We woke up this Christmas morning to about 2 feet of snow, it is very pretty and appropriate if you are staying home and hanging with the family.

Santa came to our house and it looks like he decided to stay:

Santa is also known as Peter

We enjoyed opening presents at 6:45am this morning and then the older people went back to bed for awhile.  Now we are just lazing around and eating, the perfect Christmas day!

Awesome day of vacation:

Slept in until 9:00
Did lots of nothing
Worked out for 50 minutes on the bike at the gym with Audrey and Emma
Went out to lunch with Brian and Audrey
Listened to Jim Gaffigan on Lauren's computer
Watched BYU lose (dang!)
Delivered Emma's treats to her friends
Delivered a treat to my librarian friend and a share the gift card
Ate nachos for dinner
Watched movies with the family

AAHHHH!

On another note, Palmer got a letter from Utah State University giving him a $13,000 stipend for his first year of school.  Very cool.

Reunion Sunday

Our Sacrament Meeting Christmas Program was very nice.  I was up on the stand the entire meeting which gave me a great view of my entire family sitting together on the bench!  Audrey and Lauren arrived safe and sound on Saturday afternoon.  Nothing compares to going to bed at night knowing all your children are safe under the same roof.

Audrey came with me to a girls night out party with some of the women in our ward last night.  We ate and did Just Dance!  It was pretty funny seeing us old women dancing, but Audrey was a good sport and even tried it as well!

We are looking for some new things to do this Christmas season since many of our old traditions we don't have access to up here.  We've found some light displays in Powell and Cody which is just a short hour and a half away that we may go to on Christmas Eve.

I'm looking forward to this week.  All my shopping is done and all I have to do is hang with the family.

They arrived safe and sound!  We all went to see Palmer wrestle his second guy and he lost.  But he pinned this guy later today:

Okay, so I'm waiting for my girls to walk in the door any minute and I'm trying to find something to do while I'm waiting, I'm just a little excited!  Palmer wrestled again today and pinned his guy in a little over a minute.  He looked great!  Emma cheered as well, here is a great picture of her and her cheer friends.

Quick update:

Palmer pinned his guy in the dual wrestling meet today against Riverton in the second period!

Emma cheered at the meet for her debut as a cheerleader and did a great job!

Brian filled in for me as a room mom in Peter's first grade class for their Christmas party.

I spent the day (from 6:15am--7:00pm) in Billings going to the temple and shopping with my new friend Holly.

Audrey and Lauren get here tomorrow!

Eastside Elementary Christmas Concert

It was Lucy and Peter's Elementary school Christmas concert last night.  It was really cute.  I tried to film the entire concert, but I didn't have enough memory, so here's all I got!  The concert was only 1st through 3rd grade which made it nice and short.  The 4th and 5th grades didn't have one for some reason.  Eric wasn't too disappointed in that fact.

A friend and I were planning a temple/Christmas shopping trip to Billings today, but we decided not to go.  The roads are just not looking good.  We are going to shoot for Thursday, hopefully there will be some melting going on by then.

Here is our decorated family room.  The tree looks better in these pictures than in real life!

It's really cool to have a fireplace mantle to hang the stockings on this year.

Palmer had his senior pictures taken while we were in Utah for Thanksgiving.  Here is one of them, I will be getting the rest later.  He thinks his face looks a little swollen for some reason.

Handsome dude!

It snowed!  And although it's pretty, it's also very slick.  Brian drove the kids to seminary this morning so they wouldn't have to slide around the roads.

Brian's work party on Saturday was really nice.  Not everyone came, but those that did had fun I hope.  We had food, played a game, and exchanged white elephant gifts.  Some of his employees were a little skeptical that they could go to a party and have a good time without alcohol, so I hope we proved them wrong!  (Although I'm pretty sure they headed to the bar after they left our house.)

We finally put our tree up and found out that trees look much smaller in their natural habitat than they do in your house!  It was much too tall and Brian had to cut a bunch off.  The tree isn't exactly well proportioned and it's branches aren't very sturdy.  So while we were decorating it it fell over on top of Peter!  It's a good thing it's not too heavy.  Peter thought it was hilarious.  I can only hang very light paper type ornaments on it.  We haven't got the second tree up yet because we don't have a tree stand for it and there isn't anywhere to buy one here.  Shopko was all sold out when we checked there and surprisingly Bloedorn doesn't carry them.  I'm sure Brian can figure some way to get it up.

Palmer got home from South Dakota late Saturday night.  He lost both his matches.  One was against the guy who came in 2nd at state last year.  He feels like the will be able to beat him the next time he goes against him.  It helps to know your competition.  Our school came in 15th out of about 40 schools there, so that's not too bad.

Since our house was all decked out for Christmas we decided to invite a family over last night for Brian's awesome cinnamon rolls.  It was a lot of fun!  Brian made a lot of rolls and after it was over Andy said he ate 8 of them!  Really Andy, I believe that's the definition of a pig!

Andy's basketball season ended on Saturday.  His team came in 3rd.  He coach was impressed with how much he has improved since the beginning of the season.  Andy has decided to try wrestling.  The middle school wrestling season doesn't start until January.  It will be nice to see Andy after school now that he doesn't have practice for awhile.

Bloedorn had Santa come to the store on Saturday and I had the kids go see him.

Eric is not too excited to be sitting on Santa's lap

Lucy loves Santa as you can tell by her blurry face

It took some coercing to get Peter on Santa's lap

He's warming up to Santa a little.  This time he asked Santa for a rope to go with the box.  

On the way home from Andy's basketball game in Greybull on Saturday Emma took a bunch of selfies with her and the kids.  Here is just one of the many:

Palmer left this morning for South Dakota for his first wrestling meet.  He decided to wrestle at 160 pounds after trying to lose enough to wrestle at 152.  He got down to 155 at the initial weigh in and decided to go back up to 160, which makes me very happy, he was really eating nothing for a week or so to lose those last pounds and it's not like he has anything to lose as he has 9% body fat.  Last season he had 6% body fat--way to gain some weight dude!

Andy was ordained a teacher on Sunday by Brian.  His tongue is healing nicely after his minor surgery.  He drank smoothies for a day or so and is back to normal now.  He plays his last basketball game tomorrow in the tournament.  I don't think they will win, but could possibly come in 3rd.  His team has been practicing with the high school team this last week and is really worn out!  He comes home and eats everything in sight!

We had our Ward Christmas Dinner on Wednesday night.  I was in charge of the entire program!  It was a little challenging since I'm not completely aware of what people can do and who to ask to do it, but everyone said it turned out well.  I thought it was a little rough, but everyone seemed to have fun. I had the Youth do a human Christmas tree, Emma and two others played Christmas songs on the flute, I played the harp, the primary kids sang, we sang carols, and had a nativity. At the end Mr. and Mrs. Claus came.  The food was great and there was a lot of it. There was a very large turn out with every chair taken, about 240+ people there.  Many people brought their neighbors and lots of less active members came as well.

Tomorrow is Brian's work Christmas party at our house.  I haven't even started putting up Christmas things yet, so that is the project today!  I felt very indulged yesterday as I finished reading an entire book on my kindle (Slated, a dystopian young adult novel by Teri Terry), it was nice to relax after the Christmas party planning.  

Lucy is finishing out her two weeks of swimming lessons as part of the elementary school curriculum.  She has really loved it and swam the length of the deep end without stopping the other day!  The coach says she's good and should come out for swimming!  

Emma brought home her cheerleading uniform last night.  She has been so busy lately, she went to the state drama competition, she has cheerleading practice everyday after school, and she has been helping with the flag corp tryouts for next year.  The coach asked her to be the captain of the flag corp for next year as well.  I had to check her out of school so she could get her homework done!  Then yesterday she told me she is thinking of going out for the soccer team in the spring because cheer ends at the end of basketball season!  EMMA, stop!  I had to remind her school is for academic learning, not every extracurricular activity you can fit in!  

Emma and Palmer had their band concert the other night.  They played well, even though I wanted more than 3 songs from the band and 3 from the jazz band.  They provide tuxes for the guys to wear and black dresses for the girls, so everyone looks really nice.  The band teacher is very good at picking songs that they can play well.  They don't have the most talented bunch of people, but they played well at their level.  There isn't an orchestra here and I miss hearing more musical things sometimes.  The choir also sang at the concert and did not do so well.  There was only about 30 members and the director, who is new this year, picked songs that were too hard for them.  I would have rather not listened to them and heard more band stuff, well actually just more pieces where Palmer was rockin' the drum set really.  

Picture overload!

We bought two tags from the Forest Service and drove for 45 minutes up in the mountains, hiked a ways and chopped down two Christmas trees!  It was awesome!

Palmer and Peter trying not to collapse two feet into the snow

Hiking up the snowmobile trails

Lucy Lou

Palmer and Andy spot a tree

Palmer and Andy on their way to chop down the tree

Palmer and Andy in the process of chopping

Brian hiking over to the perfect tree

Brian knee deep in snow

Lucy got a little tired of walking

Eric looks so excited to be out in the freezing cold!

My two sweet boys!

Dad with the perfect tree

Bringing the tree out of the forest

My man struggling with the tree

Almost to the truck

Sliding down the hill

Andy fell up to his waist in the snow

Ready to go home, all 8 of us crammed in the truck!

It was really a fun trip!  The trees are a little Charlie Brownish, but they are ours!

Andy and I took a trip to Powell this morning.  It's about an hour and a half away from Worland.  He had an appointment with an oral surgeon to look at the growth on the under side of his tongue.  He had a similar one a year and a half ago and had it removed.  I guess it's a salivary gland that is growing out of his tongue.  Anyway, the closest oral surgeons are in Billings, but they do come to Powell every 6 weeks ago and use an orthodontist's office there so people don't have to go all the way up to Billings.  The surgeon took the growth off which was bigger than the last one and now Andy has a bunch of stitches on the under side of his tongue.  He is in quite a bit of pain as well.  I wish I could run to Jamba Juice and get him a smoothie!  He has to have liquids until tomorrow.  Thankfully the roads were clear the entire trip.  On the way there we saw two bald eagles!  Very cool. I don't think I've ever seen one before.

Emma left for Gillette this morning with the drama team.  It's the state drama competition and it lasts until Saturday night.  She isn't acting, but is doing set design and lighting.  I saw her set design for Blythe Spirit and it looked pretty good.  I didn't know she could do that!

Lucy is in the middle of her class's rotation for swimming lessons.  She is loving it!  She is sad she has to miss one recess to go, but says it is worth it.

We are hoping to cut our own Christmas tree this year.  The permits are only $8 which is so much cheaper than buying a real or fake one.  Once we get it then I will start putting up decorations, hopefully we can go this weekend.

We took a picture of all of us (my kids, my mom, and my sister and her husband) when we were in Utah.  Amazingly enough, we all look normal!  We are a little photographically challenged!

All of us in front of my mom's house on Wednesday November 26th.  The weather was beautiful!

The list of last times has started!  Palmer said as he left for wrestling practice, "this is the last first day of wrestling season practice in high school for me."  Last Thanksgiving and Christmas with Palmer before his mission.  It's not too fun to look at it that way!

The temperature has dropped again.  On Saturday it reached into the 50's and then within an hour dropped to the teens!  It's amazing how fast it can get cold!  We just got the rest of the ice hacked off the driveway before it went down to freezing again.  It was -5 this morning.

I have sweet Lucy home sick today with the stomach nasties.  I think she is over the throwing up now and is just tired out.  She was so disappointed to miss school today.  Now we wait, to see if all of us will end up getting it!  The irony is that just last night I was thinking how nice it has been to not have anyone throw up in such a long time!  NEVER think that!

We had the sister missionaries over for dinner again last night.  They are really wonderful, happy, fun girls.  We lose the one soon, she is going home on the 13th of December.

18 days until my lovely girls fly up here for Christmas, I can't wait!