Wood cutting!

Our last day of wood cutting. I am glad we went up and played in the snow then, cause we haven't seen any since! We had quite a few adventures that day due to the new, wet snow, but only one of our trucks came out with a MAJOR dent in the side!

Brady gets an award at school

Veterans Day

I knew the Veterans Day program that the kids put on at school was coming up and so I have mentally been trying to prepare myself for this day, but it has all been for nothing. I walk into the gym on Tuesday afternoon and see all the flags hanging and immediately my eyes start to tear up. What is it about seeing the flags and hearing the National Anthem that make me get all teary? I can't even get through the first line of the dang song! And I am crying like a baby. I make the excuse its because I am the only one in the room who hasn't grown up singing this song and hearing all the other songs that my kids are learning and singing in Remembering those who have served this country. Yes that has to be the reason because I can't recall a time when I have ever been this emotional while singing O Canada. Maybe it's because I am older and realize what a sacrifice so many have made for me. I can't imagine Chas having to leave right now and go fight somewhere on the other side of the world and not knowing when he will come back or even IF.
At the end of the program they had all the Veterans in the audience come and stand at the front, most of them were crouched over and had very grey hair, if any, and the thought struck me that these men sacrificed not only for themselves, but for GENERATIONS to come. By that time I really couldn't hold it in any longer and let the tears just stream down my face, (like they are right now while I am thinking about it) and enjoyed the sight of all of these men who fought for our freedom and said a little prayer that I would be worthy to enjoy that freedom and teach my children to be patriotic and thankful for the blessings of being free.
After the program the younger kids and I went home and waited for the older two to get home. They both walked in the door and said that their friends said I was crying at the program, the funny thing was they didn't seem to surprised. I always cry, even when I feel the tiniest touch from the spirit. Blessing? I don't know, but it is a physical reminder to my children that I do feel the spirit and that is it real.

A couple Family Shots

Here are a couple of family ones, not too fancy, but not too bad considering the camera was propped onto the car.

More lovely girls

I can't figure out how to turn these babies, so you will just have tilt your head, cause they are sooo darn cute! The boys didn't dress appropriately for the occasion so there are not many of them.

My lovely girls!

Ok so instead of waiting till I catch up on my blog, I thought I would put up some pictures that we have taken recently. Here is the cutest Jo JO around!

Halloween

Halloween was a blast again this year. We had Tinkerbell, Peter Pan, cowboy, granny and a witch.

Flag Football

Brady played his first year of flag football and had a blast, Chas helped coach and was in heaven I am sure, football being his first love and all. Grandpa and Grandma were here to watch his very last games, glad they could see him play. Of course I don't have many pictures, but I have decided that Beckett may be the only kid that will have lots of pictures, mainly because he will be playing and I won't have to chase him off the field because he will actually be old enough to play!

Gwilliam's Bakery

My Mom and Dad came down for a visit at the end of October. As always it was so fun to have them here and sad to see them go. Since we have some family history over in the Baker area, we drove over there one day to go to the old "Gwilliam Bakery" as we had heard they still have some memorabilia on the walls there. It is now a pub, but they let us in to look at the cool things they have hanging up in there. We had a fun time listening to Dad tell us all about the bakery and who are in the pictures.

The Nunns

We got to stay at my cousins house in Ranchester, WY. They have a great place and we had a nice relaxing visit with them. I haven't seen them for awhile and it was great catch up. Les lived in the same town as I did growing up so it was nice to visit with him again.
And of course if there are horses around...

Beckett went missing for a couple of minutes, (I know you are all surprised!) anyway we found him way out in the horse pasture trying to "catch" the horses wearing Chas' boots, the kid keeps us running!

The hot and cold lake

At the end of our day in Yellowstone, we headed toward the east gate to take off to my cousin Les' house to stay the night, little did we know, but the gate didn't open till 8pm, yes pm, because of avalanche danger, it is safer to drive through when it is below freezing. So we got to spend about 2 hours here at this lake, before the gate opened. It actually was very cool, it is frozen across the whole thing except for about 1foot all the way around the outside edge where the water is like a hot tub. The kids kept asking if they could get in because it was so warm. It was the weirdest thing, but something to do with the underground weirdness sp? of Yellowstone, this lake is hot on the outer edge and the rest is covered with ice. Pretty cool, eh?

There were a couple very friendly bull buffalo that came wandering down to say hi, they got really close and so we decided to go into the car. The funniest thing happened though, there were these two spanish ladies who decided to walk up the road aways just to stretch their legs, they came running back yelling in spanish that the "buffalo were chasing them" according to Chas' translation. We see them running down the hill and the buffalo casually strolling behind them, we had a good laugh!

Yellowstone Part 3

Chas found this cool tree and we wanted a picture with all of us.

Walking along the board walk, it was the perfect temperature for all of our hiking, but the kids kept complaining about the smell. (rotten eggs)

Yellowstone part 2

The pictures of the geysers just don't do them justice, the hot pools were so awesome not to mention so beautiful! Just look at that blue color! Beckett kept trying to jump off the boardwalks, I wouldn't recommend taking a 2 year old to Yellowstone, but hey we got our exercise!

The landscape is just amazing, the world really is such a cool place. It's almost surreal when you go there, it is like nowhere you have ever been. Definitely a place we want to go back too and spend some more time hiking around and visiting all of the cool sites.
You can see Brady trying to keep Beckett from climbing through the railing, haha!!! Brooklyn was fascinated by the science behind the geysers and how they worked and all of that, it was a very educational trip!

Yellowstone Part 1

Well I was so excited to be able to try and start getting caught up on our blog tonight while the kids are in bed and Chas is playing ball, but alas blogger is taking FOREVER to upload pictures so instead of sitting here waiting for pictures to upload I am going to go and do something that will not drive me crazy at 9:30 at night. But here are a few of the beginning of our awesome trip that we took at the beginning of the summer.

This is the afternoon that we left, everyone was soooo excited!

We got to stop in Rexburg and stay at some good friends of ours, the Freemans in Rexburg, we had a great visit and they cooked us an awesome breakfast!
Then we got to our first tourist stop, Yellowstone! The kids LOVED it, I think it was their favorite part of the trip. Beckett couldn't stop talking about all the buffalo and everytime we saw another one he would get just as excited as the first time, he was hilarious. There is something so wonderful about how excited kids get that makes everyone else feel excited too!
We got to see the buffalo swim across this lake, which was awesome! There were some huge splashes and it was great to see them swim across.