The Spirit of Christmas

Another great video. I love these messages. As I watched on the computer, the kids and Brandon all gathered to see what it was. Messages of Christ do have the power to pull people in. All we have to do is share them. I love you all. May the Spirit of Christmas stay with you all year. Love, Pam


P.S. Pause the music before you click the link and then click on The Spirit of Christmas video.

http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=e419fb40e21cef00VgnVCM1000001f5e340aRCRD

Oh, the fun we've had...

Our family has had so much fun over the past few weeks. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, Brandon broke his long tradition of not allowing Christmas stuff out (not even the Cd's) until the first Saturday of December. Anna simply asked him why we had that tradition. When he couldn't think of a good reason, other than that's just how he likes it, she got him to pull out the decorations! She spent that morning outside, watching her daddy put up the lights. She was so cute. She came in from the garage to get a jacket and said to me, "It's cold outside, but I'm not letting daddy do this all by himself. I am the one who got him to do this." After that, they all came in to watch the Apple cup. At half time we had pizza. I surprised the kids with fun shapes. Which of course only added to the fact that the Huskies won!!

After that weekend, we started preparing for our trip to the Great Wolf Lodge. My sister got us a discount by letting us go with her homeschool group. Her in-laws came as well. It was a blast to have a nice group go.

The room was really nice.

The lobby was decorated for Christmas, which I loved.

They had a bedtime story at 8 o'clock at the clock tower and a tour the next morning that ended in learning to make Origami Wolfs.

There was a huge window in the lobby area that looked into the water park.

We loved the water park! This is my niece Emily on the Lilly Pads.

After Emily, Anna gave it a try.

They stayed together pretty much the whole time. They are the closest thing to

a sister that either will probably ever have. :-}

Evan was leery at first, but once he got playing, he loved it there.

They had a bucket that dumped over every couple of minutes.

Brandon and Riley were the first ones to brave the bucket dump.

There are four big slides to go on and the walk up to them was scary enough to make you want to go back down. Evan couldn't go on the slides, but the rest of us went on a few. I was brave and tried them ALL, even the Howlin' Tornado. Although I ended up feeling pretty sick, I went quite a few slides with Brandon, which made him so proud of me.

There was a wave pool that we all enjoyed. It rotated between no waves, regular waves and super crazy waves. The girls figured out the waves rotated with the bucket dump.

We all had a lot of fun playing around together.

My nephew Daniel, trying to keep Evans ride from spraying.

My nephew, Michael, with his grandma.

Brandon jumping in the basketball pool.

We had such a great time on our little mini vacation. This is my new favorite place. Santa, if you are reading this, they do sell gift cards and I have been mostly nice this year, if you don't count my children's opinions. ;-} Pam

Christmas Tree shopping

After a wonderful trip to the Great Wolf Lodge, we got to spend Friday getting our tree and decorating our house. It was very cold and frosty, which started off being great, but as it thawed the mud showed up, so we ended up having to take the kids shoes off as they got into the car.

The kids get the same great joy out of National Lampoons Christmas Vacation as we do so they ran around pointing at huge trees saying, "Dad, that tree wouldn't fit in our yard."

Evan didn't quite get the idea, but he thought it was funny that daddy would always say "It's not going in our yard, Russ. It's going in our living room." Evan's comment "I'm not Russ. I'm Evan"

Riley's tree wasn't too bad actually.

I think this one might have been a bush!

We decided to take a family picture next to the tree that we chose, but...

this ended up not even being the tree we cut down. We noticed after this pic that it had about 4 tops to it, so we looked for another tree. I was just too lazy to carry the camera and tripod around, so we didn't get another one next to our real tree. :-}


The kids had a fun time making lots of decorations.

By Saturday night, our tree was both straight and decorated. The straight part took us quite awhile. Some people in our house just must have crooked heads!

I had fun playing around taking pictures of the tree after it was all done.

I love having the house decorated for Christmas. Why is it that we have to take them down? Do you think it is possible that if we left them up all year the Spirit of Christmas would stick around AND our friends wouldn't think we were crazy? We'd certainly have to get a fake tree then! Hope you are all enjoying this season as much as our family is. ~Pam~