All Things Christmas

How embarrassing that I wrote nothing in December.  Now it's going to be all mashed together in one.  In my defense, for some reason when I try to upload pictures onto my computer from my phone it doesn't recognize any new pictures.  Which is super annoying and makes getting pictures take way longer.  So if anyone knows how to solve this problem, please let me know!  (update:  just spent 2 hours figuring this out.  Painful!)

We started the season off with our third annual neighborhood Christmas food drive.  My friend and I are the ones who put it on, and this year was the best ever I think.  We decided to try to get more people to come by offering up live music.  So we talked Zack and his friends Carter and Austin into putting a band together.  Little did we know how much drama would be involved in this.  I now understand why so many bands don't make it.  They stuck it out though and did a great job!  I think they maybe even liked it, even though there was no way they were going to tell us that.

The next activity was the Christmas Bus.  Skiing in the morning, party in the afternoon.  We did our annual performance at the care center.  Awesome as usual.  Zack was supposed to play his guitar, but due to a mess up with our ski carrier, we weren't able to fit the guitar in the car.  So Kate filled in on the piano.  All of the families showed off their talents, best of all the nativity with the littles.  So cute!  This year we headed to the church for games.  This added a whole new level to the event.  We played our guts out, and then filled our guts with pizza.  And just in time the bus arrived to take us to see the lights!  So beautiful!  Such a fun ride with all of the kids.  My grandma and aunt and uncle even came up from Boise to join us.  We all had great fun, thanks to Grandma and Grandpa Spjute who plan such great activities!

The next weekend Jake took Zack and Kate to Jackson skiing.  They got a deal at the Warren Miller movie, so off they went.  They loved every second of it and skied their guts out.  One day they skied 35,000 vertical feet!  Sage and I hung out together at home, which I thought was awesome.  She even got to go on the North Pole Train with her cousins!  While she was doing that I went skiing by myself, which was kind of amazing, not gonna lie.

We had a Spjute non-Christmas Eve party at April and Toby's.  This was great fun.  They planned lots of fun games, including Family Feud hosted by Toby!  Good thing someone in our family knows how to have fun!  That same day we got to go to Grandma Tracy's to decorate some delicious sugar cookies.  It was a fun-filled day for sure!

Christmas Eve was awesome.  We went skiing in the afternoon, and then came home for a fun family night.  Somehow this Christmas ended up being our 'Latin Christmas'.  It was pretty awesome.  We ended up doing a sub for santa for a family from Chile.  When we took stuff to them they invited us in and fed us delicious treats straight from Chile, and we got to talk to them for 20 minutes in mostly spanish.  It was so great.  When I was on my mission I remember eating millions of tamales every Christmas.  So when I saw someone selling authentic tamales I decided it would be fun to try it.  So for dinner on Christmas Eve we had tamales and nachos.  And it was pretty delicious I think!  Then we shared talents.  Zack played the guitar, Kate made us a treat, Sage did a dance, and Jake and I played the piano and guitar together.  Great fun.  Then we read and discussed the nativity.  We finished up the night watching Christmas Chronicles in the theater.  Jake declared it his new favorite Christmas movie so a successful night all around!

Christmas day was busy!  We made Sage wait to open presents until 7:00.  Then it was present craziness.  The kids got nothing huge this year, just lots of random.  This was the year of legos for Sage.  She spent so long doing legos that she had to get up and stretch her back out.  We headed to my cousins for delicious breakfast food and good family time.  I love getting together with my mom's side of the family.  Then we headed to Tracy's for more family time with all 100 Higley's.  When we finally made it home I was exhausted, but then I had to go into work at 1:00am.  Ugh.  However, I'd call it a successful Christmas for sure!

Christmas break with the kids home was good and pretty low key.  I forced myself to be cool with them sleeping in and just chilling.  I managed to not come unglued, so all was well.  New Years Eve was uneventful, because we're lame.  Jake had to work most of the day.  He got home and we rushed out to see a movie.  Then we went to Chuckarama.  Sage has been begging to go there for like a year, so we finally did.  And it will probably be a few years before we go back.  We're not good buffet people.  Then we went home and Kate babysat and everyone else went to bed.  We're super cool.  Happy New Year!

Sage on the North Pole Express

Zack's band

All the food we collected!

The singing of the men

Cute Claire!

Dad on the cello.  Pretty good!

Cute angels!

Struggling with the nativity

All the Christmas trees

Kate had a recital

Games at Toby and April's

They look pretty good I think!

Tamales!

Sage's dance

Christmas pj's provided by Grandma Tracy

Christmas aftermath

Hours of legos

Zack got his haircut and it looked so good!  If only I could get him to ever do his hair!

Boondocks fun!

Jackson ski trip

Thanksgiving In Moab!

I'm kind of loving going places over Thanksgiving.  The perfect weekend for travel I think.  Last year we were in St George, this year in Moab.  The Spjute Family did get together at our house the Saturday before for a fake Thanksgiving.  It was a great night of good food and even better company.

This Moab trip was the grand unveiling of the Jeep.  Jake spent lots of time getting it all ready to go.  He's very prepared and thorough, so we had new tires, he fixed something under the Jeep that I don't understand, a new bumper with gas cans and a tire jack hooked onto it, a compressor (this is used to put air in and out of the tires in case you were wondering, a first aid kit, maps, and probably lots of other things I don't even know about.  We were ready.  Jake and I were a little nervous for the drive because it is a bit of a tight fit for the kids, but they were troopers and mostly did a great job.  Our hotel was great.  Free breakfast in the morning and a great pool for the kids.  We even got to spend some time with the Johnson's!

On actual Thanksgiving we all went out to eat.  None of us were interested in a traditional Thanksgiving feast, so we ate mexican food.  And it was delicious!  Before the Johnson's left we got to take Megan on her first (and hopefully not last) mountain bike ride.  She did a great job and hopefully she liked it enough to keep doing it.  We took Megan on a nice beginner ride, and then we went on a not so nice beginner ride.  The trail was called 'Rockin' A'.  Anything in Moab with the word rock in it means not easy.  We were going up and down all kinds of crazy things.  Not my kind of riding, that's for sure.  Jake informed me that rides like that should be easy on my nice new bike.  I informed him that yes, my nice new bike made it more enjoyable, but the same not good rider was still in control of the bike.  Fortunately we all survived, and even had fun.

We went on a real Jeep ride!  It was a road in Arches, and it was a lot of fun.  It ended up being more difficult than we thought it would be, but Jake handled it like a champ.  The kids had fun and at one point Sage started yelling, "Go Blu Jean!" to the Jeep, thus it was named.  And Blue Jean did amazing.  No problems at all.  Now we're all set up for lots of good times in Blue Jean.

We did a couple of fun hikes, swam, ate good food, and even found some time to relax.  It was a really great trip!!

Cleaning up dinner.  Always more fun with family.

The boys are totally gabbing in this picture.  Okay, not really

But really, I think the best part of eating good food is sitting around after. 

I wish this picture could happen a lot more.  It was so great.

Grandpa with the littles who have replaced my littles.  So sad.  But they're so cute.

After our annual family turkey trot.  Yes, Zack ran in those clothes.

Happy Thanksgiving from El Charro!

How could Megan not have loved this ride?

We're so tough

Blue Jean crawling through Moab

My favorite arch.  Only accessible by jeep.  Beautiful.

Projects

Life is so busy right now that I never get on here to post.  So I'm going to post a couple of long posts just to catch up.  Super awesome. 

Part of the reason life has been so busy is we've had all kinds of projects going on.  For a long time.  I believe I wrote about the pond that we mostly finished.  Right after we finished that we bought an old house to use as a new office location.  The house is awesome, but it needed a lot of work.  I finally realized Jake was so busy that it was never going to happen, so I jumped in and went to town.  I wish I had taken more before pictures so you could fully appreciate the work that went into this.  Just know that it was weeks of working almost every day.  Like my kids started being surprised when I was home when they got home after school.  Not ideal, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.  First I painted the front office and conference room.  Then I removed the wallpaper in Jake's office.  Someone evil created wallpaper.  I did some of the demo of a future bathroom area.  I knocked out the ceiling and ripped up the floor.  I was so covered in dust, but I was impressed with my demo toughness.  I don't think Jake knew I could/would do that.  From there I finished painting the rest of the office: Jake's office, the other half of the conference room, the back office, and the break room.  Not a small amount of painting.  I was handling the work pretty well, but I have to admit that by the end I was beyond ready to be done.  We've moved into the office, but we still need to finish things.  Someday.

The other project we were working on, pretty much every weekend, was a goat house.  Winter was coming and our goats needed a place to get out of the cold.  So there was a time line on this one.  I have to say that no one really wanted to work on this.  We were all so exhausted by the time we got to Saturday that the last thing we wanted to do was work all day.  But work we did.  I was proud of our kids because they worked hard with mostly minimal complaining.  We spent multiple Saturdays, most of the day, working on the goat house.  But we finally got it mostly done just in time for the cold weather.  Mostly done is how we do our projects, in case you hadn't noticed.

Before I ripped apart the room

And after.  Beautiful I think

Front room I painted

Conference room I painted

Leveling out the ground and putting in the cinder block foundation

The mostly done goat house

October Happenings

This should really be more than one post, but it's not happening.  In addition to the epic hunt, we had fall break and halloween, with a lot of little things in between.  We spent fall break in St George because Zack had his final state mountain bike race there.  I'm so glad he decided to do mountain biking this year.  It's been really great.  I love watching the races, and this one did not disappoint.  I pre-rode the course with Jake and Zack the day before and it was hard!  I don't know how those kids ride technical stuff like that, really fast, with lots of people around.  I would die.  Or just stop and cry.  One of the two for sure.  Anyway, Zack did a great job.  I don't think he had a single race this year that wasn't really hot.  The heat alone would have killed me most of the time.  He said there was one hill on this course where he felt like he was in the back of a car, in the heat, with all of the windows rolled up and no air.  Ha! 

So we did Zack's race in St George.  And my birthday.  Let's just say birthdays aren't so fun when you're on vacation with lots of people.  Enough said.  The kids swam a ton as usual.  Not sure how because it really wasn't warm enough.  We rappelled off Dixie Rock, which was really cool and fun. 

Halloween was fine.  I've been so busy lately that I did absolutely nothing with my kids to celebrate.  Sage went to a maze thing and carved a pumpkin with a friend.  Zack and Kate finally carved pumpkins on actual halloween.  That's how on the ball I was.  I was feeling bad for my lack of celebration, so I made some healthy halloween treats for the kids after school.  I just couldn't bring myself to make a dessert treat knowing how much candy they would be eating.  Zack no longer trick-or-treats, so he hands out candy to all three people who come to our house.  Kate enjoyed her last year trick-or-treating as a nerd, and Sage embraced every bit of the holiday as usual dressed as Wonder Woman.  Everyone ended the night happy, so I'm calling it a win. 

Here are a million pictures.

Cool park in St George

Halloween carnival thing that we did purely for Sage

On top of Dixie Rock

Zack on his way down

Sage loved it and wanted to be the first one down

Awesome witchy-poo party

Making witches brew

The Halloween parade that was freezing!

Fingernails, ghosts, and pumpkins.  I outdid myself

Kate learned she really hates pumpkin slime.

Nerd and Wonder Woman

Sage with her friends