Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you’re all as busy as we are having fun at parties, shopping, and eating yummy treats! Here are a few things we’ve been up to:

Here’s Link at our church Christmas party, scoping out Santa from a distance. Humm, he doesn’t look so bad.

Then again. . .

I think we may have traumatized the poor kid!

Last night I got to ride a duffy boat in the Newport Beach bay with our Young Women. It was a blast! The lights were beautiful, but the company was even better. I love these girls!

This month has been very, very busy for our family. And because we have something planned every night this week and we were running out of time to get our Christmas tree up, we decided to do it first thing this morning.

Yes I’ve been missing from the blogging scene lately. I’m full of good excuses, but my best is that I had a lapse in my flickr account so I was unable to post pictures. Without pictures to post, I lost most of my motivation. But you’re in luck, my flickr account is up and running again, which means this post is going to be picture overload.

Lincoln has a love for literature. Often when I hear silence and think Link is probably getting into something, I’ll find him in his room, sitting quietly, pulling books off the shelves, carefully paging through them. He’ll spend at least 30 minutes a day doing this. It’s probably his favorite pastime. Often I’ll place him near his books with a snack, and he’ll keep himself entertained the whole time I take a shower!

Before Halloween we visited a local pumpkin patch and petting zoo. Even though he didn’t actually “‘pet” the animals, he was still very excited about the whole thing and he did touch them a couple times.

For Halloween, we all dressed up like pirates. Actually, that’s not completely accurate. For the Day Before Halloween, we all dressed up like pirates. We were so Halloweened out by the end of that night that we actually went to dinner on Halloween night instead of going Trick-or-Treating. Here are a few pictures from our many festivities. Unfortunately we didn’t get a picture of all of us together on our camera.

Miles competed as the reigning champ of the pie eating contest at our ward Halloween party. Unfortunately the title was taken from him by Brother Wingard. It was a close one though!

Last weekend we took a trip to Arizona to welcome Miles’ brother home from his mission where he served two years in the Philippines. While in Arizona, I took a few family pictures.

We took a wonderful, very needed, and well deserved vacation last week. We spent ten days in Utah visiting family and friends. It was definitely one of my favorite trips to Utah—we didn’t want to come home!

We left on a Saturday morning. Overall Link did very well while we traveled but he did have a few moments. We installed his big-boy car seat for the trip. I haven’t yet decided if I should turn him around again. I don’t know if he’ll let me!

Our first stop was my hometown of St. George. It was HOT there! But it was actually kinda refreshing if you can believe that! Miles and I commented that it actually felt like summer. We spent a lot of time in the water to keep cool. One of my new favorite places in St. George is this little water park. It’s perfect for toddlers! For those of you familiar with the area, it’s on Tabernacle and Main. After all that time in the sun we walked across the street to the little Judd’s store. We enjoyed sipping on bottled soda and satisfying our sweet tooths with our favorite childhood candy. That place brought back memories!

We also spent some time at the “river” by my parent’s house where we skipped rocks and the boys did some spontaneous “cliff” jumping. We celebrated my brother-in-law’s birthday with the family and lots of food. I think I gained 3-4 pounds on our trip. We did LOTS of eating!

One night we got a little crazy and took what a friend of mine calls “surprise photos.” It’s where you violently shake your head back and forth while the camera snaps away and you get. . . art

The best experience of the trip was seeing my sister go through the temple for the first time! It was such a sacred and special experience. There is no other place in the world where you feel more love from the Lord and for your family! It’s something I will cherish forever. (see said sister in above photo. hehehe)

Midweek we made our way up to northern Utah where we would meet Miles’ dad, sister, and grandparents. We took our sweet time and made a side trip in Provo where we visited BYU and our past employers. We had some good times on that campus, and we have wonderful memories from that area!

From Provo we continued north up to Snowbird ski resort. Miles’ grandpa owns a timeshare at the resort and we were invited to stay in a lodge with them for a few days. It was heaven—beautiful, fun, and relaxing. We spent time in the spa every morning, did some hiking, rode on the zipline, and took a tram to the top of the mountain where we enjoyed the view at 11,000 feet.

One of those nights we meet some good friends of mine for dinner. We hadn’t seen each other for a couple years and it was really fun to catch up. Though I now regret taking Link with me. I was so distracted trying to keep him from screaming that I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good conversationalist. I’m sorry girls! It was a realization to me that there are just certain things we can’t do with Lincoln anymore. Next time I’ll leave Miles home to babysit and we’ll have a girls night out!

We headed back to St. George on Saturday morning. While there we had another family get-together with more food. We really and truly had no desire to come home. But we dragged ourselves out of bed Monday morning at 4:45am to get on the road. It’s nice to be home, but it was just so awesome to not think about life and responsibility for a time.