One of my new favorite sayings, I got when we went to the Fudge Shop in Nauvoo on our Summer Vacation is "Families are like Fudge, mostly sweet with a few Nuts!" I do wonder if we aren't mostly Nuts with a few sweets.

Whenever you take family pictures I think you should always have a couple of silly shots. Relieves some of the tension!






These were the fastest family pictures we have ever taken in out lives!!! Our ward meets for church at 1:00 and so I figured everyone would be in their Sunday clothes at least by 12:30. I had my good friend Wendy Lesueur come to our house at 12:20. We shot the girls, then the boys and then the whole family. Lilly was not real cooperative in several of our shots, either her or Ben or Jacob would end up with weird faces on, but what can you expect with 7 kids...Perfection?! Anyway, we ended up with a few pretty good ones, and did all that in less than 15 minutes!

After our official photo shoot was over and Ted was running the older Priesthood boys to the church to help prepare the sacrament, I took advantage of having Lilly all dressed up and tried a few shots of my own with just her. She was still being kind of silly, it didn't help that our cat JoJo was running around up front and Lilly wanted to play with her. But finally in desperation to try to get her to stay posed in one place I told her to hug the tree and this is what she did. I think it was the perfect shot! But then again I am slightly prejudice in this situation.




















Here are just "The Guys" and just "The Girls"















Yes, Here is our Happy Family!
Merry Christmas everyone
2008!

How am I spending my Holidays?

This is my kidney stone, my kids all said it looks like the planet Mars?... What do you think?
Yeah, this was fun! As many of my friends and family know my body likes to make kidney stones!!! So just a few weeks before Christmas I found out that I had a 5 mm kidney stone in my right kidney (doctor says it was the size of a tic tac!) Anyway, they had me check into the hospital and they blasted it with a laser and then" joy to the world"(not really) I got to wear a stint for a week and a half after that. It made me feel like I had to go to the bathroom 24-7. Long story short I was very uncomfortable (to say the least) until they pulled that stint out of me. Good news that stone is gone, bad news, I still have 2 very small stones in my left kidney (around 1 or 2 mm) Doctor says we watch and wait. Yes you heard right, essentially we watch and wait for them to grow and see if they decide to drop out of the kidney before they turn into 5,6,0r 7 mm stones...OUCH! I've been doing tons of cranberry juice and lemon juice in my water hoping to flood those things out of there. We'll see how long I can keep it up!