Reception and Turkey day

This is at Lara and Jareks reception here in Albuquerque last weekend. It was fun and there was good food.
And these two couldn't get enough of the dancing. It was so fun to watch them!
Cutting the cake

This is today... yes we are all ready for Christmas. We went Christmas tree hunting... to Lowes, then we came home and decorated the whole house. Now we just have to hang lights out front, but we're waiting until it gets warmer. (It's been COLD today, for Albuquerque :) )
Us at the reception

Our wonderful Thanksgiving Dinner with just us. The food turned out really good and it was only five minutes later than I planned. Not too bad huh!

Spencer the Pilgrim with his apple/marshamellow turkey that he made.

Spencer, doing what he does best... sitting in the naughty corner.
Carly saying "cheese" for the picture
Spencer and Carly either love taking a bath together, or else absolutely loathe it. This time they were having fun.

Utah Trip

We went to Utah this weekend for Lara's wedding. It was a fun trip. We got to see Kyle's parents for a night and then we went to Ephraim for the wedding, then on to Spring Glen.



This is Carly at the pond where we went fishing.

Spencer, Travis, and Taylin with one of the fish they caught. Spencer loved having cousins his own age to play with!
Spencer and Taylin

A family picture attempted... we tried a few pics, but they were all red-eyed or blurry. This is the best one.

At the wedding. It was SO good to see everyone!

Again, at the wedding.

The Daniels girls
Taylin, Spencer, and Aunt Katie
The cousins... so much fun!

Carly at the wedding
After the I-do's
Carly trying on some of the decorations
Obviously a serious conversation between Grandpa and Grandson

The whole family. We are very blessed!

Happy Fall-idays!

We went to our ward's trunk or treat last night. This is Spencer with the "girl he's going to marry" her name is Bethany and she's a good friend. Spencer and another boy fight in sunbeams over who is going to marry her...

Carly... AKA Tinkerbell.
Carly and Spencer loved answering the door for trick-or-treaters. They'd both run to the door and Spencer would hand out the candy and Carly would just yell Hi - over and over again, then Bye, over and over again...
Carly relaxing in between answering the doors

Spencer -AKA Peter Pan

This is Carly a few days ago gearing up for the big Halloween costume-time. She loves to dress up.
This is Spencer's Pre-school group

This is Spencer and Carly right before we left for the ward party. Carly wasn't having her costume... so this is what she looked like-right up until we forced her into being Tinkerbell. She cried the whole way to the church. We are horrible parents. After she saw everyone else dressed up, she seemed to forget the tragic Tinkerbell costume and she carried on begging for candy like the rest of the kids.

We didn't get a decent picture of them together. They were so excited before the trick-or-treating that they wouldn't hold still long enough... then they were so high on sugar afterwards that they couldn't hold still. All we got were a lot of blurry pictures. And a couple of them making weird faces. Ah, the joys of Halloween!
Tinkerbell and her daddy...

So this is what Spencer and Carly do best together... make messes. Except this time Spencer got stuck in these drawers. It was so funny for me that I had to take a picture of it. I have another picture of him crying because he couldn't get out, but decided it's probably not appropriate to share. :)
Our kids have been sick this last week... lots of fun. But this is what they get to do when they are playing hooky from church with daddy... maybe I'm feeling a cough come on...
Carving pumpkins
Yes, our kids own clothes....

October Fest

Spencer loves to climb the tree in our backyard. He says he's a monkey and then tries to hang upside down... Yes the leaves are still green.

This is my little fall decoration that I made that is hanging on our front door. Just showing it off.

Kyle's parents came this last weekend and stayed with us. We did a lot of fun things and had fun. We went to the famous Albuquerque zoo one of the days. It was fun. We saw a lot of animals and observed some of their lovely animal behaviors....

We also went to one of Spencer's soccer games and cheered him on.

We also went to a pumpkin patch that is about 45 minutes away from Albuquerque. It was super windy and busy, but the kids had a great time.

Spencer waiting for a ride in this bucket-type train being pulled by a little tractor thing. (Yeah, that makes sense in my mind.)

Carly watching Spencer jump on this big trampoline.

Kyle and Spencer picking out a pumpkin at the patch.

The crew with the pumpkins.

We did a lot of things at the patch. This is when we went through this big corn maze. Luckily Kyle is great at reading maps, or we'd still be in there....

It was great to have visitors and we even provided nice air mattresses for them :) So, if you decide to come and visit, you too can have such accomodations! We would love to have more visitors! :)

Why we love Albuquerque

We go from dead lizards (as in the previous post) to live lizards.... this one got into our house a couple days ago. Of course Kyle was at work, so I had the lone privilege of getting it out. The kids thought it was pretty cool, but I think they thought it was even more cool to watch their mom chase it around with a broom. Of course I took a break from the chasing to catch a photo of it... Ah, we love lizards.

This is another awesome thing about Albuquerque. It's Balloon Fiesta time and this view is from our front porch. The kids and I walked over to this field yesterday to watch them land. If you look really close, you can see little dots in the air, those too, are hot air balloons. (above that house)

And we decided to get up-close and personal with the balloons this morning; so we headed on down to Balloon Fiesta Park. We woke up at 5 Am so we could be there for the Special Shapes Rodeo. It is so fun that it's worth waking the kids up that early to go! :)

It's just something you have to see in person to comprehend how many hot air balloons there are! These pictures don't catch the glory.

The highlight of the morning was seeing Darth Vader (not the best pic, sorry). They even had storm troopers there to send him off.

Dawn Patrol- before all the balloons get the okay to go up, these balloons go up to check the wind.
Fun, fun morning! We love the Balloon Fiesta!