Sk8r Grrrl

M's work had a Christmas Party for the kids at the local skate rink. They rented the rink for 2 hours and brought in pizza for everyone to eat. Santa even came and handed out gift certificates to Fred Meyers. It took us a while to convince K to put on skates, but once I told her I would put them on too, she was more willing to try. Here is a video of her after she had the skates on for 20 minutes. I think she was getting the hang of moving her feet by this time. If I can get M to go with us again, I don't think it would take long for her to skate on her own.

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree...

We went to the Christmas tree farm Saturday to pick out our tree. We decided to get a smaller one and put it up on a table so L wouldn't pull it down or break ornaments. We have high ceilings so we were able to still get a 6 foot tree. On Monday we decorated the tree for Family Home Evening. K did a wonderful job placing ornaments this year. She clumped them a little bit, but she did it in different places on the tree instead of in one spot. She also helped me put the lights on the tree and did a pretty good job.

Our tree.
K and me putting on the lights.

K placing ornaments.

Even M got in on the fun:)

Daddy helped K put on the Angel topper.

Our beautiful Christmas Tree.

The Real Deal

She did it! She took several deliberate steps to get to Daddy.

Family Portrait

Every year we get a family portrait done at Christmas so we can send updated pictures to our extended families. We also got a very cute picture of the girls together. They did a great job.

Ten Months Already...

I can't believe my little baby is already 10 months old. Where has the time gone?

Giving Thanks

We had our families down for Thanksgiving this year. M and I spent the few weeks before Thanksgiving getting our house all decorated and in order for the big day. Then we spent Wednesday and Thursday cooking dinner for everyone. It was a lot of fun. We had turkey breast, mashed potatoes and gravy, yams, tex mex corn, regular corn, stuffing, dressing, green beans, cranberry sauce, cranberry jelly, and homemade rolls. We made everything from scratch and it was delicious. My mother-in-law brought 2 apple pies and 2 pumpkin pies which were also yummy. We all had a very enjoyable thanksgiving. My family especially had much to be thankful for this holiday. We have truly been blessed this year.

Great Grandma with L.

Aunt Karen, Grandma, K, and Great Grandma.

Aunt Kendra, Grandpa, and Uncle Mark.

Uncle Luke, Cousin Mika, and L.

Sitting around the dinner table right before it was ready.

Cousin Mika, Uncle Mark, and Cousin Nathan.

M and N.

No Longer My Baby

I forgot you can't rotate videos like you can pictures; so the video is sideways, sorry. But here is L standing without support.

Here is L taking her first unassisted steps. I am sure it is because she was trying to keep from falling, but we were still very excited about.

Trunk or Treat

Our old ward had their Trunk or Treat last night. Most of us dressed up and went to see our old friends and let the kids play. I dressed goth-like again, K dressed as a princess, and L dressed as the whitest little Indian ever:) We had a really good time.

Thanks Marie for letting us borrow this cute costume for L.

You did a wonderful job making it!

K's grandma made this princess dress for her. It is absolutely beautiful!

I wish I could sew even half that well.

Thanks for the dress grandma! Can I get one?

Here we are before leaving for the party.

Max isn't pictured because he doesn't "do" Halloween.

Here is K and one of her best friends at the party. So cute!

Twilight Series Party

Okay, so a large group of us have read the Twilight Book series by Stephanie Meyer and we all really like it . We read the first book for book club and discussed it earlier this year. But we thought it would be really fun to get together and discuss the whole series; and what better time to do that then in October? We were told to dress up and bring a dessert. I decided to make cupcakes that look like hearts, veins and all. I also dressed in goth-like clothes and make-up.

Here is a picture of my heart cupcake.

I made 24 and left two of them for the family.

M wanted a picture of me in my outfit. He said I couldn't smile and took this

picture as I was asking "What do you want me to do?"

He also got me to do this look, then said he was going to

embarrass me with the picture. I decided to beat him to the punch.

Here are all the girls who showed up to the party. We are missing quite a few

who had other engagements that night. We had a really great time!

M's Birthday

M's birthday was on Monday. He insisted he didn't want me to do anything for him but I just couldn't let his day go by unnoticed. So I made him a special dinner, it was something we had never tried before. I didn't think it was that great, but M really liked it.

Pork chops with apples & stuffing and green salad.

K says, "So how is it, Daddy?"

From his mom M got wood chips and a wood chip holder for his gas grill.

From my parents he got a check to spend, woohoo! K opened the card for him.

Here is his slice of cake from our local bakery.

I thought this was a cute picture of the girls with daddy.

Our gift to Daddy was a picture of the gun safe we got him. He actually got it a few months ago as an early birthday gift, but I wanted it noted that we DID actually get him a gift.

Pumpkin Carving

For Family Home Evening we carved our Pumpkins.

Here are the girls with their pumpkins.

Here is Daddy sitting on my pumpkin. You can see how thrilled he is
about the prospect of carving the pumpkins:)

Here is L playing with my pumpkin.

Daddy cut the top off of L's pumpkin and we let her playing the mess

for a while. She kept trying to eat the seeds though, so we had to take her away.

K did a really good job of scooping out her seeds. I was very proud of her.

Here is L still trying to get at the seeds.

K drew a face on her pumpkin so Daddy could cut it out.

She is becoming a very good drawer.

Here is K with her finished pumpkin. So adorable!

K took a picture of me scooping out my pumpkin.

M drew a nice face on my pumpkin and then cut it out for me.

I tried to cut some, but I kept scaring M, so he took the knife away from me.

Here is the face M drew for me.

Here are our completed pumpkins. M said his was the Invisible Man.

The Pumpkin Patch

This month has totally gotten away from us. We realized on Saturday taht we had one week until Halloween and we hadn't been to the Pumpkin Patch yet. So we loaded up the kids and headed down to pick out our pumpkins.

K had already gotten a pumpkin when she went on a field trip at school,

so she decided to pick out L's pumpkin for her.

Here we are standing in the patch.

My beautiful girls.

Odd, Interesting and Beautiful Things

On our trip we found some odd, interesting, and beautiful things that we just had to take pictures of. We wanted to share these pictures with you and we leave it up to you to decide what category they fall under:)