Merry Christmas!

I'm not sending out Christmas cards this year. I'm saving paper or maybe I'm just feeling a little lazy. Also, everyone who I would send a Christmas card to probably reads this blog. So this is my virtual Christmas card. We took some family pictures while my Mom was in town to help us out. I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, considering we took them ourselves and spent about 15 minutes taking pictures. I guess it's not too hard to get good photos of really cute kids.

So wishing all of your families a very merry Christmas this year!

P.S. Have you seen this video and this video from the Mormon Channel? I love them, they are both such good Christmas videos.

Thanks for helping us take family pictures Mom!

November 2013

We got so excited for Christmas in November that we probably put our Christmas tree up the second week of November. We have a fake tree so we can decorate early and since we are going to be gone for Christmas I decided we needed to put it up early to really enjoy it. I also just really love twinkly Christmas lights in my living room.

My Grandma stopped by for a quick visit in November. Tucker's doing something crazy in this picture and Halle's belly is hanging out, but at least everybody's happy.

We have a lot of duplos, so we can build some pretty awesome things. Sheldon checked out an architecture book from the library for Tucker and Tucker's favorite building was the Empire State Building. So of course we had to build our own. I think it turned out pretty cool and it was very structurally sound.

 Finn just being his cute self. He loves to climb into our toy boxes.

One of the coolest things we did in November was go to this Family Festival at UVU. It was sponsored by a credit union and the kids got 'money' to spend on different activities. They had so many bounce houses, games, and even cotton candy and popcorn for the kids to buy. Tucker and Halle still talk about how they want to go back to that place.

 I was so excited to attend a turkey pardoning at Thanksgiving Point. Governor Herbert pardoned the turkey Lucky Tom and he will spend the rest of his life at Thanksgiving Point instead of on someone's dinner table. One of my favorite episodes of West Wing (which is one of the best TV shows ever if you haven't heard of it) is the episode where the president 'pardons' a turkey. It was exciting for me, but much less exciting for the kids.

We had an awesome Thanksgiving Dinner at Brendan and Dahlia's house. Turkey, ham, real mashed potatoes, pomegranate salad, sweet potatoes, and two kinds of pie were just a few of the foods we ate. There was so much food I could only eat a little bit of everything. That's the great thing about Thanksgiving, there's always lots of leftovers! I love that Tucker and Halle can now eat at the "kid's table." I have many good memories when I used to eat at the kid's table with my cousins. After eating lots of food we played some games while Tucker and Halle watched Claytin play video games. They have so much fun just watching him play video games and watching him do silly things with his characters on the TV.

 It was a nice enough day on Thanksgiving that we could head to a park and burn off some of the many calories we ate. Finn's favorite thing is just to climb around at a park, if we go on a walk and he sees a playground he will point and yell until we go over to it.

October 2013

October was such a great month with perfect fall weather. It's always a good year when you can make it to Halloween without snow. We started out fall season by heading to the Harvest Festival at Thanksgiving Point. There were giant pumpkins for the kids to check out, pumpkin carving to watch, and the kids favorite, doughnut eating.

We had a new nephew born at the beginning of October. It's always so fun holding little newborn babies, especially since Finn is no longer a little baby. Some kids are easier to hold once they get bigger, they cling to you and help you carry their weight a little bit. Finn is definitely not that way, he's always leaning out of my arms as far as he can.

So many fun days at the park by our house. Oh how I miss the warm weather. Good thing we will be heading to California for Christmas! 

 This year for Halloween we decided to go with a teenage mutant ninja turtle theme. I think this may be our last year going with a theme, because it was hard to find something that Tucker thought was cool and would work for the whole family. I do think our turtle costumes turned out pretty awesome. Tucker wanted to be Michelangelo so he could have nun-chucks and Halle picked out the blue ninja turtle, Leonardo. It's funny how our kids change their favorite color every week. Halle used to love pink and purple, now she usually picks blue. Tucker's favorite colors right now are yellow and purple, which is very surprising because he used to hate purple. Finn got to be the pizza because the ninja turtles love pizza :) I was the news reporter, April, and Sheldon was Casey Jones.

 I love the pumpkin walk at Central Utah Gardens. This is a funny picture of Tucker, I think he is squinting because it was hard to see with his mask on. They played some fun games, watched a demonstration on puking pumpkins, saw some animals, and ate donuts.

 One of the games they played was raking some leaves into a circle. You can't blame them because we don't have a yard to rake leaves, but they were terrible at it. It was really funny to watch them. They tried their best, but really just managed to spread the leaves around.

 Tucker at his Halloween Parade at school! 

 Cutest ninja turtles ever! We had a great time trick-or-treating.We even saw someone riding on a real horse dressed up as the headless horseman. It was pretty realistic looking and the kids were a little bit freaked out about it. Tucker is old enough that I can no longer steal candy from his basket without him knowing about it. While we were trick-or-treating I ate a pack of M&M's from his bag while he wasn't looking and a few minutes later he asked me, "Where did my m&m's go?" I quickly distracted him by showing him another door to knock on. Halle is still young enough I may have eaten a lot of her candy. Suckers are really her favorite, she was happiest just eating her dum dums.

I carved the Mike Wazowski and Sheldon carved the boogie man. I think they both turned out really cool this year. Just so you know, Sheldon is the fastest pumpkin carver ever. It took me about an hour to carve my pumpkin and Sheldon was done in ten minutes.

They day after Halloween we went to a Dia de los Muertos Celebration at Thanksgiving Point. It was really interesting to learn about the Day of the Dead Holiday, I think we might have to celebrate it next year. It's mainly a holiday where you remember your ancestors and we don't really have a good holiday where we do that. 

Our ward is always good about taking family pictures at ward parties. I'm so glad they got one good shot of us all together and everyone is looking at the camera!