It's Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas!

My BEST time of the year! I was determined to be organized and on top of things this year so that I could truly enjoy the evenings and time with my family. Sometimes I feel like the whole month of December flies by and i'm so busy buying presents, and doing neighbor gifts and Christmas cards etc that I don't just get to sit down and watch movies with my Family. Not this year! I made sure Christmas Cards were done at the beginning of the month. I came up with my neighbor gift idea and whipped up a ton of those and did my best to get those around. I did pretty good but always room for improvement.:) - We had a fun night making "ugly sweater" Christmas cookies. I love that Tate got so into it. He's at such a fun age.  He is already SO excited for Christmas and talks all day about it. He's the best. - Friday night Toby and I were able to get away and use a gift card that we have had for about 5 years.  We went to the Roof and sat right next to the window and stared out at the Salt Lake Temple and all the lights. It was truly magical and the food was amazing. Love date nights with my best friend.- We also got to our tradition of seeing Santa at the River Bottoms early on in the month. They've made it eve more fun this year with a "Smores" area and a train ride. We had Josh and the girls, and Jordan and Kristee. We shopped around some of the shops... The kids loved the toy store. We also walked through the provo beach resort. The kids are dying to go back there. After we kept with our tradition of eating at  Maggleby's Express. That place is SO ridiculously good to me. It was a fun night and we were glad to have some of the fam join us. - And the last picture is the kids opening up their December 1st gift…Their Lego countdown calendar. It's another must at this home. They look so forward to opening each individual little box and putting together their little lego creation. It's So hard for Tate to only do one a day. It cracks me up. What a wonderful time of year. Lots more Christmas activities to come!

Random Pics

Elle and Cash celebrating their awesome report card with their Dad haha - Tate hanging with his cousins- Elle and Cash on Nerd day…NERDS haha- Tate asking me to make him a bird costume out of a couple pieces of paper.  Wow. -  Elle and Cash on our date to Moana. Fantastic movie- Tate and Kemp hugging like they always do- Cash getting inducted in the Bears- and then a beautiful pictures of two oldest. I LOVE them all so much it's CRAZY!!!!

Thanksgiving 2016

There's a first time for everything and this year was my first year hosting Thanksgiving at our house! Now that doesn't mean that I cooked most the food or even the turkey for that matter but I did set up the tables and get that kind of stuff ready hahaha. - The night before we all went to Kathy's for wonderful Thanksgiving meal since Teren had to work on Thanksgiving day. I made sweet potato casserole, a ton of rolls, and green bean casserole. It was a really nice evening together. The next morning we woke up, put on the Macey's Thanksgiving Day parade, and started setting up for the big Thanksgiving meal. Everyone in my family came including Joni's family. I wish I would have counted how many people. My mom is a angel AND the hardest worker I know. She really knows how to make everything SO special. The display looked beautiful. It was pretty crazy I'll be honest but everything went off without a hitch and it was the perfect meal. It took quite a while to clean everything up but we really wanted to hurry because we were heading to Logan to do our tradition of spending the night in a hotel. That way we're closer to Preston so we can get there earlier to get our trees! Brilliant. This year we talked Josh and the girls into coming. We got there at a pretty good time, earlier enough that the kids wanted to go swimming. After I got some good Black Friday shopping in:) Then it was to bed so we could get up early and head to PRESTON. After our free breakfast of course. That's one of the best parts. - So I want to remember that this year getting trees was AWESOME! There was just enough snow to make it fun but not enough to make it hard. We went to the place we used to go to when we were kids and it was so much better than in past years. The kids got to ride in the back of the truck or get pulled behind it in a sled just like we used to and it was all just the best. If we could make it like this every year I don't think Toby would mind one little bit:) haha. Anyway it was a great time, one of my favorite days of the whole year, and the lunch after at the church with the Wimmers was fantastic away. So much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving. 

LOVE

My boys are so lovable. They are big time cuddlers and I wouldn't have it any other way. Kemp walk up to me numerous times a day and says "hug you!" It melts me. And Tate is constantly saying "Mom will you take care of me?" That pretty much means pick me up, hold me, cuddle me, tuck me in bed, just love me. And I will NEVER tell him no or I'm too busy. It's just the cutest little thing ever. I wish I could bottle them both up and keep them this age forever. Whenever my mom walks in the house he runs to her like he hasn't seen her in a month, she scoops him up, and he wraps his little arms around her for like a full 2 minutes. It's amazing. I'm so grateful these two are so darn sweet and LOVE like they do. It keep me going on their tough days because let me tell you they definitely have their tough days. But I love these two fiercely and am so grateful for them at the end of our little family. 

St. George Get Away and Glitter Mountain

Looks like we may have started a little tradition with "St. George Extravaganza" trip. We had so much fun last year we decided to do it again this year. We headed down to the sunny city with the Rothes, Ashbys, Shoffs, and Stevens and rented the big house again. It was so nice to just let the kids run free and play together and hang out with our friends. The house has it's own separate pool so even though it was a little cooler in St George the kids got plenty of swimming in. The girls got some time to go shopping, the guys got to watch the BYU game. There was lots of card and board games. Elle even got in on the all guys one. We took the kids to this awesome new park called Tonaquint Park and the kids were in heaven. We went to Fiesta Fun one night with the kids and the next night we got Brielle Kelsch and a couple of her friends to come over and babysit and we went out as couples to the restaurant Anasazi. What a fun place where you cook your own food right in front of you. That night after all the kids were in bed (except Elle..she said she heard us all night) we pulled out the game True Colors and I'm telling you I have not laughed that hard in a LONG LONG time. It was SO SO funny. This game pretty much tells you what people really think of you and we were all just dying at some of the cards and all of our answers. We played for hours and I loved every second of it. Fun fun night. The next morning was Sunday so after church we decided to take all the kids to a place called Glitter Mountain. Pretty funny story actually. It ended up just being us, the Ashbys and Rothes and none of us had been here before so Nate put the place in his gps and we all just followed him to find it. Well over an hour and half later we are driving on this remote dirt road covered in huge rocks in the middle of nowhere heading up this hill where we were certain we were all going to pop a tire and get stuck. Someone his gps had taken us way too far and we ended up turning around and finding it alright. We all got a kick out of it because come to find out we had went this ridiculously long way to find it and the whole time it was really like 20 minutes from the house we stayed in. Funny. Kind of. But once we got there the kids absolutely loved it. They had their own little hammers and tools to chip away at this little hill that was just covered in shiny rock. It was actually very cool and well worth the run around. Overall a very successful trip with some very awesome friends.

Toby and Cash's Birthdays

It was the week to celebrate TWO of favorite boys in whole world! It's actually kind of nice to have Toby and Cash's birthday so close to each other since we're just in birthday mode all week. Both boys got balloons on the ceiling and breakfast in bed with some gifts on their respective days. For Toby's birthday I had arranged with the Shoffs to have movie night in their awesome theater and to go to dinner earlier with a bunch of our friends: Shoffs, Rothes, Ashby's and Stevens. We went for Sushi at Tsunami and had such a great time talking and laughing. Then headed over to the Shoffs and put on the movie The Count of Monte Cristo. It was a great night. For Cash's birthday Toby and I surprised him and checked him out of school for Lunch and let him pick ANYWHERE he wanted to go for his birthday and you want to know where he chose?!… TACO BELL!!! What?! He and I differ in our choice of food quite a bit. But it was his birthday so the birthday boy got what he wanted:) After school we headed over to All Star Lanes and Arcades and celebrated both Toby and Cash with my family. It was so fun…Toby somehow talked the front desk girl into giving us a crazy ridiculous good deal on anything and we just played all night there. The kids really loved it. Bumper cars for adult and all. I had to throw on a couple of pics of Toby's old playing days. I love these two so much. They bring so much happiness and balance to our lives. Happy Birthday boys!!!