Aaah, a Week of Leisure

Our holiday season was great this year. We were able to see lots of family and even took a vacation! It's been a while since we were all able to get away together (aside from Interbike, but I don't really count that as a family vacation -- that was work).

It was great to get back to Arizona. I can't believe two years had slipped by since our last trip down there. Steph was a gracious hostess as we crashed at her place for ten days. I'm pretty sure we got in everything on our agenda: read books, swim, relax, bike, hike, shop (ah, what a beautiful DSW sale) and Changing Hands bookstore. And yes, the glass bottle of blueberry juice from Trader Joes did make it home intact after a grueling 14 hours in the bed of the truck.

Kory and Graysen goofing around at the restaurant in Tortilla Flat. Notice all the dollar bills? The place is covered in them.

We spent one day doing the Tortilla Flat/Roosevelt Dam loop. Here's a shot at the Goldfield ghost town.

A trip to the Bass Pro Shop provided a Gray Bear encounter. Hehe, get it? Gray... Bear?

Check out the lizards sunning themselves at South Mountain.

Naomi and the manatee discussing the finer points of Naomi's new Barbie laptop.

It's 10pm and I'm thinking that leaving for work tomorrow morning at 6:45am is going to be tough after two weeks of sleeping in. I'll write more later, but for now, thank you for all your wonderful gifts and holiday wishes. We love you all and hope you have a great new year!

Let it Snow!!

Yippee, we finally had a big snowstorm and to our good fortune, Erin and Abe were at our house!! So, while Erin and I made bushels of cookies, Abe and the kids created this snow basilisk. Although there did come a point where we had to abandon the kitchen to play in the snow ourselves.


Erin is bringing those menacing fangs to a sharp point.

Countdown to Christmas

Here's our Christmas countdown. I've given up on the paper chain. I'm not that good at planning a month in advance. With the socks, we can plan as we go and put our daily activities in each sock. Hope you're all having a great holiday!

Pearly Whites

Graysen went in to the orthodontist the other day to have his braces/appliance checked and look how things turned out! Doesn't he look handsome?

Thanksgiving

OK, finally getting around to posting about Thanksgiving. For some reason, things have just been nonstop since then and I find myself just crashing each night. So, better late than never, here are the pics of my roll making. Due to some sort of mental calculation error, I ended up baking 16 dozen rolls.

Naomi with her plate of dessert sitting next to her cousin, Stephanie. I'm pretty sure this plate has more food on it than her dinner plate did.

Here we are playing an intense game of Domino's. All except Gray, he looks far to confident doesn't he?

Reverse Engineering

Saturday we had a great study in reverse engineering as Graysen, Naomi and Gray's friend Brian took apart our broken computer monitor. They spent about an hour and a half with all sorts of screwdrivers and hammers. In the end it was a huge pile of wiring, and metal that filled two boxes. The kids loved it. Here are a few pictures.

Trick-or-Treat

For Halloween this year Gray was "monkey man" by day and some variation of the witch from the Wizard of Oz by night. The kids had a costume parade at school, but I missed getting a picture of Gray, he slipped right past me. Naomi was a witch all day then turned into a princess for trick-or-treating.