Christmas Day

CHRISTMAS DAY!! As Trin would say - "Finally here!" The kids were really excited this year. Trinety knew what was coming, and kept telling Trandon he would get presents. So of course, this made him want to open presents every day! :o) I had him help wrap presents to his cousins in hopes that he would learn that all the gifts were not for him. Penny came down from Washington; and Papa Cary and Susan came up from Utah. We were excited to have them all stay with us!!

This first pic is Trin hugging some doll clothes that I made for her. I figured I'd better get it done this year, because next year she probably won't want doll stuff. :o( She's growing up. She has 4 American Girl dolls; so I made a matching sleeping bag and robe for each of them. Plus, a couple shirts and pants. I'm planning on doing some more for her because I ran out of time! Hopefully she'll get them by her birthday!


Trandon's favorite movie right now is "How to Train Your Dragon". So he was really excited to get the "blue dragon" from his sister!

Here's Trinety being silly with her bows!

This is what Trandon got in his stocking. And his new "cheese" for pictures...most the time his eyes are open but squinted! :o)

This pic was the first of the morning...they still look a little tired. They actually didn't wake up until 8:00, which I thought was wonderful. But Papa Cary was up a lot earlier and waiting for them to come down and get him for presents! Sorry Papa! :o)

More Christmas Day!

Some more pics from Christmas Day... Penny likes eagles, so her Mom & Dad got her this dreamcatcher. It was really cool!


I think this is the only picture we got of me and Cary that day...nice eh?! :o)

Here's Susan...we decided she's the texting queen!!

A cute pic of my hubby! Hmm...wonder where Trandon got his "cheese" face. :o)

And here's Papa Cary and Penny. They don't look too happy in this pic, but I think all-in-all they had a good time!

So, I posted pictures of the house and outside on Nov 17th...this is Nov 20th. Just 3 days later, and we have a TON of snow!! The kids were so excited to go outside and play in it!! As you can see, it's still falling too.

Sister Pictures!!

In October, we decided to have a Girls Night Out as sisters. Sarah has a friend who takes pictures and set it all up so we could get some cute pics of ourselves, as well as cute pics of us together. It was so much fun!! I have so many favorites - but I thought I would post just a couple. Maybe I'll get some more posted later! :o)

(Sorry - still can't figure out how to flip pictures!)

Family Pictures

In April, my friend Heidi took some family pictures of us and they turned out great! I was so excited to have some nice pictures of the 4 of us. I can't post them all - so here are my favorites!! Thanks Heidi!! :o)

Halloween 2010

HALLOWEEN 2010



We went to our stake Trunk-or-Treat on Saturday night; and of course, Kodiak had to come! The kids loved him!! He got so much attention that night!





We invited Sarah, Brady and the boys to come over too. So here's a picture of all the kids together. Aren't they scary?? I'm not sure what most the boys were...but Bridger was a football and his costume blew-up so he was fat, plus he had a "Kick me" sign on the back. He! He! Austin was Toad from all the Mario games - awesome hat and gloves! Trinety was a witch, and Trandon was a ninja.

Cary wouldn't dress up, but I do have my cape on and some make-up.

I couldn't figure out how to flip this pic!! If someone knows, please tell me!

And here are my cute kids again!! The story of Trin's costume: She wanted to be a witch and we found a costume at Walmart. We went home and tried it on, and it was too big! So we decided to look elsewhere and found this cute costume at ShopKo. The blue part on it has spider webs with glitter!! The story of Trandon's costume: When we were at Walmart looking for Trin, he found this himself and said this is what he wanted to be! I said "That's a ninja - do you want to be a ninja?" He says "Es Mom". (He doesn't say the "y" on yes - just "es"!!) The blue part has pics of dragons - so he really loved it! In fact, he wore his costume 4 or 5 days that month! :o)

We had a great time hanging with all the kids! After the Trunk-or-Treat, we went to dinner at Wendy's and hung out there for a while before going home. It was a great night!!!

New House!!

So - Mom keeps bugging me about putting pictures of the house on my blog. So FINALLY I'm getting it done! Sorry it took so long Mom! :o) We moved in in June; and I have just been so busy trying to get things done with it that I didn't want to put pics up until it looked better. So, I finally have most of the upstairs painted and actually have hung some pictures! Here's our new house:



This is the front door and entryway. There's a very little coat closet on the right. And on the left is our office / piano room.

Here's the piano / office. I haven't done this room yet. There's wallpaper that has mountain scenes on it, with elk and eagles, etc. Not really us! But I just haven't got to it yet! Too many things to do! :o)

And here's the computers. I finally have my own desk so I can get some work done without having to put my computer away every night. It's been really nice!

Here's the view from the front entryway into the living room. We don't have a room that can be kept clean and free of toys in case someone stops by - like we did in our other house. Cary really liked that and we kinda miss it. The kids toys are everywhere during the day!! You can see my dining room off to the right there. Pics of that coming up!


This is the view of the living room from the kitchen. We have this wall that does a "z" type thing and it's hard to figure out how to decorate around it. So the furniture isn't permanently here - we just don't know what to do yet! Cary wants to either hang the TV on the wall and get a different stand to hold the Wii, DVD player, etc. OR - we were thinking we could cut this wall in half and make the room look a lot bigger. If we decide on that, it will be a couple years coming... You can also see into the little hallway that our bedrooms are off of.

Here's a view from standing over by the TV. Yes - the wall is orange! I really wanted an orange wall in my new house. Cary wasn't too excited; but he says it's ok. :o) The dining room also has 2 walls that are orange - and the kitchen is the same. But there's not a lot of walls in the kitchen, so it's not as noticeable.

These are some pictures I made for Cary for his birthday. I took our family pics and made a poster out of the one and enlarged the others. Then I painted the canvas' black and modpodged the pictures on the canvas. Added some cute ribbon and the words cut from my Cricut. I thought they turned out pretty cute!! I was proud of myself! :o)

Here's the dining room. I couldn't get the lighting to cooperate with me. But our table fit wonderfully in the space. Like it was made for it!!

Another pic of dining room - the lighting is better! Still working on some curtains. I bought some fabric that I really liked, so now I just have to find time to sew them!

Here's a pic of another crafty thing I did for the wall. My friend did a version of this - and ever since then I have had this in my head. So I finally had Cary help me to get it done! It's just a frame made out of old wood and chicken wire on the back. Then every month you can change the pictures and the decoration. I've been putting pics from 2008 and 2009 up. It's really fun to look and them, and helps you remember too. The kids really like it too!


And, here's my kitchen! Not real fancy - but it has some updated things in it and I was really excited about it. The cupboards are really nice and have the pull-outs, and spice rack, and lazy susans. Plus, there is lots of cupboard space!! We also have a gas stove (which has really helped my cooking! :o)) with 5 burners, and 2 ovens. The fridge is pretty nice and has the water / ice feature - BUT it's not working at the moment. We have an osmosis machine under the sink, and it hooks to the water from the fridge. But the osmosis thing is leaking, so we have to get that fixed. The other thing about the kitchen is the lighting - there's a ton of it! The lights on the ceiling, there's a rope light on the top cupboards (so at night when you turn them on, it gives you the feeling of a flame because of the orange!), there are lights under the cupboards, lights in the two corner cupboards with the glass fronts, plus the light over the sink! It's really nice!!


I'm going to do 2 more posts with the other pictures, because I'm just not very good at this blog thing; and this has taken me forever!!!!!!

Bedrooms

Here are our bedrooms. This first pic is the master bedroom. I haven't done our room either, but it will probably be the dark chocolate brown and the light brown like in our other house.


We don't have a door between the bedroom and the bath - I guess it used to be a "new" thing. Maybe it still is... but we don't mind too much. I really love my bathroom! It's nothing fancy, but it's just big! All 4 of us can fit in here if we need to!


We have 2 sinks and a huge mirror, plus Cary and I each have our own cupboard and drawers! We have a little shower and then a bathtub too. The tub is a jetted tub, but it doesn't work either!! It was working, and then just stopped. We'll have to check into that when we have time and money. We also have a walk-in closet (you can probably see better in the other pic) which has been wonderful too!

Trandon wanted to stand on his bed for the picture of his room! Grandma Campbell gave him a bedspread from the movie "How to Train your Dragon", and he really loves that movie. So we decided to paint his room with dragons. (They are really dinosaurs, but if you say that then Trandon will correct you and tell you it's dragons, not dinosaurs!) The bottom of the wall is painted in dark blue and is supposed to look like the castle wall. Then there are hills with dragons sitting on them, and the light blue sky. Trandon also got a "big boy' bed when we moved - no more crib!! He was having a hard time with it until Daddy put a ladder on his bed so he could get up by himself. Then he loved it!!

Another pic of Trandon's room. He wanted to show you the dragon - then he put it on the floor! So there is a little red dragon on the floor in front of him! :o)

And this is Trinety's room!! She didn't want a "little girls" room this time...my little girl is growing up. :o( But we had a lot of fun doing hers! We bought some curtains at Walmart that she liked and then tried to mimic it on the walls. I cut out some stencils on my Cricut and then put them on the walls. Trinety, Victoria and Trandon painted the colors on the stencils and then we pulled them off. They had fun doing it! Plus they did their hands on the blue wall - you can't see it too well in this pic though. It turned out so cute!! I really love it - maybe more than Trin! :o)


And here's another view from over by the closet. You can see the circles a little better in this pic. We also went and bought her (and Trandon of course!) little round chairs, and it seemed to match pretty well. Her desk ended up matching the blue on the wall - so that was nice!

And finally, since I was taking so many pics, Trandon wanted me to take one of him and Trin's stuffed animal, Kodiak. They both carry him around and fight over him. I tell them "Why don't you go outside and play with your REAL dog, Kodiak?" But it never seems to work. :o)

Downstairs

OK - so this isn't the downstairs. But I still can't get the pics to load in the correct order! This is a chipmunk that was playing in the trees when I came back upstairs and took some pics of the outside. We actually have a lot of chipmunks running around - even though we have a big dog! He was quite chunky for the winter!

This is our side yard. You can see the trampoline in the back, and we do have a hot tub. But we're not sure if it works or not. We would like to redo the deck next spring/summer so we didn't want to fill it yet. Plus, it needs a new cover!

I'm sorry I didn't take pictures when the trees were full and pretty! They are really nice - makes you feel like you're out in the mountains! This was taken standing right outside my sliding door. We have a patio that is covered on 3 sides and then the deck, so there's a lot of room to eat outside. We did that a lot this summer and it was so nice!! (Our deck is torn up because of fix-its we had to have done. Trying to decide if we should worry about putting it back together or just wait until spring.)

Here's the stairs - not that you really need to see this I guess! But they turn halfway down and then there's about 6 more stairs to the family room.

Here's our family room. It doesn't look it, but it's actually pretty big. There are 2 doorways to a big back area where we put Cary's TV and XBox, his couch, and all the games. Someday I would like to have a game table back there too! :o)

Here's another view of the family room. We have the big TV upstairs, so the little one looks funny! At the back is the hallway that goes around the stairs and leads to the extra bedroom, bathroom, and laundry room.

And here is Cary's beautiful couch!! :o) Behind it is where the board games are...

DA, DA, DA, DA!!! And here's my craft room! I am so lucky and happy to have a place to do all my stuff! And suprise, suprise - the room is already full! Hopefully I'll be able to get caught up on my scrapbooking now! :o) We also have a cold storage room right off my craft room - I didn't take a pic of that though.

Here's a pic of our guest room. Nothing much - but it is a comfortable bed! So if anyone wants to come stay - PLEASE FEEL FREE!! :o)

Here's the hallway down to the bathroom and laundry room.

This is my laundry room. It's as big as a bedroom and has carpet too! It's so nice to be able to do laundry without going down to a freezing cold room. I'm keeping up on it a lot better now!

AND THAT'S ALL FOLKS! Feel free to come over, stay, hang out, whatever!! We love visitors! :o)