The set up and the big reveal...

Tanner is the official person who puts together my tree every year. He was in a hurry this year because he had to meet some kids from school at Brittany's house to work on a group project. He ended up leaving right after he put up the tree and didn't get back until 10:30 because he ended up staying at Brittany's house, eating dinner there and going to a movie (Megamind). But at least I got the tree put up. Cynjyn was feeling terrible, stomach ache and cramping all day, but was determined to help. She climbed on the mantle to hang the things over the fireplace.

She also climbed on the potshelves to arrange my Christmas bears and tins. Taz helped by hauling the big boxex of bears up the stairs and handing them to her. He had also just put the little tree up there.

Tanner strung lights and Cynjyn tied the tree skirt.

Taz and his friend Jayden helped Garry do the lights on the roor. Usually Cynjyn helps too, but wasn't feeling well enough this year.

For the first time in awhile, I was able to put up every Christmas decoration this year. Thanks to the extra table I have! It was big enough to hold my big nativity and the new Thomas Kinkade decoration I got from Mom this year. Cynjyn wanted a picture of every "scene" in the house and she was going to model them too, so here goes. Bear with us!!

The piano area.

The stockings.

The nutcrackers.

The mantle and fireplace.

The snowmen, nativities and talking things.

The tree.

The potshelves with the bears and tins and the fiberoptic tree.
The cute helper.

I even managed to garbage pick these three trees last year and we put a few sentimental ornaments on them this year and put them in the garage. I want a clearance Christmas tree this year to put in the garage and put all my sentimental ornaments on. Wish me luck on that.

As the evening was winding down...I was admiring the tree all lit up and the peacefulness of the evening. Garry was trying to plug in the laptop under the tree and seconds later, it looked like this!! The base broke and the tree fell over. Garry found an old real tree base and managed to make the tree fit in it and we got it all undecorated and then put up and redecorated. We only managed to break one bulb in the fiasco and now it's up and all pretty again. It took about 35 minutes to revive and redo it!! Alls well now! Let the festivities begin!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We started off the day by Garry and Talon and Taz going to the turkey bowl. Tanner opted to sleep. Talon left at the last minute, so only a picture of these two!! I went on my walk so I could enjoy my dinner without guilt. It was pretty cold that morning, so I was dressed like this and still got a little chill.

Taz and Cynjyn love performing surgery as they like to call it on the slush punch. We take it out of the freezer about three hours before dinner and they cut and scrape it for a good 1/2 hour. Hey, whatever it takes to entertain!

They were also my table setters this year. They carefully got out the nice china, tablecloth and put some decorations along the center.

We kept the food on the extra table so we could eat in style.

Happy day, happy thanksgiving!

Sadie Hawkins

Last Wednesday, Tanner got asked to Sadie Hawkins. He went to ballroom dance class and the two girls had a pathway of giant dots with Tanner and Mikey's name on them and they followed the dots and found this letter that each of them had. They opened it, read it and had to do a little impromptu dance to accept the invite. Tanner is going with a girl in our ward, Natalie Leavitt. She is a year older in school but only a couple of months older than Tanner. Mikey is also in our ward and he was asked by Natalie's best friend Heidi (Warm Springs ward) and they are going to double date for it. The dance is December 11, so I'll keep you posted when that big day arrives. Last night for mutual, we went to St. Timothy's to feed the homeless. Tanner and Hunter were the only Young Men to go because there was a big dodgeball tournament at the same time. Taz went to that, but Hunter and Tanner opted to go with us.

Here is Tanner with Natalie (she's in the middle) and Dallas. The three of them are going with a group of 5 more tonight to Harry Potter, so they should have a fun weekend.

Thanks Audra!

I was perusing my cousin Chris's blog and his wife posted a link to an Old Navy coupon you could print for 30% off your entire order. Tanner had been wanting some winter clothes, so Tanner and Cynjyn and I went to ON while Taz was at football practice that was close by. They did so good that we made Taz go after football to get some winter clothes too. Here they are posing in their new outfits. The sale was good towards anything in the store, clearance, sale and regular items. I spent about $85.00 per kid and this is everything they got.

If you live by an Old Navy, go to Tales with Seaweed blog and find her post with the link! The kids had a blast shopping there. I had dropped Tanner and Cynjyn off while I ran to JoAnn's to get some flannel that was on sale. I had to wait in line almost 30 min. just to get it cut, so Tanner and Cynjyn had the run of the store and their bag was full when I got back to pay for them.

Thanks again Audra!

Our 5 day weekend

The kids had no school on Friday, October 29 and Monday and Tuesday the 1st and 2nd. We decided to take advantage of our 5 day weekend and actually do a little get away. We tend to just stay put when there is a big weekend and we wanted to get away. Taz had a ballgame on Saturday at 1:50, so we were packed and ready to leave from his ballgame. We went to St. George and saw Thriller for the 4th or 5th time, we loose track now. It was good with new dance and Giggle Girl was back. We sat higher than usual, row O and it had an isle, so we saw a lot of zombie action. This girl fixated on Garry and wouldn't stop staring at him, so he took her picture. That made her mad and she came and got in his face. It was fun!! This dude was our favorite. He looked so yucky and he walked past us several times.

It was a cold night, luckily, we brought three blankets.

Taz and zombie dude had a staredown. Taz won. Cynjyn told her zombie girl that she liked her hair! That made her mad and she and Cynjyn had a stare-down.

Then we headed off to Zion. We'd never been and I had heard of a resort place that my brother-in-laws sister had worked at. We decided to stay there. It was called Zion Ponderosa and it was on the east rim of Zion. I rented us a little "cowboy cabin" as it was called and this was home sweet home for three days. These cabins were the cheapest there. They were one room with a queen bunk bed and queen sleeper sofa. No bathroom, we had to use a shower house. They were nice. They had a bench inside a heated room. It wasn't too bad.

We got there Sunday around 3:00 and spent that day doing the recreational activities which I'll talk about later in this post. Monday, we went into Zion and did two hikes. Since we were on the east rim, we had to go through two tunnels in the park. They were literally through a mountain. They had little windows in the mile long tunnel that you could see out, here is one of the views.

See that little hole above the tree line, that is one of the windows in the tunnel.

Our first hike was to weeping rock. It was beautiful. Water was literally coming out of the rocks and plants were abundantly growing out of them too. Here is a view so pretty. We are under a rock ledge and it looks like it's raining, but no that is the water "weeping" out of the rock. It was a warm sunny day!!

A lady was kind enough to take our picture together.

Tanner made us take a picture of this plant growing out of a rock. It's his homagde to grandma to "grow where you are planted!!"

We actually saw several signs of nature "growing where they were planted."

More weeping rock.

The hike up to weeping rock was steep but short and we snapped a picture of the view behind us coming down.

There was a little river flowing at the bottom of the trail. These four went down to check it out.

Our next hike was the Emerald pools. If you went on all three parts of the hike, you could see three pools. We started out only planning on going to the first pool. I gave Taz the camera for awhile and he snapped a lot of pictures of scenery, I also made him take some pictures of us.

Some parts of the trail were pretty steep and we went through a lot of rock places.

It didn't take too long to get to the first pool. The kids wanted to keep going, so we decided to do the three pool loop.

Here we are at the second pool, it was pretty dried up and not so cool, but we swapped picture taking with another couple. There were pretty streams and views along the way, Taz and Cynjyn loved them.

We got to the third pool and there was a beautiful little beachy, sandy area with a "pool". There were a lot of rocks to climb on and Cynjyn played in the sand.

Taz tried to climb onto the big rock two pictures above, but it was too slippery, so he was glad to find some smaller rocks to climb on.

We made Tanner take a picture of Garry and I because he had been the camera man for most of the hike.

It was beautiful to see the fall colors and changing leaves while we were up there. Cynjyn and I especially loved them. She was collecting leaves the whole hike.

We saw waterfalls along the way. Here is the beginning of one that falls down to the first pool.

The hike down was pretty steep and as we got closer down, we could see the virgin river flowing through Zion.

Our two hikes totalled about 5 miles. On the way back to our cabin we stopped to take a quick picture in front of the checkerboard view.

Now onto activities we did while we were at the Ponderosa for three days. The kids took an hour long horse ride. The place was virtually empty. There were maybe three to four other families around. So, the kids were the only ones on the horse ride. Cynjyn got Spoon, Taz was on Willie and Tanner got Pinkie.

They had a tennis court and volleyball court and a playground. We played a lot of tennis. Cynjyn really took a liking to it. She wanted to play all the time.

They had a giant rec room with pool tables and ping pong and foosball. Taz loved pool.

My favorite was the ping pong. Brought me back to my days at BYU in the dorm. Garry and I would play ping pong a lot.

They had a small lodge with a little restaurant. We ate there one night.

Tanner, Garry and Cynjyn got the little buffet which had mostly chicken fingers and fries and Taz and I split a rack of ribs.

At night when it was dark we turned the little night stand in our room into a table by adding a cushion from the couch on top and played some games we'd brought.

Ziplining was one of the activities. The three kids did it and it was Cynjyn's favorite. She did it three times! (you got two rides per turn)

The boys favorite was rock climbing. Garry, Tanner and Taz did it the first day. They got three climbs and they loved it and were so sore afterwards. They had varying difficulties of walls to climb. Here is Garry on the challenging wall.

Tanner on an intermediate wall.

Tanner was really good at climbing. He is on the challenging wall.

Cynjyn climbed the easy wall and didn't make it up the first time, but then she made it on the last two climbs, she was so proud of herself.

Taz didn't make it up the challenging one the first day. So he was determined to do it the second time. And he did!!
He was the only one to try the extreme wall. He made it pretty far, but it was a hard wall!

On our way out, Cynjyn and Taz befriended the workers dog.

We had a wonderful weekend in the outdoors and spending time together as a family away from distractions of the world and real life. BUT we were all tired when we got home and wished we had another day of vacation to recoupe from our vacation!! Isn't that how it always works?