Santa was Good to Us

We had a great Christmas filled with gifts and family and friends. McKay was happy with his "mostly mission" Christmas and Spencer was excited to get Wii fit and Megan almost burst with happiness when she opened her "BeDazzler".

Christmas Morning Excitement!

So, Christmas has come and gone and now all we have are the gifts and the memories. BriAnna and Kristopher were up at the crack of dawn (or maybe even a little earlier) to open gifts and have breakfast with his family and so our family decided to wait to open gifts until they arrived at our home. This plan seemed great to the parents (Doug and Melanie)and not so great to the kids (mostly Megan and Spencer). I woke up around 7 am and this is what I found when I looked in to see what Santa had brought for us.

I was going through my pictures today and trying to do some computer housekeeping and I came across these pictures of Megan and Spencer. The first few are of when Spencer was beginning 7th grade and the next few are of when Megan was beginning 7th grade, just three years later...they are growing so fast! I am not sure why Spencer thinks it is so fun to actually get in the locker, but he does. I am sure that soon he will not be able to fit in any locker.

Recently I was preparing hamburgers for dinner one evening and I could not get the jar of pickles open so I called on Spencer to help me out of this "Pickle". He came upstairs and muttered something about how I was such a girl and then proceeded to try to open the jar. After a few failed attempts, he seemed to be using his mind over matter technique and then after some pondering, he tried a few more times. Let me just say that at this point it had become a challenge and the jar of pickles was not going to prevail. His diligence paid off and in the end we had pickles on our hamburgers! Thanks, Spencer.

Good things are worth the wait

It seems that a good portion of my time lately has been spent in anticipation of upcoming events. We have been patiently waiting for our son to receive his mission call and it finally came last week! He will be serving an LDS mission in Scotland. We are so excited for him and know that he will have amazing experiences in Scotland.
Another event that we are still looking forward to is the upcoming birth of our first grandchild. The expected due date is at the beginning of January, but we are hoping for the end of December. The girls have been having fun making blankets, shopping and attending baby showers all for the new little one. We simply don't know how much longer we can wait.

So, I guess an update is in order. Many things have been going on and most of them are exciting. We enjoyed spending time with the Scott side of the family last month as a neice of mine was getting married in the Manti temple. It was a beautiful, yet somewhat brisk November day and my neice and her new husband looked so happy as they were married. I do have to say that it brought back a few memories of almost 23 years ago when Doug and I were married in the Manti temple in December.
The cousins had a great time spending time together and I think one of the highlights of the weekend was staying at an amazing cabin in Mt. Pleasant. We sure do love our family!!

Spencer's 16th birthday!

On Spencer's 16th birthday we threw him a surprise party! My good friend Kat whipped up this way cool invite and one of Spencer's good friends handed them out at school. Despite all of our efforts to keep this on the down low, Spencer had a pretty good idea what we were up to. He wasn't all that surprised, but it was a fun party anyway.

Instead of the traditional birthday cake and ice cream, we had one of Spencer's favorite desserts, grasshopper pie. There were so many candles on the frozen dessert that we had to hurry before it all melted. It is hard to believe that Spencer is already 16. Time does fly!

BriAnna, Kristopher and Megan all helped with the decorations...my favorite was the big happy birthday poster and the balloons. The kids played Rock Band, air hockey and Foosball and ate junk food and just did normal teenage stuff. Happy Birthday Spencer!!

Beacuase of UEA weekend, the kids had the day off of school so we went swimming at the Legacy Center in the morning.