Playing in the SNOW!

We have gotten a ton of snow in the last few days, and the girls have LOVED it.  I took a ton of pictures...so enjoy!

The snow was up to Addison's knees.  It was pretty funny watching her try to keep up with Claire and Brielle, but she never complained.

Addison's favorite part of snow is eating it.

 

Sledding down the hill on the side of the house.

Claire kind of fell out before they got going and tried to see if she could just go down on her stomach being pulled by the sled.

It didn't work, so she jumped in and went down on her side.

Brielle (the girls had put on some makeup to do a circus or something before sledding.)

Addison loving every minute.

Claire being silly.

I said "Do you want to make a snow angel?"  Claire did, Addison said, "No, I make a snow face".  She quickly jumped up and realized it wasn't the best idea she's ever had.

 Snow makes things look so beautiful

 My gooey sick little baby stayed inside with me. 

Fun times!

Christmas Eve/Day

Every year we do a Christmas Eve brunch with my family.  We have a ridiculously delicious meal (this year was my dad's famous omelet, a breakfast casserole, chocolate chip pancakes, bacon, sausage, fruit, hash browns, poppy seed bread, juice, chocolate milk and biscuits) and then do our gift exchange.  We got Ben and Sara on skype so they could be a little bit involved.  Everything was going well until sweet Brooklyn suggested we sing "I Am a Child of God" to Ben and Sara...the majority of the adults were not able to make it through that.

Cute cousins getting ready to do their gift exchange (minus Molly who was sleeping...did I mention she was sick?  Oh yes, someone must always be sick for Christmas)

This year, my mom and dad's gift to the grand kids was a bit of an overhaul of the loft. My mom cleaned and organized like crazy.  Then they split the loft into sections and really spruced it up.  It is AWESOME and the kids love it.  Here are the kids sitting on the bed up there seeing the new dress up center/movie watching corner.

The new magnet wall/board

That night we opened our jammies

And then gave the kids melatonin and sent them to bed.  

I kid not.

Christmas morning the girls got up about 7:00, which was later than I expected.

Posing for the traditional "on the stairs" picture before heading up to see the presents.

The goods are spotted and they went to town.  This year we definitely went over board...but I just can't help it.  I love spoiling people.

Hanging out after all the presents were opened and things were starting to calm down.

Molly was excited to play with a cord...way better than toys.

It was a WONDERFUL Christmas.  One of the best yet.  We are so thankful to have wonderful family to spend these holidays with!

Pre-Christmas Celebrations

So...here's the deal.  I am physically and emotionally exhausted.  2012 has been a long and grueling year in more ways than one.  And at times - like now - it has left me without the ability to form a good or complete thought, let alone create a blog post.  However, I do not want memories to go undocumented...so to oblige my future self, I am going to try and do my best.

Before Christmas, we made gingerbread houses.  And not just any old ordinary gingerbread houses, but we made Barbie gingerbread houses.

Uh...yeah...they exist.

Brielle got just about as much frosting on the table and herself as she did on her house.

Claire was actually pretty good at using the piping bag and was being very careful.

Addison (house on the left) told me where to squirt some frosting and then she very carefully lined candy up in a row on it.  I am always surprised that our little wrecking ball can be so careful and meticulous with things like this.

The Sunday before Christmas, I surprised the girls with new Christmas dresses.  They were very fancy and frilly, and the girls loved them.  When we got home from the Christmas program at church, we asked the girls to quickly let us take a picture.  We always focus our attention mostly on Addison to try and get smiles for the pictures....so we didn't notice Brielle until we were done and they had already changed.  I'm not going to lie, I was a bit annoyed at first when I was going through the pictures and realized that she was making a face in almost every single one.  But I have since let it go and laugh at the pictures.

We were so glad Addison was smiling...if only we had looked to the left...oh well.

Then we told the girls to go ahead and make a silly face...because we had assumed they had been nicely posing for the previous pictures...

 Silly girls.

Delivering the First 50 Totes!

This past Sunday we decided what better way to spend the day then to head up to Huntsman to deliver the totes after our beautiful Christmas program at church.

We had been given the option of hand delivering the totes to each patient's room and those in the infusion center receiving chemo-therapy treatments or dropping them off at the hospital and having the staff pass them out to the patients.

After really thinking about it, we realized that walking into each room and seeing these patients going through what our sweet Ben has, in the same hospital that we visited Ben many times would just be too emotional.  We knew it would not be fair to those patients to see us get emotional as well, because we were trying to bring them some joy and comfort.  So we opted to drop them off in the Volunteer Workroom and let the staff pass them out.

This way we were also able to let the grand kids come along.  Nobody under 14 is allowed into the patient rooms because of germs, so they wouldn't have been able to come if we had delivered them to the patients.

It was very rewarding seeing those cute grand kids load up the cart we borrowed and slinging totes over their arms carrying them in, and knowing that we are making a difference - hopefully - to these people. 

As we were finishing up and leaving, the girl at the information desk told us she was really blown away and has never seen a donation of this size come in - especially from one group.  She was even more shocked when we told her that this was only half of it and the rest was coming in January!

And here is a little sneak peak at the card Emily made that we put into each tote as well:

We vacillated between putting "In Memory Of" or "In Honor Of", and decided that because we know he is terminal, and know he will be leaving us very soon that "In Memory Of" is appropriate.  We could not possibly love the quote Emily found any more.  It is BEYOND perfect.  We can all imagine Ben saying those words to us.

I can't BELIEVE how much we were able to accomplish for this project.  The love, kindness and generosity we have been shown has been overwhelming.  So thank you again - from the bottom of my heart!