Nacho!

Jason brought these "nacho" masks back from Mexico for the boys. They love them. But Zach and Ryan seem to think that once they put them on, it gives them an excuse to fight (without shirts).

Off Track mini-vacay

Last week while Jason was trekking with his buddies in rural Mexico, sleeping on bunkbeads in the slums, having taco eating contests and watching his friends vomit (I'll have Jason give more details in another post), I decided to take the kids on an adventure of our own. We packed up the car and headed off to visit Jason's sister Jamie and her family in Boise! With 6 young, energetic kids it was chaotic most of the time, but we had fun and give a big thanks to Jamie and Mike for letting us stay with them. Some of the highlights :

***Passing for a polygamist family at the bowling alley: 1 male, 2 females and 6 kids!

***Getting a flat tire. Luckily it was while we were there and not while we were traveling. I was worried about something like that happening while traveling and not being able to fix it by myself. But the friendly guys at the local Big-O fixed it quickly and free of charge.

***Our cousin, Mason's, Hulk birthday party. The kids got to dress up as the Hulk and punch the pinata.

***Developing Hulk muscles. (Small green balloons stuffed into their shirts. Another fabulous party game.)

***A trip to the (way overpriced) specialty candy store. All the kids chose to get these long suckers. It was a good thing we took this picture right after we got out of the car because on the way into the house Zach stepped on Owen's shoelace and he fell, breaking his sucker into hundreds of small pieces.

***Sending the kids out to the hot tub, while the adults stayed inside to rest. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

The Holidays

Now that the holidays are over, the kids are back at school and the Christmas tree has been taken down, for almost 2 weeks, I've decided to finally post about what a great holiday we had. The first thing we did to get ready for Christmas is, of course, put up Christmas lights. To avoid the countless hours it takes to put lights on the house, Jason came up with a brilliant plan to make a tree with lights in our front yard instead. I told him he didn't have to do any lights this year and that I would never ask him to get on the roof of this house again. Last year I tried to help him, but after climbing up the ladder and getting on the way higher and steeper than it looks roof, I couldn't move. He finally made me climb back down when my tears began to make the roof slippery. So Jason began diagraming his dimesions and came up with a plan for a 20 foot tall tree.

After working countless hours on the tree (he could have put lights on the house twice over in the time he worked on the tree) it was completed. He just needed to make one last adjustment to make it perfectly straight, and the lights went out! He had rigged each strand of lights to plug in to an extension cord that ran up a pole. With that one last adjustment a strand of lights was pulled out of the extension cord (at the top of the 20 foot pole). By this time he had literally been working on the tree all day and was ready to bag it. I told him that we would fix it the next day. So the tree became 10 feet tall and we put lights around the grass.

I'm only posting this next picture for my sister-in-law Jamie. She always does these amazingly creative crafts and gifts and posts them on her blog for others to see and use her great ideas. She called and asked me what we were doing for our neighbor gifts this year and I thought my idea was pretty creative (although Jason thought is was stupid, but probably because he just thinks the whole neighbor gift thing is stupid.) Reusable grocery bags. I bought some for myself and use them all the time. I love them, you can fit so much stuff in them and they are way easier to carry than plastic bags.

Every year my family does gingerbread houses. Jason and I made the gingerbread for everyone for a few years and then we decided it would be easier to buy kits. It is easier but still just as messy.

The kids ate just as much candy as was put on the houses.

My sister Kristen and her house.

Our finished house

Our kids were so excited for Santa to come this year. On Christmas Eve we had a nice dinner with Jason's family at his sister's house then visited my parents for a little while and then made it home around 10:00. We thought our kids would go right to sleep. Zach and Owen did, but Ryan did not. We kept waiting and waiting for him to go to sleep and thought that by midnight he would be asleep. Nope. He was too excited to sleep and kept saying that his stomach had butterflies and he couldn't calm them down. I think Santa actually came while he was still awake. Finally Jason and I went to bed just to be awakened by Ryan up and down all night. Finally at 6am we got up and told him he could get Zach and Owen up too.

Bright and early Christmas morning.

By New Year's day we were tired out. We had stayed up late every night between Christmas Eve and New Years Eve spending time with family. About 8:00pm I told Owen to go down and say goodnight to everyone. When he didn't come back after a couple of minutes I came downstairs to find him zonked on the sofa. He was just so cute I had to take a picture of him.

Way to GO UTES!!!