Thursday, December 24, 2009

Christmas Traditions

Every year we have some family Christmas traditions. Here are some of them:


This little guy on the blender is named Stephen our elf. Connor named him last year. Every night he flys back to the North Pole and reports to Santa if we are being bad or good. Every morning we find him in a different place in the house. He has really come in handy when we have needed to point out that Stephen is watching.

This is an ornament Trent and I got for our first Christmas. Every year we have bought an ornament. Sometimes it is to symbolize something that happened that year.

This is our ornament from last year. We bought it while we were in Hawaii.

Here is our little Christmas tree. Our kids enjoyed putting the ornaments on it.

Owen has become a little crawler in the last couple of weeks. He loves going to the tree and trying to grab any presents or ornaments in his reach.

Every year we take the kids to see Santa. Since we are cheap we take them to see Santa at RC Willey :). They even take the photo and print it out for you right there :).

After walking around the store for a minute Connor said he needed to go back to Santa. He forgot to tell him what he wanted for Christmas. He told him a Batman movie and a t-shirt. Santa said to go to bed early and to make him some chocolate chip cookies. Connor asked if it was O.K. if we made him gingerbread cookies because we already bought the mix for them. Santa said that would be great. It was pretty funny.

While at RC Willey we couldn't pass up the free hot dogs and soft drinks.

Another one of our family traditions is to go to the Festival of Trees. Here is Leah by her favorite tree.

Connor liked the Grinch tree.
We love the Christmas season and all the fun things we do together as a family. We also love the reason why we celebrate Christmas and are grateful for Jesus and his example to us.
Merry Christmas!

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Job Interview

Trent and I just recently returned from Iowa and Illinois. Trent was interviewing for a job out in Iowa and the company flew us both out to interview and check it out and see if it was somewhere we would like to move to. We brought Owen along with us (since I am his food source right now) and we left the other two crazies at home with Trent's nice mom.

Owen enjoying some alone time with his parents at our hotel.

John Deere's headquarters are out there. This photo was taken at their museum.

Owen and Trent

On Sunday we went to a small ward building surrounded by beautiful corn fields. Then we took a drive out to Nauvoo to see the Temple. It was beautiful. I wish we had more time to see everything.

After the Temple we drove to Carthage to see Carthage Jail. I was so glad we were able to go there. It was really emotional and we had a really neat missionary couple take us on the tour. His great great grandparents had lived in Nauvoo and her great great great grandparents had. She was actually a convert to the church. He shared such a beautiful testimony in the room where Joseph Smith was killed. Then he let Trent and I stay in the room alone for a minute.

We had a good trip and enjoyed seeing a part of the country that we had never seen. But, we were happy to see our other two rug rats.