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!

HALLOWEEN

Hi Everyone,
Hope you all had a fun and spooky Halloween. We were glad to have Jessica come home with us this weekend and to also have our Dad home for 3 whole days before he had to fly out to Florida again today. Just click "play" on the smile box to enjoy our Halloween pictures, and may they bring a smile to your face!

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

I just thought I would share some of our soccer season with you so far. Rachael and Jacob are both playing this year. Rachael is on a U10 league (meaning under 10yrs. old) Her team is the "Geckos" She has definitely improved this year. She has learned to pass the ball really well to her team mates and she is learning so much more about making plays and playing different positions. I think she likes playing defender because as defender she gets a little bit of a breather waiting for the ball to come down the field her way!



Rachael really hustles after the ball in her games !!!




Here's Rachael playing goal keeper in her game 2 weeks ago!




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Jacob is on a U8 league (under 8 yrs. old). His team is the "Slimers"!! Jacob has had an interesting soccer season so far. His first soccer game was exciting. This year in soccer They changed rules for U8, they no longer have a goal keeper. Wanting to encourage more kids to score goals in a game. Well, none of our kids who have played soccer so far have actually scored a goal before so Ted has been bribing the kids for years that he will pay $10 for a soccer goal. Anyway during Jacob's game they had a kick off (the referee drops the ball and one player from each team tries to kick and gain control of the ball). Jacob was the player from his team to be in the kick off. As the ball dropped and Jacob and the other boy kicked the ball Jacob got kicked by the ball right in the face. I wish I had had a video camera...there was a fire that suddenly burst in that boy!!! I could tell he was mad and at first I thought he was going after this other boy but as the game kept going Jacob was going harder and faster at the ball. He was on Fire! Finally he got himself in just the right spot and kicked that ball good and hard and made a goal! Then the next game he scored 2 goals. Ted ended up coughing up $30 to Jacob before he decided that he needed to lower the offer for making a goal! Luckily for our pockets he hasn't scored a goal for the past 2 games!?

Kick it hard Jacob!!!



Jacob racing to see if he can get to the ball first!


WE are proud of our kiddos! It's great to have the opportunities to have our children participate in these kinds of activities. They are not the most athletically talented but they try hard and have a good time doing it.

Tennis/Phillip

We also have to include Phillilp in our sports update. He has been playing Tennis at Carson Jr. High, 9th grade boys team. Their season just finished the end of October. Phillip played several doubles matches and only a few singles I don't know that we will ever see him at Wimbledon but it was definitely a fun season for him with all his friends on the team too.

Lilly's B-day & other stuff!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! And other fun stuff!!



Is there any question as to who is the Queen?!


Lilly celebrated her 3rd birthday on September 16th. We had 2 parties! She was able to have a party with all the playgroup kiddos (other 2 & 3 yr. olds w/ moms) on Wednesday and then later on Sunday we had a family party too. Of course Lisa's birthday was on Friday and Ted's was on Sunday so we threw a party all together. It was so nice to have Jessica home again for a little bit! It was also fun to watch Lilly opening presents with her little friends on Wednesday. She would open a present and then want someone else to open one, she actually wasn't quite getting the idea at first that this was all about HER! She caught on though. Her favorite gifts were of course all the ponies. Though she loves being the princess with her new Tiara and wand and she likes to do her pretty hair with all the accessories that she got!



Here are some of the mom's and kids at the party from our playgroup on Wednesday

Just a fun little thought. Lilly informed me the other day that our dog Sarah is her friend and then she pointed to our cat Jo Jo and said, "and he's my sister!"
Then yesterday Jacob very seriously wanted to know what Sarah's last name was???

This is Benjamin's bridge of Pennies, I was kind of impressed by it. It's all pennies, no glue or anything else to support it, guess what he wants to be when he grows up...
We've always thought he was some kind of engineer!! (He was building this bridge while he was supposed to be doing homework)