And Here Comes Christmas

 On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Alyssa and Ashley got to ride on a float in the Lehi City Santa Parade. They were on the float with their choir and then got to sing on these risers after the parade. It was really cold that day, so we waited with the boys in our car until the parade got to us.

On Friday, I took the kids to see Santa at the outlets. He was very nice, but Tyler was not a fan. He didn't cry, he just didn't look very happy on his lap. Later that day, we went to the Festival of Trees. I didn't get any pictures while we were there, but the kids loved looking at all of the trees. They also loved the fudge that I bought them when we needed a break from walking.
Yesterday, we had another opportunity to meet Santa. Edge Homes was hosting a Christmas event (and everything was FREE). They got to meet Santa, get a picture with him and Mrs. Clause, pick out a toy or candy, eat donuts, drink hot chocolate(which they served in actual mugs), and take home a balloon. The hot chocolate, by the way, was like drinking melted chocolate. So good.

 We are looking forward to more Christmas fun to come in the next 18 days. We are especially ready to get through the next week and a half so that we can have Danny around again.

Thanksgiving and Ashley's Devotional

We had a nice Thanksgiving. We felt fortunate to have my parents visiting for most of the week. They made a last minute decision to come to Utah for Thanksgiving so they could visit with a friend of theirs who has not been given much time to live. While they were in town, we took them to a BYU Basketball game with us. Apparently they are good luck because I won a $25 gift card for showing my Wells Fargo App on my phone and then my parents were given a Papa Johns Pizza from Cosmo for being the loudest fans(we're pretty sure it was the guys sitting behind them that helped win that one so they shared some of the pizza with them). Camden also made it on the baby cam. Our seats are right behind the basket on the front row, so that may be part of the reason for our good luck. Here are most of our kids enjoying the game with my parents. You can't see Alyssa, but she is right behind Tyler. 

We had Thanksgiving dinner at Danny's parents house and it was delicious.

The week before Thanksgiving was Ashley's school Devotional. She was chosen out of all the second graders to play the xylophone during one of the songs. She was so excited to be chosen and did a wonderful job of it. This is my first time trying this, but here is the you tube link: https://youtu.be/J8vChT0MYkE

I love the music in the 2nd grade devotional at their school. The last song they sing is called "A Chosen Generation." I truly feel like my kids are so much stronger than I when it comes to resisting temptation and doing what is right. They are chosen to grow up in a time when there are terrorist attacks and shootings and when the sanctity of marriage is being attacked. I pray that they will continue to make good choices and live up to the responsibilities that they have been entrusted with by being born in this time.

 

Happy Halloween, in December

 I meant to post these right after Halloween, and then life happened. Anyways, our kids were a racoon, Marshall from Paw Patrol, a pirate, and a teddy bear.

 This was our favorite Halloween decoration this year.

 And here are their pumpkins.

Family Pictures

We had a family photo shoot about a month ago. Here are some of our favorites.

 

Having great pictures is easy when the kids are so cute.

Pumpkin Patch Fun

Our kids have had the opportunity to go to more than one pumpkin patch this year. We took them to Cornbelly's last week. Then Tyler got to join Gawbie's preschool class at Hee Haw's on Thursday.

He loved the big white slide, the petting zoo, and picking out his pumpkin.

Just kidding, here is his real pumpkin.

Then we were invited back to Cornbelly's for no charge, so we took advantage of the invite. Tyler loved the minion. He kept calling him "silly guy."

On Friday, I took the girls to the farm right across the street from our neighborhood to pick out pumpkins for carving. I took this picture of the boys while we were waiting. I tried to get Camden to sit on the ground propped up against a bunch of pumpkins, but he wouldn't relax long enough for me to take the picture, so this is as good as it gets.

Now we just have to figure out when we are going to have time to carve our pumpkins before Saturday, especially since our kids are taking turns being sick right now.

Spelling Bee

Alyssa was in her school spelling bee again this year. She qualified to be in the school spelling bee by winning her class spelling bee. This year she was in the senior spelling bee so she was competing against kids all the way up to the 8th grade. Being in 4th grade made her one of the youngest competitors. As a result, we didn't really expect her to go very far. She did amazing. Here she is waiting for the spelling bee to start. She was chosen to go 6th out of 26(or 28 depending on whether you ask Alyssa or Danny).

She made it to the top nine, spelling 6(I think) words correctly. The highlight of the spelling bee was when she was asked to spell the word "mazel tov." Here is a video, but the word has 2 different spellings and she spelled it both ways for the judges. Little smarty pants.

We are so proud of her and openly admit that she can spell better than any of us. We have the feeling that she will have a few more spelling bees in her future. (I think that secretly she hopes to go to the national spelling bee someday.  We'll just have to see.)

Witchfest

I took the kids to the witch display at Gardner Village in West Jordan this week. We haven't been to see it since the first year that we lived here.  Even though it has been 4 years, a lot of the witch displays were the same. There was this lady sitting on a bench...

and this one using the outhouse.

I printed off a witches scavenger hunt this year and Alyssa had fun finding all of the witches on it. Ashley just had fun posing with all of the witches.

We invited Shannon, Kennedi, and Bree to come along. Here are all of the kids in front of the witch fishing with dynamite. Pretty impossible to get a shot with all of them looking at you.

 Here are some more cute pictures that I got.

After we finished the scavenger hunt, we stopped in at the Bakery to get the kids their cookie(for doing the scavenger hunt) and a donut(because they love donuts). As we were walking to the car, we saw a guy walking this baby alpaca around. Alyssa, Ashley, and Tyler loved petting it.

It was a fun afternoon.

Catching Up

Here is another catch up post. We took advantage of "Talk Like a Pirate Day" at Krispy Kremes this year. It will probably be our one and only time doing it since we were in line for 2 hours.  Danny and I decided we would much rather pay the $8 for each dozen than wait in a line like that again. Ashley insisted on wearing every piece of pirate attire that they had listed as acceptable on their website. We tried to get Tyler to wear the costume, but he wasn't into it so I ended up wearing his stuff to get our third dozen. I couldn't even eat the donuts because I was doing this fitness challenge thingy, but the girls enjoyed eating them for three days straight.
 

We took Casey to the Thanksgiving Point Gardens during their annual dog days. The girls thought it was so fun taking him somewhere besides the vet and they loved seeing all of the other dogs there. 

 Ashley had a field trip to the BYU Planetarium last week. I was able to go along, which she loved. I tried to explain to her how many hours a day I spent in this building during my college days, but I don't think she understood. She loved the planetarium show.

 We took the kids to our favorite pumpkin patch during Fall Break. We don't go there for the pumpkins, just for the fun. We happened to be there one of the 3 days that they had a dog show going on, so we got front row seats for it. The girls loved it. The boys...not so much. Here are some of the pictures from the day.

The Corn Maze was a Minion design this year.

 The kids all love this big corn crib. We buried Alyssa. She only got stepped on 4 times while she was under there.

 These wooden playsets are all over the pumpkin patch. They are different designs (airplane, truck, bus, boat, etc) but they all have a slide coming off of them. Tyler loved them.

 I meant to include this picture in my last post, but forgot. These kids sure love their Daddy. He loves them too!

September Happenings

I'm finding it difficult to find time to update our blog lately. You see, Tyler doesn't really take naps anymore. I really should enforce a quiet time, but he won't stay in his room for more than 2 minutes, so it doesn't really work. As a result, I pretty much have no time to myself unless the kids are sleeping. And by then, I'm exhausted and the last thing I want to do is sit at the computer. Another problem is that any time I even get close to the computer, Tyler wants to sit on my lap and watch home videos. That's a lot of fun, but makes it difficult to do anything for ourselves on the computer. Enough complaining though. As busy as they keep me, they sure are cute.

The girls are pretty cute too, especially when they spend time with their brothers. Here are some of the precious moments we've captured this month.

We did some fun things during the end of August and beginning of September. We took the kids to Alpine days and they got to do some fun things like the bungee trampoline, a zip line, a stunt jump, walking on water bubbles, and numerous rides. Tyler loved these swings.

We also did our annual end-of-summer trip to Lagoon. We had a lot of fun even if it isn't Disneyland or Six Flags.

 

  

  

Then there was the first day of school. I never got any pictures posted anywhere to document it, but they were excited to start again, especially Alyssa. So far both girls love their teachers and are having a good year.

I get to spend most of my day with the cute boys. Here are a couple of my favorite pictures of Camden this month.

He is trying to figure out how to use his body. He is constantly wiggling and grabbing at things. He hasn't rolled from back to front yet, but is very close to doing it. today his legs were flipped over to the front side, but the back of his head was still on the ground. I don't know how he was able to twist his body that much. He will be 5 months tomorrow.
Our family is enjoying the last bit of summer. We spent an evening outside this week and took a break from our trampoline jumping to take a trampoline selfie. Ashley insisted on having Casey in the picture with us since he is part of our family.

I hope to change my updating day to Sunday to be able to be more successful at updating more regularly. We are doing well.