Our Christmas Card

Here is this year's Christmas card. I had the address of this blog printed on the back of them, so that may be why you're reading this!

For anyone who is wondering what we've been up to this year:

Lydia is so much fun these days. She's a tiny little thing, but she is so confident on her feet (as she should be at almost 18 months) that she draws comments from strangers everywhere we go. Her vocabulary grows all the time, and she has several words that are fairly clear. Her favorites are baby, ball, duck, dada, ooshes (shoes), -ilk (milk), and -ock (sock). I don't know what's with dropping the first consonant sound of some words, but it sure is cute sounding.
Lydia loves music and is a really great little dancer. Maybe someday I'll try to post some video of all her different dance moves. Lydia also loves to blow kisses and give hugs. She's a very affectionate child.


Elise is now 3, and started preschool this fall, at a home in our neighborhood. She loves it. She can write a few of her letters, and she loves to draw cute little pictures (see below). Elise is currently very interested in the concept of big and little, and when she sees groupings of different sized anything, she assigns them titles like mommy, daddy, baby, big kid etc. We're so proud of the way she acts with Lydia. She is a wonderful big sister. Elise also has been doing a dance/tumbling class with her cousin McKenna at AED (where Cindy works). Her class performed a Christmas dance last weekend at their recital. She was so pretty in her little blue costume. Lately I've begun to wonder if Elise grasps the concept of buttering people up (for Christmas?), because she has just recently been showering Mike and I with praise like "You're the best best best mommy/daddy anyone ever had!" I would love to know where she learned this!


Mike is still working at Progeny Systems in downtown Salt Lake. When I try to describe what he does, I always get it wrong, but it has something to do with designing FPGA chip thingys for underwater acoustic kinda thingys. Very technical, I know. Sometimes he gets to travel to Rhode Island and Connecticut for his job, but it's not very often, so that's nice for us.

Mike spends his Tuesday nights developing his patience, as he leads the 8-year-old cub scouts. Seriously, I helped him last week, and I know why they call 'em Wolves. They are just like a pack of wild animals, ha ha.

I was just recently "promoted" from Beehive advisor to YW second counselor. I was about to be super disappointed as I was released from my calling, and then I was relieved to learn that I would be working with the same great Beehive class, just in a slightly different calling. It has been so fun being a leader of youth, and I'm looking forward to continuing it.

I am enjoying my role as wife and mother, and working on the "homemaker" part of it, ha ha. Speaking of which, maybe I should wrap this up and go do some laundry!

Our Disneyland Trip in October

In October we took a really fun family vacation to California. We spent an afternoon on the beach, and 5 days in the Disney parks. Our friends the Murdocks were there for part of the same time, so it was fun to see them as well. Here are some of our cute pictures:

Here we are at the beach, our first afternoon in California. We thought it would be fun to have a picnic lunch on the sand. Bad idea. It was not very warm, and it was super WINDY! We ended up having a pretty good time (despite the sand in our eyes and food), playing in the sand and wading in the water. Elise especially liked that part of our trip.

King Arthur's Carousel was probably Lydia's second favorite ride. It was the first thing she tried, and she loved it. And then it stopped moving and she had a fit, lol.

Lydia's favorite ride of all was probably the new Nemo submarine ride. This was my view throughout most of our first voyage:

Elise claimed that her favorite rides were Monsters, Inc. and "the mountain ride" (Matterhorn). She was just a hair over the height requirement for that one, woohoo!

The other highlight of Elise's Disneyland experience was the new Princess Fantasy Faire. She got to meet a "real princess" (we did not wait in the 90 min. line to meet the princesses fom the movies, but we did meet the "princess" who was passing out these crowns.) Elise was just starstruck, it was so cute.

This is us on Main Street. I made the Mickey Mouse tie dye shirts we are all wearing. It was my first experience with tie dye, but they turned out pretty nice. We got a lot of comments on them!