Holiday Fun

We had a great Christmas and enjoyed getting to spend time with family and friends. It was especially good because Jake got most of the week off to be home with us. (Hopefully he will be coming back to a job in the Salt Lake Valley soon.) The kids got lots of presents and are happily playing with them, almost to the point of forgoing food and sleep. Guess thats a good thing though, it means they got what they wanted. We have been abundantly blessed this year, we love all of our family and friends and hope that the coming year brings much love, happiness and well being.

Look at those two kids!!

I had the idea of posting our wedding announcement picture and the one that we just had taken together the first time that I saw the new pic. It has just taken me a while to dig out the old one and get it scanned into the computer so I could. When I look at the old picture I really see two kids I can't believe that we have been married for 13 and 1/2 years...

Vernal

My whole family (well except Rhett's family in Texas, wish you could have come) went to Vernal on Saturday to decorate Trisha's grave for Christmas. It was freezing cold, so cold that the kids didn't even want to decorate the little tree. But it was good to go as a family and do it together. Then we went to both my Grandparents houses to visit. My Grandma T made wonderful homemade chicken noodle soup and rolls for us and it was good to visit with them. She gave me the recipe for the rolls and I am going to try and attempt them for my family. (I'll let you know how that turns out)

This is what happens when you let Jake help...

We decorated a gingerbread house last night for FHE, this was the first time I can remember that Jake has been home to help with the decorating (we usually do this during the day when he is at work, can you imagine why?) Even though everyone was a total mess we had a great time. I don't think that I will ever forger this night. And I don't know what that is on Jake I think it might be frosting on the lens of the camera!!! But as you can see we did get the house decorated, even Abbie helped, it was really cute. Sometimes she used frosting as the glue and sometime she sucked on the candy then put it on the house. And she put every piece on the one side of the roof. No one is going to be eating this house..

Family Pics--a got a copy!!

I have a digital copy of our family picture that I can post FINALLY. I would have had them sooner if I had gotten my act together and ordered my pictures sooner. Anyway here are some others we took that day. I will be posting more on my other site later when I get the whole shoot on disk, these are the ones that we ordered but there were so many cute ones that I will put them up when I have them.

Family Pics

On Saturday we drove to Morgan to have our family pictures taken by Jake's cousin Amanda. She does a great job, can't wait to see them all. I got a small (very small) sneak peak that night after we had taken them and they look fantastic. I will post some on here as soon as I can. We froze trying to take some outside (at least it wasn't snowing when we were trying to take them) but it was totally worth it seeing the results. Then we had to go indoors to finish because we all had red noses. Can't wait to get them ordered.

Living Planet Aquarium

I promised the kids that while Lexie was off track we could do some fun day trips, well this is Lexie's last week of being off track and we hadn't managed to have any "fun days". So today we decided to go to the Living Planet Aquarium, we have been there before and its fun, only pretty small I wish that there was more to it. They did have a new part that we hadn't seen before so that was good. Lexie and Ashton really like the jellyfish because they changed colors with the lights in the tank.


Abbie had a great time running all around saying "fish", but she was scared of the rays and didn't like the play part very much once she inadvertently put her hand on a pretend crab on the rock. She didn't want to go into any of the caves after that.

Halloween

We had a great Halloween, the kids had lots of fun trick-or-treating. Even Abbie figured out that candy was the reward for going to a bunch of strange people's doors and she was all for that. Here a pic of the kiddod on their way to Ashton's preschool party that was Friday.
Halloween night at my parents house, with their cousin Zach. (Josh wanted nothing to do with pictures)
And Abbie being adorable...

Lifting Burdens

I found this great video on the church's website...Lifting Burdens

Pumpkin Patch

We took the kids to get some pumpkins tonight. We tried a new farm and had a great time. They had a great selection of pumpkins to choose from and they had free tractor rides and a small, but fun, corn maze for the kids. I have bought veggies from them at the farmers market in Herriman so when I saw that they were doing a pumpkin patch this year I want to try it. I will definitely go back next year. I also can't believe that we could be outside in the evening (it was 5:30) and not need coats or even long sleeves to be comfortable, what a difference from past years when it has been to cold to have very much fun. Abbie loved the tractor ride, she didn't want to get off.

And the kids enjoyed the corn maze, even if Mom and especially Dad could see over the tops of some of the stalks.
The kids loved the display tractors too.

Ashton's Birthday Pics

It has taken me a whole month to get Ashton's birthday pics taken (I almost gave up on doing them myself and just went to Kiddie Kandids) but finally with a bribe of going out for sushi (yes, you read that right sushi) I finally got something that I could work with for his birthday pics. He is just at an age, or stage, where he doesn't want to hold still or look at the camera, I can't tell you how many pictures I have of him smiling so cute but looking out of the corner of his eye or up in the sky or down at ground but it way too many. This picture required some editing as it was but it is what we got. And he seems so much older than four to me in this picture. Love you buddy, happy 4th birthday.

Silde Show of Our Trip

Elk Video

Yellowstone Vacation

We have had a crazy last 6 months (or more) and really haven't had a family vacation this year. At the end of the school year last year Lexie put "go to Yellowstone" on her list of things she wanted to do this summer and it got me thinking that it would make a fun family vacation to do just that. We left for Jackson, Wyoming Tuesday afternoon and made it there about 6 that night. We stayed the night there and then started out the next morning for Yellowstone via Grand Teton National Park.


Because of a storm that came in that day you couldn't even seen the Tetons but we did enjoy the drive and the scenery that we could see. We stayed in my parents condo for a few days (in West Yellowstone) and had a good time trying to relax. If I had to describe our time in Yellowstone with 5 words (ok seven) it would be COLD. ELK, FORREST FIRE, ROAD CLOSED, and COLD.
First COLD: The weather just didn't want to cooperate with us, but my kids were troopers and braved the freezing cold and snow the whole time we were there. The temperature hovered around 40 for most of the time that we were there and Thursday it was even colder down around 30 I'm just glad that I packed our winter gear. Here is a picture of us a the continental divide where it was about 25 degrees. Ashton had been asleep so he was not happy to get out of the warm car.
The cold also made it a little hard to see the pools and gysers because they became big steam pits in the cold...Lexie and Ashton are in there somewhere

Next ELK: We were really liucky to get to see quite a few large bull elk up really close. These two pictures were taken from the saftey of the car, but we did have one close call where we were at the end of the boardwalk and the elk walked across the boardwalk trapping us momentarily at the end of the boardwalk I have video of it that I will try and upload later.

Third FORREST FIRE and ROAD CLOSED pretty much go together. There was a forrest fire on part of yellowstone that had one of the major roads closed and some road construction had another, so for the first two days we could only go from the south gate past old faithful to the east gate and that was all without taking a 4 hour detour around to Mammoth. There was plenty to see and do, any because they had never been before they didn't know what they were missing. But we found out late Thursday that they had put out the fire and were opening the road for select periods of time (6am to 8am, 12 to 1 pm and 6pm to 8pm) and we could actually get to the other side. So we got up at 5:30 Friday morning to get ready, eat and loaded up to make it to the gate that they were closing by 8. We made it at 7:56. Here is a picture of some of the lingering smoke from the hot spots that they were watching and all the burned trees along the road.

After getting to the other side we were able to see the falls and other stuff on that side of the park. It started out really cold but as the sun came up and started to thaw things out (it hit a balmy 40 degrees) we were able to shed some of our layers.



The coldest day thing was waiting for Old Faithful to go off. Just standing there on the boardwalk in the freezing cold was tourture but once the geyser went off

I am going to make a slide show with more of our pictures hopefully tomorrow.

Our New Addition

We found Ginger Saturday at the super pet adoption and the kids just couldn't walk away, so since we have been looking for a dog for a little while now she came home with us. Hopefully she will be a good fit for our family. She is super sweet and calm most of the time, but like most terriers she can get very hyper and excited, she just has a solid 45 pounds of muscle behind her when she does get excited. She is patient and pretty gentle with the kids which is something that we were looking for so hopefully we can figure each other out and she can stay forever....

Ashton's Birthday

Ashton's birthday was yesterday, I can't believe that he is FOUR!!!! We started birthday celebrations on Saturday with my family(Grandma, Grandpa, Lisa, Ben, Josh, and Zack...Heather and her family were camping) we went out for dinner at Red Robin and then back to our house for cake, ice cream and presents. Monday was a fun day, I made Ashton another cake because he requested a "thomas" cake that I could make for him. So feeling a mother's guilt after having made Lexie a guitar cake for her birthday I set out trying to find some direction to make a train cake. We did end up with a "train shaped" cake although whether or not it even vaguely resembled Thomas was debatable. Jake said that Ashton thought it was cool so that was all that mattered. Ashton gets to share his birthday with his Great Grandma Jenkins (Jake's Grandma) and they had a big party for her in Lehi so we went and celebrated with the entire family for lunch in the park, unfortunately Grandma Jenkins had to have her appendix out last Friday so she didn't feel up to much celebration but everyone got to go and visit her at her house for a little while.
Then we took Ashton to Sizzler for dinner because that was what he requested "I want crunchy shrimp from Sizzler" was his answer when we asked him what he wanted for dinner. We all enjoyed a dinner and then I brought Abbie home and put her to bed while Jake took the older kids fishing. They got a pretty late start so they didn't get to fish very long and came home empty handed, but happy anyway. As a last sugar rush to end the day, we ate Ashton's train cake.