Christmas Mornin

The kids were so excited for Christmas morning. We had Mason sleep in our bed so he wouldn't be able to sneak out early. After Morgie woke up were all went downstairs to see if Santa stopped by our house.

Here is daddy and Morgie coming down the stairs to see the presents!

Mason and Morgie were excited to see all the presents Santa left for them. The both got a kitchen a play tent and tunnel to share. Morgie got clothes, a rocking chair, a kitty coloring books, a few books and several other things. Mason got an easle, puzzels, coloring books, books, clothes and lots of other things. I guess these two were pretty good this year.

The kids loved the kitchen

Mommy and Mason trying to take presents out of the boxes.

Mason got some cool Car's sunglasses in his stocking.

After playing with the presents Santa left we headed to the Christmas tree to open presents from eachother. Morgie's favorite way to open presents was with her mouth.

Aunt Shalese came over for breakfast and presents. After breakfast and cleaning up we all went to visit great-grandma Jones in the assisted living home. The kids got grandpa Don to get them cookies and goldfish crackers from the snack cart so they were happy. Later that evening we had Shalese, Don, Grandma Crook and Great-grandma Hilton over for Christmas dinner. We all had a very nice Christmas.

Christmas Eve

We always have Christmas eve dinner at grandma Crook's house and everyone is usually able to make it. This year Hadley, Joanna , Evan and Chuck were up from Kansas to celebrate with us. Shalese was also able to come for the festivities. We had our normal dinner which was so good - the only down fall of dinner was a puking incident by one of my nephews (Evan) on my shoe! After that I didn't have much of an appetite.

Grandma Crook always has to have a picture of all the grandkids at every holiday - not an easy task by any means! We decided to get the pictures done with before presents so we wouldn't have too many problems getting the kids all together. This was about the best one we could get.

The kids enjoyed finally being able to open some presents. We just exchanged the presents from cousins and they all had lots of fun. Can't wait until tomorrow morning!

Can't Hardly Wait!

Not sure how much longer this little girl can wait until Christmas morning arrives and she is able to open the presents under the tree. Also every day she gets into the tree and brings me a half opened present. Some of the wrapping looks pretty terrible but what can you do with this little cutie around. Morgie also loves to take the decorations off the tree. Luckily the ball are supposed to be shatter proof. I got the baby gate out and gated up the room the tree was in but big brother is an expert at knocking it down so she can get in.

Putting up the Christmas Tree

We put up the Christmas tree this past weekend. The kids were really excited and wanted to "help" daddy put up the tree. This time of year daddy usually gets pretty upset because our tree is so big and then it takes a while to get it up and get all the lights on the tree working. I was excited because we bought new Christmas decorations this year and I was anxious to see how they looked on the tree.

Mason is always ready to dive right in to decorating.

Morgie was more interested in taking the decorations off the tree than contributing to the decorating.

This is our big bucket of Christmas decorations.

Richard's job was to put the hooks on the balls and hand them to the kids.

We had lots of fun decorating the tree, listening to Christmas songs and drinking hot chocolate and I hope I can keep the presents under the tree wrapped this year.

Temple Square

Last night we went to Temple Square to see the Christmas lights. This was the first time for Mase and Morgie and also for Richard and Shalese. It was pretty busy but we actually were able to find a close parking space which was good since it was pretty cold out. Mason and Morgan loved all the lights. Shane had to keep a hold of Mason's hand most of the time cause Mase wanted to get right in the flower beds of climb the trees to look at the lights.

Richard always wears something with the Oregon Ducks on it. While walking around temple square there were TONS of people (guys) that would come up to Richard and say something about how good the Oregon Ducks are doing. It was pretty funny. Anyway...we all had a great time and it was nice to see all the Christmas lights and enjoy eachothers company.

Thanksgiving

We made our annual trip to Oregon for Thanksgiving again this year. We had two extra passengers with us this time. Shalese came along and so did Richard who was working with Shane for a few months. So that makes six passengers in our Explorer plus all the luggage. We definitely had a packed car. We started out at 6 in the morning to get an early start but little did we know that this would be our longest Oregon trip ever! We got to about Burley Idaho and we were in a full out blizzard. I don't think we went oer 20 mph for at least the next 3 or 4 hours.

These were our road conditions

Mason was very scared of the "white storm" and was afraid we were going to get stuck. Truth be told I was scared of that too. There were cars all over the side of the road stuck in the ditch.

Morgie was really good and didn't seem to mind the drive too much. She kept meowing like a cat which I thought was cute and funny but I think it got on other peoples nerves.

We had to drop Richard off in Bend and then head over to the mountain to stay with Shane's dad. The whole trip there took us about 18 hours the first day. Then we still had another 2 hours to get to Justin and Lori's house the next day. Needless to say we were all a little tired and ornery.

While we were there we went sledding with Shane's brothers. Mason really wanted to go and we had all the winter gear so we decided to go. We went to the high school and there is a really big fun hill to sled down. I took Mason the first time down and it didn't go so well. We rolled near the bottom and Mason decided he didn't like it very much. Uncle Brett talked Mason into going down the hill with him and they rolled too and Mason ended up with a bloody lip. Poor guy - he refused to go down the hill again but he was content playing in the snow.

Shane and Brett

Me and Shane getting ready to race Justin.

Mason was loving the snow.

The time we spent in Oregon was great. It was nice to relax and see the family. On the way home we thought we could miss the storms but we had to pick Richard back up and after that we ran right into more snow for the rest of the way home. And to make matters worse we were about 2 hours away from home and the interstate was shut down so we had to make a detour and go an extra 2 hours out of our way bringing the trip home to 19 hours. We were all exhausted and in no rush to ever make that long trip again. I think we are more airplane people now.

New Family Pictures

We decided to have family pictures taken since we hadn't had one since Mason was like 14 months old. A lady in our ward is an awesome photographer and she took us to the house that was lover 100 years old. It was a lot of fun. The house was very nice and the yard was great for pictures. Mason was a total ham and really wanted to dominate the camera. Morgie doesn't like getting her picture taken and she would not smile at all. The kids did pretty good while we were trying to get good shots and were rewarded with suckers and fruit snacks. Here are a few of our favorite pictures.

This picture describes the kids perfectly. Morgie is really somber and Mason is alway happy and in her face.

Daddy and Mason with a silly squinty face.

Daddy and Morgie with her anoyed face.

This is the family picture we chose for our Christmas card and also for the big picture displayed in our home. Once again it displays the kids personalities perfectly.

Mason, mommy and Morgie

This is the only picture of Morgie that we got where she was smiling - even a half smile around a sucker. I love how blue her eyes are in the picture.

Haloween

This Halloween Grandma Lomax and Shalese came to visit. Actually Shalese is moving here to Utah for her job. So Grandma Lomax got to go trick-or-treating with me and the kids. The kids were really excited to go trick-or-treating but we had to wait a little while because it started raining and it was pretty cold. We waited a little while and the rain died down a little so we headed out around our street. Despite the rain we still had several trick-or-treaters and we went throught 2 big Costco size bags of candy.

We always have to go to Pete and Kristy's house trick-or-treating first. They are some of Mason and Morgie's favorite people.
Mason saw some other kids riding in their wagon so we had to get ours and we had to ride from house to house in the wagon but the kids seemed to enjoy it and it kept Mason from running ahead of us and getting lost.

Morgie was the cutest butterfly ever and the costume kept her warm on the cold rainy night. She was also super excited to get a bunch of candy and we could hardly keep her out of it.

Mason loved being a sting bee and he would turn around and show everyone his stinger on him bum.

The kids had lots of fun despite the rain and got way too much candy. Morgie really got into trick-or-treating this year. Her and Mase had lots of fun and also enjoyed answering the door and handing out candy to other trick-or-treaters.