Still here!

To get totally up-to-date I would have had to get all the pics off my camera but I was afraid that if I added any more steps to this process it wouldn't get done today. But this is a good start, it at least gets us out of ski season :) I can't seem to fix the spacing on this post so sorry in advance for all the scrolling you'll have to do.

Isabel is full steam ahead into her "terrible" (terrific?) twos. I'll admit that as absolutely ridiculous as she can be sometimes she makes up for it by being even more adorable. Here she is helping to put her crib back together.

and "helping" me get my workout in...

I've been into Yoga this year and the kids love to practice some of the different poses with me. We've discovered that Mason has some crazy good balance ;)

Evidence of the crazy, cold wet spring we had. Here are Mason and his friend Carson building a "snow cannon" in the backyard.
We chased the heat down though and managed to get to St. George a couple of times.


One of our St. George trips was for Hallie's dance competition. One of their dances won this enormous trophy......luckily we didn't have to haul that thing home.

Here is Hallie looking so cute & ready to dance. She really hated those false eyelashes...

Jake on Dr. Seuss day. In typical me fashion I procrastinated figuring his costume out until the morning of but he really pulled it off.
Hallie the morning of her spelling bee. Kyle whipped up some awesome bee pancakes.

The kids with their Woodruff cousins in New Jersey. Living so far away from this side of our family we feel really blessed to see them as often as we do.

Izzie absolutely adores her little cousin Elli and chased her around any chance she could get.

The kids & I got to spend a few days in DC after the Jersey reunion. We loved spending time with our family there and getting to see all the DC sights.

Skiing

We've managed to hit the slopes with the kids quite a few times this year which has been really really a ton of fun. Here's everyone back in the car after night skiing---Mason was as tired as he looks in this picture. About an hour before the older two kids finished he skied off-trail and had a yard sale (lost his skis, hat, goggles, etc) in deep powder. By the time I got him back on the trail ad all put back together he was SO DONE! He refused to put his skis back on so he and I sat there and caught snow flakes in our mouths for awhile and then he ended up walking down the mountain. He and Kyle went and got hot chocolate and a cookie after that and he felt much better. Both he and Jake were sound asleep before we left the parking lot.

They all improved quit a bit this winter and it has made skiing with them a ton of fun. Jake's favorite line is "But Moooom! Do I have to turn?" He'd rather just head straight for the bottom as fast as his little skis will carry him :)

Trying to ski through Hallie's legs? I'm not really sure where they were going with this...

Isabel gets ditched whenever we go ski but she loves to play in the snow in our yard when it's there.

A couple of weeks ago I managed the impossible....with the help of 7 of my friends and neighbors and my always helpful mom I managed to go skiing with my good friend Stacia on a Wednesday! It was awesome. I had this slightly devious feeling all day like I was skipping school or something :) We had just had a big snowfall a couple days earlier so the snow was amazing, the weather was great, there were no crowds, and Stacia & I skiied until the mountian closed. I took some pictures but when I went to get them off my camera just now they had all been erased!! So I have to blog about it so that I have a record that it happened. I wish I could make it a weekly event but since that is SO not possible at this point in my life I am at least going to push for once a year....or maybe twice? Once a month might be do-able....all I know is that it is happening again!

Out on the ranch...

Just after New Years we took advantage of having the Alyson & Nate family a mere 4 hours away (instead of the usual 30+) and drove up to Idaho to visit them on the Sharp Family Ranch. Nate's parents very graciously let us drop in and spend the night. It was very low-key and relaxing. We had fun visiting, catching up on Flight of the Concord, learning how to feed the cows, and letting the kiddos play play play with their long-lost cousins.

Hallie: piano recital, etc.

Hallie had her 2nd ever piano recital in December. She's really enjoyed playing over this past year and it has been fun to see her progress. Here is a pic of her with her teacher:

And here is Isabel being like big sis:

This past week Hallie won her class spelling bee and got to go up against the other class winners in front of the whole 3rd Grade! She didn't win but she made it far and even got her picture in the paper. I was really proud of how cool she was under all that pressure, I'm pretty sure I was more nervous than she was. Kyle made her a spelling bee pancake that morning for breakfast and I think it really helped :)

I was going to post a short video of her playing the piano and up on stage spelling but the videos take FOREVER to download! I'm not that patient!! If I find an easier way I'll put them up.

Merry Christmas!

Our Holiday season this year started off with a BANG....literally....when I miscalculated a turn into traffic on my way to take Hallie to dance and totalled Kyle's car. Good bye Altima! You were a great, reliable, comfortable car and you will be missed. Thankfully though the car--and definitely my pride--were all that suffered major injury. I did manage to fracture a bone in the top of my right foot but that was more just amazingly annoying than anything else as I hopped and limped and swore my way through the Holidays. With that happening on December 1st the rest of the month seemed like smooth sailing in comparison.

We continued our 2-tree tradition this year by decorating our "Tai Pan" living (or dying really)tree down in the living room and our fun, eclectic, family ornament, artificial tree up in the loft. Of course we drank all the egg nog we could handle and sang along to Mitch while decorating both trees.

Kyle is really honing his pancake artistry. He made these Santa Clause and Snow Man masterpieces for the kid's breakfast on Christmas Eve.

I've taken Hallie to Ballet Wests The Nutcracker once before but in an act of bravery (insanity?) we brought along Jake, Ryan and Kevin this year. They did great through the first half when there are a lot of dancing kids, animals, and toys to watch but the second half is almost 100% ballet and was torture on everyone involved. We made it though! The real highlight for the boys was watching cliff divers at the Mayan Restaurant at lunch on the way to the theater. It was all downhill from there....for the boys anyway....the rest of us enjoyed it :)

One of our best Christmas presents this year was getting to have Grandma and Grandpa Woody come and spend the holidays with us. We loved all the baking projects, story times, bowling and so many other special memories made having you here. And our kids were introduced to wearing red vests while eating Christmas Eve dinner which they thought was really cool.

. Here they are slaving away in the kitchen...it was really disappointing when they left town and my dishes stopped magically doing themselves.

My parents and Trisha love to make the rounds around Utah County on Christmas morning and watch all the grandkids open their presents. With them there along with the Woodruffs we had quite the full house on Christmas morning! The kids loved having such a large, adoring audience.

In honor of TJ heading off to Boot Camp all of the kids Christmas pj's were camo style. And one of my mom's big presents was this life size cardboard cutout of TJ.....believe it or not that is not actually TJ in the picture ;

Even with all of the ups and downs and overall insanity that is Christmas it was a wonderful month that reminded me how grateful I am for my family and for my Savior.

Random Hiking Collage

While putting together my Mexico pictures the other day I came across this collage of pictures that we made last summer and never posted. We feel like one of our big responsibilities as parents is to brainwash our kids into loving all the same things we do so we try to get up into the mountains as often as we can. This was our first succesful Y Hike since having Isabel. Our first attempt was when she was only 3 weeks old and due to technical difficulties we only made it about 100 yards. Things went a lot more smoothly this time and everyone except Izzie made it up and back down on their own!

Thanksgiving in Cancun!

After a ridiculously long wait....here are some of our pics from our Mexico trip! I was putting it off because I was going to make an Animoto video with them (like I did for Kyle's Ironman video) but they now require you to have an annual membership to make full length videos. RIDICULOUS! Its only $5 a month but I'm not gonna do it!!! So look at the pictures one at a time, get that Jason Mraz/Colby Caillet song Lucky running through your head (or whatever song you're in the mood to listen to) and you'll get the overall effect that I was going for. We had a fantastically fun trip and we still talk about wanting to go back all the time. We got to scuba dive through underground caves (cenotes), swim and swim and swim, shop downtown, drink all the pina coladas and diet coke we could handle, go to Sr. Frogs, and swim some more. We even had a chance to make turkey cookies! And Hallie got to go with Ryan, Nana, Kelli and TJ to Xel-ha, a really cool natural aquarium/water park. We loved it! Thank you thank you thank you Mom and Dad!!!

Cute Kids

We took some Young family pics in October, here are some of my favorites of the kids: