Ho, ho, ho & Merry Christmas...

Well Christmas has come and gone and we are now prepping for New Years! We had a wonderful time having Aaron and Erika here with us for Christmas! Since we left some yummy cookies and milk Santa stopped by and left some presents at our house. This included new scooters for Bud and Emma and a floor car track for Mo. He also brought marshmallow shooters for everyone!

Christmas afternoon N8, Aaron and Erika had a great marshmallow war in the backyard. Bud, Emma and Mo haven't quite gotten the knack for blowing the guns, but had fun with them anyway. Another fun gift were homemade fleece blankets. So snugly and warm!

Then the day after Christmas we headed up north and tried sand-boarding again. This time it wasn't quite as windy, but it was still very cold.

On our way home we stopped at Fossil Falls and explored all of the crevices and rocks! It a fun place to climb and explore:

On Sunday we were finally able to get a Christmas shot since everyone was healthy and well to go to church!

Now we're looking forward to spending some time in Arizona and seeing some more of our family. We'll see my family for New Years and then Nate's brother's family for a baby blessing. It will be strange to not spend anytime in Phoenix but we're happy that we'll be able to see so much of our family.
I look forward to starting a new year and setting some new goals. That's what we did last night for FHE. Each one of use set goals for the upcoming year.
Here's a few that we hope to accomplish throughout 2010:
Bud:

• Learn to ride a bike without training wheels
• Read the scriptures
  

Emma:

• Stop biting fingernails
• Learn the letter sounds better
  

Mo:

• Stop using a bink
  
• start using the potty

Daddy:

• Read the church lesson each week
• Exercise 3 times a week
  

Mommy:

• Read scriptures daily
  
• clean and organize the closets

Family:

• Continue monthly temple attendance
• Family scripture study
  
• Work on landscaping

I hope that everyone has a wonderful start to their 2010!

All things California...

We've lived in Cali for 7 1/2 years now, and have really enjoyed where we live. We don't live in your typical California, we live in desert, conservative, hot, dry, remote California. But this Christmas N8's brother and his wife came to visit. This was Erika's first time to California ever! So, we had to do some more "typical" California things for their trip. We took a day down in LA and a great time.
Our first stop was at the Griffith Observatory so we could get some good shots of the "Hollywood" sign! It was pretty cool. Plus the Griffith Observatory is pretty neat too. The kids got to hold a piece of a real meteor and we got some fun pictures with Einstein!

We went onto Hollywood and checked out some of the stars. We saw quite a few while we walked along the streets of Hollywood and took in all of the interesting people!

After that we drove over to Santa Monica to the beach. We got their just before the sunset! It was a beautiful evening.

Then we went over and walked around the LA Temple to look at the Christmas lights.

Our last stop was at In & Out burger! We had been in the car a lot throughout the day and in quite a bit of very typical stop and go LA traffic. Bud had it and must have gotten car sick. Luckily he waited until we were in the restaurant and not in the car to BARF!! I don't think we'll be going back to that In & Out anytime soon!
Christmas Eve we spent doing thing closer to home. We let Bud rest most of the day to make sure it wasn't a stomach bug that had caused the barfing. N8 took Aaron and Erika to the China Lake Museum and then on a hike up in our local hills.

That evening we make gingerbread cookies for Santa, Ricky, Kim and Oliver came and ate tamales for dinner, our 12 days of Christmas givers revealed themselves and we checked out some local Christmas lights.


Today is Christmas and had been a great day. I'll post more about it in another post!

Serving...

I was just perusing some of the blogs kept up by couple missionaries serving in Guyana and saw a bunch of pictures of my parents! Thank-you Elder and Sister Collins (here's their blog btw: Collins Couple) for taking pictures with my parents in them and posting them!! When I talked to them yesterday all was well and they are staying very busy in Guyana keeping track of the missionaries serving there!
My mom is on the far right:
My dad and Elder LingrenMy mom:



My parents are the second couple from the left:

A pink princess shooting gun!

That is what Emma has been asking for Christmas. Neither N8 or I are "gun" people, but I figured out a way to somewhat accommodate this Christmas request! I made each of the kids (and N8 plus a few more!) mini marshmallow shooters. I had seen these floating around the internet and figured they should be too hard to put together.

The first thing you need to get, especially if your making more than one is a pvc cutter. I got it at Home Depot for about $15. This was by far the most expensive part of the entire project. But we will use them for future projects and it cut the cutting time down significantly. If you're just making one, see if you can get Home Depot to cut your PVC. A hack saw will work too, the cuts just aren't as clean.
Then you need 1/2 inch PVC. For the simple shooters I made I needed a total of about 23 inches of PVC: 3- 4 inch, 2- 3 inch 1- 5 inch. You also need 2 elbows, 2 tees, 2 caps & 2 couplers. And here's the layout for your shooter:

Then put it all together. DO NOT GLUE IT! this shooter works by blowing through it, you are going to want a way to wash it out occasionally!

My next step was to make it a 'pink princess shooting gun'! So I got myself a can a pink spray paint. Remove the coupler at the barrel of the shooter. That way you won't be putting your mouth on spray paint. Paint away! Then for an added flare I added names and stars with vinyl. I painted the boys shooter black-

When I wrap these up I will include a ziploc of mini marshmallows! To shoot, just put a mini marshmallow in the top and blow! N8 was trying them out and could easily shoot a marshmallow across the room! The total cost of the PVC and connectors for 1 shooters was $2.16! Pretty sweet Christmas present! I think Mo's favorite part will be eating the marshmallows!


I also wanted to add a few pictures from Mo's birthday. We went pretty simple. We ordered pizza and had one friends family come over~

Who's got a beard that's long and white?

Santa's got a beard that's long and white! This week Santa came to preschool. Emma asked for a doll house. Over the last couple of weeks though the main thing she keeps asking for is a "pink princess shooting gun"-seriously where does she come up with these things! We'll have more on that though in my next post! So here she is with Santa~

and Mo got a picture with him too~

Now we enter the last week of school before Christmas break! I haven't started goodie plates and haven't quite gotten in the mood to start. We'll see if anything happens in that department!

A year of Mo!!

Today my little guy turns 2!! It's really crazy to think that he is that old!
So here's a year of Mo in review!














Happy Birthday Mo!!