Wow! So much has happened!

Where do I begin? I have gotten so behind on my blog! Life has been a little bit crazy around our house. I am going to start where I left off on my blog... At the beginning of November (right where my blog dropped off the face of the earth) I found out that I was going to be the Primary President for our ward (again). I guess I have lots more lessons to learn and LOTS more FUN to have! I really love being in Primary and the kids in the ward are great. I have a fantastic presidency that is so helpful and it has been really fun to work with them. We just had our first activity and that went really well. We did a "Meet Your Teacher Breakfast" and it was a lot of fun.

On November 17th Bryce had his 34th birthday! We went to dinner at the Pizza Factory with our little family and then had birthday treats at our house. I forgot to bring my camera to dinner (of course... it takes about all I have to get the 3 kids ready and out the door with my keys and my phone... let alone remembering to bring the camera.) We had a good time and I will have to post a photo of him blowing out a few candles. We took it easy on him with the candles cause we didn't want him to cry when he saw what 34 candles really looks like! ;)

Thanksgiving came around the corner shortly after Bryce's birthday and we loaded up the car and headed to Idaho. We stayed with his brother, Trent, and his wife, Alisa, and their baby girl, Lucy. It was a lot of fun! Bryce's sister, Celeste, hosted the Thanskgiving dinner and worked her guts out to make it such a fantastic event. We left our camera out in the freezing cold car and when we brought it in to take some pictures of Thanksgiving it wouldn't stop fogging up from the warm house so not much to show you there. We did manage to stop by the Snake River and get a quick snapshot of our family. Braxton loves to see the snake river and is convinced that it is full of snakes even though we have told him that it is just the shape of the river that gave it it's name. He obviously doesn't really care what we think on the subject cause he points out a thousand snakes that he thinks he sees that the rest of us never can.

Christmas came and went in a crazy bustle. Every day seemed to be booked with all sorts of things to do and we tried to enjoy each event. Bryce went shopping with me to the black friday sales for the first time in our married lives. His eyes were opened to the madness of sales and but we managed to have a really good time and get the things that were on our list for the sales. We also had a great time going sledding with the kids, decorating the gingerbread house, drinking hot chocolate, watching Christmas movies and checking our door to see if Santa's Elves had dropped off a bell as a sign that they were keeping their eye out on our kids. Abbey had her first concert for the school choir and that was fun to go to. We had a good laugh when the first song started and I look up to see Abbey picking her nose with one finger and then just seconds later another finger needed to help out. It took about the entire 1st song to get whatever it was out of her nose and when I asked her about it after the concert just just looked at me and said," My nose was stuffed up and it was hard to sing," ... in a very matter of fact tone. At least she didn't eat it too.

Christmas Day was a blast! Abbey was the first one up and came in to see if she could go look at the presents if she PROMISED not to touch or open any of them. It wasn't too long later that she came up to our room again with full details on what she had observed. We finally let her wake up the boys and Braxton went from a dead sleep to complete hyped up Christmas energy. He was ready to tear the paper off of each gift to see what was in side and we had to teach him to read the tags first to make sure the gifts were for him first. Landen didn't care one bit about opening any presents but wanted to play with each toy that was opened. Finally later that day we opened his stuff to show him what he got so he would quit stealing Braxton's nerf gun or terrorizing Abbey's cash register. I think that Landen's favorite toy was the Radio Flyer Horse that he could ride on and it only took him a few minutes to get comfortable on it before he started standing up and trying it with one foot.

We broke tradition this year and didn't go up to Idaho on Christmas afternoon. The weather and roads were bad and we had a relaxing day in Utah. We let the kids have a sleepover with their cousins, Porter (4), Hannah (8) and Tyson (14). We had a great time! They played and played and played and finally slept a little bit... it was a blast! The roads finally cleared up the next day and in the matter of 30 minutes we decided that we were going to head up to Idaho and see Grandma and Grandpa Christensen for Christmas. It was fun to go up and it wouldn't have been Christmas if we hadn' t gone up. It made the season complete.

I am going to try and post a few pictures later to match up with my blog but for now I am going to see if I can catch a nap (one of the joys of having 9 am church!)