My Cute Family

I love having visitors especially for Christmas! My parents and four of my siblings are in town.

Nate, Dad, Mom, Tim, & Heather
Madeline, Tom, Andrew, Me, & AnnaLisa

We always need a silly picture!

Sisters-Me, AnnaLisa, and Heather
We are just missing Lara.

And the Winner is...

Drum roll please...

EMMA!

On a different subject, did I tell you about the awesome BYU football game we went to last night? We weren't sure we could go until the last minute, since Tom had a big deadline at work. We ended up leaving a little late and got stuck in horrendous traffic. We didn't actually make in to the game until halftime. We were so late that we didn't have to pay for parking, then when we went to go buy tickets they GAVE us 4 FREE tickets in great seats. We were ecstatic! We saved over $300 by being late! What a blessing!

Since we were so blessed at the game yesterday (and saved so much money), we will have an additional winner!

And winner #2 is Sarah (aka Mike:o)

And since I love you all so much, we will have one more winner!

And winner #3 is AnnaLisa!

Congrats to the three of you! MERRY CHRISTMAS to all of you! Thanks for being so awesome!

Christmas Giveaway

As a Christmas gift to my awesome friends and family, I decided it was time for a little giveaway. I have a $25 Target giftcard that I would love to share with one of you. In order to enter, all you have to do is leave a comment. You are allowed up to two entries. The contest closes tomorrow (Friday) at 10 PM (PST). I will pick a winner at random tomorrow night. Good luck! I hope you win!

Goofy Madeline

It was quite a happy moment this soccer season when Madeline actually decided to join her team on the field. She was a little speed demon when she managed to play:

Madeline's soccer coach doing his best to get Madeline to smile for her end of the season photo. It went as expected:

Sometimes these girls totally crack me up. One day they yelled for me to get the camera and this is how I found them:

Kayleigh, Praia and Madeline all sucking their thumbs again. It should be pointed out that Madeline and Kayleigh are thumb suckers but Praia is NOT!

Madeline and Praia at the Pretend City water area

Other stuff unrelated to Madeline's goofiness:

Tom has been participating in multiple choirs as of late. He will be singing in a quartet at a stake activity and a solo in church in a couple weeks. If you are interested in a nice Christmas CD, you should get the one Tom's chorale organization recently released here. You will not be disappointed!

Andrew and Madeline are both obsessed with Minecraft. Do any of your kids play it? We've had to totally lock down our xbox since our kids want to play it every moment of the day.

Andrew informed me today that he isn't getting all his school work done because his mind gets distracted by thoughts of minecraft. Hmmm...

Andrew cried at bedtime because he "needed" more reading time. (I like reading time a million times better than electronic time!!)

 I decided to do a 25 days of service advent calendar. It's been interesting. I think next year I need to tone it down some, because the way I set it up this year is creating way too much extra work for me.

Never Again!

Next time someone asks me to peel and squeeze 50 oranges for the purpose of making something special for Relief Society. My answer will be NO, NO, and NO. Never again. Life is too short to so royally waste your time. On a happy note, my kitchen smells good with all the oranges. Have you ever done something that you swore you would never do again?