10 MORE DAYS!

Today's the 14th so only 10 more days until CHRISTMAS EVE! The greatest part about Christmas for me is being with family. We plan to leave after the Christmas Eve service on the 24th and drive a straight 24 hours to arrive in AL by Owen Christmas Party time on Christmas Day. Yes, I wish we could fly but it is just too expensive for 5 of us. We'll only be there for 6 days which is a bummer.

The Vallecito Kids Christmas Party was Saturday and Haven got to see Santa.....


"Mr. and Mrs. Claus" goes to our church......(but no questions were asked!)

Pictures for the grandparents to see.....

Our "Christmas Comes Alive" is this weekend and we are very excited to see how this turns out. We have had great weather this week but snow is on it's way tomorrow and Thursday. Landon finished up his basketball season and had a great last game as he scored the game winning shot! He was so excited! He really improved this year and his self confidence definitely increased. Mike was a great coach and they finished the season at 3 wins and 3 losses. Mason is trying out for basketball this week. Everyone that tries out gets to play so this week determines who is on what team. The 7th and 8th grade will have a total of 5 teams. I think this is great because everyone gets to play this way. And Haven can now do a cartwheel! YAY!

Hope everyone enjoys the next couple of weeks and gives God glory for His wonderful SON that he sent to earth for us!

Have You Ever Tried... SHUTTERFLY?

Capturing memories is very important to me and we love to take pictures! This fall, I tried out an online photo site called SHUTTERFLY located at www.shutterfly.com and it is awesome! It is a free online photo storage site that you can download your pictures to and order them to pick up at your local retail store. Why put your pictures on a photo storage site? What if your computer crashes tomorrow and you lose all your pictures! Prevent that by downloading them to SHUTTERFLY. It also has the option to "share" your pictures with family and friends so that they can view your pictures and order the ones they might want. This comes in handy when you have family that lives so far away. SHUTTERFLY also offers various other products that make great gifts for others, including photo books, calenders, ornaments, cards, mouse pads, coasters, and much more.

Oh and for the person who is hard to buy for, try out their unique photo mugs at http://www.shutterfly.com/photo-gifts/photo-mugs

However, this Christmas season, I'll be using SHUTTERFLY for their adorable Christmas photo card offers, located at http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/christmas-photo-cards

Hmmmmmmm....these are my favorites....which one will I use this year? Well you'll have to check your mail in the next couple of weeks and see!

SHUTTERFLY also has 5 x7 photo cards as another option at http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/christmas-cards

Are you wondering why I am advertising for SHUTTERFLY? They are nice enough to offer their customers 50 free cards if they blog about their site. Pretty smart, huh? Thanks SHUTTERFLY!

Christmas Decorations

Haven and Landon wanted to start decorating before Thanksgiving so here's the results of their efforts.......

Ha-ha! They colored pictures of Christmas scenes and taped them in a line down the hall. Although we may not make it on the Christmas "Tour of Homes" for our decor, I thought it was precious!

I really turn into a grinch when it comes time to decorate for Christmas because our house is too small for all the stuff that's in it, and then adding more "stuff" stresses me out. We didn't get out but about half of our stuff and got the tree decorated the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

It is Dec 7th and there is barely any snow on the ground thus far which is pretty unusual. We were even able to decorate outside this year because of this ( and upon Landon's insistence!). We are getting excited about the "Christmas Comes Alive in Vallecito" coming up next weekend and are busy getting ready for that. I hope everyone keeps their focus on the miracle birth of our Savior this Christmas season and enjoys every minute of being with friends and family! MERRY CHRISTMAS!

We're Going to be "Greats"!

This is Kayci and Jamie Cummings and they are fixing to make us into a Great Uncle and Aunt! Kayci is Mike's sister Angela's daughter and they are expecting the arrival of Baby Brayden by the end of this month. We are so excited for them! And we are so excited to meet our first "great nephew". It's been 5 years since there was a baby in the family. And what's even better is that we will be there either for the birth or soon after (we hope!).

Congratulations Kayci and Jamie!! We love you and are so happy for you! And we can't wait to meet Brayden!

Our First Children's Trip!!

I have no doubt that God is moving and working in our little church.....but sometimes it takes a long time to see the fruit of that work. After being here 2 years, we finally have a children's group!!! Praise God! We have tons of kids that come through the church (especially in summer) but this little group has been coming on Sunday mornings for the past couple of months and it finally feels like we have a real group! We've had 7 or so up until this fall that were consistent but we've added about 7 more. So we went on our first children's outing this week so eat pizza at AJ's and then to do a little bowling.......

Here's some shots from AJ's.....

Haven had fun bowling with the gutter things up.....

And here's a group picture of our precious little crew.....

Now, a silly shot........

I have such great memories of my church's children group going place and I hope to create this for my kids. We still need youth leaders in our church and are still praying for that. We are looking forward to doing a "Christmas Comes Alive in Vallecito" live nativity reenactment on Dec 18th for the area and all these kiddos will be a part of it. Can't wait!

Happy Thanksgiving Weekend!!

Hello all and I hope you all had a fantastic Thanksgiving! Our church hosted another community Thanksgiving meal held at the the community center and we had a great turnout. The only good thing about not being with our family on Thanksgiving is that it is challenging us to learn to cook our own Thanksgiving food. We have the dressing down (learned that 2 years ago) so this year I made a sweet potato casserole and sweet potato pie for the first time ever and yum yum!!!

However, no one ate it here and I was told by someone from Colorado that they have never heard of it until a few years ago. Guess it may be a Southern thing! Or people did eat sweet potatoes during their meal and may have opted for something different for dessert. More pie for us in the end and it is already gone from this house!

I wanted the kids to learn a little about serving others so they took a turn in the serving line BEFORE they got to eat. Haven was so adorable serving her rolls! She was so excited about serving others and asked multiple times that morning if it was time for her to "serve" yet.

Landon serving sweet potatoes....

Mason tried to get out of it by paying Landon to serve in his place! Ha! He was only kidding and served his time well

We met many new faces this year......

It was great day and what a blessing to have people to spend the day with. I'll have to say that the food was good, but it didn't compare to Pat Richardson and Kaye Owen's cooking!! Can't wait until Christmas!!!!

7th Grade YAFL Trip to ABQ

Well this trip to Albuquerque (ABQ), New Mexico, turned into a series of unfortunate events. Mason played football for Bayfield Middle School and that ended the first of October. One of the assistant coaches then got the idea for us to keep practicing and go down to ABQ for the 7th grade state YAFL tournament, even though we did not play in the YAFL league this year. We played school league and YAFL is independent of school ball. So because everyone else was in on it, we had to be to! So the tournament was this past weekend and while it was fun to get away, here's where the disaster started......

1. We are all staying at a very nice Marriott hotel. We check in and instead of getting the double beds that we registered for, we were given a king size bed.......for 5 people. Many other families were done like this as well so there were no roll away beds either. We had a pretty miserable Friday night but slept well on Saturday because we were so tired from the lack of sleep on Friday...

2. Once down there on Friday, the coach wants to know if everyone brought their birth certificate which is needed for everyone to be able to play. While he told some of them to, others did not get the message. We didn't have Mason's but had someone coming to the house for the dogs anyway and they scanned it and emailed it to me. The coach was going to have to make the 3 1/2 hour drive back to Bayfield to round up the BC's that were not there so we could play. However, because he was willing to do this, the tournament director agreed to accept what we had and let the others slide. So now we can play.....

3. We play Rio Rancho, an ABQ team that creamed us last year in the 6th grade tourn and hung with them well this year. We end up getting beat by 5 points and were 2 yds from making a touchdown close to the end. Very disappointing.....

4. We go to check out, and our room has been charged $25 extra for Wi-Fi (Wireless Internet).......MASON!! He used it on his Ipod. Wi-fi is free everywhere we've stayed! Now we are at one of the nicest hotels ever and we get charged per day.....UGGGGG!! I will start a campaign against that hotel. I mean, if you don't have enough double bed rooms when people make the reservation, tell us only king is available so that we can find another place to stay comfortably. But no, their philosophy is let's get them here so they're stuck with the bill whether they stay or not....BAD BUSINESS!!

5. Sunday's game scheduled for 1 pm....the team forfeited. Now what? It was up in the air for a while, but one of our players had a cousin on the El Dorado team and they agreed to play us after their game. So while the game didn't count, we were thankful for their willingness to play a 2nd game and get home later.

6. We lost that game as well by 5 points and 2 yds away from a touchdown when the time ran out. UGGGGG!

So football is officially over now. There were some good things that came out of the weekend like a little shopping, Mason made 3 touchdowns, and the celebration of Mike's 42 birthday!! We ate out and he got steak and a free dessert and got sung to by the staff!

Here are some pics of the weekend....... I LOVE THIS SHOT!

There was a time that we never thought we would ever see a picture like that! Mason has always been good at baseball and basketball, but because of his heftiness when he was younger, he was not a fast runner and being a wide receiver was out of the question! Now he's thin and is the fastest runner on the field! Amazing!

Here he's fixing to catch a pass and make a TD!

Miss Haven got to go to Build-a-Bear and this is what she picked out....

It's Clarisse, Rudolph's girlfriend! Thanks Nuna and Mama Kaye!! (This is where your birthday money went to)

If you have never been to Albuquerque, it has this beautiful mountain/rock over to the left and the city was formed around it. It is so gorgeous and this picture does not do it justice but here is the view from the field we were on......