Emily & Aaron

This is Dan completely loving and sharing food with the animals at Fossil Rim. I think it would have tried to use its teeth if it had been able to get closer, but there is a huge set of antlers on this things head and he could not get all the way into the car.

December:

This has been a somewhat quiet December for us. Not a lot of hustle and bustle. I have really limited the shopping and we have been doing other things for Christmas. We baked a bazillion batches of cookies & brownies for the neighbors and this year to try and help the kids focus more on giving than receiving we made a reverse Christmas list. On this list we wrote down things that we would like to give rather than receive. Oh, the things on those lists were just amazing. Rebecca would like to give G-Ma the gift of us. She suggested going to G-Ma's house once a week or every other week just to spend some time with her. Robbie is super worried about me being cold all of the time so he would like to get a snuggie for me, which for those of you who don't know - a snuggie is a blanket that can be worn it sort of snaps around you. Ryan has noticed that Dan likes to give coins as gifts so he must like them because he wants everyone else to have them, so he wants to give Dad lots of coin things. It was a nice change of pace to watch them ponder over what they could give instead of making a list a mile long of what they wanted.

Dan has been working most Saturdays and so he was not able to attend Parents and Pancakes with us, but it was a lot of fun. We went to the school in our Christmas jammies and ate pancakes and sausage together and then wrote letters to Santa and mailed those. As we were leaving there was a vary special visitor at the school. The boys were able to get their pictures taken with Santa Claus.

Ok, so that was a lot of catching up to do. I will of course be adding to this within the next few days with G-ma's birthday tomorrow and Christmas coming right up here.