Family Time

After Christmas, some of Caleb's family came up and we all spent a couple of days hanging out together.

We went to the Church History Museum in Salt Lake and the kids had a ton of fun exploring the children's area.

The dance area was a pretty big hit. The kids dress up in authentic attire and then watched a little video that taught them some traditional dance moves.

On a dare from his cousin, Corbin also tried out the female steps :)

Seth found this cute little door, just his size and spent the next 20 minutes trying to open it. Since it wasn't real, he ended up leaving rather frustrated.

Corbin was quite proud of his tower that he managed to build (with a little help from Uncle Bryan :)

The next day we bundled the kids up and sent them out to play in the snow.

Makelle was mad that her overprotective mother wouldn't let her play out on the icy lake in the background.

Seth was so excited to go 'ouww' but hadn't had a nap and was in tears within minutes. He loves being outside and asks to go out multiple times a day, but I guess it was too much fun all wrapped up into one week and he just needed some downtime.

All the uncles eventually went out and built a ramp up the side of the house for the kids to ride down.

At first they were content sledding, but pretty soon the snowboards came out and when that wasn't enough, Corbin decide to learn how to do jumps. Our video quality didn't turn out very good, but here is Corbin doing his first jump on a snowboard. He was pretty proud of himself, despite the crash landing.

Merry Christmas

On Christmas Eve we ate our 'Mary and Joseph Dinner' together at home.

Afterwards we gathered in the living room and read the story of Christ's birth out of the bible while the kids acted things out. Makelle LOVED being Mary and getting to swaddle baby Jesus.

Seth wasn't so excited and refused to wear any of his biblical attire.

Then we went and drove around looking at Christmas lights in the newly fallen snow. When we got home each of the kids decorated a cookie for Santa. Corbin put peanut butter on his because when he met Santa a few weeks ago he told Corbin he likes peanut butter cookies the most, but Mom made sugar cookies instead without realizing that important fact so he had to improvise.

Seth, Makelle and Caleb had been sick with the stomach flu over the weekend and we joked that it was a miracle Corbin didn't get it, because he has literally thrown up every single year on Christmas or Christmas Eve for the past 5 years in a row. We must have forgotten to knock on wood though because around 4:00 am we heard him in his room getting sick. Tradition, I suppose.

Eventually we all got back to sleep for a couple of more hours and he felt pretty good by morning and completely forgot about any sickness when we saw that Santa had come to visit our house. They spent the next two hours opening and playing with presents intermittently until they worked through their giant pile of gifts.

Their last gift was on the tree in an envelope instead of under it, which they thought was funny, until Corbin read Mom and Dad's gift and then they were just excited.

Happy Halloween!

I've put on about 10 pounds since we bought the spandex body suit costumes, and it no longer looked quite as good. So I got a back-up costume to wear for most of the day:

Pumpkin Carving

After catching up on my blog back in July, I lost my camera and quickly fell behind again. At this point I have decided I should just move on with current blogs while I wait to find the time to go back and fill in the missed posts from the past 3 months.

We carved pumpkins with the kids last night. As usually, all three of them were grossed out by the "gutting" process and had to be coaxed into touching the inside of a pumpkin.

(Seth grabbed a knife after watching Caleb cut open the tops and tried to cut one himself. Cute kid.)

We managed to pull together matching, family Halloween costumes again this year. We are going to be the Justice League. So we decided to carve (or more appropriately, have Daddy carve) the superhero symbols on our pumpkins.

Caleb is really becoming quite the master carver.

Annual 4th of July Tank Wars with the Millers

Seth's Birthday Party

We celebrated Seth's first birthday with a family dinner on Sunday. On Saturday we put the kids to bed and then got out his little table and chairs to assemble, so we would have it all ready for his party. 5 minutes in, he woke up and ended up staying up to help us put the whole thing together. Surprise!

For dinner we had Seth's favorite food... all kinds of fruit.

After dinner we had more fruit for dessert. I made him a fruit pizza, that was supposed to look like a soccer ball. My giant cookie design skills could use a little work, but he didn't seem to mind, he dove in before we even had a chance to light the candle.

"What, was I not suppose to eat that yet?"

Grandma Nash, Jan, Ken, Eric, Tyler, Tori, Rachel, Wesley, Grandma Lloyd, Grandpa Lloyd, and Matt were all there with us to sing Happy Birthday to him. But between his painfully shy personality and recent encounter with fire, the candle and song was too much. He burst into tears and dove over the cake to get to his mom.

All was forgotten once he got to eat his treat though :)

Corbin and Makelle were so excited to help him open his presents.

Uncle Tyler and Aunt Tori got him a sock monkey to go with his new nickname. We thought it was pretty clever.