12-16-11
Katelyn's quote of the day
"If I were the grinch I would know better."

Gingerbread houses with the Petersons

Jackson- Salt Lake Temple. Kevin- Santa's sleigh.

Jeffrey- Harry Potter Maze.

Kyleigh- Santa's workshop

Mike- Christmas on the Res

Rusty- Medeival Christmas

Holly- Gingerbread barbie house

Jeff- Gingerbread sandcastle.

Naiya- Curious George's house

Dawn- Mosaic

Apparently, I got a picture of everyones house except mine. Oops. We had loads of candy to choose from. Yum!

Thanks Petersons! We had a great time.

Christmas Packages

The ladies at the post office literally shouted in excitement when I walked in to pick up my packages yesterday. They needed the room.

1000

Rusty and I set a goal a couple of months ago to do be able to do 1000 squats and 1000 lunges (on different days) without stopping. We got the lunges last week and the squats this week. It took 35 minutes of nonstop lunges to get to 1000, and 40 minutes to do the squats. Congratulations to us!

We did our Christmas decorating just before Thanksgiving. I know, it's early. However, last year our tree was up before Halloween (we were leaving for Christmas, O.K.!). Katelyn did the honors of topping the tree this year. Kyleigh was as excited and helpful as usual. Ridge was HILARIOUS. I showed him how to hand an ornament. He looked somewhat interested. Then he walked over to Rusty and grabbed another ornament. He aimed high and threw the ornament as hard as he could at the tree. It fell to the ground, he picked it up and threw again. After a few tries it stayed on the tree. He proudly walked over to Russ and grabbed another ornament. We laughed so hard and Rusty said he remembers doing the same thing. So, by hanging and throwing our tree was decorated this year. The ornaments were fairly evenly spread out on day 1. By day 2 Ridge had pulled everything that was within his reach off the tree and it was thrown or hung up higher. On day 3 Ridge pulled out a baseball bat to see if he could knock anything off that was just out of his reach. By day 4 the tree was less exciting and he seems to be leaving it alone for the most part. He has now moved on to the candy filled advent calender.

Thanksgiving 2011

We were lucky enough to have Thanksgiving with Mike and Holly and the Keeps and Petersons again this year. We changed it up a bit and had dinner at Mike and Holly's. We were planning on going to a movie in the afternoon, but the day and evening were so incredibly beautiful that we wouldn't have wanted to be inside a theatre at all. We ended up hanging out in the back yard. The boys rode bikes and played on Mike's bike stunt equipment. Katelyn joined in the bike riding. The other kids played on the swingset. Holly and Dawn spent hours pouring over the ads for Black Friday. They left that night for Oahu and had a crazy black friday shopping weekend. I was smart enough to bring my computer so I worked on my blog book all afternoon. Everyone ate lots and lots of food and pie. I must say that an outdoor Thanksgiving, although not traditional, is fabulous.

Playing Indian

The girls play indian in the front yard almost every day. They collect the little green nuts from the palm trees and "hunt" and make food, etc. On Saturday they talked Russ into playing with them. They even gave him a chief's headress. It was a sparkly white headband wrapped around his forehead with two feather shaped pipe cleaners sticking out the back. Russ helped them collect nuts off the tree by lifting them up on his hand. Ridge joined in also. You can see they are in swimsuits. No surprise there, they are always running around in swimsuits. Russ later went and attached the machete to a broom stick and cut down a whole branch of nuts. The girls were so excited. Maybe Santa will bring them some supplies to play enhance the indian game.