December 2010

Tanis at his band concert

Tanis received the Student of the Month award for his class we were so proud of him.

The stockings were hung with care.....

And Santa Claus found our house. We had Christmas at my house this year and it work really well. I have to thank my sweet babysitter though for getting my tree up and decorating it with the children. I didn't know when I was going to have the time to do it with school 4 nights a week and she surprised me one night to a beautiful decorated tree. And the kids loved doing it.

I absolutely love this face when Ash opened her Ipod Shuffle she was so excited. Santa did well this year.

One of the reasons we had Christmas at my house was my dad refused to get a tree this year and every year he is as we call him the Grinch or Scrooge. So while we were out shopping my mom found the book How the Grinch stole Christmas. It was prefect and she made him read it all the way through till the end to find his real present of movie tickets.

One of my days off that Derek also had off from work we decided to go for a family outing. We took the kids to the Arizona Museum of Natural History. It was really neat. Lots of dinosaur bones, we got to pan for gold, saw a flash flood, and there was a mine are that had the train that Wyatt is pointing at he loves trains. We had a lot of fun.

After the museum we headed over to see the Mesa temple lights and the nativities that were set up in the Visitor Center. It was so amazing. The lights were beautiful and all around the grounds they had life size parts of the nativity. The Visitor Center nativities were neat to see from all over the world. All in all we had an amazing December. We had multiple people leave gifts and cash on our doorstep to make our Christmas season special. It was a special thing for us and a wonderful teaching experience for us to teach our children about the gift of giving. I can't wait to be the family doing the giving. Thank you to those who we will ever be grateful too for those generous gifts of giving.