Maleah's Winter Concert

Maleah Announcing

Here's Maleah at her concert. It's far away, but she amazes me how comfortable she is in front of an audience. I wish I had her confidence!

Maleah's Concert

Here's Maleah with her chorus teacher after the concert. They did a really good job and had lots of fun.

Maleah with her orchestra teacher.

She's in the zone here!

New Year's Eve

I just thought this was cute. We went to Curtis and Diantha's house for New Years Eve with Steve and Katie. This was when we put all the kids down on the family room floor to watch a movie and the IDEA was that they would eventually fall asleep while we played games upstairs. Well, being the irresponsible parents that we were that night, we stayed up until almost 2 am and consequently so did the kids. It was quite the party, but we had a lot of fun. We ate all sorts of good food (that in itself is a party to me) and we played games. We're so lucky to have such good friends to have fun with!

Maleah's 10th Birthday

I can't believe Maleah is 10!!!! She is growing up too fast. She is such a great kid! She has such a kind heart and an enthusiastic personality. She is incredibly smart and talented. She's good at almost anything she tries to do. I feel the Lord has really blessed me to give me the opportunity to be her mom. It's so fun for me to watch her get older and see how she views the world and it's great to see her wanting to do right and watching her testimony of the gospel grow. She is a wonderful person to have in our family. She brings so much fun and enthusiasm. Happy Birthday, Maleah!!! I love you!

On Maleah's birthday we had Elisa (our friend from Brazil that is here for her Senior year of high school) over for a "sleepover". The girls had a lot of fun with her! We also had Steve, Katie, Abbie, and Eliza over and we went to the church and had a soccer game in the gym. It was really fun. Here we are after dinner getting ready to sing "Happy Birthday" and bring out her cake.

The Toys Are For the Kids, Right?

Christmas evening after the kids were all in bed Katie, Steve, Cody, and I went downstairs to test the durability of the kids new toys. This picture was actually taken with the lights off (because the lightsabers light up and make sound, so the effect was so much better in the dark!) so Cody had no idea what a great shot he had.

Christmas Day

The highlight of the Christmas presents was all of the Star Wars stuff: lightsabers, actions figures, Star Wars dishes and books. The kids thought it was great to watch Rylan with the lightsaber. He thought he was pretty cool too! You can tell that Rylan is the center of entertainment in our house.

This was Christmas morning. Each of the kids made us gifts at school and that is always one of my favorite things. Maleah made us a ceramic bowl that was beautiful. Jess made us an adorable snowflake ornament with her picture in the middle of it. And Isaac gave us a Christmas magnet with his picture in the middle of it too. We had a ball opening gifts and the kids got a kick our of Rylan's excitement for the paper and boxes. He was actually scared of his gift! It was a ball popper that sings songs and blows balls in the air. It was a little too much for him to begin with, but he eventually warmed up to it.

We had a great Christmas this year. We have the tradition of taking fresh homemade bread to all our friends during the holiday season. And since I can't bake and deliver 15 loaves of bread in one night we do a few per week and it kind of lasts all through the holiday season. We have a great time visiting everyone. It's one of my favorite things about the Christmas season.

Christmas Eve

This was our Christmas Eve tradition of fondue. We did it at Steve and Katie's this year. We had a great time! The kids made a massive mess once we got to the chocolate part, but that was part of the fun. We did our white elephant gift exchange which is always hilarious. We made the rule that it had to be something you already had and you couldn't purchase anything. So the kids even went through their stuff and they had to wrap it so that no one knew what it was (except usually me because I need to help in the wrapping process for some of them). There were some funny things. Isaac got a "Worst Case Scenario" board game that he was very pleased with! Steve got a microphone and a dancing Santa Claus (well, it used to dance before it broke). Maleah got cloth diapers (that was Rylan's contribution!). Anyway, random stuff, but we had a lot of fun. We are going to miss Steve and Katie next year. They are going to move this spring because Steve joined the military. We have had so much fun living close to them and we've become great friends. We hope they'll be back in a few years for law school!