Matchy Matchy, Merry Christmas! (2011)

So I received a request to update my blog... It's nice to know (or maybe sad) that at least one person has been checking our blog for the last 8 months and there have been NO updates!! Sorry! I joined facebook and that has been the 'new' way for me to update on our family. I always knew it would be hard to do facebook and a blog... So here's a new post, but it's not anything "new" I thought I would start a closer to the last blog post... Christmas!

For Christmas I made everyone matching pajama pants!! It was so fun to see everyone in their penguin pants! We did our own Christmas here (before Christmas) and then we went to Missouri and had Christmas all over again!

A day or so before we left Fort Worth, a few of us started to get sick. Last winter was the WORST WINTER EVER!! I could time it, almost to the day, as to when I would get sick... It was about once a month. I was sick at Thanksgiving AND Christmas... Even though we were sick, Michael and Sarah still let us come - I don't remember which ailments we had at the time, it seems like pink eye, sore throat were among them.. Thayne, myself, and Hyrum were all on medicine. As luck would have it, Michael's family had just had pink eye and had extra medicine - which was nice to know in case we reintroduced pink eye to them! While there, we got to see Conner's Baptism and see Uncle Jeffrey, who had just gotten off his mission! AND Uncle Troy, Uncle Jason, and Auntie Christy!! And Sarah's Mom!!

At Conner's Baptism, we learned two new songs: "Build An Ark" and "Savior." In Missouri, the Primary kids had learned these for the program, but we didn't know them at all, but we fell in love with the beautiful words and melodies. Now we sing them at FHE and Thayne's sister and her husband sang "Savior" at Evelyn's Baptism! It ended up being a wonderful trip! I am so glad we made it and that Michael and Sarah allowed us in their home! One night we were able to hear all about Uncle Jeffrey's mission and ask him any questions we had. The Chinese food on Christmas Eve was probably Thayne's favorite! He could eat Asian food everyday. We helped make our "famous" brown sugar ham for Christmas dinner and it was delicious! Disco I hope your chocolate eating days are behind you... While we were there he devoured an entire chocolate football that was probably 1/3 the size of a real football. Samuel was sad, Disco was happy, until they had to remove the chocolate from his body :(

Anna came home from the trip wanting a "purple chinchilla." Michael and Sarah have 2 chinchillas: Pikachu? and Bandit. Pikachu is gray, but Anna thought it was purple. So that's what she wants a purple chinchilla. The chinchillas were so soft!! and such great jumpers, they were big hit with everyone! I also learned that I stink at basketball. Ok I already knew that, but I still had fun playing horse, rooster or whatever animal it was that we spelled.. A family gathering wouldn't be complete without an all night round of "Paper Telephone." If you don't know what the game is, here is a brief overview. Everyone starts with a blank sheet of paper and writes a sentence, you pass that to the left and read the sentence you were just given, and draw your best picture of it. Fold the sentence over so the next person only sees your picture and pass it left... Now look at the picture given you and write a sentence to describe it... and so on, and so on... this game gets crazy!!! Lots of laughs and lots of fun!

I also loved the Nerf gun battles we got into - - Troy, I hope your eye has made a full recovery by now!! The line: "No head shots!!" has become a 'classic' around here! Merry Christmas!!