13th anniversary

Last night we celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary. No grand fanfare, but we went out to dinner at Fortel's Pizza Den and enjoyed a happy hour just re-connecting and remembering what real pizza tastes like. (Domino's does not qualify.) And....drum roll please...the best part was using our now built-in babysitter. Emily has babysat for us twice now in the evening and done a fabulous job. A new phase of life! She enjoys earning some money, and I enjoy the cheaper family rate. Maybe we can go out more often! 13 years! It goes by so quickly.
Afterward we came home and enjoyed a piece of pie and some sparkling grape juice in the good goblets (much fancier that plastic everyday ware) and then settled in to watch a movie together. Of course, I fell asleep after about 10 minutes, and Trevor sleepily asked me if we should save the movie for another night.
That didn't happen on our first anniversary, but 4 kids later...

Christmas Day

Christmas morning! The kids were so excited! They woke up at 6:00 but we made them go back to bed. but then a half hour later they woke up too excited to wait any longer. so we heard them go downstairs where Emily entertained them until 7:30--the appointed time to open stockings with mom and dad. Christmas is fun with kids.

Sandi's baby!

Here he is! My new little nephew!

family nativity picture

This picture was taken at the creche and carol activity at church. Trevor, Emily and Max are in it under protest, but Sam and Ginny were so excited to dress up like Mary and one of the wise men. Anyway, I thought it turned out pretty cute.

I'm an aunt, again!

My baby sister had her baby this morning at 3:30 a.m. A bouncing baby boy 8 lbs. 4 oz. What a brave girl she was...she and Scott worked together and accomplished their goal of a natural childbirth. It was quite a long labor, too. Nancy and I were both having sympathy pains for her and couldn't sleep all night fretting about it. It's so hard to be so far away! Now she's a mommy! She and Scott are so excited. I'll post a picture as soon as they send one. I'm so excited to go out there for a visit in a couple of weeks. They named him Mannix Scott. They are going to call him Manni--not sure how the spelling is, though. I got a little teary this morning thinking about how proud and happy I was. I love my little sister! And now we have a new nephew to love, too!

Music

It's really late and I still have a few things I need to do before I can go to bed, but I wanted to write about something special that happened today. In sacrament meeting, I sang a really beautiful arrangement of What Child Is This with four other ladies from our ward. All of us are good singers, but not professional, if you know what I mean. But when we started to sing, I felt like the Holy Ghost surrounded us in this warm, magical glow, and my voice blended with theirs....and that moment was perfect. I was thinking about the words we were singing, about Mary looking down into the eyes of her little baby, and mothers everywhere seeing their babies with those same feelings. I thought about how that baby grew and taught, healed and ministered to the people, and how as the song says, "Nails, spears, shall pierce him through, the cross be borne for me, for you." And then the last verse calls to all men everywhere to come and embrace Jesus Christ in their lives..."Joy, Joy for Christ is born, the babe the Son of Mary." And as we sang, my voice wasn't my own--it was part of this chorus of voices of not only the women in the room with me, but women through the ages who have loved the Savior. It's hard to really put words to the spiritual feelings I had at that moment. I am grateful to Heavenly Father for helping to feel Christmas in this special way. I'm grateful for music and the many sweet moments I have experienced that have helped my testimony to grow.

Sam and Ginny

Thanksgiving

random pics of kids

Ginny's birthday

We celebrated Ginny's birthday with a small family party after our trip to Mississippi and a little celebration with our preschool friends.

pics

Vicksburg Mississippi

more trip pics

trip to Mississippi

Here is an excerpt from our kindata letter about our trip:

We went on a fun family trip at the end of October--a journey down south to Mississippi with the civil war band. It was about an 8 hour drive…not too bad. On the way we had fun looking at the cotton fields that were being harvested. I'd never seen cotton fields before. We stopped in Memphis to see Graceland. We loved it! We saw the pink Cadillac, his jet, the Lisa Marie, toured the home and saw all his gold records and jump suits, etc. Now every time we hear an Elvis tune the kids perk up their ears.
Vicksburg, Mississippi was really fascinating. The band played at the 100th anniversary of the Illinois monument. The monument itself is a big marble domed building. The band sang and played in there--and the echoes were incredible! Beautiful! It was like history resonating all around you with the names of the soldiers on all sides. The 33rd regiment fought at Vicksburg, so that was especially meaningful. We toured the court house museum and saw a lot of interesting artifacts, including some things from Jefferson and Varina Davis. A real highlight was the Cairo ship that had been found in the Mississippi and restored. The artifacts were incredibly well preserved. Bottles that still had their original liquids in them, etc. That ship was sunk in only 12 minutes, but everyone on it survived. We learned that most civilians survived the siege of Vicksburg by living in caves. I bought a book that was a journal account of one such lady and her son, and was really touched by it. We also enjoyed some good Southern cooking at a round table restaurant. Catfish, fried okra, biscuits, corn bread, black-eyed peas, etc. It was interesting how many of the locals had trouble understanding our northern accents! We also squeezed in a moment to visit the coca cola museum where coca cola was first bottled to deliver to customers who couldn't visit the soda fountain in the local drugstore.
An interesting side note to the trip was that in the evening as we relaxed in the hotel, we were able to watch our beloved Cardinals win the world series! It doesn't take long living in St. Louis to catch Cardinals Fever. Go Cards!

activity days

Here are my cute girls from activity days at church.
We took these pictures to use as part of a project to make our own Friend magazine.

Halloween

Halloween 2006. Ginny the fairy princess (of course) Sam, Max, and Trevor as ghosts of civil war soldiers, and Emily as Olivia Vertigo.

new pics!

Here are some new pictures, at last! I haven't gotten around to uploading pictures in quite awhile. I'll start with the kids' soccer pictures.