Happy times

It's been quite a while since I posted so I thought I would share some pictures of what we have been up to lately. The weather has been beautiful and we have enjoyed spending a lot of time outside. Our kids couldn't be happier!

Spending time at the park. Do you think Kyson is liking that swing or what?




This afternoon I played outside with Caleb and Kyson while Jared made dinner. Caleb loves to push his cars up and down the little grass path we have in front of our house. I stuck Kyson in Caleb's big truck and Caleb pushed him around. I think he had a good time!




I kept trying to get a good picture of Caleb and Kyson together but Caleb wasn't cooperating so I told him to go give Kyson a kiss. Caleb ran over, grabbed Kyson's face and smacked him one right on the lips!


I told him to try again, but to just kiss him on the cheek.

On the House!

Today I signed into my ING mortgage account online and what did I see? I saw my mortgage payment made not by me but by ING themselves! Now you must be thinking that I must be seeing things but no! It's true. How might this be possible you might ask? Well, I won their On House Contest in December! They asked all of their customers to write a 500 word essay of why they deserved to have their January mortgage payment paid by them. I wrote my 500 words and I was one of the winners!!! Yay for me and THANK YOU ING!

Long lasting friendships

The Saturday after Christmas we enjoyed getting together with some of my greatest friends from High School and college. We had dinner together, reminisced about our days together, played the "What if" game, and exchanged gifts. We don't get to see each other enough these days so it is always so fun to get together. Thanks Salaina for organizing it all, we had so much fun!!!

Christmas day fun

We had a fun and relaxing Christmas day. Our boys had fun opening presents and playing with them.



Caleb really enjoyed playing with his new race track for his cars.

The Best Christmas gifts

The best gift I recieved this Christmas was having this little miracle a part of our family for his first Christmas.

As I took the time on Christmas to think about how blessed we are to have him a part of our family, I started thinking about all we have learned in his short life time. I have definitely gained a deeper appreciation of the Atonement of our Savior as I felt its complete comforting power many times. What a special day it was to celebrate the birth of our Savior while thinking about how much I relied on Him throughout the year.
I'm just so grateful for the precious gifts my children are to me and for our Savior who makes everything in this life possible and worthwhile.

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve was filled with playing games with my family, watching Charlie Brown's Christmas Special (Jared has decided this is going to be a tradition in our family), reading the Christmas story out of the Bible, and the boys opening one present. All of my family was together so we had a full house but it was fun!

Here are some of us playing sequence. I heard later that my brother-in-law Dallas never lost a game of sequence and we played it quite a bit! He's one of those people who seems to win every game even if it is 95% luck!


If you are around my family very much chances are you will learn how to play rook. My Dad loves to play it and all of us kids have grown up playing it. Here's my Dad, Jared, and two sisters; Jamie and Christy playing the first game of the night.


Before we went to bed the boys all got to open a present of Christmas pajamas.



Here are my boys all ready for bed in their snuggly pajamas! Merry Christmas!

SNOW

We went to Show Low for Christmas this year. When we got there Tuesday night there was quite a bit of snow on the ground. Jared decided the next day to take Caleb out to play in it so they got all bundled up and headed outside.


Here is the first snowman they completed. My little brother Stephen helped them build it. I think Caleb just enjoyed hiting it with his stick.

Notice the gloves at the bottom of the picture? Yes, those are Caleb's and he refused to wear them. He would rather just have cold hands than wear gloves...crazy kid!

They started building another one and Jared was the only one who stuck it out to finish it. I told him he needed two more snowmen to complete our family but I guess a Daddy and a Caleb snowman was enough!