Thanksgiving and stuff

Carson pointed out that I totally stink at blogging this year. Unfortunately, I also stink at taking pictures, and that plus four kids (read: my insane life) means I have neither the time nor the incentive to blog. But he's been working super hard and getting up early to teach Seminary, and tonight came home from work at 7:30 so exhausted that he went straight to bed after putting the kids to bed. And I had to upload some pictures to Costco anyway so I thought I would upload a few (dozen) to our blog so he can stop feeling any pressure to update it.

Caeden is in Mrs. Cloud's preschool (we love her!) and here they are at the pumpkin patch (Caeden is in the green hoodie, in case you couldn't tell which spastic child is mine)



With Halloween on a Sunday this year and an informal trunk-or-treat on Saturday night I neglected to get any pictures of the kids in their costumes this year! Sorry Cerola! But they love their Halloween shirts almost as much as their costumes:


and of course the candy is the important part anyway

I put up some Halloween decor courtesy of my Silhouette:



we also got a black light and these webs that are supposed to glow but they didn't really

and I took most of our fall decorations up to the office so I had to buy some new ones... I won't lie, I was super excited about that!


We had awesome weather at the beginning of November and the chickens were loving it

and Aspen was loving her swing


and the yard looked amazing and things started to bloom again... until it snowed and all those new green things looked like wilted spinach hanging from sticks




Trey and Becks actually still like to dress alike- this day they did it by accident and thought it was so cool they wanted me to take a picture. Their classrooms are right next door to each other at school, even though they are 4 grades apart!

We drove to Utah for Thanksgiving and after snowstorms on the way there and on the way back (and a very long drive with little kids) I think it's safe to say that we won't be driving in the winter again... it wasn't too dangerous if we took it slow, but it's the SLOW part that was killing us! But it was really fun to be there with Carson's family. We took a family picture on the morning of Thanksgiving, and the setting was beautiful but it was so bright that none of the kids would look at the camera! This is the best we got (note to self: if you wear a white jacket, BUTTON IT UP if you don't want to look ginormous)

Carson's sister Kristin's boyfriend Chris Cumerford's family came (got that?) Thanks guys, for our only good picture of Thanksgiving

unless you count this one, which, sorry Rees, but I think is cancelled out by the following pictures of your son




Cody & Lisa have the perfect eating area for Thanksgiving dinner, can you believe they can fit three full-sized tables between their kitchen and their family room?

and thanks Lisa for hosting!!

Jessica, you and Korina almost make up for Jaron

and this could have been a nice picture of Chris' dad without a glare (or something) from Cody

but there really is no excuse for this one... I hate the phrase LOL but I canNOT help but laugh out loud when I look at it!

So the day after Thanksgiving we headed up to Salt Lake to catch the lights at temple square and we were lucky that the Ericsons could come with us AND that we ran into our old friends the Bennetts! BUT unlucky that our camera battery died and this is the only picture we got!

and now we're into Christmas already. Aspen wasn't so sure about the Santa with a real beard at our ward Christmas party but Beckham and Caeden loved it... Beckham even sat on Santa's lap and said he wanted a race car set (?) even though he says he doesn't believe... and Trey played along nicely, he is {kind of} growing up!

Hopefully it won't take me 2 months until I post again? If it does, then Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Blog as Journal

I know a few others get part of their motivation for blog posting in their desire to keep something of a family journal.  Getting it on your blog is only half of the process.  Getting it in a more permanent form where you have permanent access to it would be the second half.  I have found the best option is to print it as a PDF file.  An easy way to do that is to use the following free program http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/.  Once installed you treat it like a virtual printer.  Instead of printing your blog on paper through your Canon printer, you tell the web browser to print your blog via the "PDFCreator" printer that will show up in your printer list after it is installed.  Since there obviously isn't a printer, you won't get anything printing out from anywhere, but what it will do is send the printing information to the program and turn it into a PDF.  Try it out and make your blog posts permanent.

Fam Pix

We took some family pix at one of our favorite Maple Valley places, Lake Wilderness.  Special thanks to Marcie for letting us boss her around and tell her where and how to take our pictures, she did great!  Thanks!  I messed up a few camera settings that left the pix a little less than perfect, but considering we had to work around four kids, they turned out fairly well. 

Aspen's Room

We haven't quite finished Aspen's room, but we've been putting my mom off for a long time in showing her some pictures.  So, here they are.  Just a few more things to do then it will be done.  Hopefully, before her first birthday!

End of Summer

I didn't take my video camera to the boys' soccer game so I made a couple animated GIF images of the rapid fire still shots I took of their goals.  Bex's shot gets clipped a little on the right side so click on the image to go to the full version.

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School started and Bex started his first day of kindergarten.  He obviously doesn't have the same fear of public displays of affection as does his older brother.

I can't believe trey is old enough to be in fourth grade!

Here are some unpolished pix of Aspen.  No time to post process :-(

Caeden looks so grown up in this pic that I couldn't resist posting it.

We never posted a picture of our patio furniture outside so here it is.

Never a good sign when you come outside and find your child naked on the top of the fence.  I'm glad he's comfortable with his manhood, but please learn some discretion!

Caeden showing off his newly found head stand skills.

We finally started doing some updates to our home last week in preparation for my bday party.  I wanted to hang these horizontally, but they were presents for Marisa so she got to choose vertical.  

The big surprise for my bday was our friends the Hesses and Curtises got together and bought me a couple hens and made a chicken coop.  I mentioned a few months ago that it would be kind of cool to have a couple.  They made a mental note and totally shocked us with these!  Becareful what you say around your friends.  It was great timing because we were considering getting a pet for the boys and now we have these.  They love them too.

We are very sad that our close friends the Curtises are moving so we named the hens after them.  It is a little weird referring to Brackon as a female, but we are getting used to it ;-)