I have been trying to catch up on some things that happened these past few weeks and this was a memorable one for me. We always get together around mothers birthday and celebrate (89 this year!) and make our christmas candies. We had decided on the 20th of december but as it approached there was a lot of talk about a big storm that was supposed to happen. I awoke to just a cloudy, very windy day so I decided to go for it. I got up to clearfield and it was like driving into a wall of snow. I picked up Teina and she about blew away getting from her house to the car. We decided we would just go until it got to bad to go farther. By the time we reached the canyon, it was a white out. I knew the Yukon went pretty good in the snow, so we went for it. It was pretty scary. I couldn't tell if I was on the road or not so I just went down the middle. A big semi came up behind me and started honking and I thought he was going to run over the top of us. I moved over as much as I dared and he zoomed past me glaring at me. We kept going and finally made it to moms. I heard later of 2 semi's that had jack-knifed in the canyon that day...I bet he was one of them.

We had a real fun time celebrating mom's birthday. Well worth the scary drive. It is such a blessing to our llives that we still have her with us. I never stop learning from her. She has such a wonderful loving spirit about her, it just lifts me up to be around her. These are a few pictures I took that day.

T'was the night before Christmas...

Got our new Jammies on!

We're ready for Santa to come!

Candice and I drove to Arizona with Camille and Olivia to help them get home safely. It was quite the adventure.

There was a bad storm going through the area and we drove through a terrible dust storm. Camille had to swerve all over the road to miss flying tumbleweeds and it made Olivia sick, so she threw up. We decided to just stop and clean her up . Camille got out of the car to get her some clean clothes and almost blew away! We drove through a lot of desert and some real beautiful places too. We finally made it to Wilkinson's home. It is really nice and she had everything decorated for Christmas. They were in SanDiego for the weekend so we didn't get to see them. Olivia came running out yelling beers! beers! We are all like Beers???? Then we went in and saw the Christmas tree all decorated with cute bears. She is so darn cute, Candice and I had a really hard time saying goodbye.

Grampa's Birthday

Suzie threw a fun party for Grampa at her house. It was great to see all the family and even better to see Grampa doing so good at 89!

Christmas 2008

Our first good snow storm we all went out and built a big snowman and put it at Winkler's front door. Sorry Leslie, You'll have to go out your garage door.

Making Snow Angels with Epaw. Look at my cute Gingerbread man!

Santa is good from a distance but not up close.

This has been a wonderful Christmas...it all goes by so quick, I wish I could wrap it up and save it so I could get it out and enjoy a little bit of it every day!

OK OK I'm doing it! No wait this is really fun. Why didin't I do this before? Candice and Camille have really been after me to start a blog and so here goes.

This is a picture of the family up in the Uintas where we went to cut down our christmas tree. It was quite the adventure. We went on thanksgiving weekend while everyone was home. Jamie had told us about cutting a christmas tree in this place called Christmas meadow. It sounded real cute but there was nothing cute about getting there. We drove for what seemed like forever, then when we got up into Evenston, the roads changed into a sheet of ice. It was really scary...mostly because I was driving. Kelley was in his truck with Katie and Candice and K.C. and I had Kellen and Camille and Olivia with me in the Yukon. I put my car into 4 wheel drive and it went a little better but Kelley's truck wouldn't shift into 4 wheel so he was sliding all over the place. We crept along till we got to a place where they would let us cut trees and all piled out and went on the hunt. Jamie's family found a beautiful blue spruce but I think it was the only one on the mountain. We were having a hard time finding anything that didn't look like it was straight from Charlie Brown's Christmas.

Kellen went off in a different direction and found a pretty good looking one. So we went with that. Olivia was so great up there. Didn't mind the cold and just wanted to crunch crunch in the hard snow. I could just eat her up. All in all it was a really fun day. I love it when the family can all be together!