The Norm

Between all the Holiday festivities, there were school plays, basketball games, holiday preparations, recitals, and every day life.

Watching football with grandpa

Impressive! She gets her sleeping abilities from her dad

Cook out on the last warmish night of fall

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Sweet Dreams

The coach (me) with Lou's basketball team

Being the coach for Lou's team was very frustrating while at the same time being equally fun and rewarding!  These cute girls worked hard and improved a lot.

Lou as the "Littlest Snowflake"

 As a gift to their parents, Curly's class performed a musical.  Curly sang a solo in her role.  She did great!

Curly and the wonderful Mrs. Erickson

"Helping" mom bake.  One of the many pounds of butter we used!

Gingerbread cookies

Playing "Library"

Some of the happenings, weren't so normal.  Paisley graduated from BYU-Idaho!  She is on to bigger and better things.

Paisley's graduation

Nathan, Kristi and Diego arrived in time to celebrate mom's birthday.   We celebrated with sushi and Pineapple Dream Dessert.  It's a treat to be close enough to celebrate with her.

Mom's birthday

Our sun babies get to learn to ski this year!  All together, at the same time.  We have been a few times since this back yard ski lesson and they are doing great!

The first ski lesson

Thanksgiving with the Lakes

Prepare to be blog bombed!  You would think that with all the technological advances that make life easier, I would be able to keep this blog more up to date.  Maybe that will be a New Years resolution... oh wait, New Year's has passed...

We had wonderful holidays this year.  With Thanksgiving and Christmas combined, we were able to spend time with all of our siblings and their families.

Thanksgiving was spent in Utah with the Lakes.  We took advantage of the free zoo day and joined the rest of Salt Lake Valley for a gorgeous, sunny spring day viewing animals.

Thanksgiving dinner was consumed in the Waters lovely home.  Everyone contributed and everything was delicious!

Kids eat first!

Spud watching football with the guys.

 

After dinner, there was some football playing, visiting the park, crafting, and napping.  In the evening we enjoyed exchanging gifts with each other.

Uncle Steve and the April Fools Twins

Gifts from Oma

The day following Thanksgiving, we visited Thanksgiving Point to play at the Museum of Natural Curiosity.  It was an amazing place and we had a lot of fun!  I managed to get caught on the stretchy spider web (if you've been there, you know what I mean).  I looked ridiculous trying to get through all the layers, but I have not laughed that hard in a long time!

Spud in giant Lego heaven

Saturday, we visited at Grandpa and Grandma Woodbury's home with many of our Woodbury relatives.  It was really fun to see Nikki and her daughter visiting from Virginia.  In the evening we went to see the beautiful lights on Temple Square.

Cousins - Nicole, me, Elyse

It was a wonderful, long holiday weekend!  We are grateful that everyone made the effort to be together.

Sweet Berry becomes a bit more sassy

In November we celebrated Berry's 4th Birthday.  She received a surprise for her birthday - Aunt Jeniel and Lyssie came to celebrate with her.  We celebrated the special day with breakfast in bed (provided by her sisters) and lots of playtime with Lyssie, Jeniel and her siblings.

Jeniel and I had fun making her Rapunzel cake

 

 Curly and Lou insisted that Berry have a birthday party, so we decided on a dress-up tea party with a few friends.  Curly, Lou and our 9 yr old neighbor (who Berry loves to play with) served the girls and played games with them.

Berry is in a wondrous stage of life when everything can be make-believe and magical.   She chatters all the time, and says the cutest things.  She is snuggly and sweet with everyone (and I mean everyone) most of the time.  She had also become prolific in her use of paper, crayons, markers, scissors, and glue.  With that said, turning four also seemed to turn up the sass in Berry and time-out has become a bit more of a necessity.  We wouldn't have her any other way though!

So happy she became part of our family

October in a pumpkin shell

If you could sum the month of October up in three words it would be dirt, rocks, and fun.

Let's start with the dirty stuff.  I can't even calculate how many hours days we spent working on our unfinished yard.  We removed rocks and more rock and even more rocks.  When we thought we had removed as many rocks as was humanly possible, we kept on removing rock.  For some reason, we did a lot of this in the dark using shop lights.  Then the sprinkler man came and worked his magic.  Finally it was time for sod.  The night before our sod arrived we decided it was a good time to put in a french drain.  So once again in the dark, we dug a really deep trench and an even deeper hole.  Then we took all that rock that we had removed form the yard and put it back in the yard, added drainage pipe and burried the whole thing.  We finished about 11:30 at night.  I think our neighbors might have been questioning our stability of mind...and so was I.  Finally we laid sod.  We were humbled and grateful when about 30 people youth and adults from our new ward showed up to help us with this project. 

 Seeing green grass out the window makes me smile!

Now for the fun.  Berry started preschool.  She loves going with her buddy Lilly.

 My girls surprised me with a spa night - a nice foot soak in icy water, foot massage, and hair style.

Curly, Lou and I had the privilege of traveling to Arizona to see many of our dearly missed friends and tour the Phoenix temple during the open house.  The whole weekend was a wonderful treat.  We stayed a night with Uncle Lynn and Aunt Blynn (and the crazy girls took a dip in the cool pool).  We enjoyed visiting with them and playing with their dogs.  Then we traveled to Peoria and stayed with the Bakers.  They were wonderful hosts.
 
When we arrived, Candy told me more volunteers were needed and asked if I was interested in helping with the Temple open house on Saturday morning.  Of course!!!  Dave offered to take all six of their kids plus my two to the Mormon Helping Hands service project, so that Candy and I could go help at the temple.  It was such a treat to be part of that experience. 

Later in the day I went back to the temple with the girls for our tour.  Because I had been through the tour as an usher earlier, I was able to point out things to them that I had noticed, particularly the beautiful artwork. 

The few days we were there were filled with visits to many friends.  We were always on the go.  We had park dates and dinner dates.  Curly and Lou were able to see almost all of their friends.  We were able to spend time with our dearest neighbors and many other friends.  We were also able to attend our old ward on Sunday. I loved being able to catch up with old friends as if not time had passed at all.  I even got to squeeze in a jog with my running group. 

The whole trip sped by so quickly and were on our way home to Idaho with many happy memories in our hearts.
 

 

We arrived home for a beautifully warm Halloween (we still felt like we were in Arizona).  

We got creative carving pumpkins courtesy of Grandpa Lake's garden.  Paisley joined us for a "spooky meal".  And we had a fun night of trick-or-treating.  Curly and Lou dressed up as Hermione and Ginny.  Berry was a princess and Spud was a very appropriate Lion. I helped with Lou's class party and thought I should probably dress up too, so I threw together a gypsy costume.  Even my dad got into the spooky spirit, and scared innocent trick-or-treaters with his creepy gardner get-up.  Fisher didn't dress-up, but he did carve a gnarly pumpkin.

Waltours 2014

About five years ago, Grandpa Woodbury began traveling to Southern Utah every fall with his sons and sometimes grandsons.  He called this annual pilgrimage "Waltours" (after his name Walt).  This year, grandpa extended the invitation to Waltours to the entire Woodbury family and it turned into a mini family reunion.  We all headed down to St George, Utah in mid-October to see the sights and enjoy the gorgeous weather.

We had planned to visit Zion National Park, but happened to be there on a very busy day, so we skipped it.  Which turned out just fine.  It had been quite a while since many of us had seen each other and we were happy to catch up.  We visited the Grafton Ghost Town where our great-grandmother taught school during it's "hey-day" of a community.  It might look familiar - it has been the set for several movies, including "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

In the evening we visited the adorable St George Children's Museum.  We had free reign of the museum and the kids (and adults) had a whole lot of fun.  We loved that they had a shadow picture room just like the old Salt Lake City Children's Museum had featured.  It was nostalgic to be in there with my cousins.

 On Saturday we began with a walking tour of old town St George.  Grandpa grew up in this area and we saw his childhood home and his grandmother's home, along with an old general store that has been turned into a quaint sweet shop (with every pleasing flavor of soda imaginable).  We also toured Brigham Young's winter home.

 We ended the tour in the town center and enjoyed a picnic lunch.  Then there was lots of time to play in the splash pad, relax on the grass, or ride the carousel.  Berry was fascinated by the many bronze sculptures around the town center.  She would hug them and talk to them like they were her new best friends.  After some downtime at the hotel, we drove up Snow Canyon and took a hike in the beautiful red rock.  The finale of the evening was a delicious dinner at a local restaurant.

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 The reunion was short and very sweet and we are so happy that we were able to go!