Happy Birthday Carson!

We celebrated the birth of my main man last week!!!

Happy Birthday Carson!!!

We are so blessed to have you. You are the best Husband and Daddy around, and without you our family would not function at all. You are the hardest worker I know, and I am so glad we get to celebrate YOU!

Snow fun!

Playing in the snow is lots of fun when Daddy is willing to pull you around on a sled for a good while.

Christmas Fun!!

We were so lucky to get to go to Moab for a whole week over Christmas break. 

We let the kids decorate sugar cookies, and they had a blast.

We especially liked the black Christmas tree!

 We spent Christmas Eve at Grandpa Mel's. Kynlee and Uncle George stole the show with their whip cream shenanigans. 

 Everyone always has fun tormenting Aunt Morgan.

 We have so much fun doing a white elephant with my family. Grandma Ree looks great in her new Leg Lamp necklace.

It is so much fun playing Santa!!!! Why do paretns never tell you how fun it is? I am probably more excited about the little things I pick out for my kids than they are. I made the girls these dresses, and I also made little matching bow ties for the boys outfits. I even made a matching dress for Kynlee's little doll Sammy and little set of pajamas for her too. 

 Braxton looks pretty pleased with his gift from Grandpa Dan and Grandma Sue.

 This is Korbin's "cheese" face.

 I have been waiting to get this picture since October when I made the dresses.

 Braxton was more than happy to model his Sunday clothes.

 And even though I didn't get his feet in the picture, this is Korbin modeling his new socks. 

 Matching jammies :-)

 Some of us may have had a little too much fun over the break!

Christmas is my favorite time of year, seriously I am so depressed when it is over. Having kids around makes it so much more magical. We did lots of things this year to try to teach Kynlee that Christ is the reason that we are celebrating. We also did lots of family activities where I worked hard to remember that our family time is more about having fun than trying to achieve some idea in my head about how Christmas activities are supposed to be. 

Merry Christmas!!!

Mom Struggles!!!

Do any other moms have trouble planning fun things for their kids and then their kids misbehave and can't participate in the fun activity???

I ran into this very problem when I tried to plan a fun Christmas activity. 
Kynlee and I had made sugar cookies earlier that day, and for Family Home Evening we planned to decorate the cookies and then take them around to our neighbors. 

Unfortunately Kynlee was not willing to eat her dinner that night. We had told her that she couldn't decorate cookies if she didn't eat her dinner. We were hoping that threat would motivate her to eat, but when she wouldn't we were forced to follow thru with the consequences. 

We started decorating with the babes, but Carson and I were both in bad moods by this time. Carson was in a double bad mood because he doesn't like decorating cookies anyway.

What was supposed to be so fun ended up being such a bad experience.

Well actually our babes all had lots of fun.

Here's a nice fake smile so we can always remember this memorable night.

Pretty soon Carson was bundling up the babes so we could go around the neighborhood and I was decorating cookies all by myself.

What fun!

 The next night we made little reindeer cookies to take with us to Moab. Kynlee ate her dinner that night and we all had way more fun. Not only did the reindeer cookies turn out really cute, they were way easier than traditional sugar cookies.

Parenting is really hard when I don't want to take away my children's privileges just as much as they don't want me to take them away. Maybe someday I will figure out a better method, but probably not any time soon because I am really good at struggling with this whole Mom thing.